Stephen L. Moore - Pattons Payback: The Battle of El Guettar and General Pattons Rise to Glory

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Copyright 2022 by Stephen L. Moore

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ISBN 9780593183403 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780593183427 (ebook)

Cover design by Jason Booher

Cover image: General George S. Patton uses a pair of binoculars to view troop movements from a foxhole in the North African Campaign of World War II in Africa circa 1943. (Popperfoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)

BOOK DESIGN BY TIFFANY ESTREICHER, ADAPTED FOR EBOOK BY ESTELLE MALMED

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For my family, for enduring my desire to preserve history, and to the North African veterans who fought to preserve our freedom.

PROLOGUE

MARCH 4, 1943

On a mild, sunny afternoon on the outskirts of Casablanca, Morocco, a tall U.S. Army officer was riding a Thoroughbred charger named Joyeuse when an adjutant reached him with a message: General Dwight Eisenhower had phoned.

The message was terse. The officer, whose men knew him as Old Blood and Guts, among other less polite nicknames, was to pack his bags and be ready by morning to depart for extended field service in Tunisia.

George S. Patton knew something was up. It was about damn time.

For the past two months he had been largely removed from frontline action. During the Allied invasion of French North Africa, dubbed Operation Torch, Major General Patton had commanded a task force of 33,000 men whose November 8, 1942, landings centered on Casablanca. Within three days his men had battled through fierce Axis resistance and taken the city, resulting in an armistice with the French resident commander, General Auguste Charles Nogus.

By early 1943, Patton had converted Casablanca into a vast Allied supply depot and an entry point for thousands of Allied troops arriving weekly into North Africa. Although his role was important to the war effort, he was a fighter, not a man meant to watch from the sidelines, and he found himself miserable. I wish I could get out and kill someone, Patton wrote to his wife. During a visit to troops in Tunisia, he wondered aloud where the Germans were. I want to get shot at, he told another officer.

His chance would come soon enough. The fifty-seven-year-old two-star Army general was a complex man and leader: charismatic, irreverent, impulsive, and inspiring, often at the same time. He was a showman who strutted about with an ivory-handled Colt revolver on each hip as he vented his frequent frustrations with a high-pitched voice.

Patton had been tabbed with planning Operation Husky, the forthcoming Allied invasion of Sicily. While Patton prepared in Casablanca, the major general in command of the U.S. Armys II Corps in Tunisia sent his ill-disciplined forces against Adolf Hitlers battle-hardened Panzers and Field Marshal Erwin Rommels Afrika Korps infantrymen, but the fighting had not gone as expected for the Americans.

Throughout these actions, Patton had been mired in Morocco, supremely frustrated at being left out of the action. On March 2 his depression grew deeper when he learned that his son-in-law Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters had been missing in action for weeks. With a heavy heart, he wrote to his wife and daughter that Waters was unaccounted for. To his diary, he confided that he believed his son-in-law to be dead.

He took a break from planning the following day. He and some of his staffers joined a wealthy local to duck hunt on his 10,000-acre farm. Patton shot poorly and instead found more interest in two Roman ruins his group encountered during their outing in an amphibious vehicle. As a boy, he had read of Julius Caesars conquests and those of other great soldiers like Napoleon and Hannibal. He believed himself to be the reincarnation of great warriors of the past who had fought in famous battles.

On the morning of March 4, he inspected troops of the U.S. Army Third Division, finding them to be undisciplined and unsanitary. During the afternoon he had borrowed the Thoroughbred from General Nogus for a ride through the countryside.