The most feared Allied commander in the German High Command during World War II was not the British field marshal who won at El Alamein, but the American general who was nearly court-martialed for slapping a soldier, and Dwight Eisenhower knew it all along. The proof, locked in a vault for three decades, lay in the intercepted German orders that showed Hitler holding 150,000 men at Calais waiting for a phantom army led by George S. Patton, a deception so successful that it shaped the outcome of the war in Western Europe.
Eisenhower, bound by the Ultra secret, could not reveal the truth for years, but he wrote it into his memoir in a single, measured line that the Germans feared Patton more than any other Allied commander, a statement that was dismissed by British historians until the intelligence files were finally opened in 974, confirming that the enemy’s operational planning had been obsessed with the man they called the American commander they had reason to fear. This is the story of that fear, the silence that protected it, and the confirmation that came too late for the men who had lived it.
The story begins not on the beaches of Normandy, but in the forests of East Prussia, where Adolf Hitler stood over a map table in a bunker roofed with eight meters of reinforced concrete, refusing to believe his own generals. The Allied landings on June 6th, 944, he insisted, were a feint, a mask for the real invasion still to come across the narrowest stretch of the English Channel at the Pad Calais, led by the one American general the German army had learned to fear more than any other. His name was George S.
Patton, and Hitler held an entire army in place to wait for him. The problem was that Patton was a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒, commanding tanks made of rubber and landing craft made of plywood in a country house in southern England, while Eisenhower read the intercepted German orders at his headquarters in London, knowing exactly why Hitler believed what he believed, and unable to say a single word of it out loud for the next thirty years. This is the story of a fear that shaped the outcome of the Second World War, a truth locked in a vault for a generation, and what Eisenhower finally admitted in careful, measured words in the one line of memoir he was allowed to write.
To understand how it came to this, you have to go back through the whole strange story of how the German high command decided that George S. Patton was the American general who could end them, back years before D-Day, back to a peacetime army and a peacetime officer corps that neither the Americans nor the Germans knew was about to be thrown into the largest war in human history, because none of these men were born generals, they were all once junior officers waiting for a war that many of them had privately begun to believe would never come. By June of 1,944, three men stood at the center of the Allied war effort in Western Europe, and each of them had reached that summit by a different road.
The oldest was Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 57 years old, the son of an Anglican bishop, born in a London vicorage, raised in Tasmania, while his father served as bishop of that remote Australian island, who had known poverty as a boy, his father’s salary as a colonial bishop modest, and Bernard had been a difficult, prickly, combative child at war with his own mother, whom he grew up resenting, and would refuse to visit even in her old age. He had gone to Sandhurst on scholarship, fought in the trenches of the First World War, been shot through the lung by a German sniper, an injury that nearly killed him and left him convinced for the rest of his life that most senior officers were fools who wasted men’s lives through poor preparation. He was small, wiry, sharp tongued, famously abstinent from alcohol and tobacco, drank cocoa in the evenings and went to bed early, disliked by many of his fellow British generals as a self-promoter, and he did nothing to change their minds.
He had a genius for publicity and he cultivated it, and in November of,942 in the deserts of Egypt, he had defeated Raml’s Africa corpse at the second battle of Elalamine, been given a knighthood and a periage and the affection of the British public in a war that had until that moment given the British very little to celebrate. Since Lamagne, Montgomery had worn the aura of the general who did not lose, his method famous, overwhelming logistics, setpiece battles, refusal to attack until every gun was in place, every shell counted, every plan rehearsed, he called it the scientific approach to warfare, he believed deeply that the age of the great cavalry general galloping into battle on instinct was over, and that modern war belonged to the commander who was patient enough to build a hammer big enough to crack any nut, and by944 he had a British public and a British government who believed in him with something close to religious conviction. The second man was General Dwight David Eisenhower, 54 years old, a farm boy from Abalene, Kansas, who had gone to West Point because it was free, missed the First World War, kept back in Pennsylvania to train tank crews at Camp Colt in Gettysburg, never fired a shot at an enemy in his life, spent the two decades between the wars in obscurity, aid to General Fox Connor in Panama, where he learned military history from a mentor who saw promise in him, aid to General John J.
Persingin Washington, aid to Douglas MacArthur, first in Washington and later in the Philippines, where the relationship had gradually curdled into a personal dislike that both men carried for the rest of their lives. He had been chosen over dozens of more senior generals to command the entire Allied invasion of Europe because George Marshall believed that Ike could hold a coalition together in a way that no other American officer could, he was supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, his headquarters was at Bushy Park in London, and by September of 1,944 would be at the Palace of Versailles, he worked from 6:00 in the morning until well past midnight, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, would suffer his first serious heart problems in the years to come and eventually a series of heart attacks that would nearly 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him in the White House, and every decision he made was studied by Churchill, by Roosevelt, by Marshall, and by the enemy. The third man was Lieutenant General George Smith Patton Jr.
, 59 years old, Californian, wealthy, cavalry trained, decorated in the First World War at the Muse Argon, a veteran of the Chase after Ponchovilla in Mexico in 1,916, he came from a family with a warrior tradition on both sides, his grandfather had been a Confederate colonel of the 22nd Virginia Infantry killed in the third battle of Winchester in 9,864, his great uncles had died in the Civil War as well, his father had been a district attorney in California and had drilled into young George the belief from earliest boyhood that his destiny was to lead men in battle. He was dyslexic, though nobody used that word in the 1890s, struggled to learn to read and had been tutored at home before he ever saw the inside of a schoolhouse, came to West Point in 1000. 904, failed his first year for academic reasons, repeated it and graduated in 1,99, wore an ivreyhalt singleaction army revolveron his hip, gave profane speeches to enlisted men, wrote poetry in private, believed seriously and sincerely that he had lived past lives as a Roman legionary and as a Napoleonic marshal, carried in his soul the certainty that he was a warrior born, that he had always been a warrior, and that the Second World War was the fulfillment of everything he had been placed on the earth to do.
In August of 1,943 in Sicily, he had walked into two field hospitals and slapped two American soldiers who were suffering from what the army called battle fatigue, the 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁, when it broke on the American radio in November of 1,943, had nearly ended his career, Eisenhower had defended him, Marshall had let him keep his uniform, but when the invasion of France was planned, Patton was not given a landing command, Bradley got the American assault, Patton got something that looked on paper like a demotion, he got command of an army group that did not exist, the first United States Army Group, Fuzzag, on the mapsin London, it was a real formation, real staff officers, real headquarters, real radio traffic filling the airwaves out of the county of Kent on the southeast coast of England, directly across the channel from the port of Cala, from the air, German reconnaissance photographs showed hundreds of tanks, trucks in the fields around Dover, every tank was rubber, every truck was plywood, every radio message was a fiction, and commanding the whole thing, giving speeches to soldiers who existed only in the imagination of the enemy was George Patton, Patton hated it, he wrote to his wife Beatatrice that he felt Eisenhower was punishing him, making him a display piece, a museum general, he raged in his diary, waited for a real commandthat seemed like it was never coming, drank too much in the evenings, wrote long, mournful letters home complainingthat the war was passing him by, that other generals were earning glory while he inspected 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 tanks in the English countryside. What Patton did not know, and what Eisenhower could not tell him was that his very reputation was already the most important weapon in the Allied arsenal, because on the German side of the channel, four German generals had already decided over the previous 18 months that George Patton was the American commander they most feared. The oldest of them was Field Marshal Geared von Runstead, 68 years old at D-Day, turning 69 that December, a Prussian aristocrat of the old school, thin and dry with the manners of an 18th century cordier and the cold professional judgment of a man who had spent his entire adult life in uniform, commanded army groups in Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, led Army Group South in the invasion of the USSR in 9,941, been relieved by Hitlerthat December over a dispute about withdrawal, been recalled to command in the Wests in 9,942, and had run OB West ever since, old enough to have served the Kaiser in 1,914, old enough to have watched every major European war of the 20th century from a staff position, joined the Prussian officer corpsas a young lieutenant in the 1890s when Kaiser Wilhelm still walked the parade grounds in Berlin and the world was ruled from a handful of imperial capitals, belonged to a world that no longer existed, but he still commanded armies in it, and he had come to a conclusion about George Pattonthat he would carry into Allied custody in 945 and confirm to a Canadian intelligence officer with a notebook in his hand.
