PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (7 page)

“Lieutenant Patton, how long will it take you to get ready?”

Patton answered that he was already packed. Taken aback, Pershing replied: “I’ll be God Damned. You are appointed Aide.”
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The Punitive Expedition was a large force of two cavalry brigades and a brigade of infantry—ultimately numbering nearly 15,000 men—aug-mented by the 1st Aero Squadron equipped with a half-dozen rickety Curtiss JN-2 “Jennies,” state-of-the-art aircraft for the Army Air Service, but already obsolete by world aeronautical standards. (Although the planes proved highly unreliable, they fascinated Patton, who, in World War II, would pioneer the use of light spotting and reconnaissance aircraft during the Third Army’s epic advance across France.)

Over nearly a year, from March 1916 to February 1917, Pershing would lead his men some 400 miles into the rugged eastern foothills of Mexico’s Sierra Madres. As an aide, Patton performed the duties of factotum, everything from ensuring the general was well fed to assisting him with inspections; looking after the well-being of his horses, motor vehicles, and troops; and serving as a courier. That last role was a dangerous one, and Patton eagerly embraced it. In April, he volunteered to deliver a message to the 11th Cavalry, which had advanced to the south and was cur-rently—somewhere. It was, Patton wrote, “almost a needle in a haystack.” Seeing him off, Pershing shook Patton’s hand and cautioned: “‘Be careful, there are lots of Villiastas.’ Then still holding my hand he said, ‘But remember, Patton, if you don’t deliver that message don’t come back.’”
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The message, of course, was delivered.

Frustrated by the expedition’s failure even to catch sight of Pancho Villa, much less catch him, General Pershing decided to target some of Villa’s key subordinates, the most important of whom was General Julio Cardenas. Patton begged Pershing to give him an opportunity to participate in the manhunt, and he was temporarily attached to Troop C, 13th Cavalry. Learning that Cardenas was apparently living on a ranch near San Miguelito, Patton and part of Troop C rode out in mid-April. They did not find the general, but they did locate his wife and baby, as well as his uncle. In a letter to his father written on April 17, Patton noted that the “uncle was a very brave man and nearly died before he would tell me anything.” Clearly, Patton and his men had tortured Cardenas’s uncle in an effort to extract the general’s whereabouts. Just as clearly, they had been unsuccessful. As Patton noted in his diary, “Tried to get information out of uncle. Failed.”
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The next month, on May 14, Pershing dispatched Patton on a foraging expedition, to buy corn from Mexican farmers. Patton and his party of 10 soldiers, 2 civilian scouts, and 2 civilian drivers set out in three automobiles. They stopped at two villages, Coyote and Salsito, and made the necessary purchases. Then Patton continued on to Rubio, where he spotted a group of 60 very rough-looking Mexicans, whom one of his scouts, an ex-Villista himself, identified as associates of Villa and Cardenas. This suggested to Patton that Cardenas was nearby, and he and his men drove the six miles north to San Miguelito and the same hacienda in which he had earlier found the general’s uncle, wife, and baby. Several times during his life, Patton described what happened next.
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About a mile and a half south of the house the ground is lower than the house. And one cannot be seen until topping this rise. As soon as I came over this, I made my car go at full speed and went on past the house . . . four men were seen skinning a cow in the front. One of these men ran to the house and at once returned and went on with his work. I stopped my car northwest of the house and the other two [cars] southwest of it. I jumped out carrying my rifle in my left hand [and] hurried around to the big arched door leading into the patio. ... I rounded the comer and walked about half way to the gate. When I was fifteen yards from the gate three armed men dashed out on horseback, and started around the southeast corner.

So schooled was I not to shoot, that I merely drew my pistol and waited to see what would happen. . . . When they got to the corner they saw my men coming that way and turned back and all three shot at me. One bullet threw gravel on me. I fired back with my new [ivory-handled] pistol five times. Then my men came around the corner and started to shoot. I did not know who was in the house. There were a lot of windows only a few feet from our right side. Just as I got around the corner three bullets hit about seven feet from the ground and put adobe [chips] all over me.

Patton had deployed his small force carefully, so that all exits from the house were covered.

I reloaded my pistol and started back when I saw a man on a horse come right in front of me. I started to shoot at him but remembered that Dave Allison had always said to shoot at the horse of an escaping man and I did so, and broke the horse’s hip. He fell on his rider and as it was only about ten yards, we all hit him. He crumpled up.

During this gun battle, another Villista who ran out of the hacienda very nearly made good his escape, but Patton and some of his men sent a hail of bullets after him. He, too, fell dead.

Two down, but Patton needed to know just how many Villistas were left in and about the hacienda. He climbed onto the roof of the building to get a better look. As he stepped out onto the dirt roof, it gave way, with Patton falling through and coming to a stop, wedged in at the armpits. Patton quickly struggled out of the hole. In the meantime, one of his scouts shot and killed another escaping Villista.

During the entire adventure, Patton noted, the four men who had been skinning the cow continued to go about their work, completely ignoring the mayhem. Patton now ordered the roundup of these four, and he and three soldiers each seized one as a human shield while they searched the interior of the hacienda. The hate-narrowed eyes of Cardenas’s mother and wife (who held her baby daughter in her arms) followed the men. Cautiously opening a heavy wooden door, Patton found a number of wizened old women, cowering in prayer.

In all, three Mexicans had been killed in the “Battle of San Miguelito.” One of the cow skinners identified one of those slain as Julio Cardenas himself. The others were a Villista captain and a private.

