Patton General Quotes

I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom

A man must know his destiny… if he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder… if he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight...

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.” —General George S. Patton As

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” —General George S. Patton, Jr. General

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.

I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French one behind me.

You must be single-minded. Drive for the one thing on which you have decided.” —General George S. Patton

Live for something rather than die for nothing.

The truth has no agenda.

God doesn't punish people who take their lives. They need him more than anyone else. - General George Patton

Great leaders take care of their men first, and then worry about their own needs.

Yet it is America that now commits the unconscionable act of deferring to Russia at the expense of Britain—in effect, killing England. Winston

I was fascinated by all the great generals, from Alexander the Great to George Patton. I hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit.

If everyone is thinking alike,’ General George Patton said, ‘then somebody isn’t thinking.

The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.

General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.

Americans despise cowards,” Patton continued all those months ago, putting his own spin on U.S. history. “Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.

When General George Patton tried to convince Eisenhower to make a push to conquer the city first, Eisenhower blithely asked, 'Well, who would want it?

General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. —General George S. Patton

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” General George S. Patton, Jr.

Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity: General George S. Patton.

It is sad and shocking to think that victory and the lives of thousands of men are pawns to the 'fear of They,' and the writings of a group of unprincipled reporters, and the weak-kneed congressmen, Patton wrote in his journal. 'But so it is.

General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, “Seventh Army didn’t cause that destruction, did it, sir?” The man replied, “No sir, that happened in the last war.” “What war was that?” “The Second Punic War.”5

A handful of the senior officers listening to the speech disapproved of Patton’s coarse language. Patton could not care less. He believes that profanity is the language of the soldier, and that to speak to soldiers one must use words that will have the most impact.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them. —ALLEN SHAWN

war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor

General George Patton once said, ‘No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his.

Americans have seen fit to elect twelve generals to the U.S. presidency, but even before there was a United States of America generals ruled the earth. Take

Thus begins a sideshow to the war itself: the undercover battle led by William Donovan and the OSS to ensure that Eastern Europe fall into the hands of Soviet Russia.

The mere thought that the fighting will soon end fills Patton with dread. “Peace is going to be hell on me,” he writes to his wife, Beatrice.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash. —GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON, COMMANDER OF THE U.S. THIRD ARMY IN WORLD WAR II

As we will see in the following pages, peacetime is not always kind to generals and they do not necessarily do well outside their task of generaling. Perhaps that is because during war they become as close to gods on earth as we are ever likely to see. Patton

It is ironic that the people who make history are some of the most bold, courageous, and passionate people that have ever walked the earth, but the actual writing of history is often so fact driven that all emotion is deflated from the telling of a person's life story.

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.

As I approached the field, I called the tower, identified myself, and said I would like to land and pay my respects to General Patton if that was agreeable and convenient. I was cleared to land. When I parked, there was Georgie in his famous Jeep with the three-star flags flying, his helmet reflecting the sun gloriously and his ivory-handled revolvers at his side. He rushed forward, threw his arms around me, and with great tears streaming down his face, said, "Jimmy, I'm glad to see you. I didn't think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me.

Malaria prevention and eradication should be inspired by General George Patton’s advice: “A good plan executed violently today is better than a perfect plan in a week.” In this war of attrition, millions of people will be lost while waiting on researchers to finally emerge triumphant from their labs with the perfect malaria cure; yet meanwhile, there are plenty of time-proven, practical actions that individuals, families and communities can do today with what is already in hand that can decisively defeat malaria transmission if applied with vigor and disciplined consistency.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.

Give me four days so that my planes can fly, so that my fighter bombers can bomb and strafe, so that my reconnaissance may pick out targets for my magnificent artillery. Give me four days of sunshine to dry this blasted mud, so that my tanks roll, so that ammunition and rations may be taken to my hungry, ill-equipped infantry. I need these four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla. I am sick of this unnecessary butchering of American youth, and in exchange for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver You enough Krauts to keep Your bookkeepers months behind in their work. “Amen.