Beside Runstead served his chief of staff, General Gunter Blumenrit, 52 years old, round-faced, quiet, meticulous, the kind of staff officer who lived inside the paperwork, spent his entire career in staff positions, moving from one headquarters to another, drafting orders, compiling reports, doing the invisible work that keeps an army moving, not a warrior in the patent sense, an organizer, and he had by 1,944 seen more Allied and German operational plans than almost any German officer alive, it would be Blumenrit after the war sitting in Allied custody who would give the fullest surviving account of what the German high command thought about the Allied generals it faced, Blumenrred would eventually write a book about Runstead and he would contribute to the US Army Historical Division German Report series over 2500 documents produced by captured German officers under American supervision between 1945 and 1,955, those documents are still in the National Archives today, anyone can go and read them. South of them at a chataau called Lar Roong on a bend in the sain was army group B commanded by field marshal Irwin Raml and Raml’s chief of staff was General Hans Spidel 46 years old at D-Day Bavarian a doctor of philosophy in his own right with a mind as much academic as military spidel had studied history and philosophy at the University of Tubingan he had written his doctoral dissertation before returning to a full military career, among the German generals of the West one of the most intellectually formidable men in uniform, Spidles had already in the spring of 1,944 become quietly involved in the conspiracy against Hitlerthat would lead to the 20th of July bomb plot, would survive the war, be tortured by the Gestapo after the plot failed, but would refuse to name his fellow conspirators, would write a book called Invasion 1,944, published in 1994 that gave a firsthand account of what Raml’s staff was thinking in the weeks around D-Day, and in the post-war years, Spadel would go on to become the first supreme commander of NATO land forces central Europe, working directly under his old enemy, and by then, friend Dwight Eisenhower and in the field in command of the Panzer Lair Division, was General Fritz Berline, 45 years old, a veteran of Raml’s Africa Corpse, where he had served as chief of staff during the campaigns in Tunisia, watched Pattonin the desert, watched Pattonin Sicily, and now in Normandy, he was about to face Patton again, one of only a handful of German commanders in the entire Vermacht, who had fought against George Patton in four different theaters on three different continents across two years of war. These four men and the intelligence officers who worked for them had spent the previous 18 months building a picture of George Patton in their minds, that picture had been built out of hard experience, not out of Allied propaganda, not out of newspaper stories, out of what their own soldiers had seen and what their own dead had proven, and what they had concluded about Patton was so specificand so deeply held that when the invasion of France came, the German high command was prepared to bet the war on the belief that Patton was still coming, that whatever they saw on the Normandy beaches was a mask for the real blow still to come at Calala.
And here is the strangest thing about that summer, at exactly the same time, the German high command was preparing to hold an entire army in place, waiting for Patton, the American War Department was seriously discussing whether to remove him from the army altogether, because on the 25th of April, 1,944 at a small welding ceremony at a clubin Nutsfordin the northwest of England, Patton had made a speech, said without prepared notesthat it was the evident destiny of the Britishand the Americans and he had added of course of the Russians to rule the world, when the story went out some of the initial press accounts dropped the mention of the Russians, what Britain and America read the next morning was that Patton had declared the Britishand Americans would rule the world, the political explosion was enormous, members of the US Senate demanded Patton’s removal, Marshall considered sending him home, Eisenhower nearly relieved him a second time in nine months, Patton apologized, wrote a formal letter of contrition, apologized in person to Eisenhower, apologized in writing to Marshall, Marshall stayed his hand, Eisenhower kept him, and on the German side of the channel, in the office of Fremhiri West, the intelligence branch of the German army, responsible for tracking Allied forcesin the west, Colonel Alexis von Rouroannewas quietly moving Patton to the top of his threat list, Rowanne, 41 years old, was a German officer of complicated loyalties, a Baltic German aristocrat, deeply Christian, deeply conservative, and by 1994, deeply anti-Nazi, would be executed on the 12th of October, 1,944 at Plutency prison in Berlin for his connections to the 20th of July plot against Hitler, some historians, notably Anthony Cave Brown in Bodyguard of Lies in 1,000 975, have arguedthat Rowen deliberately inflated German estimates of Allied strength, feeding false intelligence upward for reasons of his own conscience, other historians have disputed this, the question of Rowane’s actual motives remains contested, what is not disputed is that under Rowan FMday here west produced assessment after assessment placing Patton at the head of the allied ground threat. So on the eve of the invasion of France two different governments were doing two completely different things with with the same man, the Americans were considering firing him, the Germans were rearranging their entire defensive posture around him, both governments thought they knew what George Patton was, only one of them was about to be proven right. To understand what happened next, you have to see the places where the story was being written on both sides of the channel and in offices and headquarters in three countries where men who had never met were making decisions about each other on the strength of pieces of paper.
The German side first, deep in the forests of East Prussia, about 8 kilometers east of the town then called Rastenbergin what is today northeastern Poland stood the compound known as the Wolf’s Lair, Wolf’s Shauns, Adolf Hitler’s forward military headquarters on the Eastern Front, a series of low concrete bunkers set among tall pine trees ringedwith mines and barbed wire roofedwith as much as 8 m of reinforced concrete on the largest of them, the place was cold and damp even in summer, the pine trees blocked the sun, the bunkers were lit by electric lamps day and night, Hitler, who was a hypochondric and a poor sleeper, spent whole nights walking the corridors of the compound, his staff learned to expect him to appear at any hourwith new ordersand new theories about the war, from this compound, Hitler had run the war on the Soviet Union since 1,941, and from this compound,in the days after D-Day, he continued to insistthat the German 15th Army would remain at the Pad Cal and wait for the real invasion under George Patton nearly 900 m to the west. On the sane river in France sat the medieval chateau of Lar Ro Guon perched on the edge of a limestone cliff, its towers rising above the river, looked more like a piece of a fairy tale than a war headquarters, but since March of 1,944, it had housed Army Group B under Field Marshal Win Raml,the officer directly responsible for the defense of the beaches at Normandy, Raml’s office was on the ground floor, his chief of staff, Hans Spidel, had rooms above, it was from Lar Ro Gillionthat Spidel would later write about what the German high command had believedand feared on the eve of the invasion, the chatau’s owners,the Ducal family of La Rosh Fukold, had been forced to allow the Germans to occupy the building, the family lived in a small apartment in one of the towers, watching quietly as the men who had conquered France drew up defensive plans in the great salon downstairs, when the Germans withdrew from France in August of 1,944, they would leave Larosk largely intact, the chateau still stands today, its terraces still look out over the sane, exactly as they did on the day, Raml and Spidel debated where the invasion would fall. Farther east at St.
