Patton Russian Quotes

It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow. George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids. Oney thing they respect is force.

In this orientation of his concluding strategy he followed ideas that dominated the thinking of the highest American military councils. It reflected an astounding feeling of inferiority that prevented not only Ike, but especially Marshall and MacArthur, from relying entirely upon their own resources and power to finish the job without further Soviet assistance. Both Marshall and MacArthur kept insisting that the Red Army be brought into the Pacific war or else, they warned Roosevelt, Japan would endure for at least another year, if only by continuing the war from Manchukuo. And Eisenhower insisted upon the Russian pressure from the east, irrespective of its political price. In this context, Berlin became nothing but a “prestige objective” in an assessment amazingly devoid of any political—or even military—vision.

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 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.

McNarney relayed a Soviet complaint that he was too slow in disbanding and confining several German units in his sector of military government. “Hell,” Patton exploded, “why do you care what those Goddamn Russians think? We are going to have to fight them sooner or later; within the next generation. Why not do it now while our Army is intact and the damn Russians can have their hind end kicked back into Russia in three months? We can do it ourselves easily with the help of the German troops we have, if we just arm them and take them with us; they hate the bastards.” Patton had put his foot in his mouth again. It was a serious faux pas, this reference to those “German troops,” and it shocked McNarney. “Shut up, Georgie, you fool!” he told Patton. “This line may be tapped and you will be starting a war with those Russians with your talking!” But Patton refused to shut up.

One result of the Bolshevik conquest of half of Western Europe is that they have reduced the scale of living in those countries to the Russian scale, which is very low, and furthermore, have prohibited the United States and England from selling to about a third of their former markets. In view of the fact that the world financial arrangements were based on sales to and between all members of the world nations, the removal of a third of these nations is bound to upset the political economy of England and America, and therefore throw large numbers of men out of work and consequently make them readily acceptable victims of the virus of Communism.

The Russian general is used to such supplicant behavior. During the war, he ordered his troops to shoot any of their comrades who ran from the Germans, and any Russian village that was thought to have collaborated with the Nazis was burned to the ground. Zhukov is so feared that other Russian generals have been known to tremble in his presence. Patton does not tremble. “He was in full dress uniform much like comic opera and covered in medals,” Patton later wrote to Beatrice of Zhukov. “He is short, rather fat and has a prehensile chin like an ape but good blue eyes.” As Russian tanks rolled past the reviewing stand, Patton noticed Zhukov gloating over the new Soviet IS-3 model

My compliments to the general,” Patton says, “but please inform him that I do not care to drink with him or any other Russian son of a bitch.