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. fears no one. But now he sleeps flat on his back in a hospital bed. His upper body is encased in plaster, the result of a car accident twelve days ago. Room 110 is a former utility closet, just fourteen feet by sixteen feet. There are no decorations, pictures on the walls, or elaborate furnishings—just the narrow bed, white walls, and a single high window. A chair has been brought in for Patton’s wife, Beatrice, who endured a long, white-knuckle flight over the North Atlantic from the family home in Boston to be at his bedside. She sits there now, crochet hook moving silently back and forth, raising her eyes every few moments to see if her husband has awakened.

When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan I realized that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock…Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more.”[12]

From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a good Goddamn about such complaints. I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder we push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that. There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that 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 II, you won’t have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, “Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.

Someday, if we won, if humanity survived, we'd be in the history books. Me and Jake and Rachel and Cassie and Tobias and Ax. They'd be household names, like generals from World War II or the Civil War. Patton and Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. Kids would study us in school. Bored, probably. And then the teacher would tell the story of Marco. I'd be a part of history. What I was about to do. Some kid would laugh. Some kid would say, "Cold, man. That was really cold." I had to do it, kid. It was a war. It's the whole point, you stupid, smug, smirking little jerk! Don't you get it? It was the whole point. We hurt the innocent in order to stop the evil. Innocent Hork-Bajir. Innocent Taxxons. Innocent human-Controllers. How else to stop the Yeerks? How else to win? No choice, you punk. We did what we had to do. "Cold, man. The Marco dude? He was just cold.

I have lived 19 years but … amount to very little more than when I was a baby,” he told his father as Thanksgiving approached. “I am fare in every thing but good in nothing. It seems to be that for a person to amount to some thing they should be good in at least one thing. I some times fear that I am one of these darned dreamers … who is always going to succeed but never does,” adding that if that were the case “it would have been far more merciful if I had died ten years ago than to be forced to live—a failure.”27 At

So as through a glass and darkly The age long strife I see Where I fought in many guises Many names—but always me. And I see not in my blindness What the objects were I wrought But as God rules o’er our bickerings It was through his will I fought. So forever in the future, Shall I battle as of yore Dying to be born a fighter, But to die again once more.5 It was but one of a number of experiences such as this that caused Patton to maintain a continuing belief that in some earlier incarnation he had been a part of powerful, ancient armies, even though he was not a mystic but a practicing Episcopalian.6

Doesn’t the superior lose control if his subordinates have a great deal of freedom to make their own decisions? The historical record quickly shows this is not the case. Generals George Patton and Bruce Clark both used mission-type orders in World War II. The German army has used mission-type orders for over a century, yet it has not been an army that was “out of control.” What changes is the way control is achieved. Instead of controlling by telling the subordinate what to do and then demanding constant reports to show he is doing it, control comes through the intent and the mission. Indeed, control is really replaced with guidance, while the intent and the mission “glue” the force together. There are

In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

Damn it, Sir, I can’t fight a shadow. Without Your cooperation from a weather standpoint, I am deprived of accurate disposition of the German armies and how in the hell can I be intelligent in my attack? All of this probably sounds unreasonable to You, but I have lost all patience with Your chaplains who insist that this is a typical Ardennes winter, and that I must have faith. “Faith and patience be damned! You have just got to make up Your mind whose side You are on. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to your Prince of Peace. “Sir, I have never been an unreasonable man; I am not going to ask You to do the impossible. I do not even insist upon a miracle, for all I request is four days of clear weather. “Give me four days so that my planes can fly, so that my fighter bombers can bomb and strafe, so that my reconnaissance may pick out targets for my magnificent artillery. Give me four days of sunshine to dry this blasted mud, so that my tanks roll, so that ammunition and rations may be taken to my hungry, ill-equipped infantry. I need these four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla. I am sick of this unnecessary butchering of American youth, and in exchange for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver You enough Krauts to keep Your bookkeepers months behind in their work. “Amen.

