George S. Patton: Old Blood and Guts

America's most famous commander from the Second World War, "Old Blood and Guts" was a bombastic leader who fought hard, swore harder, and thought that defending his flanks was for cowards and losers. We follow the complicated, intense, and action-packed life of George S. Patton from an Olympic athlete to his adventures fighting Pancho Villa, to his career as one of America's founding fathers of armored warfare, and across the raging battlefields of North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany during the height of World War II.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. September twenty sixth, nineteen eighteen, a wet,
muddy day in the musar Gone Forest of western France,
American tanks clatter ahead, firing their cannons and machine guns,
rolling inexorably towards the town of Chepey. At the front

(00:24):
of the formation walks the unit's commander, a tall, strapping colonel.
He has taken it upon himself to create, train, and
equip the newly formed tank core of the American Expeditionary Force,
and now he is personally leading them into battle against
the Germans. He aims his Ivory handled forty five and
fires at the Ami trench line, as round after round

(00:46):
from their rifles and machine guns paying against the hulls
of the American armored vehicles. Colonel George S. Patten grits
his teeth, reloads his weapon, and orders his troops to
charge ahead. Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week.

(01:13):
My name is Ben Thompson and I am here as
always with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, how
are you doing.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
I'm doing fine, and shout out to all our listeners.
Hi listeners.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yes, yeah, we have a lot of new people. I
see that some people have been liking and some new subscribers.
We really appreciate it. It really helps the show out.
We want to keep making these and without your support,
we can't keep doing it. So if you guys are
if you're a fan of the show, please do give
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(01:45):
Week and yeah, all of this stuff really helps us.
Please share it with a friend who you think might
like it, download a show, check it out. The more
listeners we can get for the show, the more likely
we are to be able to continue doing this in
the future, which would be really great. And we hope
that that is able to happen because we have a
lot of badasses that we need to talk about in

(02:06):
the future and it would be nice to be able
to do that.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
So, speaking of Badass, Pat, I heard that you were
going to do Barbenheimer. I think the last time we
talked you'd mentioned possibly.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Doing that, possibly doing Barbenheimer. Well, I'm getting together with
some friends at work and we're going to do half
of Barbenheimer because I don't think I could handle sitting
in a movie theater for two feature length films now
that I think.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
About it, especially like since one of them is, like,
I think, something in the over three hours range. I
think this is a it's like a full time job
to watch both these movies in a day.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, not that there's anything wrong with long movies.
It's just they're long, and you have to manage your expectations.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah. Yeah, it's just you know, that's your day, right,
and you should be reading about badasses to research for
our show, and instead you're going to be sitting in
a movie theater. Yes, my wife does love Richard Fyneman.
She thinks that he's like She's like, if if there
are any people I would ever like consider leaving you for,
it would be Tony Stark, assuming he was completely real,

(03:11):
or Richard Fyneman. It's just because she's like an engineer
and she likes engineering stuff. And I don't know if
he's a badass or not, but I don't want to
write about him because of that sentence, because she said that.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Well, Tony Stark is fictional and Richard Feyneman is dead,
so I think you're okay.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, And Richard Fyeman was also kind of like famously
a huge asshole in real life.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Unfortunately, some badasses were also assholes.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
Yeah, you don't want to meet your heroes?

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Should we call them bad assholes?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
Maybe you never want to meet your heroes, right, like
everybody's just.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
People and there, No, you never do you never do it.
You also don't want to meet your enemies.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
No, that's true, that's very true. But yeah, even some
people who like we have this ideal of them in
our heads, or we love them in movies or love
them on TV, or we like the idea of them,
like you don't really want to let him babysit your kids,
you know. No, Speaking of which, have you have you

(04:08):
seen the Patent movie?

Speaker 2 (04:09):
I don't think I have, no you have.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Though I have seen Patent you know. I have. My
funny story about the Patent movie is I have a
friend who is a musician, and he used to play
on the Warp tour he was doing, which is like
a traveling like punk rock festival. I don't know if
they still do it. I went to several of them
when I was in high school. In college, he, I

(04:32):
guess had been playing some show and this was I
don't know. In the like late two thousands, he was
playing a show and at some point during the show
he'd fallen off the stage and hurt himself or at
some point I had injured himself or was I don't know.
For whatever reason, he ended up in the medical tent
and he missed his ride to the next stop on
the Warp tour. So he went out into the talent

(04:54):
parking lot and was just trying to flag anybody down
to get a ride to the next stop. And he
gets picked up by this like really nice tour bus
and it's the band Rancid. They did time Bomb and
Ruby soho. They're like like a pretty well known punk
rock band from the nineties. They're still doing songs now,
but like their big hits were from the nineties. And
he gets picked up by them, and he's like, dude,

(05:15):
it's Rancid. Like they're awesome. I love them. I group
listening to them. This is gonna be great, Like they're
gonna be total party animals. These guys have these giant,
like two foot like mohawks and stuff, and they're kind
of punk rock icons h. And so he gets in
the car and he's like we're gonna party, and it
turns out that the entire band was all getting sober
at the same time, so there was no drinking and
no partying, and all they did was watch Paten on

(05:38):
repeat for like the entire drive to the next tour destination.
Oh wow. And he was like, I like the movie,
but you know, watching it three times in a row
it was kind of a lot.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Is this like the grown up version of putting your
toddler's favorite episode of Pop Patrol on repeat?

Speaker 1 (05:57):
It is a lot like that. Yeah, it's just like
sitting to Baby Sharks seventy five times in a row,
that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Well, I will say that Patent is very good. You
know the nineteen seventy movie it won just like ridiculous
number of awards. I mean, it's worth a watch if
you like war movies. It is what you think it is.
We're going into it. It's a war biopic, and you know,
there's problems with it that are not really worth mentioning, Like,
you know, all of the German tanks are just US

(06:28):
tanks from the nineteenth It's actually really funny because all
of the German tanks they're supposed to be Tiger one tanks,
but there's no there's very few Tiger one tanks left
in existence, and they couldn't see g them in so
they took M sixty patent tanks, which are literally named
after George Patten, and they painted them in German colors
and put a German cross on them, and they're like,
these are the German tanks. And it's really funny because

(06:50):
you know, it's the patent tank and Patent's fighting them
and they're painted up like tigers. But yeah, the movie
it was Fritzsford. Coppola wrote the screenplay a George C.
Scott's in it. It won like so many Academy Awards
Best Picture, Director, Best Actor, Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Film Editing, Sound,

