Tanks for the memories.

AuthorUmansky, Eric
PositionPolitical Booknotes

FIELD GENERALS, THE COMMANders who actually lead battles, don't get much glory nowadays. Take the war in Afghanistan. Do you know the name of the officer who was directly in charge of the ground operations there, including the battle in March entailing the heaviest fighting U.S. soldiers have seen in a decade? He's Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck.

Not that you should know his name. It's the age we live in, in which technology (video linkups, live images of drone footage, etc.) allows higher-ups to micromanage wars from far away. Hagenbeck's boss, Gen. Tommy Franks, has essentially telecommuted every morning to Afghanistan from a base on the other side of the globe in Tampa, Fla. (Let's see somebody make an Academy Award-winning movie out of that one.) Advocates of this kind of long-distance warfare might want to pick up the new biography of Gen. George Patton, by historian Stanley P. Hirshson, General Patton: A Soldier's Life.

Patton lived by the advice of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, who observed in his autobiography, "Some men think that modern armies may be so regulated that a general can sit in an office and play on his several columns as on the keys of a piano. This is a fearful mistake" And one that Patton rarely made. "He was usually found up at the front," wrote The New York Times during World War II, "fanning himself with his helmet shell and swapping yarns with GIs. At the end of one hot, dusty day in France his face was covered with black French dust and his eyelids looked like the pollen-covered legs of a honey bee."

That kind of hands-on leadership had two effects: It helped Patton become a remarkably effective general, and it made him a celebrity.

In the preface of his book, Hirshson, who's also written biographies of Mormon pioneer Brigham Young and Gen. Sherman, "takes issue" with previous works on Patton, which, he says, are filled with "incomplete research" that has led to "dubious interpretations." That seems pretty self-important and unsportsmanlike. Except that Hirshson is right. His book is stuffed with uncovered letters, transcripts, and recollections. They combine to give readers a remarkable insider's view of the action.

Patton was born in 1885, into what was essentially Californian aristocracy (yes, there was such a thing). He wasn't a great student, but he was a hard worker. That, plus his family connections, got him into West Point. After graduating, he finished fifth in the 1912 Olympic pentathlon...

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