Patton at Knutsford

On 25 April 1944 General George Patton, commander of the American Third Army, attended the opening of a Welcome Club for American soldiers in Knutsford, a small town in Cheshire. Asked to say a few words, he remarked casually that since it was the destiny of the British and Americans – and, according to some accounts, “of course the Russians” too – to rule the world, the better they got to know each other, the better they would do the job. The next day his words appeared in the press, and in a version without the Russians. A storm broke in Washington, and for several days Dwight Eisenhower seriously considered sending Patton home five weeks before the invasion of France.

As far as the content of a few sentences spoken in a chilly hall to a few dozen people goes, the affair was trivial. It became serious for three reasons: since August 1943 Patton had been a general “on probation”, the United States Senate was due to confirm his promotion, and the Allied command needed him – or at least his name – for a great deception operation against the Germans.

A general sidelined

In the autumn of 1943 Patton lost his chance to command in the first wave of the invasion. After the slapping incidents in Sicily in August that year, and especially after they were revealed on American radio in November, his career hung by a thread. Command of the First Army, which was to land in Normandy, went to his former subordinate, General Omar Bradley. Eisenhower and the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, valued Patton as a fighting commander but considered Bradley less impulsive and less prone to mistakes.

Instead Patton was given the Third Army, which under the plans of autumn 1943 was to enter the fighting only once the beachhead had been enlarged. He formally took command on 26 January 1944, ten days after Eisenhower arrived in London as Supreme Commander. The army’s headquarters was at Peover Hall, an Elizabethan manor house a few kilometres from Knutsford requisitioned for military use. The task was laborious: the Third Army consisted mostly of divisions without combat experience that were only just arriving from America, and throughout the first half of 1944 Patton was busy training them.

Commander of an army that did not exist

The German command rated Patton more highly than any other Allied general and assumed that he would lead the main blow from the British Isles. The Allies decided to exploit this. Under Operation Fortitude, part of a wider plan to conceal the invasion, Patton was shown as commander of the First United States Army Group (FUSAG). This army group existed very largely only on paper, in bogus radio traffic, in dummy equipment on the coast of Kent and in the reports of double agents run by British intelligence. It was meant to convince the Germans that the main landing would come across the Strait of Dover, in the Pas-de-Calais, and that the landing in Normandy would be only a diversion.

In this game Patton was the bait, but bait that could not be displayed too openly. He was ordered not to appear in public and not to attract the attention of the press. His presence in England was no longer a secret, but the place and nature of his work were. Any high-profile appearance by the general threatened not only a political scandal but also disruption of the carefully constructed picture that the Germans were to receive through intelligence channels.

A few sentences at a welcome club

The club in Knutsford had been set up by local residents so that American soldiers stationed in the area would have somewhere to spend their free time and get to know the British. According to accounts cited by his biographers, some sixty people came to the opening on 25 April. Patton, a neighbour from nearby Peover Hall, was the guest of honour. According to his later explanations, he had agreed to come on condition that there would be no journalists, and the organisers had assured him of this. The speeches made that day were about Allied unity and friendship between nations.

Called upon to speak, Patton talked for a few minutes without preparation. In the version most often quoted, he said: “Since it is the evident destiny of the British and Americans, and, of course, the Russians, to rule the world, the better we know each other, the better job we will do.”

There was, however, at least one reporter in the room. The story went out through British news agencies and appeared in the papers the next morning, and from there in the United States. Many versions lacked the reference to the Russians. Patton and his entourage later maintained that he had mentioned the USSR, and witnesses cited by his biographers are said to have confirmed this. Other writers quote his words without the Russians, and the very first press reports already differed on this point. It is impossible today to establish with complete certainty exactly what was said in the room. The sources agree on one thing: what reached the public was above all the version in which only the British and Americans were to rule the world.