(07:11):
you know, just and that's all just the Academy Awards.
There's this It's one of those ones that's just like
probably has its own Wikipedia entry of like list of
awards won by this movie.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
And even if you haven't seen the movie itself, Patten's
epic speech at the beginning has kind of taken on
a life of its own.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
That's true. But also we're going to get into it
on this episode. But one thing about that patent speech
is that they toned it down for the movie because
he swears a lot in it and the yeah, and
you know, they say swear like a sailor, but Patton
could swear with the best of them, so it got toned.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Down a little bit for the for the movie.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
I'll give you an example, because this is like a
this is a patent quote that I like, I'm not
going to attempt to do it in the style of
George C. Scott, like Academy Award winning actor George c.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
No one can do that. Only George C. Scott can
do George Sea Scott right.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
And I don't have the presence of a military commander.
I am just some guy recording in a closet. Okay,
here's the quote, and I'll do my best to not
impersonate George see Scott with it. We're not just going
to shoot the sons of bitches. We're going to rip
out there living goddamn guts and use them to grease
the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those
lousy hunt bastards by the bushel fucking basket. Or is

(08:24):
a bloody killing business. You've got to spill their blood
or they will spill yours Bravo. Bravo.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Sounds like you're just explaining your to do list.

Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah, it's like a bad It's like a bad cover
song of like an awesome song that you like.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
But if I try to do it, if I try
to do it more accurately, like it's like covering the Beatles, Right,
I'm never going to improve upon the George Sea Scott
version of this, but I'll just adapt it in my
own style of mild mannered podcaster dude.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah, so we are going to talk about Patten, and
we are going to get to it right after this break.
George Smith Patten was born November eleventh, eighteen eighty five,
in San Gabriel, California. As a young kid, he loved classics.

(09:13):
He loved reading. Yeah, he liked reading old Greek and
Roman war stories. He liked all kinds of military history.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
There are many war stories in Greek and Roman sources.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yes, yes, but he was generally focused known for Yes,
he was probably reading about Caesar and Hannibal more than
he was reading love poetry. Yeah, exactly. His great uncles,
he had six of them. They were all Confederate officers
in the Civil Wars from this military family on both sides,
and he kind of knew pretty early on that that's

(09:45):
what he wanted to do. He went to high school
in Pasadena, he attended the Virginia Military Academy, and then
from there he went to the US Military Academy at
West Point. He graduated in nineteen oh nine, was commissioned
a second lieutenant in the US Cavalry, which was still
a thing that was relevant in nineteen oh nine, and
not long after that he gets married to his wife, Beatrice,

(10:06):
who he stays married to for the rest of his life,
which is kind of cool. Now we don't know how
or why he was selected. There's not good data on this,
or nobody wrote it down. I don't know why, but
he ended up like he graduated in nineteen oh nine,
and in nineteen twelve he was selected to represent the
United States in the Stockholm Olympics in a new event

(10:28):
that they had just created called the modern pentathlon, which
pat is based off. It's just like a modern interpretation
of the ancient Greek one, right.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yeah, yeah, and the ancient Greek pentathlon. And Patten might
very well have known this since he was a student
of the Classics, as the pentathlon was done in the
original Olympics, you had to perform in all of the
things that you needed to be a superb Greek soldier.
So the long jump, the javelin throw, the discus throw,

(10:58):
the stadium foot race and wrestling. Now that's what it
took to be a soldier back then. But in nineteen twelve,
what do you need to be a good soldier? In
nineteen twelve, it seems like discus throwing doesn't seem as
relevant for modern warfare.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
Not so much so in nineteen twelve, the modern pentathlon.
The things that it takes to be a good soldier
in the world in nineteen twelve they decided was fencing, shooting,
horseback riding, swimming and running seems pretty legit.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, what type of running? Like, are we talking sprint.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Or long distance? Four thousand meters cross country?

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Cool?

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (11:39):
And so yeah, it was at pay fencing, pistol, shooting,
riding like a questrian events, a swimming in a four
thousand meter cross country running.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
So George S.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Patten competes in this in nineteen twelve, he's a participant
in the first ever modern pentathlon Olympic event. He finishes
fifth out of thirty two competitors, behind four guys from Sweden,
which I don't know. Sweden swept the metals the Stockholm
Olympics in this event. Weirdly, the thing that hurt Patten

(12:12):
in his finish was that he finished twentieth in shooting,
which you'd think he'd have been better at that because
he's kind of famous for waving around those ivory handled
pistols that he used to carry. So there's a little
debate on this. So the judges rules that he missed
on his final shot. His argument was that he didn't

(12:32):
miss it just went through an existing bullet hole, kind
of like the Robin hood splitting the arrow thing. Yeah,
he just perfectly shot the same bullet hole twice. And
one thing that leads a little credenses is that he
was using a larger caliber handgun than anybody else was.
Everybody else showed up with their twenty two target pistols
twenty two caliber target pistols, and he showed up with

(12:53):
his Service thirty eight, which is sixteen millimeters wider than
the twenty two, and so he was saying, oh it was,
you know, the holes a little bigger, and this one
went right through and that's why he.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Didn't see it.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
The judges didn't agree and he finished fifth, So that's that.
So he comes in fifth. He doesn't get a medal,
but he does represent the US in this event. After that,
he returns to the army and they send him to
France in nineteen thirteen to study with the French Master
at Arms, this guy named Charles Clary at their cavalry school.

(13:29):
He learns to speak French fluently better than I am
speaking it currently, and he learns the French sword fighting style,
which is very different than the German and up until
this point the American sword fighting style. The Germans preferred
to slash with the sword, but the French like to
stab with it. Think of like those long, skinny rapiers

(13:50):
that we see across the board on you know, the
musketeers and things like that. And so the French guard, yeah, God,
the French doctrine was that with the advent of armor,
you were going to have to stab at weak points,
so it was the only way to get under the armor. Yeah,
whereas the Germans just wanted to brute force you down,
brute force through it. So he learns the French style

(14:12):
of fighting, and then he comes back to the US.
He's set up at the Mounted Service School, it's a
cavalry school in Fort Riley, Kansas, and he is certified
as the Army's first Master of the Sword, which just
sounds like, oh yeah, it sounds like he man right,
it sounds like the power.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
And it seems odd to me that this is the
first time the Army has had a master of the sword,
like swords has been around for a long time.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Yeah, I guess like the US Army isn't traditionally known
for its sword fighting.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Okay, yeah, true, true.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
But yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know
why this is just randomly where we started with it.
But Paton goes over in nineteen thirteen, learns from the
French master who was at the time deemed to be
like the greatest military swordsman alive, and he comes back
and starts teaching sword fighting to the US Army. He
writes a couple of books about it, various books about

(15:06):
sword fighting, and he helps design the next generation of
cavalry saber. Yeah. He is part of the team that
designs the model nineteen thirteen Army Cavalry Saver, which today
we call the patent saber.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Okay, so yet another thing named after him.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Yes, it will be the first of many things that
will be named after him. The patent saber is a
little because he'd been learning the stabbing technique. It's a
little more stabby than it's a cavalry saber, and most
cavalry savers are big and heavy and curved. But he
wanted one that was a little more stabby, a little
a little more rapier like, because he had been learning

(15:47):
that style of fighting. The Army produced twenty thousand of
these weapons, and they went into production in nineteen fourteen,
the same year that World War One began. Yes, and they,
you know, didn't see a lot of action because suddenly
swords are not that useful anymore.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah, Patton actually got selected to represent the United States
in the nineteen sixteen Modern Pentathlon, but those games ended
up being canceled due to the war. Yeah, so Patten
and the US didn't.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Join the war immediately though.

