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February 1965 Issue
EXPLORE
Two Fighting Generals: Patton and Macarthur
As a prelude to becoming a superb fighting general and an ambassador to France, JAMES M. GAVINpicked coal and sold papers for a living in the Pennsylvania mining towns, enlisted in the between-wars regular Army, got into West Point without a high school education, learned to fly, and then helped to pioneer in the development of the airborne infantry. Now, at fifty-seven, he is chairman of the board of Arthur D. Little, Inc., one of the country‘s most versatile research corporations.
By James M. Gavin
FEBRUARY 1965 ISSUE
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THE sun rose slowly, as though rising from a furnace, and then quickly spread its heat across the Sicilian countryside. It was the morning of July 13, 1943, and I was en route by jeep to Gela. As I drove up on the high ground overlooking the sea, there was General George Patton, ivory-handled pistols and all, standing overlooking the busy scene in the harbor. When I arrived in front of him, still gripping an M-1 rifle, he whipped out a huge silver flask and said, “Gavin, you look like you need a drink. Have one.”
I had landed behind the enemy lines, by parachute, about seventy-five miles to the east of Gela four nights before, made my way through our lines with a handful of paratroopers the following night, picked up first a platoon of 82nd Airborne Engineers and then a battalion of parachute infantry, and engaged what later turned out to be a combat command of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division. I had had a busy two days of it, and finally made my way toward Gela on the fourth day, passing by burning tanks, quite a few dead bodies, and extensive demolished roadblocks.
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General Patton had given us a send-off talk about a week earlier, when we were still in North Africa. His talks on such occasions were usually quite good, earthy, and I was impressed. One thing that he said always stuck with me, for it was contrary to what I had believed up to that moment, but after being in combat only a short while, I knew he was right. Speaking to all of us late one afternoon as we assembled in the North African sunset, he said, “Now, I want you to remember that no son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb son of a bitch die for his country.”
Patton went on to discuss the tactics that we should employ in fighting the Germans and the Italians, stressing with particular emphasis the Italians. The point that he wanted to make was that we should avoid a direct assault on an enemy position, but seek to envelop his flanks. The General in doing so, however, used terms applicable to sexual relations. He did so in a very clever manner, emphasizing the point that when one arrived in the rear of one of their positions, the Italians would invariably quickly try to switch to a new position to protect themselves, and at that moment would become vulnerable to our attack from the rear. It was not so much what he said as how he said it that caused us to remember the points that he wanted to make — though I did feel somewhat embarrassed at times, and I sensed that some of the troops felt a bit embarrassed also. Ladislas Farago in Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (Obolensky) describes the reaction of the troops to his talks: “They laughed at the elaborate pornography of his pep talks, but also blushed.” But the General made his points, and they remembered them as much for the very language that he used as for their content.
General Patton commanded the U. S. Seventh Army in its assault on the island of Sicily. It was a command to which he had aspired all his life; and his life was a tumultuous one, from the day he graduated from West Point in 1909 until he met his untimely death in Germany shortly after the end of World War II. Never a man to hold back an opinion, nor to take counsel from his fears, George Patton was a restless, impatient, peacetime soldier. He burned up much of his energy playing handball, playing polo – he was a seven-goal man – and writing. And when he wasn’t doing these things, he was sailing his yacht, or writing to the service journals about war as he foresaw it, or doing any one of the many things that he did well. There were a number of doubts when he was selected for his first armored command since he had been known as a horse cavalry enthusiast for many years. Few realized, however, that he had commanded armored tank forces with distinction in World War I.
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General George C. Marshall had served with him in World War I and appreciated not only his tank background but the effervescent driving qualities of leadership that characterized everything he undertook. Farago describes how General Marshall, in anticipation of the need for his exceptional leadership, picked him from almost certain retirement to bring him to Fort Myer, Virginia, in October of 1938, and then sent him to his first armored command at Fort Benning, Georgia. General Patton commanded the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, when I commanded the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, at the same post, but on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. The common meeting grounds of the troops from both commands were the bridges over the river between Phenix City and Columbus. They were the scene of some rather serious forays, out of which came a degree of mutual respect. In our first major battle in Sicily in World War II, we found ourselves joined with the 2nd Armored, and the paratroopers still insist today that they were lining the curbs with the Sicilians, applauding the 2nd Armored as it captured Palermo.