Patton had been a reflective man, an extraordinarily well-read student of wars and military leaders, ancient and modern, with a curiosity about his war to match his energy. No detail had been too minor or too dull for him, nor any task too humble. Everything from infantry squad tactics to tank armor plate and chassis and engines had interested him. To keep his mind occupied while he was driving through a countryside, he would study the terrain and imagine how he might attack this hill or defend that ridge. He would stop at an infantry position and look down the barrel of a machine gun to see whether the weapon was properly sited to kill counterattacking Germans. If it was not, he would give the officers and men a lesson in how to emplace the gun. He had been a military tailor’s delight of creased cloth and shined leather, and he had worn an ivory-handled pistol too because he thought he was a cavalier who needed these trappings for panache. But if he came upon a truck stuck in the mud with soldiers shirking in the back, he would jump from his jeep, berate the men for their laziness, and then help them push their truck free and move them forward again to battle. By dint of such lesson and example, Patton had formed his Third Army into his ideal of a fighting force. In the process he had come to understand the capabilities of his troops and he had become more knowledgeable about the German enemy than any other Allied general on the Western Front. Patton had been able to command with certainty, overcoming the mistakes that are inevitable in the practice of the deadly art as well as personal eccentricities and public gaffes that would have ruined a lesser general, because he had always stayed in touch with the realities of his war.

But perhaps the best and most memorable way to explain the conflict that arose between honoring traditional honor, and honoring one’s individual psyche, can be conveyed in a story from World War II. In 1943, coming off his dazzling victories in the Sicily campaign, George S. Patton stopped by a medical tent to visit with the wounded. He enjoyed these visits, and so did the soldiers and staff. He would hand out Purple Hearts, pump the men full of encouragement, and offer rousing speeches to the nurses, interns, and their patients that were so touching in nature they sometimes brought tears to many of the eyes in the room. On this particular occasion, as Patton entered the tent all the men jumped to attention except for one, Private Charles H. Kuhl, who sat slouched on a stool. Kuhl, who showed no outward injuries, was asked by Patton how he was wounded, to which the private replied, “I guess I just can’t take it.” Patton did not believe “battle fatigue” or “shell-shock” was a real condition nor an excuse to be given medical treatment, and had recently been told by one of the commanders of Kuhl’s division that, “The front lines seem to be thinning out. There seems to be a very large number of ‘malingerers’ at the hospitals, feigning illness in order to avoid combat duty.” He became livid. Patton slapped Kuhl across the face with his gloves, grabbed him by his collar, and led him outside the tent. Kicking him in the backside, Patton demanded that this “gutless bastard” not be admitted and instead be sent back to the front to fight. A week later, Patton slapped another soldier at a hospital, who, in tears, told the general he was there because of “his nerves,” and that he simply couldn’t “stand the shelling anymore.” Enraged, Patton brandished his white-handled, single-action Colt revolver and bellowed: Your nerves, Hell, you are just a goddamned coward, you yellow son of a bitch. Shut up that goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men here who have been shot seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying…You’re a disgrace to the Army and you’re going back to the front lines and you may get shot and killed, but you’re going to fight. If you don’t I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose. In fact I ought to shoot you myself, you God-damned whimpering coward.

Monday, September 17, 1945 We all drove to the airfield in the morning to see Gay and Murnane off in the C-47 /belonging to the Army. Then General Eisenhower and I drove to Munich where we inspected in conjunction with Colonel Dalferes a Baltic displaced persons camp. The Baltic people are the best of the displaced persons and the camp was extremely clean in all respects. Many of the people were in costume and did some folk dances and athletic contest for our benefit. We were both, I think, very much pleased with conditions here. The camp was situated in an old German regular army barracks and they were using German field kitchens for cooking. From the Baltic camp, we drove for about 45 minutes to a Jewish camp in the area of the XX Corps. This camp was established in what had been a German hospital. The buildings were therefore in a good state of repair when the Jews arrived but were in a bad state of repair when we arrived, because these Jewish DP's, or at least a majority of them, have no sense of human relationships. They decline, when practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relive themselves on the floor. The hospital which we investigated was fairly good. They also had a number of sewing machines and cobbler instruments which they had collected, but since they had not collected the necessary parts, they had least fifty sewing machines they could not use, and which could not be used by anyone else because they were holding them. This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large wooden building which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about half way up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England, and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General. A copy of Talmud, I think it is called, written on a sheet and rolled around a stick, was carried by one of the attending physicians. First, a Jewish civilian made a very long speech which nobody seemed inclined to translate. Then General Eisenhower mounted the platform and I went up behind him and he made a short and excellent speech, which was translated paragraph by paragraph. The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted, and actually about three hours later, lost my lunch as the result of remembering it. From here we went to the Headquarters of the XX Corps, where General Craig gave us an excellent lunch which I, however, was unable to partake of, owing to my nausea.

