Military Matters

I was deep into a sharp but fair review of Stanley P. Hirshon's biography Patton: A Soldier's Life before I noted that it was written by Victor Davis Hanson. Considering that Hanson has praised Patton in extravagant terms in his own work, I thought his criticisms were remarkably nuanced. He praises Hirshon's mastery of the Patton archives, and says that the book will be a "valuable storehouse" for future students of Patton. But that's about all the good things he can say. Essentially he charges Hirshon for neglecting the fact that Patton was a soldier.

Yet the deepest problem with A Soldier's Life is that it really is not a soldier's life. One could make the argument that on key occasions—the approach to Brest, the closing of the Falaise Gap, the crossing of the Seine River, the August race to the Siegfried Line, the initial desire to go much deeper to the rear of the Bulge, and the decision to stop before Prague—thousands of lives might have been saved had superiors ceded to Patton's judgment. Such controversial and monumental decisions affected an entire theater; yet they warrant only a few pages in Hirshson's account and are overshadowed by stories of Patton's purported liaisons, insensitive language, and blinkered class biases. In lieu of in-depth military analysis, we get a few extended quotations from Chester Wilmot, B.H. Liddell Hart, and S.L.A. Marshall—none of whom is known for consistency, fairness, or sympathy to Patton.

This could be taken out of an academic paper of Hanson's I remember, in which he charges military historians of recent times of neglecting the grind and plod of battle as the primary means to understand the soldiers or commanders whom they purport to chronicle. After all, the only reason Hirshon decided to study Patton was because he was a famous general. (I should add, by the way, that Hanson doesn't deny Patton's liasons, language, or class biases. As for Patton's racism and classism, he seems to be pretty well described by Alistair Cooke's description of H.L. Mencken: "He disliked all sorts of groups on principle, but was prepared to put aside all prejudices when meeting with an individual." Something like that.)

I thought of Patton when reading a little comment on Strategypage.com about the Pakistani offensive into the border regions. By assaulting al Quaeda, the Pakistani's have forced them to use their radios and satellite phones; combat and movement forces them to use insecure means of communication. This means they can be tracked, that signals intelligence can be picked up from their conversations and reports, and that cell phone calls to terrorist cells in Pakistani can be walked back to those terrorist cells. Things happen when you press hard in an offensive, and Patton of course knew this well. It was the "Soldier's General" who believed in slow, cautious, frontal assaults...which, oddly enough, means that he lost more men.