Patton‘s sweep around the west end of the island was both heartening and reassuring to U.S. enthusiasts of armored equipment. However, as his forces advanced eastward toward Messina, they eventually began to go through a narrow funnel as the rugged terrain moved closer to the sea. It was at this time that General Ridgway and I called on Patton in his headquarters in Palermo to consider the use of parachute troops in cooperation with proposed amphibious end runs. We finally agreed that the terrain was too restricted in its possibilities for paratroopers, but nevertheless Patton launched two successful amphibious assaults. Winston Churchill, long an advocate of exploiting Allied superior sea power, was intrigued, and Farago, in referring to these amphibious coups, quotes Churchill,
“I had of course always been a partisan of the ‘endrun,’ as the Americans call it,” he wrote, “or ‘cat-claw,’ which was my term. I had never succeeded in getting this maneuver open to sea power included in any of our desert advances. In Sicily, however, General Patton had twice used the command of the sea flank as he advanced along the northern coast of the island with great effect.”
I always considered these attacks to have been of extraordinary significance because first, they planted the seed of Anzio in the mind of Churchill, and second, they demonstrated a capacity for innovation in war on the part of Patton that I do not believe was possessed by any other high commander but MacArthur. And in using his sea power in this manner, he was motivated no doubt as much by a desire to reach Messina first as he was to try something new in tactics. At the time, he was striving mightily to reach Messina before Montgomery, who had been stalled around Catania for over a month. It was the beginning of a rivalry that persisted, usually in a friendly way, but sometimes bitterly, until the end of the war.
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AS THE war entered its final stages, coincidence brought the 2nd Armored and the 82nd Airborne Divisions, and General Patton and me, together once again. In March of 1945 I had orders to prepare for a parachute assault on Berlin. At the same time, the 2nd Armored Division was preparing plans for an armored attack through the Germans into the city. Unfortunately, for reasons still not clear to me, the operation was called off. Nevertheless, the 2nd Armored was the first division to occupy Berlin, and the 82nd Airborne Division relieved it immediately following the Potsdam Conference. At once an incident occurred in which General Patton played a characteristic role. As the American representative on the Kommandatura, I was told by the Soviet member that either the Americans or the Russians would lead the forthcoming victory parade in the city, but that neither the British nor the French would be acceptable to the Russians.
I replied that I would be happy to draw lots for position in the parade or to arrange ourselves alphabetically, in a diplomatic manner, using the French language as a base for determining our alphabetical position. My Soviet opposite number insisted that the Russians lead, and when I refused to agree, became incensed and said that we must see Marshal Zhukov, who at that time was at Potsdam.
We went out to see him, and after a rather heated discussion he threatened to call General Eisenhower. I assured him that my position would remain unchanged, and that was the last that I heard of the matter until the day of the parade. He must have called, however, because General Patton came to Berlin to be the senior U.S. Army officer present on the occasion. Marshal Zhukov arrived at the reviewing stand, resplendent with medals from his chin to his waist on both sides of his tunic. Shortly, George Patton arrived, equally dazzling, with his polished helmet and twenty stars, medals, and ivory-grip pistols.
After the introductions on the reviewing stand, there was some uncertainty about what would happen next. Suddenly, Marshal Zhukov jumped into his open-topped Ziv and started to review the nearby standing troops. In a split second George vaulted over the side of his open car, with me following in his wake, and we reviewed the troops beside Zhukov. As it finally turned out, this was the Russian idea of who was to be first in the parade. It was not a matter of who would march first, as was our custom, but rather what senior officer would review the troops before the parade began. So George protected the honor of his country, the feelings of our Allies were not hurt, and the Russians learned that George was not to be outdone.