Bridezellia was like General Patton she had an Operations Room, HQ established in her sitting room. Wall charts, to do lists, pictures, contact lists, mood charts, a calendar, list of dates and jobs were marked off with daily duties in her thick black diary. Her second in command was Saoirse, her local wedding planner. Nothing was going to be left to chance and nobody was going to ruin her prefect day. No expense was to be spared and fools were not suffered gladly. Raised voices were constantly heard in her phone calls to suppliers. Her personality changed and she became a hot head, losing her patience easily. Nobody entered her sitting room, the twilight zone without an invitation

—General George S. Patton A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

At that moment Bastogne was under siege by two of Hitler’s most dashing generals, Fritz Bayerlein of Afrika Korps fame, and Patton’s old adversary at Argentan, the famed cavalryman, General von Liittwitz, who were charged with reducing this obstacle without delay. Assuming that McAuliffe’s fate was sealed inside the ring, Bayerlein decided on a dramatic gesture. He sent a four-man delegation with a white flag of truce into the fortress, demanding that the defenders surrender. When their spiel was translated to McAuliffe, he answered with a single word that was to electrify the Allied armies in the whole of the Bulge. “Nuts!” he said and had the puzzled Germans (who did not know what the idiom meant) escorted back to their line.

While in the final analysis each of his campaigns was properly authorized in general terms (for not even Patton could free-lance in a world war), the sweep and success of each was triggered by some sly trickery Patton had to employ in certain psychological moments to gain permission, first to mount campaigns instead of conducting what were supposed to be merely supporting drives, and then to broaden his invariably limited missions into triumphal marches. To gain his victories (in which the results usually justified his means and the fact that he had exceeded his orders), he had to play a lot of backstage politics and apply ingenious subterfuges.

Like Lono’s sword, he was both a symbol and a lethal tool; like the bayonet, his sole purpose was to be buried in the foeman’s intestines; like all of his prior imagined reincarnations, his sole purpose was, like some macabre butterfly, to metamorphose into a killing machine, and die with sword in hand.

Patton was ecstatic, writing home to Beatrice that “I know I am needed!” and “The Lord had a perfect cut for me and pulled his punch”.[46] He filed this incident away with numerous others, all of which pointed towards the inevitability of his own destiny; manifest on a personal level, this was American exceptionalism writ small.[47]

Give me four days of sunshine to dry this blasted mud…I need these               four days to send von Rundstedt and his godless army to their Valhalla.               I am sick of the unnecessary butchery of American youth, and in exchange               for four days of fighting weather, I will deliver to You enough Krauts to               keep Your bookkeepers months behind in their work. Amen.”[57]

Sir, it seems to me that You have been much better informed about the               situation than I was, because it was that awful weather which I cursed               so much which made it possible for the German army to commit suicide.                 That, Sir, was a brilliant military move, and I bow humbly to a supreme               military genius.”[58]

Man of Controversy “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.” —General George S. Patton General George S. Patton was a man that spoke his mind and usually invited much controversy upon himself in the process. Many viewed his capacity as a so-called “straight shooter” to be his best asset and also his worst detriment. There can be no doubt the worst of Patton’s tirades came when he belittled the very people he worked so hard to save - the Nazi Holocaust survivors.

For now, Patton keeps his comments to himself. Volatile words could get him fired - or even killed. Patton is a man of strong beliefs, and as he will tell the press in a few weeks, he is utterly sure of the Russian danger: 'Churchill had a sense of history. Unfortunately, some of our leaders were just damn fools who had no idea of Russian history. Hell, I doubt if they even knew [that] Russia, just less than a hundred years ago, owned Finland, sucked the blood out of Poland, and were using Siberia as a prison for their own people. How Stalin must have sneered when he got through with them at all those phony conferences.