Speaker 1 (16:21):
The World War One starts in nineteen fourteen, and the
US kind of stays out of it for the first
three years of the fighting over there, and you know,
Patton's kind of itching to get into battle. He's a
he's a guy who likes to wants to fight. He
first gets his chance in nineteen sixteen when the town
of Columbus, New Mexico was attacked by soldiers under the

(16:44):
command of Mexican General Pancho Villa.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Yeah, and this was an attention getting moved. Via wanted
to poke the bear. Basically, he wanted to get the
US to invade Mexico. So what do you do, You
attack Columbus, New Mexico.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
They were having a civil war in Mexico and Via
had been at the forefront of it and he was
winning and then he was losing, and then the US
backed the other guy. And Via was upset about it
because Via actually controlled more territory than the other guy did,
and he was just kind of trying to provoke trouble. Yes,

(17:19):
and he got it. I mean, the US said, put
together a force to go down there. They went down
there to try to attack.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Him, and the force included Patent.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
The force did include Pattent. It wasn't originally supposed to it,
so he had to volunteer. He went to General John Pershing,
Blackjack Pershing, who was the American general in charge of
the expedition and was like, Hey, what can I do?
How can I get involved with this? How can I
be part of this? And so Pershing took him on

(17:48):
as a personal aid and a courier pushing actually at
some point was engaged to Patent's sister.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Oh well, small world.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
Yeah, So Pershing and this American expedition goes down to
try to capture Poncho Villa because he'd killed some Americans
during this raid on Columbus. They don't find him, they
don't get him, though Paton does see some action down there.
He leads an attack where it's a group of thirteen
Americans and they're driving in three Dodge automobiles nineteen fifteen Dodges.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
So yeah, super new.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, like super new, this hasn't been done before. Yeah,
picture like a model t Ford, right, it doesn't have
like a you know, it doesn't have a roof. But
thirteen American troops in three Dodges they attack. If he
used to position, they kill three of them, including this
guy named Julio Cardenas, who was the head of Panchovilla's bodyguard.
And you know, depending on how you want to look

(18:43):
at it, it's possible that this was the first motorized
attack in American military history.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Could be could be thirteen.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Guys in a couple of cars, but accounts, Yeah, cars
were extremely rare in nineteen fifteen.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, Yeah, one is happening.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
Yes, And the US does eventually join World War One
in April nineteen seventeen. Remember the Lusitania. So the US
joins World War One in April of nineteen seventeen, and
Blackjack Pershing is chosen to be the overall commander of
the American Expeditionary Force and Patten stays at his side

(19:23):
and goes over with him as an aid. Pushing and
Pattern are getting along pretty well now, and they get
stationed in France with the Entente forces. Patten he doesn't
really like being stuck at HQ. He doesn't love doing
you know, kind of training new soldiers or doing paperwork.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
So, no, that doesn't sound like his jam.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
It's not his jam at all. He's not a peacetime general.
He's not a desk general kind of character.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah, I mean, I bet he had a lot to.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
Teach them, but yeah, but it wasn't what he wanted
to be doing. If there was fighting to be done.
He wanted to be out there, yeah, but he doesn't
get deployed to it. So what he ends up doing
is he starts to take an interest in armored vehicles
like tanks. He's a cavalry guy, and cavalry is not
viable in nineteen seventeen. He's trained his entire life. He
did the modern pentathlon. He's trained on how to ride

(20:11):
a horse and fight with a sword, and neither of
these things are going to help you against the beltfad
machine gun. He's got to learn something new. He's got
to re reorganize, and he's getting into tanks. It's like,
maybe this will be the new thing to replace what
the way cavalry was used in warfare. So he goes
to the French Army tank school and he learns to
drive tanks, and he learns how to fight with him,

(20:31):
and he learns all this stuff. So once again he's
being trained by French Army guys. He does learn to
speak French fluently, which is kind of cool and not
something else, something else you wouldn't expect out of George Patten.
So he gets promoted to colonel and then he starts
training American tank soldiers how to know in the tactics
and how to operate the vehicles, and he leads the

(20:54):
first American tank attack. Sometimes he drives them, sometimes he
walks next to them, sometimes he sits on them, but
he leads. I mean it tanks it this time, and
they go like six miles an hour, so you could
literally walk next to it.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
Okay, yeah, yeah, some people might even be able to
outrun them.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yes, yeah, they're big and slow, but you know at
the time, tanks, Yeah, they're tanks. It's a giant like
boat on land. It's an ironclad right, Like we hadn't
seen cars in nineteen fifteen, and then in nineteen seventeen
you got a tank, and like, we look at them
now and we're like, a, it's not that impressive compared to,
you know, the stuff that we see today. But nineteen seventeen,

(21:32):
nineteen fifteen, man, you've never seen anything like it. You're
still sailing around in wood boats for the most part.
But they did go slow, and so Patten generally is
walking in front of them, pointing where the different attacks go.
Shoot that guy, Shoot that guy. There's machine gun over there,
Shoot that which is kind of what he becomes known for.
He's kind of brave and aggressive and he's a colonel,
so he shouldn't really be out in front of the

(21:54):
army like this, but this is this is pat and style.
He wants to be out in the.

