What would Patton say about the war in Iraq?

Victor Davis Hanson

WHAT CAN WE IMAGINE Gen. George S. Patton might say about the present war? Based on what he himself said and wrote, his record in the field, and what scholars have written about him, I think we have some reasonable ideas. I will begin with Patton's strategic thinking, then follow with suppositions about tactical and operational doctrine.

Patton listened to the BBC almost nightly, spoke French fluently, and was an insatiable reader of history: German Field Marshal Erwin Pommel, French General (and then Emperor) Napoleon Bonaparte, and Roman Emperor Julius Caesar were among his favorite topics. He was a learned person despite purportedly being dyslexic. In any case, based on news reports, his extensive studies of European history, and meetings with those who had worked with the Soviets, he firmly believed that the Allies were making a horrible mistake by not driving on to Berlin to bring all of Germany behind Anglo-American lines. If we could paraphrase his thinking it might go something like this: We had fought World War II in part to ensure that Eastern Europe, i.e., Poland and Czechoslovakia, did not remain under the domination of Adolph Hitler's totalitarian regime; yet our policies at war's end were guaranteeing that those countries would fall under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's equally evil domination.

In a famous exchange, Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower asked of Patton's request to move eastward immediately, "What in the world for?" Patton, without hesitation, replied, "You shouldn't have to ask that. History will answer for you, Ike." Eisenhower's righthand man, Gen. Omar Bradley, protested and offered up the standard American fear of sustaining 100,000 casualties. Of course, the Soviets did take over 100,000 casualties storming Berlin, a fact later used to argue for Eisenhower's prescience. Again, however, the Soviets suffered such losses because the Germans were fighting ferociously in order that everybody behind them might surrender to the West. Had the Germans known that the Allies were going to take Berlin, the city might have fallen after brief resistance in the same manner as other German strongpoints in the West.

Patton had the further notion that, after defeating the Nazis, we should not destroy Germany's armored forces and dismantle its strategic forces, but instead use them as a basis to rearm for the purpose of stopping the Soviets, who enjoyed an enormous superiority in respective land forces on the continent. This was blasphemy to most experts in the U.S., made worse by Patron's often puerile and offensive slurs about Russian primitivism and barbarity. As a result of his uncouth pronouncements, Patton's otherwise astute and vocal anti-communist rhetoric found little support, and indeed gave him very little margin of tolerance when his proconsulship of Bavaria later ran into trouble. Yet, this very idea of German rehabilitation would--within months after his dismissal--turn out to be the basis of NATO.

Patton always realized that armed forces serve political ends and create an immediate reality on the battlefield that politicians argue over for years--that there are times when audacious commanders can create favorable diplomatic situations impossible to achieve by politicians even after years of negotiations. Well before Pres. Franklin Roosevelt or Eisenhower, he understood that the new Germany was an ally, and the old Soviets were now the new enemy of freedom.

Applying Patton's thinking to today's situation, we first can recognize the so-called "war on terror" as a misnomer. There never really has been a war against a method other than something like Pompey's crusade against the pirates or the British effort to stifle the slave trade. In fact, we no more are in a war against terror than Patton was fighting against Tiger and Panzer tanks. Patton, who understood the hold of a radically triumphalist Nazism on a previously demoralized German people, would have the intellectual honesty to realize that we are at war with Islamic fascists, mostly from the Middle East, who have played on the frustrations of mostly male, unemployed young people, whose autocratic governments cannot provide the conditions for decent employment and family life. A small group of Islamists appeals to the angst of the disaffected through a nostalgic and reactionary turn to a mythical Caliphate, in which religious purity trumps the material advantages of a decadent West and protects Islamic youth from the contamination of foreign gadgetry and pernicious ideas. In some ways, Hitler had created the same pathology in Germany in the 1930s.

Because of the Internet and globalization. Islamic youth have firsthand knowledge of the U.S.--its splendor, power, and luxury--that simultaneously attracts and repels them, creating appetites forbidden in traditional and tribal society. Thus, the fascist terrorists, to be successful, and cognizant of this paradoxical envy and desire, offer a mythical solution in lieu of real social, political, and economic reform that, in short order, would doom the power of the patriarch, mullah, and autocrat: Blame the imperialist Americans and the Zionist Israelis who cause this self-induced misery. Even those who do not join the extremists, like most Germans of the late 1930s, do not mind--albeit on the cheap--seeing their perceived enemies take a fall, as long as the consequences of terrorism mostly are positive in a psychological sense without bringing them material suffering in recompense.

Patton also would agree that the remedy for this disease includes aid and reconstruction--helping the defeated to rebuild under democratic auspices that would allow real reform. In fact, he was sacked as proconsul largely because he was said to be too interested in jump-starting German reconstruction at the price of accommodating Germans once affiliated with the Nazi party. Patton, however, would insist that it is only by military defeat and subsequent humiliation first that the supporters of terrorism against the West will understand the wages of their support for Islamic fascism. Once people in the Middle East see that the Islamic fascists are defeated--and that all who support and condone that ideology are synonymous with it and thus must pay for their complicity through some measure of sacrifice and suffering--radical bellicose Islamicism really will end. Patton was quite clear about defeating, humiliating, and then helping the Germans--the proper order of such a progression in attitude being absolutely critical.

