Gen. Patton, a nut and genius, is now a sad figure in wax

CHIRIACO SUMMIT, Calif. - We are down here in the Mojave, both the high desert and the low desert, at a place along Interstate 10, an hour out of Palm Springs, called Chiriaco Summit.

When U.S. troops trained here for the African desert campaigns of World War II, some of them died. Temperatures ranged from below freezing to 120 degrees in the shade. The troops gobbled salt pills like peanuts.

Somebody figured out that by pouring diesel fuel around the tents and mess halls you could discourage tarantulas, scorpions and rattlesnakes from visits.

In 1943, this vast, miserable series of 11 tent cities consisted of 18,000 square miles in three states: Nevada, Arizona and California. But it was run from Chiriaco Summit.

Tenderfoot GIs from Brooklyn, Chicago and, yes, Seattle were required to run a mile in 10 minutes with full pack. Water was rationed. Men died of heat. They cursed the devil who designed this hell.

So here we are, in the epicenter of nowhere, in front of the General Patton Memorial Museum. This was George Patton's playground. And he was World War II's most famous American battle tactician.

Some thought him eccentric, but he was a bit of a nut, really. He believed in reincarnation. He was a war lover. He was so rich he gave his Army pay to charity. He thought of himself as "the gentleman warrior."

He wrote poetry and spoke fluent French. He could converse like a diplomat, but in front of troops his obscenities would trouble a mule skinner.

He declared that troops who didn't chase women could not fight well.

He actually believed that crap. He also believed that men suffering from shell shock or battle neurosis, long recognized by medics as legitimate breakdowns, were "cowards" and malingerers and "yellow-bellies."

Many people remember the famous "slapping incident" that dominated headlines in World War II. Actually, he slapped two soldiers in a hospital, both suffering from nervous breakdowns.

An officer striking an enlisted man is subject to court-martial. Only the fact that he was a brilliant tactician, a bent-for-hell leader who won many battles, kept him from being broken in rank and sent home in disgrace.

"Georgie." "Old Blood and Guts."

The Army cartoonist Bill Mauldin portrayed him as a gross, comic figure called "Pistol-packin' Bluggett." Patton wanted to put Mauldin in front of a firing squad.

But Patton won battles. Lots of battles, in Africa, Sicily, France and Germany.

When he crossed the Rhine on a footbridge into Germany, he paused long enough to urinate in the river.

Had Gens. Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley let Patton alone, he would have been in Berlin long before the Russians or the British commander, Bernard Montgomery. In fact, military historian Martin Blumenson argues that the Sicily slapping incident was of enormous importance.

Patton was a candidate to be Eisenhower's chief military adviser. But the public uproar over the soldiers' slappings made Patton's elevation impossible.

The stolid, conservative, by-the-book Bradley got the job instead, and Blumenson concludes: "Eisenhower would have then relied on Patton for counsel. The difference between Patton's and Bradley's methods would certainly have resulted in a final victory more rapidly gained."

Patton's troops, most of them, loved him. He saw that they got the best of everything - food, clothing, supplies, weapons - and they took an elitist view of themselves. Later they were proud to proclaim, "I rolled with Patton."

And when it was all over, the German field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt quietly said, "Patton was your best."

The gentleman warrior was determined not to run out of wars. He urged an attack on the Soviet Union, whom he called "the Mongols," using Germans, whom he admired, as allies.

His news conferences in his later years were disasters. His public utterances and his private letters and his diary were dark and foreboding. He attacked communists and Jews.

How sad, the gentleman warrior, I thought, standing before his life-size wax image in the Patton museum. So many of our military heroes end up this way.

Emmett Watson's column appears Tuesdays in the Local section of The Times.