Speaker 2 (21:57):
Middle of his style.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, he doesn't want to be sitting at a desk
telling people where to go.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
He wants to be literally appointing to him.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
So he fights through the Battle of Sammiel and during
the musar Gone offensive, which we've covered before.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Yeah, that's where our pigeon friend share Amu did his reorhearshing.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yes, So we're in the muse Are Gone and Patten
gets shot in a thigh and this guy named Joe Angelo,
like one of his one of his adjutants, drags him
into a trench. Patten's passed out for like he's out
for like an hour, bleeding like you know, went clear
through his thigh and came out his butt, and this
guy revives him, and Patten's kind of laying in his

(22:37):
trench and he just starts giving out orders to this
guy Angelo. He's like, Okay, what's happening something, what's going
on over here? You go over here and give this
order to this guy, go over here and give this
order to this guy. And interestingly, both Patten and Joe
Angelo get the Distinguished Service Cross for this battle. That's
the it's just below the Medal of Honor on the
stack rank of American Combat Medals Patent for leading from

(23:01):
the front, getting shot and then continuing to lead well wounded.
And then Joe Angelo for running across a field of
machine gun fire to drag him to safety, and then
running across that same field of machine gun fire two
or three more times too, Like this isn't you don't
radio win your orders here, you have to run like
the lost battalion. You have to run over there and
talk to the guy. Hey, you're in charge now because

(23:23):
our guys hurt.

Speaker 2 (23:24):
So at some point world War One ended, yes do yeah?

Speaker 1 (23:30):
Yeah? So World War One ends and Patton goes back
home and he's doing more of that peacetime stuff.

Speaker 2 (23:37):
How'd that go with him?

Speaker 1 (23:38):
He hates it, of course, he hates it. He's doing
training and peacetime stuff. There's a couple interesting stories from
this time period. He gets a life saving medal from
the Coastguard because he was out on his boat and
some kids fell off either his boat or a nearby boat,
and modern pentathlon comes back again. He jumped in the
water and swam over and saved a couple of these

(23:58):
children that had fallen into the phone into the water
and we're drowning, and the coast guard gave them a
medal for saving these kids, which is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
One thing that is not that cool is he was
part of the army response to the bonus army situation
in nineteen thirty two. I'll go over this very briefly,
but basically, a lot of these World War One vets
came home and they still hadn't gotten they weren't getting
their pensions, and the government owed them money because they
like for just back pay and pensions and some bonuses

(24:29):
and that stuff. Yeah, and in nineteen thirty two were
in the Great Depression. Also, the war has been over
for you know, twenty years almost.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of back pay, a.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
Lot of back pay, and you know, they kind of
had deferred it at the time you get paid, and
the deal was they were going to get paid, and
I don't know thirty nine or something, but in thirty two,
these people are all suffering. They're unemployed, they can't work,
they can't pay their bills. So these old veterans they
set up a camp outside the capital and they demand

(24:59):
to be paid now. And George Patten is a is
a colonel at this time, and they order him to
go and clear these protesters out, and he says no,
and so then they put Douglas MacArthur in charge, other
famous super aggressive American general Douglas MacArthur. They put him
in charge, and he orders Patten to clear these guys out.

(25:23):
And I think just as like a little bit of
a power play, but you know, that's that's what happened.
And you know, I was Patton argued with them and
said he didn't want to do it and he didn't
really feel comfortable doing this and he didn't think it
was right, but they're going to remove him from position,
from his position if he doesn't do this. So he
does it. He tear gases these people and he marches
through the army in there and disperses this bonus army

(25:44):
group and amid the tear gas and the you know,
nobody died, but this is also like not you know,
this is kind of rough tear gas. Amid the tear
gas and the and the dispersing and the you know,
the struggling on the on the Capitol law on George
Patten sees Joe Angelo. He's one of the protesters on

(26:05):
the field.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Joe Angelo who helped me out when he was lying
bleeding in a trench.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Angela finds him and is like what and Patten's like,
you gotta go, No, you can't. They can't see us
like this. It's going to their media is gonna have
a field day with us if they see us. You
gotta go, And so he did. But that was that
was a really hard moment for Patten to kind of
have to do that and then see his old friend,
like the guy who saved his life and have to
do this. So that's a hard moment for him. After that,

(26:32):
he gets sent in nineteen thirty seven to Hawaii to
be an intelligence officer there kind of working on building
plans for the Pacific, which is interesting because he doesn't
end up serving in the Pacific. He does, however, write
a document in nineteen thirty seven just titled Surprise that
predicts a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and he
predicts it happening in roughly the way that it happened.

(26:56):
So that was interesting. It's very like I was reading
through it today, is very He's very specific, like they're
going to come up here. They're going to hide their
things here because we don't have any guys here. They're
going to hide their things here. They're going to use submarines.
They're going to use this, and he predicts basically Pearl
Harbor four years before it happens.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
So did anyone actually read that white paper?

Speaker 1 (27:18):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Had little effect, but he did see it coming, which
means he was a good intelligence officer I suppose.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
He also gets kicked by a horse and breaks his
leg in almost dies because this one gets infected. Yeah,
modern pentathlon coming back again. He becomes an advocate for
armored warfare and that's what he decides he's going to
spend his time and energy on. So he gets together
with a guy named aDNA Chaffee and they start organizing

(27:50):
and training and writing the doctrine paperwork for American armor.
They end up creating the first to the first and
second US Armored Divisions, which are kind of the two
tank divisions in the US Army, and he commands the
second and he nicknames it hell on wheels, which.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
I like, that's awesome, Hell on wheels, Hell on wheels.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
So surprise, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and bring America
into the war. A couple of years later and George
Patten gets sent off to fight in the war, and
as he's kind of organizing his men, that's when he
gives the famous speech that we know from the movie.
You know, He's one thing I like about it is,
you know, one of the one of the complaints about

(28:31):
the Americans is that, you know, it took us so
long to join the war, and it's because Americans can't
fight and they don't want to. The Germans referred to
Americans as bubble gum soldiers because they were always chewing
bubble gum. They were weak like bubble gum, and if
you killed them, you could find bubble gum on them.

(28:52):
They're always carrying it. But that's not how Patten saw it.
Patten gave his speech and there's one that I like,
and I once again attempt to quote Patten. Here, you're
here today for three reasons. First, you're here to defend
your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here
for your own self respect, because you would not want
to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you

(29:13):
are real men, and all real men like to fight.
And that kind of sums up Patten in general. This
is kind of how he feels about things. He wants
to fight. He doesn't want to be sitting at a desk.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Ye.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
And so after this break, we're going to get into
George Patten in World War Two, which is the thing
that he's the most known for. Welcome back. So we
are with George Patten, famous Olympian, American olympian, George Patten

(29:49):
and World War One fighter and Pancho Villa fighter and
guy who is looking for a war and he has
finally found the war that he's been looking for his
whole life. He goes off to World War Two in
nineteen forty two. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is
December of forty one, and in forty two, Patten and

(30:10):
General Eisenhower they start to plan what's called what's going
to be known as Operation Torch, which is the American
attack in North Africa. The World War Two is happening
all over the world, and the first place that US
decides to intervene is in North Africa where the British
are fighting the Germans and the Italians and the VS French.

(30:31):
So Patten leads a unit. He's got his tank guys
that he's been training at second division. He leads an
attack to capture Casablanca from the VS French. And yeah,
if you've seen Casablanca, you know that it was taken
over by the VCH French and thanks to the brave
actions of Humphrey Bogart and his allies, the way was

(30:53):
paved for George S. Patten to land there in nineteen
forty two and retake the town. So the Americans capture
Casablanca from the Vichy French and Paten actually he's commanding
from the front as he does, and here inns a
medal of Bravery from the Sultan of Morocco, which is pretty.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Fancy, pretty badass.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah, and he wants to keep pushing east on attack,
but he doesn't get selected to lead that attack. Instead,
it goes to a different general and the American army
starts to drive east across Morocco and into Tunisia, where
they run into the desert. Fox Erwin Rommel, Erwin.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Rommel yeah, so he is on the German side, obviously
on the Axis side. He's a badass in his own right.
He's also a very complicated figure. He was a career
military officer, renowned for his strategic mind, and wrote a
book called Infantally Glifed on or Infantry Attacks, published in
nineteen thirty seven, which meant that the book was out

(31:55):
and available to be read by all sorts of people. Pastor,
and he was really smart, kind of a nerd. He
learned all about internal combustion engines. He memorized logarithm tables
in his spare time, which personally I think is badass.

(32:16):
And both of these things are actually probably very useful
in his line of work. He got the nickname Desert
Fox because well, he was smart and clever and good
at tank warfare in North Africa. Because of course, anytime
someone calls you a fox, the first thing you think
of is tank warfare, right, Yes, of course we say,
you know, tanky like a fox. So that we could

(32:40):
go into a whole lot about Rommel, but this is
an episode about patent. And on the one hand, he
had a reputation for being, like, you know, one of
the good ones, so he was described as being professional
humane treated prisoners of war well. When he had some
Italian prisoners of war, he said, oh, we should treat

(33:02):
them as well as we would treat German civilians. The
more you dig into Rommel, the harder it gets to
sift out what he actually thought, what people attributed him
and whatever. And so I do want to make it
clear that he is on the one hand, very cool
and on the other hand also problematics. So let's not
lose sight of the fact that whatever his beliefs and

(33:23):
whatever his code of honor, he's still working for the
Nazi regime one way or another. And we do have
evidence that he said racist things about soldiers of color,
about Indian soldiers in the British Army.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
On the third.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Hand, he did participate in the conspiracy to kill Hitler,
that's right.

Speaker 1 (33:43):
He was implicated in the Vulkarie operation, the bomb to
kill Hitler, And then I think that's yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
And when he was caught, he was given the option
of either standing and facing trial and his name dragged
through the mud, having his family disgraced, or because of
the respect that Hitler did have for him, he was
given the option of discreetly committing suicide and preserving the

(34:15):
name and reputation of his family, and.

Speaker 1 (34:19):
Which is what he did. Yeah, it seems like an
easy decision the Roman like the fall on your sword.
So yeah, so Rummel is you know, he is, I
believe rightly believed to be one of the greatest tank
commanders of all time, right he oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, yeah, No one's criticizing his tank strategy.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Yeah, he helped develop the Blitzkrieg with Heinz Guderian that
was able to overrun France in I think like two weeks.
He commanded the lead elements of that Blitzkreek attack during
the Battle of France. And then now he's in North
Africa and he's been beating up on the British down there,
and the US joins the war and in February ninth,

(35:00):
Team forty three they go to attack Rommel at the
Battle of Kazarine Pass and Rammel just crushes them, right,
And he's not operating, he doesn't have a lot of reinforcements.
He's outnumbered a lot of times, like he's not dealing
with as you know, some of his equipment is a
little bit older, and he's kind of the b team right,
Germany didn't have that many resources to go around, and

(35:21):
they're kind of prioritizing holding France and maybe invading England
and fighting the Russians, and so he's kind of getting
whatever's left over and he's able to beat the US
and the British with it. And so, you know, the
US gets beat badly at Katherine Pass and Patton gets
angry and he's like, give me the opportunity to lead
this attack. So Eisenhowers is okay, fine, you can take over,

(35:44):
and he gets the call to go forward and he
starts driving ahead. But one of the problems he's running
into is that the British Air Force, the RAF was
supposed to kind of provide some close air support like
attack you know, some German army or from the air,
and they are the right. Yeah, it just makes everything

(36:04):
easier when you're not dealing with when you're not driving,
when enemy artillery is moving around. Air support is extremely
valuable to war and Patent, for whatever reason, didn't believe
he was getting enough of it, and so it's slowing
him down on his advance. So he ends up coming
into conflict with Air Vice Marshall, Sir Arthur Cunningham of

(36:25):
the RAF and he's like, you know, I need this
air support whatever, and kunding Up dispatches a couple of
officers to Patent to talk to him and just be like, hey,
look man, like we're doing the best we can. You're
getting all the air support you need. We have air
superiority in the entire region. And as they're having that meeting,
the building that they're in gets attacked by German bombers,

(36:49):
and like German bombers are like straping the airfield and
like literally like pieces of the ceiling or falling down,
and Patent yea. In the movie, George got ones outside
and start shooting. His shooting is a firearm at the
airplanes and stuff that didn't really happen.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
But he's kind of a foolish waste.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
Of generally, yeah yeah, but he did later remark that
like because of the irony of the situation, like I
need air support, you have your superiority, and then they
get bombed. Patton later remarked like, if I could find
the sons of bitches who were flying those German airplanes,
I'd mail each of them a metal Because he got
the air support he needed after that meeting kind of

(37:29):
kissed you guys for proving my point for me, as
if on c Yes could not have planned this better.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Well, the US operations in North Africa, they're going to continue,
but they're going to continue without patent because we're moving
on like we need. We're going to go attack Sicily now,
and they want him for that, so he gets redeployed
that he comes back out of North Africa. The US
and British eventually move on. They will defeat Rommel and
him out of North Africa, but George Patten is not

(38:03):
part of that. He gets redeployed to the US seventh
Army and they are going to attack Sicily to try
to knock Italy out of the war. We're going to
start working marching towards Rome now in forty three, and
we need to we need to kind of weaken that
ally of Germany. Pattan gets deployed into Sicily and he's
fighting there and he's having a lot of success. He's

(38:25):
marching his troops around and he's taking cities from the
Italians and the Germans who are defending them. But there's
some controversy that happens with him in this operation, he
disobeys orders. People tell him not to move forward, and
he moves forward because he, of course is just going
to look for a fight, and he finds it wherever
he's looking for it. He also finds it with his
superior officers who are telling who are mad at him

(38:48):
for not following orders, and he's angry with them. And
he's a hot headed guy. He's opinionated, and he doesn't
say he's sorry for stuff. He's aggressive, the qualities that
you want in a military commander who's on the attack.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
But might not work in other contexts.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Right, you're not wrong, You're just an asshole, like that
big Lebowski quote. Right, there's some of that happening here too.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
And he gets in the big trouble around the same time.
And this is also in the movie, which I like
that they portrayed in the movie. But he also is
kind of like getting mad at soldiers who are suffering
from what they called at the time, battle fatigue.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Which is what we would call PTSD.