Later that evening General Patton and I had dinner together with some other senior officers in Berlin. The conversation ranged through many subjects, as it always did with George. There was one thing that I particularly wanted to discuss with him – the problem of fraternization. Ever since we had crossed the borders of Germany, the troops had been admonished about the evils of fraternization. Understandably, the wives and sweethearts back home didn’t want the high command to countenance the troops’ hopping into bed with the fräuleins. Besides, there was much to hate the Germans for, and fraternization obviously was not compatible with hating – we were supposed to continue with the hating. So the necessary policy forbidding fraternization was promulgated and distributed through all the commands. Troop commanders were threatened with drastic punishment if they did not enforce the ban. The Stars and Stripes published articles from time to time about the dangers and impropriety of mixing it up with the fräuleins.
Meanwhile, to the troops, and especially to the 82nd Airborne veterans who had been at war more than three years and who had come all the way from Africa, the policy made little sense. Surely they hated the Germans, but what did that have to do with their relations with pretty fräuleins, of which there were many? There was much rationalizing about the subject. The reasoning among the troops went that if the big brass were worried about the troops being contaminated with Nazism, they could be rather formal about their relations with the fräuleins and perhaps this would not count as fraternization. For example, if they did not take off their airborne caps or their jump boots, the relationship would certainly be devoid of all politics.
In the final analysis, the ban was really unenforceable and placed the troop commanders in a very difficult position. I thought, therefore, that I would mention it to George since he usually had a rather good feel for what was going on in the minds of the troops. As a beginning I thought that I might point out what was really taking place and why it wasn‘t fraternization, as the higher command saw it; so I turned to him at the dinner table and said, “General, you know the troops really are not fraternizing.”
He turned quickly toward me, looked at me with amazement, and blurted, “Why, godamnit, Gavin, you’re as nutty as a fruitcake.” I didn‘t say another word. But the allure of fraternization to his troops had been on his mind, and Farago reports a telephone conversation that Patton had with General Bradley as he eagerly sought permission to carry the battle into Czechoslovakia.
Patton’s eagerness kept puzzling Bradley, so now he asked, “Why does everyone in the Third Army want to liberate the Czechs?”
Patton said nothing about the Russians. “Oh, Brad,” he answered, “can’t you see? The Czechs are our allies and consequently their women aren’t off limits. On to Czechoslovakia and fraternization!” he yelled into the telephone. “How in hell can you stop an army with a battle cry like that?”
GENERAL PATTON was a rambunctious, flamboyant officer with mannerisms intended to impress his troops. He had the wit, as Field Marshal Rommel once expressed it, to make himself distinctive, so that he stood out at all times and was recognized by soldiers wherever he appeared. He liked to talk to junior officers about the rather ordinary problems that sometimes perplexed them. Before D-Day in Normandy, he walked up to me in a London hotel lobby one day and said, “Gavin, do you think machine-gun ammunition should be loaded in belts with one round of tracer to every five or six rounds, or do you believe we should not have tracer mixed in with ball?” It was a matter that we had been arguing about, and I really don’t believe that he was particularly interested in my personal opinion, but it was characteristic of him to raise a subject for discussion in which he suspected that I might have an interest, as a basis for further conversation. Through this device, he frequently was able to talk to junior officers and enlisted men, and thus they got to know him better. Like all good professionals, however, he was very exacting of the troops under his command, and individuals from other commands entering his Third Army area frequently felt harassed by the penalties imposed upon them for such things as being in improper uniform or failing to salute.
We occasionally speculated about why George made such a spectacle of himself with his glossed helmet, ivory-handled pistols, and stars wherever he could properly place them on his uniform. We wondered why he felt that he should urinate off the first pontoon bridge over the Rhine River, or make forays not too far from enemy fire. A close mutual friend told me that George had assured him that he was more afraid of showing fear than anything else, and that since he knew fear often in battle, he behaved in this manner to cover up his true feelings. As Farago observes:
An intricate human being with an intellectual turn of mind, he discovered early in life that although he was brave, he was not altogether unquestioning in the face of danger.
He resolved to condition himself against fear, and set a course of training that seemed as reckless and foolish to the outsider as it was purposeful and systematic to him.