Applying these lessons to the first Gulf War, Patton perhaps would have thought it mindless to mobilize an entire expeditionary army--a rare event for a democracy--and then confine it to the Kuwaiti theater of operations, given that the problem never merely was the occupation of Kuwait, but the tyrant in Baghdad who had a prior record of frequent aggression. From the moment he took command in Normandy, Berlin was on Patton's mind as the only ultimate goal.

As far as encouraging allies to go along, again, Patton always talked more in terms of a fait accompli: The general's job is to create favorable conditions on the ground that his politicians can deal with from a position of strength, rather than vice versa--an American army that achieves victory will have more allies than it knows what to do with. Go to Berlin if Berlin is the problem. Confront the Soviets if the Soviets are the problem. Hesitancy does not earn advantage. Similarly in Iraq today, if our goal is to give Pres. Bush leverage with the Europeans and the tyrannical Middle East, then we should continue to destroy the power of the insurgency in Iraq, proving to friends and enemies alike the consequences and advantages of American power.

In matters of tactics, Patton was famous for believing that American armies, being militias of the season, were not equipped immediately to go head-to-head in hard slogging with veteran professional militaries such as the German Wehrmacht of World Wars I and II. Speed, victory, and firepower were our forte--not slow wars of attrition. Patton had nothing to do with the three greatest American disasters in the European theater in World War II--Market Garden, the Hurtgen Forest, and the Ardennes--and expressed worries over our response in all three instances, inasmuch as Allied countermeasures offered few avenues for mobility and attack on the flank.

Patton grasped that air power had revolutionized armored warfare, a sort of mobile infantry at the beck and call of land forces. Thus, the old doctrine--that the infantry incrementally goes ahead to clear mines and pockets of resistance, and then the tanks follow, fanning out in a large triangle with the flanks protected was a recipe for disaster. It meant that the enemy might retreat on a broad front--as the deflation of the Bulge in January, 1945, attests--harvesting a continuing crop of frontline troops. His idea was to have rapid armored wings sweep out, bypass points of resistance, and cause psychological turmoil from the rear that could collapse enemy fronts. American Sherman tanks--poorly armed and protected--nevertheless were lighter, faster, used less fuel, and more easily were maintained than German armor. Speed, audacity, and numbers might allow them to achieve results impossible even for their individually superior German counterparts. The way war had evolved in 1944 made this possible: Sherman tanks had radios that were connected with airborne P-47 anti-tank dive-bombers--tactical air power now being worth an entire armored division in Patton's eyes.

When Patton went operational on Aug. 1, 1944, he traveled nearly 400 miles in little more than 30 days. Bradley and Eisenhower complained that he was bypassing resistance, was violating pre-Normandy planning, and was not part of the strategic effort to hit German industrial centers in the Ruhr. Patton answered back that his success was having a psychological effect in causing the collapse of entire armies and offering new potential alternatives--with only brief windows for critical exploitation--that might change accepted realities and vault the Allies across the Rhine before the shortened days, poor weather, stiffening German resistance, and extended Allied supply lines could come into play to stifle the American advance by autumn. His lesson? When there is an opportunity for exploitation--one-quarter of Fallujah taken or terrorist Muqtada al-Sadr reeling--hesitancy and conventional thinking can forfeit unforeseen advantages and offer a collapsing enemy a reprieve that will end up costing far more casualties later. Beware of a false sense of forbearance that can turn deadly.

Patton had two phrases that he used almost ad nauseum. The first, from French statesman Georges Danton, was "Audacity, always audacity, still more audacity." The second was "the unforgiving minute," from writer Rudyard Kipling, referring to certain times in war when the collective will of a people or an army can, without warning, collapse--critical moments that must be capitalized on. Unlike Eisenhower and Bradley, who thought the August, 1944, collapse of the German army was likely and thus the war would end before Christmas, Patton knew that if the Panzers were saved from near death, they could be ready to kill again and under far more favorable conditions. That is exactly what happened at the Falaise Gap. Later at the Seine River, near the Siegfried Line, and when attacking the Bulge, Patton saw that a sweeping hook, rather than a head-on assault, might bring on a total collapse, but only if risks were taken and old plans ignored in light of new realities. Again, the conservative, doctrinaire approach of cautious attack proved the far more costly tactic.