Speaker 1 (39:32):
Yes, yeah, like same thing we're talking about with tank shock, right,
Like you're seeing some messed up stuff. You're being put
in these crazy additions. You're not sleeping, well, like you're
seeing horrible things. You're afraid for your life every minute
every day. But he gets mad at a couple of
these guys in hospital for this and he's he slaps them,
which ish not cool. Pack It's really not cool. Yeah,

(39:55):
he told some of his guys to like he told
some of his hospital officers, like, if they're coming with
battle fatigue, I don't want to hear about it, right,
don't even treat them for that. They're just they're just
cowards and you got to send it back out there,
which it's not cool. Now, that's not a cool way
of treating people who are suffering from this. And Patton

(40:15):
is just kind of like a grumpy grandpa and like
even by greatest generation standards, he's a he's a yah, Yeah,
he's like a grumpy uncle or something. And he's also like,
to this day he's a hero of grumpy uncles everywhere. Yeah,
that's just kind of that's kind of his vibe. And
again it's what maybe made him a very aggressive military commander.

(40:39):
But interestingly, like this doesn't play in nineteen forty three either,
so when word of this comes out, he gets removed
from command. He was pretty successful in Sicily. But when
word starts coming out there like he's not he's fighting
with his own people over their battle fatigue, Eisenhower removing him,

(41:01):
like like sending him back stateside, but instead they just
they take the command away from him and he won't
command another force in the field for a year, almost
a year. So the US Army they start to use
this to their advantage because over the fighting that has
happened in North Africa and in Sicily, so far he's
been successful. And the Germans they don't like him because

(41:24):
he's very aggressive and he attacks hard and his men
fight hard for him. You know, these two, these these
two incidents with the PTSD guys, I'm sure he had
plenty of you know, people would grumble about him, right
his his nickname in the army was old Blood and Guts,
and the joke among his men was like, yeah, are
blood his guts? But that wasn't entirely like a lot

(41:49):
of his men liked him, and a lot of them
responded really well. He would give these big, bombastic speeches
and people liked it, and they liked that he was
going to lead them. And you know, even if they
didn't like him, personally, they thought he was their best
chance to get home alive because he was going to
fight and win unfair. Yeah, and not like not screw
around with him. He was going to take them into battle.
He gave speeches like here's one that just kind of

(42:13):
encompasses George Patten where he's like, I don't want any
messages saying I'm holding my position. We're not holding a
goddamn thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing
constantly and we're not interested in holding on to anything
except the enemy's balls. We're gonna twist his balls and
kick the living shit out of him all the time.
Our basic plan of operation is to advance and keep
on advancing, regardless of whether we have to go over, under,

(42:34):
or through the enemy. That's how he operated, and that's
how he talked and sometimes and that worked for a
lot of his soldiers, and a lot of his men
really liked him, and we're really proud to have served
for him, served with him.

Speaker 2 (42:43):
Yeah, there's a sort of clarity to his message.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yes, that's what he wants to do, and that's what
he's gonna do. And you can't send that guy home
because that guy is inspirational to your men, and he's
terrifying to your enemy because he's developing.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
These He's got his uses, right.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
The Germans are like, I don't want anybody twisting my balls. No,
So what they do is that they haven't put him
in charge of guys. They think maybe and there's some
talk that like maybe Patton himself was starting to like
suffer a little bit of PTSD stuff and that's why
he was hitting these guys and acting the way that
he was, because maybe he was starting to kind of

(43:18):
the pressure of the war and stuff was starting to
get to him. I don't know how true any of
that is, but if it was true, he wouldn't have
ever said that so or what that said about him.
Probably Anyway, what the US Army is able to do
with this, though, is use him as a as a threat.
So the army, you know, sicily is happening. The Americans
start moving into Italy, but what they really, what the

(43:40):
Allies are trying to do, is attack Normandy. That's your
big D Day operation. And the only way D Day
works is if that the entire German Army doesn't know
exactly where we're going to land, right, you had to
distract them and make them think something else was going
to happen. So what they do with Patton they put
him in Dover, which is where you would a Master

(44:02):
Forces if you were going to have a big landing
at Cala, which is northeast France. We were actually planning
on landing northwest France, but we were trying to trick
the Germans into thinking we were going to land in
the northeast at Calai, which is a little closer to
England than Normandy is.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
And there's a.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Whole thing about it. We could do a whole episode about,
like all of the misdirection around trying to Oh yeah,
we had spies, like the soe is working over there.
England had this huge network of double agents that were
trying to convince the Germans that the landing was going
to come in Cala. There were inflatable tanks that were

(44:38):
being set up outside Dover. Inflatable tanks, yes, yeah, like
you'd see in a car dealership, just blown up inflatable
German tanks, so that if a German aircraft flew over,
they'd see that there were tanks lined up there.

Speaker 3 (44:53):
When there really weren't.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
So decoy tanks and all the tanks in the other
location were covered under tarps and camouflage netting. The other
ones are kind of sitting down in the open. We're
just or word camouflage quite as well.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
And apparently that worked because the Normandy landing was Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
Normany leading was successful. This huge operation to distract the
Germans worked, and Patten, even though he did very little
on the battlefield or any in anything other than psychological,
like the idea of him being in Dover, you know,
contributed a little bit to the Germans being concerned that
this has to be where they're going to line up.
They can't have this attack without this guy. So the

(45:36):
attack happens, you know, June nineteen forty four. We've all
seen the saving Private Ryan stuff, and like the Allies
attack and they they get a foothold in Normandy and
Patten's third Army is deployed. He's put back in charge
of the third Army. They deploy him on the west
flank of the invasion. So like Brittany region and of

(46:00):
the Germans have kind of once the landings are successful,
they start to pull back towards Germany and Patton is
operating in western France, so he doesn't encounter huge resistance,
some vshy French guys, some some Germans. But he's making
really big gains really quickly. He's not waiting for orders
to slow down and stop. If he as long as
he's got feel in his in his tanks, he's going