Charmaine and Lelay, a suburb of Paris on the western edge of the city, sat OB West,the headquarters of Field Marshall Runstead, this was where the operational orders for the entire Western Front were drafted, it was here that the reports from FM deer west arrived day after day warningthat Patton’s phantom armyin Kent was preparing to strike, Runstead, an older man, worked comparatively short hours, rose late, worked in the mornings, took a leisurely lunch,and then closed his day at a reasonable hour, his subordinates admired his composureand disliked his fondness for champagne, and south of Berlin at Zassan stood the German army general staffand the analytical bureau of FM deheri west itself where Colonel Alexis von Rouroen worked over intelligence estimatesthat were whether he intended it or not feedingthe German high command exactly the picture that Allied deception planners wanted them to see. Now the Allied side, 50 mi north of London in the town of Bletchley, sat a Victorian country house on a lake surrounded by hastily built brick huts, Bletchley Park, this was the government codeand cipher school, the British center for signals intelligenceand cryp analysis, it was here that Alan Turing and hundreds of mathematiciansand cryptographers had from the earliest months of the war been breaking into the German Enigma cipher system, the house was cold in winter, the huts were unheated, the staff wore layers of sweatersand worked around the clock in shifts, many of them were young women, university graduates, chess champions, crossword puzzle enthusiasts recruited for their intelligenceand their capacity for tedious work under high pressure, they lived in requisitioned lodgings in the surrounding villages, ate at long tablesin the mansion, knew nothing about the war outside the specific piece of German traffic they were assigned to, the intelligence that came out of Bletchley Park was called Ultra, it was so secretthat even most senior Allied commanders in the field did not know it existed, its distribution was controlled personally by an RAF officer named Group Captain Frederick William Winterbotham who ran the systemthat got ultra intelligence out to the very few commanders cleared to see it and who kept the secret so tightlythat its existence was not publicly revealed until his bookthe Ultra Secret was published in 1,974 at Bletchley Parkin the spring and summer of 199. 944, the decoded German messages were showing something extraordinary, the German high command really did believe in Fusag, they really were positioning their reserves against Patton, every intercept confirmedthat the deception was working exactly as plannedandthat the German fear of Patton was not something invented for propaganda purposes, it was real, it was measurable, it was in the enemy’s own operational orders, in his own words, being decoded on tables in wooden huts in Buckinghamshireat Bushy Parkin the suburbs of London, sat Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Cha Eisenhower’s headquarters until September of 1,944 when he would move his forward headquarters to the palace of Ver Sai just outside Paris, it was from chathat Eisenhower ran the western war, it was here that he calls ultra intelligence about German fear of Patton, and it was here that he made the decisions that turned that fear into a weapon.
In the county of Kent,in the southeast of England,in the towns of Dover and Folkstone,and along the whole broad landscape of the North Downs was the Phantom Army itself,in the fields, dummy tanks made of rubberthat inflated in the sun and slowly deflated at night, requiring British soldiers to run compressorsto keep them looking correct from the air,in the harbors, plywood landing craft painted to look real from above that would have sunk if you had tried to sail them,on the airwaves, hundreds of 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 radio messages every day, generated by real radio operators sitting in tents in the woods, sending out the signal traffic of an army groupthat consisted in reality of maybe a few dozen intelligence men, a signals unit,and General George S. Patton, Patton spent his days there being driven from location to location, being photographed at basesthat did not house real troops, giving speeches that were designed to be overheard by the Germans through the intelligence network, he knew he was commanding a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 army, what he did not know was how completelythe 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 army was working. Then the battlefields themselves,the places where the idea of Patton had already earned the fear that made all of this possible, North Africa, Tunisia,the mountain gap at Casarine Pass, where in February of 1,943,the German veterans of Raml’s Africa corpse had shattered an inexperienced American II corps under Lloyd Fredendall, and then 6 weeks later,the small town of Elgatar, where the same American corps, now under Patton,had counterattackedand stopped the Germans cold,that was the place where the staff of the Africa corpse first began to notice that something had changed on the American side, Sicily,the island south of Italy, dry and mountainous, Polarmoon the north coast taken by Pattonon the 22nd of July 1,943, Msinaon the northeast corner taken by Pattonon the 17th of August 1,943 just hours before Montgomery’s forces arrived, it was in Sicilythat General Hans Valentine Hub, commander of the German 14th Panzer Corps, filed reports back to the German high command, notingthat the American commander opposite him was moving faster than defensive planning could keep up with France.
In August of 1,944,the Phantom Army would become real, Patton would take command of the real third United States Army, break out of Normandy, race across the plains of central France in what remains the fastest sustained advancein the history of modern warfare, places would become famous of ranches, leal, or charts, Ross, Fallets, Mets, and then at the end of the year,the town that would seal Patton’s reputation for the rest of the war and for the rest of history, Bastonin the Belgian Ardensin a snowy forestin a bitter winter where the Germans would try one last time to change the course of the war and would find that George Patton was faster than they had ever imagined possible. That is the geography of the story, from a bunker in East Prussia to a chateauon the lake in Buckinghamshire to a country house in Kent,from the mountains of Tunisia to the forests of Belgium and behind all of it in officesand interrogation rooms after the war in Allied custodyin Britainand Germanyand eventuallyin the United Statesin the archives of the United States Army Historical Division where captured German generals would sit down after 1,945 and in careful typewritten reports still on file today would put on paper what they had actually thought about George Patton when it counted, that is what Dwight Eisenhower would eventually admit in his own careful way in the years after the war. The first place the German army learned to fear George Patton was North Africa, to understand why, you have to understand what had come before, in November of,942 in Operation Torch, American forces had landed in French Morocco and Algeria, their first major test against Germans came in February of 1,943 at the mountain pass of Casarene in western Tunisia, Raml’s veteran Africa corpse, hardmen who had spent 2 years fighting the British across Egypt and Libya hit the American second Corpsand drove it back 50 mi, approximately 6,000 American casualties, whole units panickedand ran, equipment was abandonedin the passes, tanks were left burning where they stood, American soldiers threw down their weaponsand ran on foot through the mountains, it was the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered on any front so far in the war, the blow was not only military, it was psychological, since 1,942,the American public had been toldthat its army would carry the war in Europe,that its soldiers were the best fed, best equipped, best trained in the world, Casarine puncturedthat belief, Eisenhower at his headquarters in Alers made the decision, relieved the second core commander Lloyd Fredendalland on the 6th of March 1,943 he replaced him with George Patton, the choice was not obvious, Patton had never commanded a corein combat before, he had commanded the western task forcein the landings at Casablanca the previous November, but that had been a division-sized operation against a French garrisonthat had put up only limited resistance, Casarine was different, Casarine was a full-scale meeting engagement against veteran German Panzer forcesand second Corps had just lost badlyand its morale was in pieces, Patton walked into a corethat had lost, turned it around in six weeks, imposed uniform standards, tightened discipline, demandedthat officers wear their ties into combat if that was what the regulation said, find soldiers he saw improperly dressed, required steel helmetsto be worn everywhere in the core area, got into argumentswith his subordinates aboutthe color of the socks issued to enlisted men, was ridiculous in some of his methods, was also right in his fundamental instinct, a defeated army needed to remember in every detailthat it was still an army, every enforced regulation was a small brick in a wall of restored self-respect, drove second corpsas hard as he had ever driven any unit in his life, and on the 23rd of March 1,943 at the town of Elgarin the mounts south of Gaffsa, he counterattackedthe German 10th Panzer Divisionand stopped them, the Germans noticed Fritz Berline was one of the senior staff officers of the Africa Corpse at that time, Raml himself had already been recalled to Europe by early March of 1,00 943 before Elgatarand would not return to the Africa corpse, he had been ordered home to Germany for medical treatmentfor a persistent illnessthat had been worsening for months, but Berline was still there working under Raml’s successor, General Jurgen von Arnim,and he was watching what was happening on the American side, watched what happened to Second Corpsin the 6 weeks after Patton took over,and he would write