Twelve Desperate Miles by Tim Brady Read Free Book Online

service and wounds.
    Patton became one of the most visible and highly regarded young officers in the war. He developed a style of personal leadership that would carry over into the next war and would soon be apparent in North Africa. He was no remote, commanding figure to his troops; whether in training or combat, he was there among them on a daily basis, cursing, exhorting, letting them know in no uncertain terms that his role was to make them better and braver soldiers. He was hardly beloved by his soldiers, but he was respected; and Patton gained a reputation as a fighter and a strict disciplinarian who was capable of leading and inspiring his troops.He also liked to see a salute snapped off with a smart style that came to be known in the ranks as a “George Patton.”
    His eccentricities were also becoming legend within the army. Patton liked to write poetry on what he called “the manly virtues [that war] engenders.” It was also in France that he became relatively open about his belief in his own reincarnations. One of the young lieutenants under his command in the tank corps in France, Harry Semmes (who would subsequently serve with Patton in North Africa and write a biography of the general after World War II), recorded an instance when Patton was driving through the French countryside in an area he’d never seen before to visit an American station. He had an odd feeling that he’d been in this same locale as a soldier in another life. “As the car approached the top of a hill,” Semmes wrote, “Captain Patton, to whom the vicinity was entirely unfamiliar, reached forward and asked the soldier driver if thecamp wasn’t out of sight and just over the hill to the right. The driver replied, ‘No sir … but there is an old Roman camp where we are going over there to the right. I have seen it myself.’ ” According to Semmes, Patton proceeded to the camp but, once there, had another intuition.Wasn’t their theater of action straight ahead? He asked at the station headquarters. It was nighttime, and Patton had no way of knowing where the fighting was. “ ‘We have no theater [there],’ ” Patton was told, “ ‘but I do know that there is an old Roman theater only about three hundred yards away.’ ”
    After the war, Patton was stationed near Washington, at Camp Meade, Maryland, and spent much of his time, with limited success, petitioning Congress for funds to build the army’s armored forces. It was during these years that he first met and became friends with “Ike” Eisenhower, another West Point grad and rising star in the U.S. Army who, like Patton, had settled into an underfunded and often undervalued peacetime army.The two would spend a year together at Fort Riley in the mid-1920s, as well as study at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Patton also graduated from the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which was required education at the time for any officer hoping for advancement in the army.
    From Fort Riley, Patton took Beatrice and his family to the first of two interwar postings in Hawaii, where, among other duties, he wrote a plan for the defense of the island should she be attacked by air. He also honed his polo-playing skills. Back near Washington, at Fort Myer in Virginia in the early 1930s, Patton was reunited with his friend Eisenhower under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Here he met for the first time Captain Lucian K. Truscott, another officer who would become a crucial figure in the career of George Patton and one with whom he was about to become reacquainted in London. All four were involved in the notorious squashing of the 1932 Bonus March.
    In July of that year, thousands of World War I vets, financially devastated by the Great Depression, marched on Washington, demanding payment on bonuses that had been promised them as veterans of theGreat War. The problem was that the soldiers had been given bonds that weren’t due to be