(46:22):
to drive them. And he drives them basically until he
gets to the border with Germany. He sweeps them all
the way around France. Paris is liberated. He wasn't part
of that operation, but he drives down those highways and
he gets to Metz, which is on the border with Germany,
and he runs.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
Out of gas.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Oh, and so he's kind of stuck there, and they're
not giving him more gas because they know if they
give him gas, he's just going to keep driving forward.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
They cut him off, or it's sort of yeah, cut.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
Him off, like you've had enough, Right, he's not gonna
he's not gonna slow down, he's not gonna stop. As
long as he can put fuel into his tanks, he's
going to driving forward. And maybe we're going to wait
to we'll wait see what happens first, wait for the
rest of the army to catch up. Yeah, he has
some great quote about like all these idiots want to

(47:12):
worry about their flanks. I don't care about my flanks.
That's for the enemy to worry about. Guys want to
go forward. So he says some fighting around Mets. Mets
is a fortress and there's kind of a grind there.
He's ground to a hall. He doesn't have fuel. He's
trying to attack Mets. The Germans are defending it pretty hard.
And that's roughly where he's at in December of nineteen
forty four. So he's been in North Africa, he's been

(47:32):
in Italy, he's been in Normandy. But these aren't the
actions in World War Two that he's really the best
known for. He is known for what happens in December
of nineteen forty four, at what is known as the
Battle of the Bulge. So the Allies have attacked Germany.
They've pushed all the way through France. They're on the
German border there. They've just got across the river to
get into Germany. Now and the Germans make a counter attack.

(47:55):
They kind of throw all their best forces together, all
their SS panzer divisions and all their best troops, and
they decided they're going to try to break out So
in December of nineteen forty four, under bad weather conditions
that don't allow the Allied aircraft access, twenty nine German
divisions moved through Belgium. Twenty nine divisions and divisions like

(48:17):
twenty thousand people, and they're doing the Blitzkrieg all over again.
They're they're going to do the Battle of France plant
all over again and just roll up the Allies like
they did in nineteen forty. So they start rolling out
and the Allies they do what they can, but it's winter,

(48:38):
it's cold, all the roads are blocked, there's no air cover,
and the Germans are kind of rolling through. Early on,
they're kind of steamrolling the troops there. We had kind
of there was a weak spot in the Allied lines
and the Germans were exploiting it and they do a
really effective job of driving through. But the Americans hold

(48:58):
out at one city in Belgium. It's called Bastone. And
if you've seen Band of Brothers, this is the the
winter battles that they fight. It's the hundred first Airborne Division,
and these are airborne troops. They're not designed to fight tanks.
They're not designed to fight yeah, panzers and tiger tanks
and panther tanks and that sort of thing. The anti
armored weapons they have are person like human carried not

(49:23):
or can be deployed by airplane. They're not the they're
not the big guns that you need to fight this
sort of thing. So they're holding out at best Stone,
and Germans have to get them out of there because
Bestone is like a hub for the main road that
goes from Germany to Antwerp, which is where they need
where they want to get to to complete this encirclement.

(49:46):
And you know, the one hundred first Airborne isn't giving
it up. They're holding, but it's not. It's one division
of guys who have no real heavy weapons and they're
outnumbered and they're in big trouble and they're not they're
not designed to hold out like airborne troops aren't designed
to defend positions. They're designed to attack behind enemy lines
weekly defended areas. So we got to get there, We

(50:08):
got to get these guys some reinforcements, or bad things
could happen. Patten has started to hear about this, and
the second he starts hearing about this, he starts making plans.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Of course he does.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
Yeah, he's got seven contingency plans on how you just
give me some gas I can get out there. So
Eisenhower hold holds a meeting of the generals, like, what
are we going to do these guys invest on, they're fighting,
they're struggling, they're getting hammered by the Germans. We got
to go help them. Patent says he can disengage six
divisions of the Third Army and have them engaged with

(50:41):
the Germans in three days, and Eisenhewer says, no way.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
Yeah, Now, these are tanks we're talking about in divisions,
combat divisions. If you look at Google Maps, they'll tell
you that getting from sarbrook And to Bostonia is two
hours along the major highway. But that's if you're driving
probably above the speed limit in just a little car

(51:04):
and you're not trying to slip all this stuff.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Yeah, you know, yeah, your Volkswagen Jetta could do it
in two hours, But we're driving one hundred and thirty
three thousand vehicles carrying sixty eight thousand tons of gear. Yes,
And you know, you've seen those pictures of like, you know,
the Russian column that was headed for Kiev. It's that
kind of thing right, Like it's a highway of tanks

(51:28):
driving in a single file or double file this distance
in the snow, not on a highway, and we've established it.
Like these tanks aren't that fat. I mean, these are
better versions of the tanks than the Reino FT's that
they were driving in World War.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
One, but still they're just tanks.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
Sherman tank is not a is not a Volkswagen Jetta
on terms of speed. But he's kind of got the plan,
and the second Eisenhower he's able to convince Eisenhower that
he can do it. Eisenhower is not not sure about it,
but he's like, okay, fine, see what you can do.
So Patton is able to move these guys there in

(52:06):
forty eight hours. The attack is spirited by the thirty
seventh Tank Battalion, which is led by Colonel Creighton Abrams,
who's the guy that the M one Abrams tank are
current US military tank. It's named after him. And they
get across there. They rush across Germany to relieve the
fighting at Bestone and these these German divisions have run

(52:26):
up against the hundred and first Airborne and they're being
pinned down. And then the counter attack arrives and it's
just you know, divisions of US tanks driving as fast
as they can, and they are able to break up
this German attack and defeat the Battle of the Bulge. Now,
worians like to argue about whether how successful, how important

(52:48):
the Battle of the Bulge was, and how much of
a chance the Germans had to actually inflict a severe
defeat on the Allies if like this battle hadn't happened.
But I always hate the like alternate history, like thinking
about that kind of stuff, like.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
Yeah, yeah, because you can come up with all sorts
of whatever.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
Yeah, being able to move that amount of troops and
armor and vehicles and trucks, so you need all these
trucks and jeeps and all these other things to carry
the fuel on the and the Amo and all that stuff.
Being able to move that logistically is a humongous feet
And they were able to get out there, and they
were able to defeat these these German and the best

(53:29):
army that the Germans had, right, the best troops they
could throw out there. This is all you know, first
sas second ss like big big units. And the Americans
are able to get out there, and Patent's able to
get out there and defeat them, which is huge turning
point in the war. From this point on, like we
get across the Ryan River, we're in Germany, the main
thrust of the German Army, the main attacking forces of

(53:52):
them have been defeated. Their big defensive line, the Sigfried line,
is breached, and from that point on, Patten just rushes
into Germany and he's the only problems that he's having
are gas related and gas related.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
Just to make clear, we do not mean flatulence, we
mean fuel.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Yes, yeah, so they're not like I said, they're not
giving him. They're not giving him the fuel that he needs,
like the gasoline that he needs. And so he has
his guys. They reach one fuel depot and he has
his guys lie and say they're from the First Army
instead of the Third Army. So they steal the First
Army's gas and keep driving and so yeah, so they

(54:31):
steal their gas and do they drive across Germany and
check and the war ends, and he's in Czechoslovakia and
the war ends. Him and the Third Army are credited
with capturing eighty one thousand, five hundred miles of enemy
territory over two hundred and eighty days of continuous combat.