later in the reports he produced for the United States Army Historical Division after the war, that this was when the Africa Corpse first realizedthe Americans had found a commander of a different type, not a commander who managed his core, a commander who drove his corps, not a commander who reacted to German initiative, a commander who forced the Germans to react to him, Raml back in Europe followed the news from Tunisia through the reports coming in to the German high command, his personal papers captured by the alliesat the end of the warand edited for publication by the British military historian Basil Little Hartin 9,953 as the Raml Papers contain his observationsfrom that period, the picture the papers give is of a German commander who noticed in the spring of 1,943 that something on the American side had changed, Raml would never fight Patton again directly, would take command of Army Group B in France in early 1,944 planning the defense against the coming invasion, and when the invasion came in June of,944, Raml would be one of the German generals most convincedthat the real blow was still to fall at Calala under Patton, Raml would not live to see the end of the war,on the 14th of October 1944, forced by the Gustapo to choose between suicideand a treason trial for his connection to the 20th of July plot against Hitler, he took cyanidein the back of a staff car near his home in Herlingan,a small town in southwestern Germany, his widow was told he had died of a stroke, his son, Manfred Raml, who was then 15 years old and serving in a German anti-aircraft unit, learned the truth from his mother a few hours later, Manfred Raml would live to become mayor of Stoutgardin the 1970s, become friends with the sons of Patton and Eisenhower and Montgomery, but that comes later, Raml’s estimation of Patton formed in the spring of 1,943 would live on in the men who had served under him in Berlinin Spidle who had become his chief of staff at Army Group B and through them in the German operational thinkingthat would put 150,000 German soldiers in a stationary defensive position at Cala through the entire summer of 1994 waiting for a man who was never coming.
That was the first layer, the second layer was Sicily, the invasion of Sicily began on the 10th of July 1,943, Operation Husky, Patton commanded the American 7th Army, Montgomery commanded the British 8th Army, they landed at opposite ends of the southern coast of the islandand drove north, the German forces defending Sicily were commanded at the operational level by General Hans Vontenhub, 52 years old at the time, a veteran of Stalenrad, where he had commanded the 16th Panzer Divisionand been flown out on Hitler’s personal orderin the last days beforebefore the pocket was closed, lost an arm as a young lieutenantin the First World War, by 1,43 considered one of the most competent defensive commanders in the Vermacht, Hub and his forces conducted a fighting withdrawal across Sicily, retreating in stages toward Msina in the northeast corner of the island where they planned to evacuate to the Italian mainland across the straight of Msina, it was by German standardsa well-run delaying action, Hub saved most of his force, extracted them across the strait under Allied air power,and delivered them intact to the defense of the Italian mainland,in pure military terms, his Sicilian campaign was a success, but in his reports back to the German high command, Hub noted something specific, the tempo of the American 7th Army under Pattonwas disrupting normal defensive planning, Patton moved faster than the standard German operational calculations could handle, where a German staff officer would expect an American attack to develop over four or 5 days, Patton was launching it in one or two, Patton took Polarmoon the 22nd of July, 1,943 in a wide openen race across the western half of the island, then swung east along the northern coastand drove for Msina against tough German rear guard resistance, used amphibious endr runs, small landings behind the German linesfrom the sea to bypass strong defensive positionsand force the Germans to keep withdrawing,on the 17th of August, 1,943 American units of the seventh army entered Msina in the morning,a few hours ahead of the leading British troops of the eighth army coming up from the south, Patton had won the race, it was,in his own words to his staff,the greatest personal triumph of his life to that date, walked through the streets of Msina looking,in the words of an American war correspondent,like a man who had just won a horse race,and was still deciding whether to celebrate or to be modest, it had been,from the German point of view,an unexpectedly bad month, some later accounts, drawing on post-war German reportsand interviews have described Pattonas being viewed by German staff officers of the period as a kind of American gerion, borrowing the name of the German general who had pioneered mass tank warfare in,940, the exact phrasingand the exact origin of that comparison are not securely establishedin the primary German documents of 1,943 and careful historians treat it with caution, what is not in doubt is that by the end of Sicily, FMday here Westand the operational staffs at OB West had George Patton clearly identified as the most operationally dangerous American ground commander they had faced. And here is the second strange twist in the story, at exactly the moment the German high command was raiding Patton at the top of the American threat, back in the United Statesand in Washingtonand in London,the American press had just discovered the slapping incidents in Sicily,on the 21st of November, 1,943,the radio commentator Drew Pearson,broadcasting on the Blue Network, broke the story of what Patton had done in the field hospitals at Santa Gataand Nikicoia, American senators demanded Patton’s court marshal, mothers of American soldiers wrote to the War Department demandingthat he be removed, Marshall considered it, Eisenhower, who had already reprimanded Patton privatelyin August of 1,943and had ordered him to apologize personally to every unit of the 7th Army, defended him publicly again, but the situation was clear,in the winter of 1,943and the spring of 1,944,the German high command was rearranging its western defensive posture around Patton,the American political establishment was considering whether Patton should remain in uniform at all. That was where Operation Fortitude came in, Fortitude was the deception planthat supported Operation Overlord,the invasion of France, its purpose was to convince the Germansthatthe real invasion would come at the Pad Calala, not at Normandy,and to keep as much German strengthas possible tied down at Calalafor as long as possible after D-Day,the plan had many components, false radio traffic, double agents run out of London by the British 20 committee,so-called because its members had numbered 20 and because their double crosswork had been marked in Roman numeralsas XX,rubber tanksin the fields of Kent, wooden landing craftin the harbors, 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 supply dumps, 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 sewage lagoons, even a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 army group patch designedand issued to look like the insignia of a real formation, at the center of it all was George Patton commandingthe fictitious first United States Army Group, Fusag,the genius of fortitude, was that it did not have to teach the Germans anything new, it did not have to convince themthat Patton was dangerous, it only had to confirm what they already believe, that is the third strange twist, Fortitude did not create German fear of Patton, it amplified a fear the Germans had built up themselves out of hard combat in Tunisiaand Sicilyover the previous 18 months, ifthe German high command had not already been prepared to believe that Patton was the American commander to to fear all the rubber tanks in the world would not have worked, the double agents were real, the most famous of them, Juan Puhol Garcia,cenamed Garbo, was a Spaniard working out of London, who ran what was effectivelya fictitious network of subgence feeding fabricated intelligence to the Germans, he had begun his double agent career in Lisbon before the warand had reached England by 1,942, by the spring of 1,944,the Germans considered him one of the most reliable sources of information they had inside the British Isles,in fact, every message he had ever sent them had been written or approved by British military intelligence, Roman Churnioski,cenamed Brutus, was a Polish airman doing similar work, Duchian Popov,cenamed Tricycle, was a Yugoslav playboy who had been feedingthe Germans false information for years in Lisbon,in New York,in London, all of them day after day throughthe spring of 1,944 sent messages describing FusAG movements, Fusag assembly areas, Fusag loading schedulesfor the invasion of Calala,the Germans believed them, not becausethe deception was clever, though it was, but becausethe German high command was already looking for exactly this picture,and the double agents were giving it to them, by D-Dayon the 6th of June, 944, FMir West was assessing Fuzzagas a real army group of many divisions positioned in southeast England, ready to invade Cala, the real fuzzag of course did not exist, the Germans reacted exactly as Eisenhower needed them to react, the 15th Army under General Hans von Salmouth, over 150,000 men and hundreds of tanks stayed at Calala, Panzer divisionsthat could have been thrown against the beaches at Normandyin the first critical week stayed in placeas or moved slowlyor were redirected back and forth as new false reports came in from FM day here west, the 15th Army only began to break up its cala positionsand shift westward in late July about 7 weeks after D-Day as operation Cobra broke the American line open at Sant Low, by that point,the Allied lodgementin Normandy was firmly established, millions of tons of supplies were coming ashore,the bridge head was ready to break out,and in England still was George Patton commanding an armythat did not exist, waiting for the real commandthat was finally about to arrive.