These lessons also apply in recent times. In the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein put almost 250,000 Iraqi troops in bunkers in the sand, and even after weeks of U.S. bombing they remained operational. In response, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf marched hundreds of miles around the flank, leaving many of the entrenched Iraqi positions behind and headed toward Basra, his long flanks covered by air support. Although we copied Patton's tactics, we forgot their purpose--stopping at the so-called Highway of Death because of the television images of "thousands" of enemy dead. Pentagon staffers worried at the time that 20,000 enemy soldiers had been killed, thus causing a global uproar. We know now that the real number was in the hundreds, and that when we stopped before Basra, fleeing Iraqis did not, and they killed thousands of virtually defenseless Shiites and Kurds over the next few weeks. During the next 12 years, Anglo-American pilots flew thousands of missions in Iraq's no-fly zones, all as a precursor to the second Iraqi war. In short, we forgot Patton's most important lesson: The purpose of outflanking the enemy is to demoralize and annihilate him, thus removing the reasons to go to war in the first place.

In the 2003 Iraqi War, on the other hand, Americans drove 400 miles from the Kuwaiti front up to Kurdistan, often bypassing resistance on the way to Baghdad. Never has an armored column traveled so quickly with so few casualties. It was comparable to Patton's march from Normandy to the Siegfried Line. Moreover, the same institutionalized Army critics of such Patton-like tactics emerged, decrying vulnerable flanks, oblivious to the protection offered by 1,000 planes in the sky. Indeed, Patton often was evoked as the U.S. moved quickly, creating conditions of shock and awe, demoralizing the enemy who crumbled and fled. Again, though, these are fluid, not permanent, situations. If an enemy is demoralized but not destroyed, he may well come back encouraged and with less respect, interpreting magnanimity as weakness or incompetence. Fallujah and Najaf are proof enough of the tragedy that can follow when a defeated enemy is not crushed completely.

America's restless soldier

Finally, Patton had very strong views about the character of the U.S. soldier. On the one hand, he appreciated that Americans grew up driving cars, that they were mechanical and practical, highly individualistic, restless, and liked to move: in other words, ideally suited for mechanized warfare. Yet, he conceded that Americans also had a limited attention span, easily became impatient, were averse to standing in place, and required constant encouragement about the larger purposes that had brought them so far from home.

Patton's own general sense was that his Third Army took greater casualties when immobile, not simply because of stiffening enemy resistance, but because his soldiers were singularly ill-equipped for a war requiring rote, method, and patience. In the present context, Patton would advise us, ill view of our national character, to be on the advance constantly, seeking to surprise and storm enemies rather than merely being reactive. If we are in a real war, Americans must move quickly on Fallujah and Najaf rather than "contain" such "no-go" zones. Syria and Iran should be warned that their continued sanctuary and aid to terrorists are synonymous with a state of war with the U.S. Patton would advise us that static occupation, negotiations with undefeated insurgents, and mild rebukes to neighboring terrorist sponsors not only are futile, but against the American character of decisive advance and unconditional surrender once war is upon us.

Patton sometimes was asked where he was going. Berlin always was his answer, along with quips about Hitler soon to be in chains. This was no mere braggadocio, but revealed strategic insight that there could be nothing less than unconditional surrender, occupation of the enemy heartland, and the humiliation accruing from taking the German Fuhrer; only in that way might Nazism be discredited. We bristle at such Manichaeism in the present postmodern war, forgetting that we shall not be through with Islamic fascism until the governments of Iran and Syria cease their support, Al Qaedists are killed or in cuffs, and the greater Middle East autocracies are terrified of offering succor to terrorist offshoots. Anything less as our goal and we will be in a perpetual quagmire of reactive warfare.

Like the Athenian historian Thucydides, Patton appreciated that the emotions that sophisticated people sometimes think are so unimportant--fear, pride, honor--are, in fact, what drive us humans, and therefore must be addressed in any total war. We chuckle at his attention to dress, protocol, medals, speeches, and theatrics, but this obsession was not vanity as much as recognition that soldiers are proud and sensitive beings, and must be rewarded and punished in visible ways; war being the essence of human emotion. By the same token, military operations are more than just ground taken and held. They are powerfully symbolic, conveying to third parties either hope or dejection when they see armies routed from the battlefield.

Today, millions in the Islamic world are watching the West struggle against Islamic fascism. Perhaps deep down inside they prefer, logically and with some idealism, to live under Western-style freedom and democratic auspices. Yet, nationalism, pride, religion, and ethnic solidarity war with reason, combining to produce far greater resentment against a powerful America, even when it brings the very freedom that the Arabs for decades have said they wished. A modern Patton would not be bothered by such inconsistency. Rather, he would make sure that he not only had defeated the terrorists and their supporters, but had done so in such damaging fashion that none in the Middle East might find such a repugnant cause at all romantic, bringing as it did utter rain as the wage of the wrath of the U.S.

Patton, who was both learned and yet not smug about the power of the primordial emotions, understood perfectly the irrational nature of warfare and the effect that utter defeat or glorious victory has upon an otherwise rational people. No wonder he hated war defined as a purely bureaucratic enterprise or a purely material and industrial challenge, inasmuch as neither can change the hearts of men that need to be changed. Instead, they usually increase the body count and rarely lead to lasting peace. We should remember wild-eyed George Patton in our Fallujahs to come.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a fellow in California studies at the Claremont Institute. He has authored, co-authored, or edited 14 books. This article is adapted from a lecture given at Hillsdale (Mich.) College.

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