Farago’s biography is fascinating. It frequently reads as though it were fiction, and perhaps some of it is, for in places he often puts words into the mouths of his characters that seem impossible for him to have obtained from any authoritative source. There are strange omissions also, notably an incident much discussed at the time, when Patton launched a costly advance into Czechoslovakia that resulted in the rescue of his son-in-law, who had been in a German prisoner-of-war camp. But Farago’s biography moves along at a pace matched only by the dash and brilliance of Patton’s tank columns. His aggressiveness, while thoroughly respected by the Germans, was a frequent source of trouble to Eisenhower, who constantly was urged by Montgomery to make a main effort in the north. It reached the odd situation in the fall of 1944 where both sides were trying to hold back Patton. Farago describes it:
So the cry was “Hold Patton!” on both sides of the fence. It was undoubtedly the strangest and most paradoxical situation of the entire war. Eisenhower had given orders to hold Patton exactly when Hitler had issued identical orders!
Since Patton seemed to thrive on argument and opposition, Generals Bradley and Eisenhower are frequently cast in rather unflattering roles. Bradley was a sagacious commander, who sought always to balance risk with probable achievement, while at the same time, he held his casualties to a minimum. To Patton, this was sometimes unpardonable conservatism, which, he reasoned, in the long run would cost more lives. So the tug of war for divisions, gasoline, freedom to undertake new missions went on between the two, while Eisenhower had to weigh the requests of Montgomery on the north against the insistent demands of Patton on the south. Like many of the admirers of Patton, Farago believed without reservation that if Patton had been given the resources that he demanded, the war could have been ended in the fall of 1944. Having commanded a division in the Nijmegen-Arnhem airborne assault under Montgomery’s command in the fall of 1944, I believed then, and I do now, that with an additional corps, Montgomery could have broken into the North German plain and brought an end to the war. But the record suggests that in dealing with two strong-willed characters such as Patton and Montgomery, Eisenhower seemed unwilling to suppress either totally, and thus neither was given all the resources available, while both sought to advance the attack in their own sectors. Perhaps Eisenhower should have relieved Patton of his command at this time, but such a decision was unthinkable, as indeed it was for Lee to relieve Longstreet at Gettysburg for an entirely different reason. War is waged by men, not automatons, and human relations frequently override tactical considerations. We shall never know whether the war could have been brought to a victorious end in ‘44, and the historians will argue this point for many years.
The war entered the bitter winter of 1944-1945, and the Battle of the Bulge broke upon us. It was an opportunity for one of Patton’s finest achievements, the swing of an entire field army through ninety degrees, on very short notice, to launch an attack on the beleaguered bastion of Bastogne. Bastogne is a brilliant monument to Patton’s capacity as an Army commander, and Farago tells the Bastogne story in a fast-moving style, a style that surges ahead with a racing description of Patton’s armored sweeps. Critics will take exception to some parts of this biography, but I consider it to be a fair representation of Patton as he was. I hesitate to think of what Patton might have written had he lived long enough to write his autobiography, but the possibility leads us to General Mac Arthur’s Reminiscences (McGraw-Hill).
VIEWED as a whole, Reminiscences is quite unlike any other military autobiography that I can recall, and we have had quite a few autobiographies written by our generals in the past. There is about it a self-righteousness and an air of infallibility that become a bit irksome. Further, General MacArthur uses incidents to support his anxieties that are questionable. For example, recounting the events leading to his climactic dismissal, he cites as evidence of President Truman’s having lost his nerve the President’s famous letter to the music critic Paul Hume in December of 1950. In it the President threatened bodily harm to Mr. Hume for his poor review of his daughter’s singing. Going on, MacArthur observes, “I realized that I was standing at the apex of a situation that could make me the next victim of such an uncontrolled passion.”
Actually, he was not relieved until April 11, 1951, and then after a series of events that surely would have been irritating to any President. In addition there are a surprising number of almost direct quotes from other biographies of MacArthur, notably General Whitney’s, MacArthur: His Rendezvous with Destiny. It has been suggested by William Styron, writing in the New York Review, that MacArthur’s style was “lusterless Eisenhowerese which is so favored by corporation executives and which may be the result of MacArthur’s later years at Remington Rand.” All of which causes one to wonder if, in part, the overall tenor of his book is not attributable to his advanced years. Surely he could have written a better book ten years earlier. As it is, the cumulative impact is one that does not do justice to the General as a person or to his extraordinary career as a public servant. A better biography of MacArthur will be written.