On the 1st of August, 1,944,the Phantom became real, the Third United States Army was activatedin France, Patton took commandand what followed wasthe fastest sustained advancein the history of modern warfare, Leurs or Leong Chart Ross cities that had been under German occupationfor 4 years fell in days, Patton drove east across the summer fields of France so fastthat his own supply lines could not keep up with him, drove himselfand his staff to exhaustion, slept 4 hours a night, ate his meal standing up in his tent in front of a map dictating orderswith a mouthful of eggs, his subordinate commanders, some of whom had thought him half mad in peace time, discovered that in war,the same intensitythat had been ridiculous in a garrisonin Hawaii, was decisive on a road in France, when Patton wanted a bridge captured intact, he wanted it captured intact this afternoon, not tomorrow, not tonight, when a division commander told him a river could not be crossed until pontoon engineers arrived, Patton would find a fordand cross the river before dark, his army moved on his will as much as on its wheels,in the second week of August, Patton’s forces reached Argentanand pushed toward the town of Filets, where a huge pocket of retreating German forces was almost surrounded, Bradley, Patton’s immediate superior, ordered him to hold at Argentan to avoid friendly fire complicationswith Montgomery’s Canadian forces closingfrom the north,the gapin the pocket stayed open for another critical 2 days,between 20 and 50,000 German soldiers, depending on the estimate, escaped through it, they included some of the men and staff of Fritz Berline’s Panzer Lair Division,the same officer who had first noticed Pattonin North Africain 1,943 and was now in France thus being chased by him again. Then in September of,944, Eisenhower facedthe decisionthat would define the rest of his war, Patton wanted his third army given priority for fueland suppliesfor a direct thrust across the Rine into Germany, Montgomery wanted the same for his forcesin the north, both promised to endthe war within weeks if given priority, Eisenhower chose Montgomery, under pressurefrom Churchilland from British political imperativesand followingthe broadfront strategythat spread supplies across all Allied armies, Eisenhower diverted a huge share of the available logisticsto Montgomeryfor a bold British airborne operation called Market Garden, aimed at seizingthe bridges over the Rineat Arnum in the Netherlands, Market Garden began on the 17th of September, 1,944, ended disastrouslyon the 25th of September, around 17,000 Allied casualties across the whole operationwith about 8,000 Britishand Polish paratroopers lost at Arnham alone,the Rinewas not crossed,the British First Airborne Division was effectively destroyedas a fighting force, Pattonat the same time sat in eastern Francewith tanks that were running out of gasoline, turned his frustrationon the ancient fortress city of Metsin the province of Lraine, Mets had not been taken by force since the year 1552, its ring of forts had been rebuilt by the Germansin the 1870s and modernized since,the forts sat in a wide arc around the city, dug into the hillsides, walls of reinforced concreteand steel, garrisoned by German infantryand artillery,the German first army under General Ottovon Koblesf held it with everything they could scrape together, Patton, low on fuel, low on ammunition, low on air supportbecause of poor autumn weather, reduced Mets over the course of 2 and 1/2 months,the city itself fell to the third army on November 22nd, 1,944, last fortressin the outlying ring, Fort John Dark, surrendered on the 13th of December, 1,944, Mets was a slow, expensive victory, many historians, including Hugh M. Cole in his 1,950 study,the Lraine Campaign for the US.
Army Center of Military History and Rick Atkinsonin the guns at last lightin 2013 have notedthat Patton’s slownessat Mets was not a failure of Patton’s leadership, it was the direct consequence of the fuel and supply prioritythat had gone north to Monkyand had been wasted at Arnham, Patton knew it, wrote about it in his diary in bitter termsin late 1,944, believed until the end of his life that ifthe fuel had gone to him instead of to Montgomeryin September, he would have been across the Rine before winterand the war would have ended months earlier, that is the fourth strange twist, the German defense of Mets was in a way saved by Allied politics, not by German skill, Runsteadand Koblesf had bought their extra weeks at Mets, not on the battlefield, but in Eisenhower’s headquarters when Ike gave the fuel to Montgomery. Then came December,on the 16th of December, 1,944, roughly 30 German divisions attacked through the Ardens Forestin a last desperate offensive designed to splitthe Allied frontand reachthe port of Antwerp, it was the battle of the bulge, in command of one of the two main assault armies was General Hasso von Mantuful, 47 years old, a cavalry officer by background, small in stature, barely 5 1/2 ft tall, brilliant, energetic, one of the most capable operational commanders in the German army,the German offensive punched a huge dent in the American lineand surroundedthe 101st Airborne Divisionat the small crossroads town of Baston, panic ran along the front, reinmentswere slow, weather grounded Allied air support, fog closed in over the Arden,snow began to fall,temperatures dropped to 15° bosat night, American units brokeand ran in some sectors,in others they held on ground they could barely see, some of the American soldiers who died at the bulge froze into the snow before their bodies could be recovered,on the 19th of December, 944 Eisenhower called an emergency conference of his senior commanders at Verdun,the mood in that room was grim, Bradley looked shaken, Montgomery characteristically was on the sidelines, nobody had a plan, he turned to Patton, George, how long will it take you to attack? Patton had already war gamed the answer during the train ride to the conference, answered without hesitation, 48 hours, Three divisions, the other officers in the room thought it was impossible, Eisenhower knew better, he had known Patton for 25 years since a summer at Camp Me in Marylandin 1991 when both of them had been young captainsin the tiny American tank corps, he said, Make it so, and Patton delivered, the Third Army pivoted 90 degrees to the north, disengaged from its offensive operationsin the SAR,and struckthe southern flank of the Bulgeon the 22nd of December, 1,944, whole divisions moved across icy roads in the dark, fuel froze in the tanks, men slept in ditches, but they moved,on the 26th of December, elements of the fourth armored division, led on the ground by Lieutenant Colonel Kraton Abramsand the 37th tank battalion punched through the German cordon around Bastonand relievedthe one first airborne,the German offensive collapsed,the bulge closed,the last great German attack of the war had failed,on the German side,the reaction was catastrophic, General Hasso von Mantufoin interviews with the British military historian Basil Liddell Hart after the war published in Liddell Hart’s bookthe German general’s talkin,948and expanded in later editions made clearthat the German high command had not expectedthe Americans to respondthat quickly, their planning models allowed for a much slower Allied reaction time, Patton’s counter-stroke was outside those planning models, it was in Manufel’s own postwar assessment, decisive,that is the fifth strange twist, Manufol,the German general who had plannedand led one of the main assault armiesat the Bulge,would after the war become a member of the German Bundistag, serving as a politicianin West Germanyfrom 1,953 to 1,957, attend NATO events, meet Dwight Eisenhower, then President of the United States,in personand on multiple occasions,in interviews with historiansand in memoirs of his own, Manufol would go on the recordwith a professional respect for George Pattonthat some of his own American counterparts, notably Bradleyand Montgomery, would never bring themselves to match, Eisenhower meeting Manufelat NATO functions did not publicly correct him, he also did not publicly agree with him, he simplyin the phrase used by Rick Atkinsonin his history of the campaign let it stand,that that silence wasthe closest thing to an admissionthat Eisenhower ever gave in public.