In the first instance it would carry the American Seventh Army under the celebrated gun-toting General George S. Patton and the British Eighth Army under General (later Field Marshal) Sir Bernard Montgomery.

Few Allied generals can have hated each other more than Patton and Montgomery.

line from a biography of General George S. Patton: “Never take counsel of your fears.

QUALITIES OF A GREAT GENERAL” 1. Tactically aggressive (loves a fight) 2. Strength of character 3. Steadiness of purpose 4. Acceptance of responsibility 5. Energy 6. Good health and strength George Patton Cadet

Duty is the essence of manhood.”—General George S. Patton

A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away from them.

enormity of the German caravan

Churchill understands this harsh political reality. And though he won't admit it to Stalin, both men know that England has already seen its global power seriously diminished...Even now, as Churchill attempts to seduce a madman, American soldiers flood the streets of London. They are paid a higher salary than their British counterparts, and spend it freely. British soldiers seethe at the sight of American GIs with English girls on their arms, but there is nothing the Tommies, as they are called, can do about it.

when the Americans liberated Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. Ohrdruf is particularly important because General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, visited it on 12 April, just a week after it had been discovered. He brought with him Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, and insisted on seeing ‘every nook and cranny’ of the camp, ‘because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda’.23 Here they observed torture devices, a butcher’s block used to smash the gold fillings from the mouths of the dead, a room piled to the ceiling with corpses, and the remains of hundreds of bodies that had been burned in a huge pit, as if on ‘some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue’.24 Patton, a man well used to the horrors of the battlefield, took one look at the ‘arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water’ in the pit, and was obliged to retire behind a shed to throw up.25

Many are convinced that the Second World War will be the war to end all wars, but Patton knows better. As a reminder to himself that war is inevitable, he has been reading Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars each night before bed. The memoir recounts Caesar’s battles in Gaul4 and Germany from 58 to 51 BC. The words rise up off the page for Patton, and he feels a personal connection to the action.

I don't do martial arts for trophies or for fun. I'm a fighter, and I train to win any fight I'm in. I don't believe in rules and I don't believe in fair fights. You want a fair fight, join a boxing club. I also don't believe in dying for my country. I have a kind of General Patton take on that: I think the other guy should die for his.

In his lifetime, Stalin will murder millions of people. Some will be shot, others will be denied food and ultimately die of starvation, millions will be sent to die in the deep winter snows of Siberia, and many will be tortured to death. Already, during one infamous murder spree in April and May of 1940, some twenty-two thousand Polish nationals were shot dead. What began as an attempt to execute every member of the Polish officer corps soon expanded to include police officers, landowners, intelligence agents, lawyers, and priests. The shootings were conducted for nights on end, often beginning at dusk and continuing until dawn. Some were mass killings carried out in the Katyn Forest, while others were individual executions inside the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons. Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner at Kalinin, personally shot seven thousand men in the back of the head as they knelt before him. Those killings took place inside a cell whose walls were lined with sandbags to deaden the sound. As soon as a victim fell dead, he was dragged from the room and thrown onto a truck for delivery to the burial site, while another handcuffed prisoner was marched before Blokhin and told to kneel. Noting that Russian pistols had so much recoil that his hand hurt after just a dozen killings, Blokhin opted for the smoother feel of the German Walther PPK.

The only certainty life contains is death.’ Patricia Briggs. ‘A man on a date wonders if he’ll get lucky. The woman already knows’ is a quote of Monica Piper. ‘The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his’ is a famous view of General George Patton. ‘Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought’ is a quote from Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. ‘When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will

Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way. General George S. Patton Jr.

former cavalry barracks in a

Skorzeny recounts his escapades in

aside to give the British an open shot at Messina, George had every reason to be furious. After all, Montgomery had supplies from Syracuse, he had the eastern road, and he had the Seventh Army watching his back. What more did he need? Was Alexander’s job to make sure Monty snatched every last laurel of victory for the British Empire? Then again, George was in no position to argue. The Supreme Commander had just jacked him up over Seventh Army’s reports, and the friendly fire on Ridgway’s paratroopers had driven George deep into Ike’s doghouse. He worried, with some justification, that Ike was going to fire him. Ike had lectured him for months on the necessity of complete and seamless Allied harmony, and he had personally warned Patton that he would send home any general who failed to cooperate. Now, George fretted, Ike seemed to be looking for an excuse to fire him and replace him with someone more pliable. Someone like Omar Bradley.59 It was no time for George to open his mouth, and he knew it. Seventh Army would comply fully with Army Group orders, he assured Alexander. If called