I was a lieutenant attending the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, when Douglas MacArthur was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. It was at this time that he personally went into the streets of Washington to take responsibility for the evacuation of the bonus marchers. Incidentally, he took with him two majors, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton. He describes the events leading up to the bonus march and the evacuation itself in his Reminiscences. It has been a much-writtenabout subject, but I have never read anywhere the feeling of the junior officers toward MacArthur’s participation. We all felt that it was a gesture of personal responsibility on his part, and it was deeply appreciated by us. It was an act that certainly could have destroyed him in the public mind. Using the Army against our veterans was unthinkable, but this he was directed to do. He didn’t delegate the responsibility: instead he, Chief of Staff no less, strode into the midst of the affair and took full responsibility for what was taking place. It was characteristic of him, and for this he was thoroughly respected. But the difference between him and Patton was also quite apparent. Although MacArthur was present, he really wasn‘t part of the operation. There was an aloofness about him that always kept him remote from the juniors even though they were in close physical proximity. A few years after the bonus march, I served with the Philippine Scouts, a pre-World War II force that became part of MacArthur’s Bataan army. I remember MacArthur’s visiting us at Fort McKinley on Luzon to watch some test firings of a new 81-millimeter mortar. We were observing mortar fire from high ground when he strode up in a rather imperious way. There was an aura about him that seemed to keep us junior officers at some distance. When he did talk to us, it was obvious that it was the general talking to a lieutenant or a captain rather than a fellow soldier discussing a professional problem. But he was impressive, and in his own way inspired great confidence and tremendous respect. We knew him by reputation to be a man of great physical courage and by professional behavior to be a man of vision, intelligence, and great moral courage.
The fortunes of war took me to Africa and Europe instead of to the Pacific Theater, and I did not see General MacArthur again until the Inchon landing. I participated in the operation with several scientists as members of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. Our main purpose in being there was to look into the shortcomings of our tactical air power, which it had been assumed prior to Korea would stop any North Korean offensive in its tracks. I was on the outskirts of Inchon on a hill with “Chesty” Puller’s 1st Regiment of Marines when the MacArthur entourage arrived. The scene was almost exactly the same as it had been fifteen years earlier in the Philippine Islands. The erect, long-striding, buoyant General, in complete control of the situation and of himself, exuded confidence and left absolutely no question that the operation was a great success and that he knew exactly why and what he was going to do next. Disdainful of physical danger as usual, he went forward to look at some T-34 Soviet tanks with their cargo of dead North Koreans draped over them and about them; they had been knocked out of action only a few minutes earlier.
Later I was to have an opportunity to talk to MacArthur in his office in the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo. He greeted me warmly, sat me down, and began to talk to me about airborne warfare. This was characteristic of him. He obviously had studied the European airborne operations, knew the units that had participated and the recent maneuvers in the United States, and was aware ol what I had written about the future of airborne operations. He began by saying that after the North Korean attack began, remembering the reports on the 82nd Airborne Division on recent maneuvers in the United States, he asked for it to be flown to the Pacific at once. This request had been denied. He went on to say, however, that the only way to win in future combat was to fly a thousand miles behind the enemy’s fortified areas and organize a huge airhead, and thus get to his vitals at once and destroy him where he is most vulnerable. I was fascinated and at the same time rather alarmed.