While the war was still fresh, there was one more strange twist in the story of what the Germans thought about Patton, everything the German high command had done during Fortitudeand after had been read at the time in real time by the Allies, not through spies, not through captured documents, through ultra the ultra decrypts of German military traffic in the west showed exactly which Allied commander the Germans were tracking,which Allied commander they were positioning against,which Allied commander they were building their reserve dispositions to counter,the name in those decrypts againand again was Patton, Eisenhower had seen those decrypts, Bradley had seen them once he was cleared for Ultra, Montgomery had seen them, but none of them could ever say what they had read,the Ultra secret was so closely held that its existence could not be revealed even after the war, British and American policy after 1,945 was thatthe decrypted German trafficand the fact that Enigma had ever been broken at all would remain classified,the reason was pragmatic, Enigma type machines were still in use in various parts of the worldin the postwar decades, nations that had not knownthe German cipher was breakable might have felt safer using similar systems themselves, Britainand America wanted them to keep feeling safe,and so the whole intelligence picturethat had shaped Eisenhower’s operational decisionsfrom 1,943 to 1,945 sat in a locked vault,and every man who had seen it from Ike down had signed his life awayin oaths of secrecy about it,the Ultra Secret held for 29 years after the war, it was not publicly broken until 1,974, by which time most of the men who had earned the story with their blood were already dead. The end of the war did not settle the question of who the Germans had feared, it made it louder,in May of 1,945, Germany surrendered,and within weeks,the American and British interrogators who had been waiting for this moment began working their way through the captured German officer Corps, every senior commanderfrom Runstead down was pulled into Allied custody,given a roomand a typewriter,and in many casesa series of interrogators who had been reading their operational orders for years,and now at last could ask questions directlyat Trent Park,a country estatein North Londonthat had been turned into a special holding facility for senior German prisonersand at other compoundsof Britain Germanyand eventuallyin the United Statesas the German generals began to talk, Field Marshal Gird von Runstead, 69 years old, sat downin the summer of 10,000, 945,with a Canadian intelligence officer named Milton Schulman, Schulmanwas a young man,an aspiring writeron temporary dutyas an interrogator, he had a notebookand questionsand time, took Runstead through the whole western campaignfrom D-Day to the fall of Germany, Schulman published his notesin 1947 in a book called Defeatin the West,the book became one of the earliest serious accounts of the German perspectiveon the Western campaign,in it, Runstead discussesthe Allied commanders he had facedand his professional judgments about them,the essential picture Schulman preserved is consistent, Runstead considered Pattonthe most dangerous operational commander among the allies, not because Patton always got his way, not because Patton always won, but because Patton wasthe one Allied General Runstead staff could not predict, Runstead himself,by then a widowerowerand a broken man,had been placed in Allied custodyand was living out his final years as a prisoner, releasedin 1,948 due to ill health without ever being tried, diedin February of 1,953 in Hanoverin a small apartmentof heart failure, was 77 years old,the proud Prussian field marshal, once master of half of Europe, ended his life on a small pensionin a divided Germany, General Gunter Blumenrred, Runstead’s chief of staff, sat downin interrogation roomsand later at US Army writing facilitiesin Germanyand the United States to produce a series of studies on the Western campaign, some of these appeared in his 1,952 bookvon Randet,the soldier and the man, others exist to this dayas typewritten manuscripts in the National Archives, part of the German report series that produced more than2500 documentsbetween 1,945 and 1,955, Lumatrit’s overall picture isthe same, Patton wasthe commander OB West could not predictwhose speed changedthe tempo of the whole western campaignwhose reputation through fortitude tied down German reservesthat were desperately needed elsewhere, General Hans Spidle, released after having survived his own imprisonmentby the Gestapofor his rolein the 20th of July plot, wrote a book called Invasion 1, 1944, published in Germanyin 9,949, Spel’s book gives the fullest firstirhand account of what Raml’s staff at Army Group B had believedin the weeks around D-Day, what Spidel makes clear is that Runstead was persuadedand the German high commandwith himthatthe real Allied blow was still to come at Calala under Patton, that belief did not come fromthe double agents, it came from what German commanders had learned about Pattonover the previous 18 months, Spidle would go on to a remarkable second careerin,957 at the height of the Cold War, appointed supreme commander of allied land forces central Europewithin NATO, commanded NATO ground forceson the very ground where he had once plannedthe defense against the allies, worked directly under Dwight Eisenhower, who was by then president of the United Statesand NATO’s political head,the two men, once enemies on opposite sides of the channel, sat in meetings together as colleagues, Spidle would diein November of 1,984 at the age of 87, having lived long enough to see the ultra secret revealedand to know thatthe German high command’s fixation on Patton had been read by the allies in real time all throughthe war, General Fritz Berline, who had faced patentin Tunisia,in Sicily,in Normandy,and in the Bulge, wrote his own contributionsfor the German Report seriesin the late 1940s, his assessments of Patton based on direct combat experience across four theatersare perhaps the most valuable single record of what a German commander actually thought about Patton after having fought him more times than almost any other Vermacht officer, Berline diedin January of 1,970, one year after Eisenhowerat the age of 71, and General Hasso von Mantu, imprisoned only briefly, released to become a farmer, then a defense industry executive, then a politician, gave interviews for the rest of his life to any serious historian who came to him, his most extensive recordisin Basil Liddell Hart’sthe German general’s talkpublished in,948and expanded in additionsas across the 1950s, Mantifil’s evaluation of Pattonas an operational commander of the first orderison the record, it is not an ambiguous evaluation, it is a professional judgment offered by a German general who had fought Pattonat the bulgeand had been beaten, between them, these five men, Runstead, Blumenrit, Spidel, Berline,and Mantu, laid downin the years after the war a written German recordthat told from the German side exactly what the German army had feared about George Pattonand why. Then the memoir wars started,in 1 948, Eisenhower published Crusadein Europe, his memoir of the war, it sold enormously well, was praised for its restraint, its measured tone, its refusal to settle scores, reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic remarked on its dignity, Ike had not written a bookthat attacked anyone by name, he had written a bookthat told the operational story of the war in Western Europefrom the point of view of the man who had commanded it,in Crusadein Europe, Ike wrote about Pattonwith more warmthand more admiration than he wrote about almost any other commanderin the book, described Patton’s driving power, his instinct for exploitation, his ability to make things happenthat other commanders could not, acknowledged in effectthatthe Germans had feared Patton more than any other Allied commander, he was in that book telling as much of the truth about Pattonas he could tell without touching Ultra, but Ultra was stillthe wall he could not cross, he could not in 9,948 sitethe German interceptsthat would have proved what he was saying, could not tell his readersthatthe intelligence file,the actual daily read of the German high command’s operational orders, had shownfor 18 months exactly which Allied commander the Germans were positioning against, he said what he could say, held back what he had to hold back,in,951, Omar Bradley publisheda soldier story, Bradley had commandedthe 12th Army Group,the American commandthat had contained both Pattons, third army,and Courtney Hodes’s first army, through most of the fightingin France and Germany, Bradleyand Patton had disliked each other during the war, Bradley had thought Patton reckless, Patton had thought Bradley timid,a soldier’s story reflected some of that friction, Bradley was not warm toward Patton, was not hostile, but he was measured in a waythat did not do Patton any favors.