Storm in the press and in Congress

The reactions came from two sides. Some British newspapers were indignant that an American general had left out the Soviet Union, which for three years had borne the heaviest burden of the land war against Germany. Others pointed to the slight on the coalition’s smaller states – Poland, the Netherlands, Norway or China – which in the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942 had pledged to fight together and not to make a separate peace. A few months after the Tehran Conference, at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had agreed the date of the invasion, talk of “ruling the world” sounded like a declaration of Anglo-Saxon hegemony – and, in the version without the Russians, like a slap in the face for Moscow.

In the United States Patton was criticised by liberal and conservative Congressmen alike. Their common ground was the conviction that generals should keep out of politics. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, declared that Patton’s words were his private opinion and not the policy of the United States. The most painful consequence, however, was a practical one. Since the autumn of 1943 a list of nominations for permanent military ranks had been waiting in the Senate, including Bradley and Mark Clark among others, and Patton was to be promoted from the permanent rank of colonel to permanent major general. After the Sicily affair a Senate subcommittee had put the decision off. According to American historians, Marshall now cabled Eisenhower that the Knutsford speech had most likely killed any chance of the promotion being confirmed.

Eisenhower hesitates

Eisenhower was furious. He had repeatedly warned Patton to weigh his words. On 29 April he wrote to Marshall that Patton was apparently unable to exercise “reasonable judgement” in matters where a senior commander must take into account the effect of his actions on public opinion. He added that he was considering “the most drastic action” – that is, relieving the general – but wanted to know the Chief of Staff’s opinion.

Marshall replied coolly and to the point. He left the decision to Eisenhower but reminded him that Patton was the only available army commander with experience of fighting Rommel, and that the matter should be considered solely in terms of its value to the operation. On 30 April Eisenhower wrote back that he would relieve Patton unless new, unforeseen circumstances came to light.

At 11 a.m. on 1 May Patton reported to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Bushy Park near London. By the accounts of both men the conversation was emotional; Patton offered to resign so as to spare his superior any trouble. Eisenhower did not decide then. Two days later, on 3 May, he concluded that Patton was “too valuable to lose” and informed Marshall that he was keeping him. He sent Patton a written warning: if he once more embarrassed the War Department by word or deed, he would be relieved at once. Patton replied, expressing his “undying loyalty and gratitude”.

Chronologies often sum up this episode as a reprimand from Eisenhower to Patton. That is a simplification: Patton was one step away from being relieved of his command, and the written warning ended a week of uncertainty rather than being an ordinary rebuke.

Place in the history of the war

The Knutsford affair did not change the course of the war, but it came close to changing the command line-up for the most important campaign in the west. Had Eisenhower sent Patton home, the Allies would have lost not only one of their ablest armoured commanders but also the figure around whom a fictitious army group had been built. The German command might have taken his disappearance as a sign that FUSAG was not the main blow.

After 3 May Patton kept his command and kept quiet. Operation Overlord began on 6 June 1944 without him, in accordance with the plan drawn up by SHAEF. For several weeks after the landing Patton remained in England, and the Germans, convinced by Operation Fortitude, kept their Fifteenth Army in the Pas-de-Calais, waiting for his blow. At the beginning of July he flew to France, and on 1 August 1944 the Third Army formally entered the fighting and, through the breach at Avranches opened by Bradley’s First Army, drove into Brittany and towards the Seine. Impressed by these successes, the Senate confirmed in August 1944 his promotion to permanent major general, which a few months earlier had seemed out of the question.

The episode also showed how sensitive a matter the unity of the coalition was in 1944. A remark that Patton regarded as social pleasantry touched at once on relations with the USSR, the ambitions of the smaller allies and the American debate over whether soldiers had any right to make political pronouncements. Patton drew no lasting lesson from it. In the autumn of 1945, by then military governor of Bavaria, he lost command of the Third Army after a public remark belittling denazification; his increasingly open hostility towards the Soviet Union was no secret either. He died in Heidelberg on 21 December 1945 after a car accident.