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  • Patton:Celebrating the UnAmerican National Hero
  • R. Barton Palmer (bio)

God, How I Hate the Twentieth Century

Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton (1970) offers a richly detailed and thematically nuanced version of the World-War-II career of George S. Patton (authentically reincarnated in George C. Scott's memorable performance), the only American general to achieve during that conflict an international reputation for compelling leadership, tactical brilliance, and battlefield aggressiveness. The film unsurprisingly celebrates Patton's unique accomplishments but, true to the complexity of its subject, does not ignore the general's overweening egotism; his relentless pursuit of personal glory in what should, morally speaking, be thought a collective endeavor; and his often costly insensitivity to political realities. These failings, which were well-publicized, perhaps contributed more than his battlefield successes to the fame that he went on to achieve and continues today to enjoy, as the several website shrines devoted to him attest. George Patton, so Schaffner's film movingly demonstrates, learned the tragic truth of modern celebrity, that, as Leo Braudy puts it, "lurking behind very chance to be made whole by fame is the axman of further dismemberment," as the self, in all its peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, is subjected to ever-increasing investigation (8).

Patton takes great pains to anatomize that dismemberment, in the process revealing, as we shall see, the cultural ironies that shaped the general's problematic rise to prominence and his ultimate fall from grace. Eschewing any evocation of his colorful early career (including a creditable performance as a pentathlete in the 1912 Olympics and some legendary World War I heroics), the filmmakers instead begin with Patton's rehabilitation of 7th Army after the Battle of the Kasserine Pass in the North African campaign, a calamitous defeat for US forces in their first engagement with the Germans, revealing systemic failures of discipline, organization, and command. Patton's insistence on strict discipline (especially the wearing of proper uniforms) and extensive training soon turned these forces into effective fighting units to the surprise of subordinates like II-Corps commander Omar N. Bradley, who, later in his memoirs, confessed how "though [End Page 34] trivial in themselves, these reforms promptly stamped his personality upon the corps" (44).

Based closely on Bradley's memoirs (which offer a largely unsympathetic portrait of the general) as well as on a more positive biographical account, Ladislas Farago's Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, Schaffner's film offers a retelling of the Patton legend that never seriously deviates from the facts, though there are a host of minor inaccuracies (see Farago and Bradley). Schaffner, to be sure, touches only briefly on Patton's substantial contributions to the final defeat of Rommel's Afrika Corps during the campaign-ending assault on Bizerte (in which II Corps plays a central role) but concentrates instead on the Sicilian invasion, which follows immediately. Here the filmmakers' interest in character predominates. The military aspects of the successful operation are evoked to provide an unflattering dramatization of Patton's egotism (especially his questionable competition with that other noted Allied glory seeker, British general Bernard Montgomery) and his promotion of an uncompromising discipline, which this time has dire rather than positive consequences. Patton's impatience with unsoldierly weakness and disciplinary failure leads him during a visit to a field hospital to slap around one of his soldiers, who, as the general is distressed to discover, is suffering not from any physical wounds but from "battle fatigue." What to Army doctors was a disabling psychological condition was to Patton nothing less than cowardice. Widely reported in the press, the incident became a debacle that led to his dismissal as 7th Army commander. Unfortunately, Patton proved himself during subsequent public appearances (emphasized in the film) constitutionally unwilling to adhere to the protocols both personal and political that then were supposed to govern the behavior of senior American officers. Outspoken, opinionated, and too comfortable in the limelight, he is easily goaded by reporters into making bombastic remarks that are then readily portrayed as outrageous.

At this point in the war, as the filmmakers emphasize, both Patton's leadership and his tactical brilliance were admired, if misunderstood, by those above and below...

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