Then in 1,958, Bernard L. Montgomery published his memoirs,the book was written in the voice of a man who believed with genuineand absolute convictionthat he had won the war in the Westand that everyone else, particularly Eisenhower, had gotten in his way, criticized Ike openly, criticized Bradley, reduced Patton to a minor figure whose main function had been to make Montgomery’s job harder, it was as a memoir an enormously self-serving document,the book caused a furore, American reviewers were outraged, British reviewers were divided, Ike,by then in the White Houseas president of the United States, did not respond, Ike had a private rule about public feudswith former comrades in arms, believed thatthe dignity of the office of supreme commanderandthe dignity of the office of president required him not to answer this kind of attackin kind, so Montgomery’s memoirs sat on shelvesin Britainand Americaand were soldand readand Ike said nothing. In 1996, Eisenhower published his second memoir, Atase: Stories I tell to friends, it was a lighter book, a collection of anecdotesand reminiscences, it was not a settling of scores, touched on Patton,on Marshall,on MacArthur,on Montgomeryin a personal register, it did not respond to Montgomery’s 1,958 attack, Ike would not respond to Montgomeryin print at all, not in 1,958, not in 1,967, not ever, but he had left something else on the recordin small ways,in careful ways,in interviews givenin the 1960s,in speeches at West Point,in private conversations with historians who came to see him at his farmat Gettysburgafter his presidency, kept quietly coming back to Patton, would say in various ways over the yearsthat Patton had been indispensableat the bulge,thatthe counter-strokein the Ardenhad been a maneuver no other American commander could have executed at that speed,that in the exploitation phase of mobile warfare, Patton had been in a category by himself, historians who spoke with him, including Steven Ambrose,in the years when Ambrose was working on his biography of Eisenhower, came away with the understandingthat Ike, without ever making a formal public declaration, considered Patton’s operational contribution to the war to have been greater thanthe record was giving him credit for,and there was one more linein Crusadein Europe, quietand easy to miss,that capturedthe whole thing, Ike wrote in substancethatthe Germans had feared Patton more than any other Allied commander, wrote it as a plain statement of fact, did not could not cite Ultraas his source, did not namethe German generals, did not quotethe intercepts, just wrote itin the voice of the Supreme Commander who had seen what he was talking aboutand expected his readers to take his word for it, some of them did, others, particularly in Britain, did not,the counterattack came as counterattacks always doin the war of memoirsfrom the British side,the most influential British reply was Chester Wilott’s book, The Struggle for Europe, published in 1952 Wilmontwas an Australian-born journalistand war correspondent who had coveredthe campaign in Northwest Europefor the BBC, his book became one of the standard post-war histories of the western campaignand it was written from a British perspective, Wilmont argued in substancethat Ike had been too generous to Pattonand not generous enough to Montgomery, argued that Ike’s broadfront strategyhad cost Britain a chance to win the warin 1,9944and he cast some doubt on the value of German testimony about Pattonsuggesting that captured German generals had reasons of their own to flatter their American capttors, that charge could be leveled at some kinds of post-war German testimony, but it did not fitthe specific German record about Patton, Blumenritand buyerline were writing under US Army supervisionas paid contributorsto a research program, Manufol was speaking to a British historian, Runstead was answering questions from a young Canadian officerwith a notebook, nobodyin the postwar German officer corps had anything to gain by talking aboutthe American general they had feared, if anythingin the political climate of the late 1940sand early 1950s they might have had something to lose,and yetthe German record on Pattonlaid down separately by five different senior officersin different settingswas strikingly consistent, Wilmont died youngin 1995,at the age of 42, killedin the crash of a British airlinerin the Mediterranean, did not live to see the ultra secret revealed, did not live to see his own book challenged by the evidence that came out of the vault after 1,00 974.
Then in,974the wall came down, Frederick William Winterbotham publishedthe ultra secretin Britain,the book revealed for the first time to a general audiencethatthe allies had brokenthe German Enigma cipher systemin the 1940sand had been reading much of German military communicationsthrough most of the war,the book was rough in places, Winterbotham had been writing from memory, some of his details were wrong, butthe fundamental claimthat Ultra had existedand had been decisive was trueand it openedthe archives, Ronald Leuen followedin 1,978 with Ultra Goes to War,a more careful history, Ralph Bennett published Ultra in the Westin,979 focused specifically on how Ultra had shapedthe campaign in Franceand Germany, these books, working with newly released documents, began to describe what the actual ultra decrypts had shown,the German fear of patent described in Ike’s memoirsin 9,948and dismissed by some British historiansin the 1950s was now visiblein the archived intelligence traffic itself,the German operational orders read at Bletchley Parkin real time,the German high command’s obsession with fusag,the German 15th army held at Calalathrough the summer of 1,944 waiting for Patton, it was all there on paperin the decoded messages the Germans themselves had sentand had assumed nobody was reading, Ike had been tellingthe truth, he had not lived to see it confirmed, diedon the 28th of March 1,969 at Walter Reed General Hospitalin Washingtonof congestive heart failure, was 78 years old, was still bound bythe secrecy he had signed forin 1,943, 5 years too early to see thee vault open, Manufel,the German general who had ledthe assaultat the bulgewould live to see it, diedon the 24th of September 1,978,the same year Ronald Leuen’s book came out, had knownthe truth all along, of course, he had lived it, now,in the last months of his life, he watchedthe world outside catch up to what he had understood since the winter of 1,944, Runstead had diedin February of 1,953 before Ultra was public, Blumenand Trit diedin October of 1,967, also before, Spedel diedin November of 1,984, having seen the wall come down, Byerline diedin January of 1,970, 1 year after Eisenhower, Patton of course had died first of all of themon the 21st of December 1000 in 945 in a hospital roomin H Highlebergof complications from a car accident 12 days earlier, had been 60 years old, had never been toldin his lifetime exactly how much the Germans had feared him, had never been read into ultra, gone to his grave believingthat Ike had held him back for political reasonsand never suspectingthatthe same reputation he had built in Tunisiaand Sicilyhad without his knowing kept a German army in place at Calalafor 7 weeks after D-Dayand quite possibly saved Bradley’s beach headat Normandy. That is the whole story, two commanders allied against a common enemy, one of them famous, honored, knightand celebratesuck across Britainand much of the world, Bernard Law Montgomery,a master of the setpiece battle,a general who did not lose,a generalthe Germans respected, who they positioned defenses against, who they prepared to receive,the other one, George Smith Patton Jr. ,seen at the timeas an embarrassment,a slapper of soldiers,a giver of inmperate speeches,a general nearly removed from the American armyin the summer of 1,943and againin the spring of 1,944and also quietly hiddenin the German intelligence filesand in the ultra decrypts,the American general,the German high command was actually afraid of,the commander who had won the desert war got the parades,the puridge,andthe postwar knighthood, Montgomery would livein his cottageat Eisington Millin the