Prior to the Normandy landings, when I was General Eisenhower’s senior airborne adviser in London, General Marshall sent over a proposal that the airborne divisions be landed in the Orleans Gap, the area between the headwaters of the Seine and Loire rivers in which the city of Orleans is located. It was assumed that by sealing off this area, while at the same time destroying the bridges over the two rivers, all the German forces could be cut off and destroyed. This was practically all that the Germans had in northwest France. The thing that shook those of us with Sicilian and Italian experience was our extreme vulnerability to armored attack, for paratroopers had nothing adequate to deal with the Panther, Tiger, and the Royal Tiger tanks of the German Panzer forces. Courage alone was not enough to punch a hole in six inches of armor. The shells of the small bazooka with which we were equipped often bounced off and in nearly all cases failed to penetrate. The nearest thing to an antitank weapon that we had was the British six pounder, and that had to be landed by glider, and its only real advantage was the distance at which it could engage a tank compared with the bazooka. We were likely to enjoy overwhelming air superiority, but this was of little avail at night; hence the likelihood of the Orleans airhead seizure’s being successful was extremely low even though as a map exercise it appeared to show great promise. The concept was daring, the courage would have been present in abundance, but the tactical weapons to succeed were totally lacking. After this proposal was rejected, the pendulum swung far in the opposite direction, and for a while much consideration was given to dropping small packets of paratroopers all along the beaches to knock out specific small tactical units. One of my Air Force colleagues at the time described it, saying that it was like “sending Michelangelo to paint the barn.” The final solution that succeeded so well was between the two extremes.
But returning to my conversations with General MacArthur, or rather General MacArthur’s dissertation to me, his concept was very daring and under some specific tactical conditions might succeed, but at the time we lacked the tactical means to make a success of such a deep penetration. In World War II MacArthur’s exploitation of our superior sea power had been extraordinarily successful; now he was thinking of the use of air power for the same purpose: avoidance of frontal assault through vertical envelopment. More than any other commander in World War II, he understood the costliness of the direct assault and the need to exploit the media in which we had supremacy. In his Reminiscences, reporting a meeting with President Roosevelt at Pearl Harbor in 1943, he says, “The days of the frontal attack should be over. Modern infantry weapons are too deadly, and frontal assault is only for mediocre commanders.”
My meeting with him had been a stimulating, indeed for me a memorable, occasion. But more important to me than the views that the General expressed was the fact that he had gone to such trouble to look into my own particular interests and ideas. Visitors frequently, if not usually, left his office absolutely overwhelmed with General MacArthur’s sympathetic understanding of their point of view on particular problems. Both by his personality, especially his articulate forceful manner of speech, and his grasp of a subject, he was inclined to be overwhelming. And when I walked out of his office and passed by the desk of one of the junior staff officers whom I had known in the service for many years, he said, without trying to be humorous or sarcastic, “Now, you have met God.” There is no doubt that MacArthur was an extraordinary general with great gifts of courage and intellect and one of the truly great captains of our time. For these reasons I regret that his memoirs do not portray the man that he was more sympathetically and more accurately.
IN HIS Reminiscences his controversy with President Truman comes through clearly as it builds up to the climactic moment of his recall. In the conduct of foreign policy, in the prosecution of our military plans to support that policy, and in domestic politics, President Truman and General MacArthur were in conflict. The first problem confronting them both was the administration of Japan. President Truman’s memoirs expressed the view that he was determined not to allow the Russians to have any part in the control of Japan. On the other hand, MacArthur alleges that the United States surrendered its unilateral authority to administer Japan to a Far Eastern Commission.
Referring to the commission, he writes, “They met in Tokyo and were, I suppose, to oversee my supervision of the Occupation.” MacArthur saw to it that the commission became hardly more than an advisory body, but not before he had an open split with the State Department. The State Department, in justifying its participation in the establishment of the Far Eastern Commission, alleged that MacArthur had approved the plan. This he strongly disagreed with, and, as he expresses it in his Reminiscences, “The State Department thereupon acknowledged the error and confirmed the accuracy of my denial.”
I was particularly interested in how he handled the Soviet representative in Tokyo. I had been the senior United States representative on the Kommandatura in Berlin from the summer of 1945 until my departure in late November of the same year. It had been a frustrating experience as the Soviets sought to gain administrative and military control of the city despite the responsibilities of the United States and our Allies. In Tokyo, when the Soviets realized that MacArthur was conducting the Occupation in his own way without consulting them, they sent their representative to call on him. MacArthur reports the meeting:
General Derevyanko became almost abusive and threatened that the Soviet Union would see to it that I would be dismissed as supreme commander. He went so far as to say Russian forces would move in whether I approved or not. I told him that if a single Soviet soldier entered Japan without my authority, I would at once throw the entire Russian Mission, including himself, into jail. He listened and stared as though he could not believe his own ears, and then said politely enough, “By God, I believe you would.”
