Of the allied world War II generals, George Patton may be considered the most “German.” He had carefully studied the early Blitzkrieg campaigns against Poland and France and shared the conviction of the Wehrmacht commanders that that a war of movement — short, sharp, and furious — was the way to avoid a repetition of the endless slaughter of World War I. “Always take the offensive. Never dig in,” was Patton's motto. He expressed his aversion to fixed positions in graphic fashion: After having found some slit trenches around a command post in Tunisia meant to protect it from air attacks, he asked the commanding officer, Terry Allen, to show him his, whereupon he promptly urinated into it. “There. Now try to use it.”
Like Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Germany's most skillful World War II commander, Patton would also carefully monitor performance. This he did by sending out his staff officers to the front line units.
To Patton, war meant destroying the enemy's main force, not clinging to territory. His favored approach was the oblique one: Hold them by the nose and kick them in the rear, which in more polite textbook terms translates into pinning the enemy while the tanks attack his flanks. Patton saw tanks as upgraded cavalry, infinitely more powerful, whose deep penetrations could collapse enemy lines.
