To: bentway who wrote (344471 ) 7/31/2017 1:15:21 PM From: Cautious_Optimist Read Replies (1) | Respond to Patton??politico.com He valued loyalty above all—“A loyal staff is more important than a brilliant one,” he wrote—and his inner advisers rarely contradicted him, which was an obvious disservice. Any sign of weakness sent Patton into a rage. Many of his associates, including Eisenhower, felt that “Old Blood and Guts” showed increasing signs of mental imbalance. Patton had zero sympathy for the Holocaust victims living in wretched, overcrowded collection camps under his command. He was unable to imagine that people living in such misery were not there because of their own flaws. The displaced Jews were “locusts,” “lower than animals,” “lost to all decency.” They were “a subhuman species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our times,” Patton wrote in his diary. A United Nations aid worker tried to explain that they were traumatized, but “personally I doubt it. I have never looked at a group of people who seem to be more lacking in intelligence and spirit.” (Patton was no friend to Arabs, either; in a 1943 letter, he called them “the mixture of all the bad races on earth.”) Patton’s callousness, anti-Semitism and indifference to the job of re-education were bad enough, but what really worried Eisenhower and Truman was Patton’s desire to start another war. The Soviet Union had been a close U.S. ally against the Nazis, but Patton was an early, fervent anti-Communist who loathed “Genghis Khan’s degenerate descendants” and felt Roosevelt had surrendered too much European turf to the Russians. He was obsessed with pushing them back out of Germany.