Speaker 2 (54:49):
Wow, that's nine months over nine months of continuous combat.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
Yeah, every day. And like some of those spearhead units,
gret Neighborhms, the seven hundred and sixty four Tank Battalion
was involved with a lot of this. They were in
a lot of the fighting. They were the first African
American armored unit, and they were at the front of
a lot of the fighting here, and they did heroes
work trying to fight the Germans here. A couple of

(55:15):
guys from that unit received Medals of Honor and it's
a really interesting story as well. That was part of
the Patten's Third Army. Okay, so the war ends and
now we have George Patten with no more wars to fight.
The World War two is over Allies one and then

(55:35):
the Japanese surrender. Patten is just like there's a quote
of him where he's just like, let's just fight the
Russians while the bad heads are still sharp. We've got
our whole army over here. Let's just start fighting the Russians.
And all of the rest of the Allies are just
kind of like, h we're friends with them. Remember, we're
not going to do that right now, the Stalin seems

(55:56):
like a nice guy. We're gonna or very least. We
don't want to keep fighting these guys. They've got their
whole army out. You're mobilized as well. So let's let's tick.
Let's stick a pause on fighting wars and and and
try to rebuild Germany here and he writes in his
diary after he hears about the Japanese surrender, he writes, yet

(56:19):
another war has come to an end, and with it
my usefulness to the world. So he goes around giving speeches.
He's a he's a huge celebrity in the US now,
he's like, you know, considered the him and ees an
Hour like the greatest, you know, most well known and
Omar Bradley like some of the greatest American generals of
the war, the most well known fighters in Europe. And

(56:40):
he does these speeches. He hates it, uh, and he
starts acting like a like an angry grandpa, you know.
And maybe it's some PTSD stuff, Maybe it's CTE from
like the shelling, and maybe he's just drinking too much,
you know, maybe he just was bored and angry. I
don't know, but he doesn't like rebuilding Germany. He doesn't like,

(57:02):
you know, kind of maintaining the peace. He's starts saying
some anti Semitic stuff, he starts seeing some racist stuff.
He wants to fight the Russians. We got to do
something with this guy, Okay. So he's removed from the
Third Army and they give him a little staff position,
which he doesn't like because he's a history guy and
he loves the history stuff. They were going to put

(57:23):
him in charge of writing the history of the war
for the US Army. So they put him in a
position where he could do that. Yeah, but he hates it.
It's not working for him. And then on December ninth,
nineteen forty five, so seven months after victory in Europe day,
he's driving from a pheasant hunting trip in the Rhineland.

(57:44):
He's driving in a military jeep. He's not driving it.
His aid de camp is driving it, a guy who's
been friends with him for a long time, and they're
driving and they have a low speed head on collision
within US Army truck. Nobody's hurt, neither driver is hurt,
but Patten ends up hitting the windshield with his head
and breaks his neck. And he's paralyzed from the neck down.

(58:07):
He goes to the hospital, his wife flies out to
spend time with him. He's in traction for twelve days,
and then he dies on the twenty first of December
at the age of sixty. And I think this is weird.
But he's buried in Luxembourg, of all places.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
Well, is there a US Army cemetery there?

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Yeah, there's an Army sent it's kind of near where
he was when he died, But he still would you'd
think Arlington National Cemetery or something. You know, you wouldn't
expect it. If you wanted to see Patten's grave, you'd
have to go to Luxembourg.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
Anyway, he's a complicated character.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
He is, Yeah, definitely badass.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Definitely badass. I mean that's hard to argue with. And
anytime you talk to like, you know, anytime you want
to have a discussion of great badasses for American history,
he's kind of the World War Two general that you
bring out because he you know, he was very successful
on the battlefield, but he also had this like bombastic personality.
It got him in trouble sometimes. And there's certainly problematic

(59:03):
aspects of his character, but he also, you know, was
that's the kind of guy you want on your team
when you're in a war.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
He's was big and loud and aggressive and had these
huge speeches where he was going to rip the enemy's
guts out, and Greece his tank treads with them, and
that plays well sometimes. And he's correctly remembered as being
one of the first armored commanders in US history, and
he's also remembered as being one of the greatest. Him
and Rammel kind of get listed as the greatest tank

(59:31):
commanders whenever you start talking about that kind of thing.
The Americans named three tanks after him. They M forty six,
forty eight, and sixty tanks were all the patent. There
are variations on a similar theme, but they are still
three different tanks named after him.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
It seems like a fitting tribute.

Speaker 1 (59:48):
And I, you know, I guess what I want to
end this on is a quote from Patten himself. He's
got some problems and there's some there's some stuff that
you know, people can create size about him. But the
way I want to end this is with a quote
from him to his men. He says, there's one great
thing that you men will be able to say, after

(01:00:09):
this war is over, and once you are home again,
you may be thankful that in twenty years from now,
when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson
on your knee and he asks you what you did
in the Great World War two, you won't have to cough,
shift him to the other knee and say, well, your
granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana. No, sir, you can look
him straight in the eye and say, son, your grand
daddy rode with the Great Third Army and a son

(01:00:31):
of a goddamn bitch named Georgie Patten. Yeah, which I
think is how he wants to be remembered, and it's
how he is remembered.

Speaker 2 (01:00:41):
Yes, so that's George Patton.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
That's George Patten.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:00:48):
And all right, well, Pat, stay badass, Stay badass, And yeah,
it's been fun hanging out with you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
And hey, listeners, Mike subscribe, tell your friends.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Yeah, yeah, definitely do that. Yeah, and thanks so much
for listening, but we will see you on the next one.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, me Pat Larish,
and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is by me
and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.

(01:01:34):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.

(01:01:55):
If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen, and tell
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