Patton ordered the three corpses to be strapped across the hoods of each of the detachment’s three automobiles, like trophy stags. Ready to leave, Patton suddenly saw a band of perhaps 50 Villistas approaching at the gallop. Shots were exchanged, and the vastly outnumbered Americans lead-footed their accelerator pedals and rumbled down the road to Rubio. (Or as Patton sardonically put it: “We withdrew gracefully.”) As a precaution, Patton directed one of his men to cut the telegraph wires along the road to prevent word of the shoot-out from reaching the town before their arrival. After passing through at high speed, the party did not stop until it had reached Pershing’s headquarters. There Patton was mobbed by news correspondents, who were starving for a story in what had become a long and monotonous Mexican sojourn, as dry as the surrounding desert. Headlines trumpeted Patton’s name, and, even better, official army dispatches mentioned him repeatedly.

George S. Patton Jr. was now a national hero—at least for a few weeks. In the longer term, the Punitive Expedition had more important consequences for him. Patton’s automobile trip to San Miguelito was, in fact, the very first time a United States Army unit had been transported into battle by motorized vehicles. In his assault on the Cardenas hacienda, Patton, who would champion the tank in World War I and would be the foremost American exponent of mobile warfare in World War II, had, more or less inadvertently, pioneered mechanized combat. Even more important, the San Miguelito exchange—and indeed the entire Punitive Expedition—created a genuine bond between Patton and Pershing. Patton saw in Pershing the ideal general, the mold from which all others should be struck. Not only did he have a firm grasp of strategy and tactics, he issued crystal-clear orders, he demanded absolute discipline, he earned and returned absolute loyalty, and, while he never lost the big picture, neither did he miss the most minute detail. Added to all of this, he
looked
the part. He was, every inch of him, a commanding officer. Patton watched, admired, and learned. He was more determined than ever that he, too, would become a general— a general just like John J. Pershing.

But San Miguelito proved to be the high point of the Punitive Expedition. Wanting to avoid a major international crisis, President Wilson ordered Pershing to withdraw to within 150 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border, and, from that point on, boredom set in. On May 18, Patton recorded in his diary, “I did absolutely nothing but take a bath.” On the next day: “Terrible wind all day. No one did anything.”
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And so it went, day after dreary day.

Second Lieutenant Patton was at last officially advanced to first lieutenant on May 23, 1916, and he spent a good deal of idle time writing to his family, including encouraging letters to Papa, who had decided to run for the U.S. Senate. In August, Patton accompanied Pershing back to Columbus, New Mexico, for a few days of vacation. Beatrice met her husband there, and Nita was on hand to greet Pershing. Everyone began to assume that, despite the difference in age, the two would wed. As Patton put it to Beatrice, “Nita may rank us yet.”
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Patton soon returned to headquarters in Mexico, where, early in October, he met with a bizarre accident. While writing a report in his tent, his gasoline-fed lamp exploded, sending flames across his face and hair. “I ran out side and put my self out,” he later explained to Beatrice.
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The burns were serious, and they were painful, but Patton suffered neither permanent scars nor was his eyesight damaged. He was granted sick leave, met Beatrice in Columbus, then traveled by train to his boyhood home at Lake Vineyard and, in Los Angeles, was treated by Dr. Billy Wills, an uncle by marriage. His sick leave made it possible for him to be at Papa’s side when he learned that he had been very soundly defeated by his Republican senatorial opponent.

As for General Pershing, Patton had clearly and deeply impressed a very important man; however, he had done so in more ways than he intended. Pershing would demonstrate his high regard for Patton by bringing him into his circle almost immediately after the United States entered the Great War. Before this even, however, in an October 16, 1916, letter to the convalescing Patton, Pershing not only wished him a rapid recovery, but felt moved to issue a warning against the dangers of self-absorption: “[D]o not be too insistent upon your own personal views. You must remember that when we enter the army we do so with the full knowledge that our first duty is toward our government, entirely regardless of our own views under any given circumstances.”
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As much as he learned and would yet learn from the example of General Pershing, Patton probably never took these words to heart. Certainly he never found himself capable of putting them into practice.

CHAPTER 4

GEORGE S. PATTON JR.
HAD EARNED a MEASURE
of fame in the vain pursuit of Pancho Villa, fame as seductive as it was short-lived, but he had also endured more than a measure of boredom. This was not the war Patton longed for, but there was the inestimable career benefit of entry into the orbit of John J. Pershing. Having earned in Mexico the second star of a major general, Pershing was on his way up. Patton continued to serve as his acting aide until Pershing succeeded Major General Frederick Funston as chief of the Southern Department and left for his new headquarters in San Antonio. Patton stayed in El Paso with his cavalry regiment and was given command of a cavalry troop. He also easily passed

his promotion examination, which put him in line for captain. Nor did it hurt Patton’s prospects that Pershing and Nita continued to grow closer. Marriage seemed likely, even imminent.

At the end of the Punitive Expedition, Patton’s prospects were bright. Then they became brighter still. On April 6, 1917, just two months after Patton returned from Mexico, President Wilson, reelected to a second term on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” decided that the United States could no longer endure Germany’s assaults on its rights as a neutral. U-boat attacks on British liners carrying American passengers (including the sinking of the
Lusitania
on May 7, 1915) and the revelation of the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, in which the German government proposed to Mexico an anti-American military alliance, as well as the growing perception that German imperial aggression represented an enduring threat to democracy itself, moved the president to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Germany and the other “Central Powers.”

Yet the first Patton to try to get into the war was not George, but Papa. Hoping to find a worthwhile government appointment, he boarded a train bound for Washington. With him were his wife and daughter Nita. Because of Nita, they stopped in San Antonio to call on Pershing, only to discover that the War Department had just summoned him to the capital. All four took the same train the rest of the way to Washington.