He had scribbled a note in pencil giving Patton authority to assume command of the four American divisions in Tunisia the moment he landed there, and Patton had taken off again directly for the front. Eisenhower had followed up his note with a memorandum of instructions. Patton was not to keep ' for one instant' any officer who was not up to the mark. 'We cannot afford to throw away soldiers and equipment ... and effectiveness' out of unwillingness to injure 'the feelings of old friends,' Eisenhower had written. Ruthlessness of this kind toward acquaintances often required difficult moral courage, Eisenhower continued, but he expected Patton 'to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.' The first old acquaintance to go had been the general who had commanded at Kasserine, a man whom Eisenhower had rated, prior to the start of the serious shooting, as his best combat leader after Patton. This general had been shipped home to spend the rest of the war excercising his top-notch paper qualifications as an elevated drill instructor.

Basically, action is, and always will be, faster than reaction. Thus, the attacker is the one that dictates the fight. They are forcing the encounter with technique after technique that are designed to overcome any defensive techniques initiated by the defender. Much of this exchange, and determining which of the adversaries is victorious, is all a matter of split seconds. That is the gap between action and reaction. That attacker acts; the defender reacts. Military history is saturated with an uneven amount of victorious attackers compared to victorious defenders. It is common to observe the same phenomenon in popular sports, fighting competitions, in the corporate world of big business. The list goes on and on. So, how do we effectively defend ourselves when we can easily arrive at the conclusion that the defender statistically loses? It is by developing the mentality that once attacked that you immediately counter-attack. That counter-attack has to be ferocious and unrelenting. If someone throws a punch, or otherwise initiates battle with you, putting you, for a split second, on the wrong side of the action versus reaction gap. Your best chance of victory is to deflect, smoother, parry, or otherwise negate their attack and then immediately launch into a vicious counter-attack. Done properly, this forces your adversary into a reactive state, rather than an action one. You turn the table on them and become the aggressor. That is how to effectively conceptualizes being in a defensive situation. Utilizing this method will place you in a greater position to be victorious. Dempsey, Sun Tzu and General Patton would agree. Humans are very violent animals. As a species, we are capable of high levels of extreme violence. In fact, approaching the subject of unarmed combatives, or any form of combatives, involves the immersion into a field that is inherently violent to the extreme of those extremes. It is one thing to find yourself facing an opponent across a field, or ring, during a sporting match. Those contests still pit skill verses skill, but lack the survival aspects of an unarmed combative encounter. The average person rarely, if ever, ponders any of this and many consider various sporting contests as the apex of human competition. It is not. Finding yourself in a life-or-death struggle against an opponent that is completely intent on ending your life is the greatest of all human competitions. Understanding that and acknowledging that takes some degree of courage in today’s society.

Among the dangerous leaders of human history, my father sometimes mentioned General George S. Patton because of his charismatic qualities—but more often his example was President John F. Kennedy. Around Kennedy, a myth of kingship had formed, and of Camelot. The handsome young president’s followers did not question him and would have gone virtually anywhere he led them. This danger seems obvious to us now in the cases of such men as Adolf Hitler, whose powerful magnetism led his nation into ruination. It is less obvious, however, with men who are not deranged or evil in and of themselves—such as Kennedy, or the fictional Paul Muad’Dib, whose danger lay in the religious myth structure around him and what people did in his name.

Combat is, axiomatically, not fair nor does one try to be fair.

Lt. Col. Creighton “Abe” Abrams commands the spearhead Thirty-Seventh Tank Battalion of the Fourth Armored Division. He chews on a long unlit cigar so enormous that his men compare it to the barrel of a gun. Abrams is thirty years old, a lantern-jawed Massachusetts native who graduated from West Point just eight years ago. Some day he will be chief of staff of the army, a four-star general so famous they will name a type of tank after him.