English countryside, receiving visitors, giving lectures, writing more books, defending his memoirs against criticsuntil he died, passed awayon the 24th of March 1,976 at the age of 88, buried with military honors,the commander the Desert Wars enemies had actually feared got a car accidentin a Cadillac outside Mannheim 12 days in a hospital bedand a small white crossin a graveyardin Luxembourg,and in the middle of it, doing what he couldwith what he was allowed to say, was Dwight Eisenhower,a man who had spent 3 years of his life managing an alliance that required him to hold one truth about his own commandersin silenceand to allow another softer,more diplomatic truth to stand in its place, wrote the truth into Crusadein Europein 9,948 in a single lineand hoped his readers would understand it, some did, some did not,the full evidence sat in a vault under Britishand American controluntil 1,974,at which point most of the men who had earned the story with their blood were already dead, Runstead Raml Blumenrred Bayerline Patton Bradley who would live until,981 Montgomery who would live until 1,976and would never publicly walk backthe assessmentsin his memoirs, Ike had diedin,969, 5 years too early to see the vault opened, butthe record he had left was therein the sentences of crusadein Europe,in the memoirs of the German generals he had defeated,in the interviews Mantifal gave to Basil Liddell Hartin the confidential reports Blummentand Berline had writtenfor the US Army Historical Division,in the interrogation notes Milton Schulman had taken from Runsteadat Trent Parkin the summer of 1,945,and finallyin the ultra decrypts themselves releasedto the publicin the years after Ike could no longer see them,the German high command’s own operational orders,the German staff’s own signals traffic,the German intelligence branch’s own daily estimates,the one name that recurred againand again, week after week, month after month, throughthe summer of 1 1944,and into the winter,and on to the last days ofthe war, was Patton,not Montgomery, Patton,that was what Eisenhower had known,that was what he had said as clearlyas he could say itin 1,948,and that was what took a broken cipherand 30 years of silence,and one retired Air Force officer’s decision to publish a bookin 9,974 to finally conform, by the time the confirmation came, most of the menin the story were beyond hearing it, but the record was there on paperin the archives, available now to any historian who wants to open the file, Field Marshall Runsteadin the summer of 1,945 sitting across a tablefrom a young Canadian intelligence officer named Milton Schulmanand quietly making clear thatthe American general OB West had feared,from the desert of Tunisia to the forest of the Ardans was Patton, Colonel Axis von Rouroanne, chief of Remdei West, dead by executionin October of 944 for his rolein the plot against Hitler, whose intelligence estimates had put Pattonat the top of the Allied threat listall throughthe spring of 1,944, Field Marshall Ramlin his personal papers capturedat the end of the warmarking Pattonin the desert of 1,943 as the American commander of a different order, General Bayerline who fought Pattonon four battlefieldsontthree continentsand whose written recordfor the US Army Historical Division confirms againand againthatthe officers who faced Patton knew what they were facing, General Spidleat Larash Gayonin the spring of 1,944 watching Ramland Runsteadandthe German high command betthe western campaign on where Patton was going to strike, Spadel, who would later in the piece serve NATO under Eisenhower’s political leadershipand would sit in meetings across the tablefrom the man who had once been his enemy, General Manufelo,at the Bulgein December of 1,944, watching his own carefully planned offensive shatteragainst a counterattack he had not believedthe Americans could mountthat quickly, Manufo, who would later in the piece sitin the German Bundistagas a Democratic legislatorand would meet Eisenhower againas an American presidentand Dwight Eisenhowerin his office at Chaffand later in the White Houseand finally at his farmin Gettysburg, holding all of itin his head for the rest of his life, knowing what he could not say, sayingin the one sentence he was allowedwhat he could say,and waiting for a day which did not comein his lifetime whenthe file could be opened,the file opened 5 years after his death,and there in black ink on the pages of intercepted German traffic wasthe confirmation of everything Ike had knownand everything he had put quietlyon the recordin 1,948,that wasthe story of what Eisenhower said when he realized which Allied generalthe Germans really feared, he said it as clearlyas the secrecy would let him, said it in one line in his memoir, carried the rest of it to his graveand 30 years after the fact,the vault openedand the record came outand Ike,who was no longer alive to hear it, was proved right.
There is something else to say about this story,and it is the piece most tellings leave out,the Germans did not fear Pattonbecause Patton was flashy, they did not fear him because he wore ivory revolversor made profane speechesor slapped soldiersor committed political indiscretionson the front page ofthe London newspapers,the Germans knew nothing about those thingsor if they knew they did not care, they feared him because he was fast,because he made decisions faster than any other allied commander they had studied,because his army moved on his will more than on his logistics,because when Patton had a holein front of him, he went through it without waiting for orders,without waiting for supply linesto catch up,without waiting for anyone,and in the operational art of mobile warfare,which the Germans themselves had inventedin 1,939and 1,940with the Blitzkrieginto Polandand France, they recognizeda kindred practitioneron the other side, Montgomery was,in the German view,an excellent commander of the setpiece battle, they respected him, took him seriously, planned against him with care, but they understood him, could predict him,knew roughly how he would move,how long he would take to prepare,what shape his attack would assume when it finally came, Montgomery for all his brillianceat Elamagne,at Marath,at Normandy,at Conn was a generalthe German staff could plan against with confidence, Patton was different, Patton did not attack whenthe doctrine said he should, attacked when he wanted to,crossed rivers beforethe pontoon engineers arrived, committed reservesthat were not ready to be committed,turned north whenthe map said he should turn east,and the German operational staff doingthe mathematics of defenseat OB Westin St. Germaineand Lei could not solvethe equation,that is what fearin a professional military sense actually means, it is not the fear of losing, it is the fear of being unable to predict, it is the fear of preparing carefully for one thingand being hit by another,and in the four German generals whose written records survivefrom Runstead down to Mantto Patton wasthe American commander they could not predictthat is the thing they said in interrogationin memoirin interviewsin the German report seriesin Blumatrit’s bookon Runsteadin Spidle’s bookon the invasionin Berline’s contributions to the U army historyin Mantuul’s conversationswith Liddell Hart, different sources, different settings, different audiences,the same conclusion, sometimes the truth about a war does not settlein the year the war ends, sometimes it takes a broken cipherand half a lifetime of silence to be told at last,sometimes the generalthe enemy feared most is not the generalthe world remembers,and sometimesin a small white graveyardon a hillsidein Luxembourgat the head of a formation of American deadlies a man who never got to know how much he had frightened his enemyand how much his own commander had known itand how much they had both been unablein the end to say, his name was George S. Patton, his enemy called himin their private reportsthe American commander they had reason to fearand Dwight Eisenhowerin careful measured sentencesand in one line in a book publishedin,948 said so,that is the truth of it, it is on the record now, anyone can look it up.