And so the Russians were not permitted to dabble in the affairs of the Occupation Government, and Japan today is much the better for it. On a recent visit to Tokyo, where I attended the 1964 Olympics, a Japanese said to me, “General, there is one thing we Japanese people will always be grateful to you Americans for; you saved us from Soviet occupation.”
MacArthur had a conflict of view with Washington on the possible use of the Chinese forces on Formosa, views that he frequently aired in public. The issue was brought sharply to public attention by a letter on the subject that he wrote to Congressman Martin. The letter was released, to the embarrassment of the Administration, which at that time was struggling to hold together the support of our Allies in the Korean effort. To retain their support, we had to assure them that we had no intention of extending the war to the mainland of Asia. The UN commander in the field, however, appeared to be advocating the contrary.
It is clear from his Reminiscences that MacArthur was incapable of differentiating between what he considered to be national objectives and the objectives of the United Nations. Commenting upon our entry into the Korean affair, he writes, “The American tradition had always been that once our troops are committed to battle, the full power and means of the nation would he mobilized and dedicated to fight for victory– not for stalemate or compromise.” The mandate from the United Nations clearly limited the General’s actions to Korea. This brought into collision a military philosophy, developed during a brilliant career, with the limitations of coalition warfare in the nuclear age. The world had changed faster than he had realized. Our Allies had hardly recovered from the catastrophic damage of World War II, and now nuclear weapons posed an even greater danger. No longer could a nation act unilaterally and solely in its self-interest, nor could its commander in the field. And this state of affairs came about at the very time that General MacArthur was culminating a decade of decision making, both in war and peace, in which he had had the traditional freedom of action that we give to our Army commanders. And in the end he had to go, and Mr. Truman was unquestionably right in relieving him of his command.
Unfortunately, word of his relief came to him over a radio news broadcast under such circumstances, as he described it, that it “practically placed me under duress. No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies.”
And so, he returned as an old soldier to fade away, but he will not fade away, nor will the controversy. And it will be remembered when the McClellan-Lincoln controversy has been forgotten. There is much yet to be known about MacArthur and the reasons for President Truman’s attitude toward him. For example, more information about MacArthur‘s political aspirations as well as his correspondence with his supporters in the Republican Party would add significantly to an understanding of the controversy. And when all the facts on the Chinese intervention are in, when we know, if we ever do know, how much of MacArthur’s plans reached his opponents through our Allies in the United Nations, then we will be in a better position to judge his service in the Korean affair.
While many are inclined to judge both MacArthur and Patton in terms of civilian standards of behavior, one should realize that they devoted their entire lives to one purpose: to be prepared for war and to win a war, if one should occur. In the lifetime of both generals we changed many things about our government; we conducted our business affairs, wrote our books and painted our pictures, raised our families, and pursued a way of life that offered much to free men. And when this way of life was challenged, we had in the ranks of our Armed Forces the Pattons and MacArthurs who served us well. There may have been many shortcomings in our institutions, and perhaps other aspects of our daily lives, but when the issue of war chilled the hearts of our people, there was one thing that was not lacking: their generalship.
巴顿接着讨论了我们在与德国人和意大利人作战时应该采用的战术，特别强调了意大利人的战术。他想说的是，我们应该避免直接攻击敌人的阵地，而是寻求包围他的侧翼。然而，将军在这样做的时候，使用了适用于性关系的术语。他以一种非常巧妙的方式强调，当我们到达他们一个阵地的后方时，意大利人总是会迅速地试图转换到一个新的阵地来保护自己，而在那一刻，他们会变得很容易受到我们从后方的攻击。与其说他说了什么，不如说他是如何说的，这使我们记住了他想要表达的观点--尽管我有时确实感到有些尴尬，而且我感觉到一些部队也感到有些尴尬了。拉迪斯拉斯-法拉戈在《巴顿。Ordeal and Triumph (Obolensky)一书中描述了部队对他谈话的反应。"他们对他精心制作的色情演讲感到好笑，但也感到脸红"。但将军提出了他的观点，他们记住了这些观点，因为他使用的语言和内容一样多。