In all, eighty-four Americans are murdered in cold blood in what will come to be known as the Malmedy Massacre.

The seventy-one-year-old Churchill is a creature of habit, rising each morning at 7:30 in his official residence at 10 Downing Street, just a half mile up the road from the Houses of Parliament. He works in bed until 11:00, whereupon he bathes, pours a weak Johnnie Walker Red scotch and water, and then works some more.3 He sips Pol Roger champagne with lunch at 1:00 p.m. Whenever possible, this is followed by a game of backgammon with Clementine at 3:30. He takes a ninety-minute nap at 5:00 p.m. Arising, Churchill bathes a second time, works for an hour, eats a sumptuous dinner at 8:00 p.m., and smokes a post-dinner cigar with a vintage Hine brandy. After that, he goes back to his study for more work until well past midnight.

It's one thing to raise three children. It's another thing altogether to raise three boys. There is a certain unique dynamic (or dynamite!) that boys bring to a household. The presence of even one girl in the home is at least some measure of comfort to a mom. There is always the hope that having one other female with which to identify might bring a calming influence on family life. But peace and quiet are usually the first of many casualties associated with an all-boy family. Mom is greatly outnumbered from the start, and she must possess the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, and the tenacity of General Patton if she is to survive the ordeal.

No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.” ​- ​GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON

Mick required far less hand-holding than Michael. Signing the Stones, though, had required a full frontal assault worthy of General Patton, one of my heroes. The final battle exploded at the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in ’83. After months of relentless pursuit, I had them. All they had to do was sign when suddenly at 3 A.M. Mick goes mental and calls me a “stupid motherfuckin’ record executive.” I lose it. I reach for his throat. I have a vision of punching out all ninety-eight pounds of him. I stop myself, envisioning tomorrow’s headline—“Yetnikoff Kills Jagger.” Jagger relents, signs and from then on it’s wine and roses. It was Mick—wily and witty Mick—who later that year plotted with my girlfriend, the one called Boom Boom, to throw me a surprise fiftieth birthday bash where Henny Youngman emceed and Jon Peters, Barbra

The Third Army commander's last instruction to his commanders reflected the admonition against a dribbling attack given by General Eisenhower: he (General Patton) favored an attack in column of regiments, "or in any case lots of depth." As usual Patton was optimistic. He felt certain that the enemy was unaware of the storm about to break, that German intelligence had not spotted the appearance of the 26th Division in the area, and that it did not know the exact location of the other two divisions. "Drive like hell," said Patton.

Among those who yielded to revulsion was General Patton, who had charge of more Jewish DPS than any other commander. He called ‘the Jewish type of DP’ a ‘sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time’. No ordinary people, he said, ‘could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years’.209

It’s so dark,” Patton says. “So late.” He closes his eyes and falls back to sleep.

Unresolved grief is created when we don't allow ourselves to work through feelings as they arise. If we deny having painful feelings or put them on a shelf, they don't simply evaporate. Rather, unresolved feelings gnaw at our energy, prey on our emotions, and generally debilitate us.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” ~General George Patton

Screaming Meemie” rockets screech into the darkness, a deadly sound that American soldiers everywhere find unnerving.

As General George S. Patton stated: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

The battle plans and tactics of the Fifth Panzer Army, more than those of any other German army that took part in the Ardennes counteroffensive, bore the very strong personal imprint of its commander, General Manteuffel. As a junior officer in the prewar panzer troops, Manteuffel had made a mark as an armored specialist. His record in North Africa and Russia, where he achieved a reputation for energetic leadership and personal bravery, brought him to Hitler's attention and promotion directly from a division to an army command. Despite the failure of his Fifth Panzer Army in the Lorraine campaign against Patton's Third Army, Manteuffel was listed by Hitler for command in the Ardennes. His staff, carefully selected and personally devoted to the little general, was probably the best German staff on the Western Front.

There is only one kind of discipline—perfect discipline. General George Patton

Patton was being driven in a jeep. Just days before, the silver-haired Seventh Army commander had admitted to a fellow general that the two things he loved most in life were “fucking and fighting.