Nicknamed “Big Willies” and “Little Willies,” they were the first operational armored vehicles produced by the British, who in 1915 were spurred to create tanks by their aggressive and innovative First Lord of the Admiralty – a young man named Winston Spencer Churchill. In 1916, the first tanks were employed in combat by the British during the Battle of the Somme. “I can’t see for the life of me where I am going to do much in this war.” Unknown to Patton, events were occurring that would soon alter his life and career. “I am a sort of ‘Pooh-Bah’ and do everything no one else does,” he lamented in a letter to his wife, Beatrice. Initially, Patton served in Paris, and later when Pershing moved his headquarters to Chaumont, Patton served in the capacity of a combination of headquarters commandant, adjutant, provost marshal and jack of all administrative trades – an assignment that bored him and, with combat looming, one from which he sought to escape. When America entered World War I in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson appointed Pershing to command the AEF, Patton accompanied Pershing to France.
The incident was reported in newspapers throughout America, and for the first time Patton’s name became nationally known. When Patton learned that the Punitive Expedition was being formed, he persuasively talked Pershing into taking him on to his staff as an aide-de-camp.ĭuring the Punitive Expedition, Patton led a patrol in search of Villa and got into a deadly shootout at a hacienda with one of Villa’s henchman, whom Patton killed with his revolver. Patton was a young, recently promoted cavalry captain, newly assigned to Fort Bliss after duty at Fort Riley, Kan. Patton and Pershing first met in 1916 at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the wake of Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, N.M., that led to the Punitive Expedition in Mexico during what proved to be a futile attempt to find and capture or kill Villa. Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France. However, one of the finest examples of his military genius occurred not in World War II but in World War I, when Patton was a very junior officer assigned to General John J. Scott that won seven Academy Awards to the tribute that appeared on a large sign placed outside a corps headquarters in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War upon which was emblazoned one of Patton’s principles: “Hold ’em by the nose and kick ’em in the ass.”Īll of this would certainly suggest that Patton’s true legacy stems from his World War II achievements. Since Patton’s death in December 1945, his fame and legacy have endured, from the 1970 film starring George C.
These actions, along with Patton’s unfortunate propensity to garner bad publicity through his flamboyance and self-destructive acts – such as the two slapping incidents in Sicily in August 1943 – are all part of the Patton legend. PATTON JR.’S fame rests primarily on his deeds on the battlefields of World War II: the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942 resurrecting American prestige and fighting ability at El Guettar in Tunisia in March 1943 his heroics in Sicily that landed Patton on the covers of both Newsweek in August 1943 his exploitation with Time and 3d Army during the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead at the end of July and beginning of August 1944 and, perhaps most of all, his dramatic and prophetic actions in December 1944, when Patton was the only Allied senior commander to anticipate the great German counteroffensive in the Ardennes known as the Battle of the Bulge, in which he overnight turned 3d Army 90 degrees from Lorraine into the Ardennes and orchestrated the relief of Bastogne during the worst winter weather in Europe in 50 years.
George Patton’s famed genius for war first appeared in 1918 on the battlefields of France.
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