PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY Read Online Free

crossing is the same as that used by Labienus with his Tenth Legion about 55 B.C.” His absorption in military history was more than intellectual or even professional, for he made no secret of his belief in reincarnation. In 1943, before the Allies stepped off from North Africa to invade Sicily, British general Sir Harold Alexander admiringly observed, “You know, George, you would have made a great marshal for Napoleon if you had lived in the 19th century.” Patton replied dryly: “But I did.” He was never embarrassed to confess his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that he had marched with Napoleon or with Bohemia’s John the Blind against the Turks in the fourteenth century, or even that, as a Roman legionnaire, “Perhaps I stabbed our Savior / In His sacred helpless side.” 1
    The past, for Patton, was not all in books or even in lives earlier lived. It was his very birthright. After he had proposed to Beatrice during Christmas of 1908, he wrote a letter to her father, Frederick Ayer, justifying his choice of career. Patton admitted that there was no rational reason for embarking on a life so financially unrewarding as that of an officer in the U.S. Army, but, he explained, “I only feel it inside. It is as natural for me to be a soldier as it is to breathe and would be as hard to give up all thought of it as it would to stop breathing.” 2
    The very first childhood game he remembered playing was “soldiers,” with his sister Anne, called Nita, assuming the rank of major “while I claimed to be a private which I thought was superior,” Patton recalled. Their father joined in, snapping a salute to brother and sister each morning and asking “how the private and major were.” Not much later, George came to understand that “private” was superior to nothing, and he began referring to himself as “Georgie S. Patton, Jr., Lieutenant General.” 3
    Out of doors in the golden California sunshine, George learned to ride early. While Papa happily fashioned wooden swords for his son and taught him how to build forts, he could not keep up with the boy’s energy, drive, and endless craving for exercise and endless activity.
    Family heritage, the reading of heroic tales and military history, love of horses, boundless energy, and exuberant play—these were the elements of George Patton’s boyhood, and the adult Patton would never leave them far behind. There is no evidence that he ever seriously thought about becoming anything other than a soldier. More to the point, all the evidence reveals an early and ever-growing desire to be a leader, a commander, a winner of great glory and universal recognition. During the six years he spent at Clark’s School for Boys, he strove to excel despite his dyslexia, which earned him the ridicule of fellow students whenever he stumbled over words he read aloud or wrote on the blackboard. It must have been painful for him, but he was never discouraged. Raised on the romance of his Scots and Confederate ancestors, people beaten but unbowed, he saw defeat as a challenge to win next time or to triumph in the end. Later, as a mature commander, he would inscribe, using all uppercase letters, in one of his field notebooks: “YOU ARE NOT BEATEN UNTIL YOU ADMIT IT. HENCE DON’T.” 4 In any event, no matter what happened to him, his adoring father and mother never allowed him to feel defeated.
    But for the limitations of dyslexia, George Smith Patton Jr. was, as he himself later recalled, “the happiest boy in the world,” 5 and the idyll was made complete by summers spent on Catalina Island, which the sons of B. D. Wilson’s business partner Phineas Banning had purchased in 1892 to turn into an upscale vacation resort. There is where the Pattons had a summer place, and it was there, in 1902, that 17-year-old George met Beatrice Banning Ayer, privileged daughter of a Boston industrialist named Frederick Ayer and his second wife, Ellen Barrows Banning, niece of Phineas Banning.