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Now Patton was playing his favorite role. He was the swift, slashing halfback of Coach Eisenhower's team. His quarterback, General Omar N. Bradley, had set up a climax play and had called Patton's signal. Halfback Patton had had superb blocking from Lieut. General Courtney Hicks Hodges' First Army. Now the star open-field runner was ripping into the secondary defense.
Basically it was the same play on which Patton had sped to a touchdown in the Battle of France, after the First Army had opened up a hole for him in the Saint-Lô breakthrough. There, as at the Rhine, it had been Quarterback Bradley's precise timing and teamwork that had shaken Patton loose to do his spectacular stuff. Now, as he had after Saint-Lô, it was Halfback Patton who captured the headlines. He was definitely in nomination for Public Hero No. 1 of the war in Europe.
Speed & Daring. George Smith Patton Jr., third in three generations to bear the name,* is fast becoming a legend. The U.S. public, always more interested in the ballcarrier than in the blockers who open a hole for him, liked Patton's flourishes, his flamboyance, his victories.
The Patton legend extends into other armies. There are "Patton men" in the U.S. First, Seventh, Ninth and Fifteenth Armies, who believe Patton's aggressive spirit and swift movement should set the tone and pace for all U.S. arms. Some try to imitate him. Keener appraisers do not undervalue Patton's fiery leadership, his dash and imagination as an army commander. But they believe that George Patton is in exactly the right job now, running his army at the front rather than a team of armies from group headquarters.
The reserve British regard Patton's elan and peacock-strutting brilliance as "great style," even compare him with his colorful antithesis—cautious Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. The French, Dutch, Belgians regard Patton with vast confidence. Even the Germans help to glorify him. Some enemy officers & men consider it more honorable to have had to surrender to "Bloody" Patton's Third Army.
Long forgotten by Europeans and by most U.S. soldiers in Europe is that emotional storm of 19 months ago in which Patton literally gave the back of his hand to a soldier sitting on a hospital cot. The U.S. has not forgotten the episode—but it has begun to misremember it, to transmute it into the Patton legend. The U.S. newspaper with the largest circulation—the tabloid New York Daily News—a few weeks ago editorially referred to him as "Patton, who . . . slapped a soldier . . . for going in the wrong direction from the front."
In slim, big-chested Patton, hero-worshiping Americans had a candidate to fit the mass idea of what a Hero General should be—the colorful swashbuckler, the wild-riding charger, the hell-for-leather Man of Action, above all the Winner.
Out of the Past. Cavalryman Patton gallops along in a tradition of military men Americans have always cheered—Phil Sheridan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Elwell Brown Stuart, the men who used their cavalry as Patton uses his armor, like a saber. Patton is a modern version of Jeb Stuart's scout and raider: Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby.