As a young officer, I was fascinated by Gen. George S. Patton, the WWII commander whose audacity helped break the siege of Bastogne and carry the Battle of the Bulge.
There was something immediate and clear about the way he thought through and communicated his leadership philosophy. He seemed to innately grasp military operations and excelled in getting others to do the same. His crystalline wisdom was almost always carried home on the wings of artful profanity, which Patton accepted as the language of combat.
Patton had what philosopher Carl von Clausewitz would call coup d’oeil. French for “stroke of the eye,” this refers to the ability of a commander to rapidly discern the essential truth of a situation and instantly intuit the best course of action. Patton’s trademark decisiveness was a function of this intuition, refined by a lifetime of studying the history of war. He was, without doubt, an operational genius.
In the years since, my ardour for Patton’s ideas has cooled somewhat. He was a creature of a total war context, so his ideas and principles are understandably concerned with total destruction of the enemy. He seldom dealt with the nuance of limited aims on a battlefield, so many of his core notions lack applicability in a counterinsurgency of the sort waged by the US in Afghanistan, for example.
Patton was also a civil-military disaster, constantly and openly quarrelling with his political masters. He believed they were inept and gutless, and often notoriously undermined them in front of his officers. This wouldn’t be accepted these days; we’ve developed a norm which accepts an unequal dialogue where discrete disagreement is okay, but public obedience to civilian control is expected. Recall what happened to Gen. Stan McChrystal when he stepped afoul of this.
Still, some of Patton’s teachings continue to echo across the ages. One vignette in particular still strikes a chord with me many decades after I first encountered it. Below I’ve included snips from Porter B. Williamson’s book on Patton, which I recommend.
As the story goes, Patton, a 3-star at the time, came upon a group of his men attempting to winch their vehicles back to the firm bank of a stream. He immediately started castigating them for failing to follow his instructions and getting their vehicles stuck as a result.
Unamused, the captain commanding the team fired back. “That’s exactly the reason I have five vehicles in mud up to the axle, General. Anyone trying to cross that stream bed at any speed is a damn fool!” (my emphasis).
Whoa.
Anyone whose ever been an O-3 in any of the services will understand the career-menacing gravity of this exchange. It takes guts to challenge a 3-star, especially one as iron-willed as Patton. To call him a fool is another level of courage, making the distinction with foolhardiness difficult. For the avoidance of doubt, Patton had the power to destroy this captain’s career and put a howitzer-shell-sized dent in his life. But remarkably, that’s not at all what happened.
A bee now properly in his bonnet, Patton walked down to the stream bed, defiantly stamping his foot into a seemingly solid surface while glaring at the captain.
“I’ll show you how to get through this stuff! It takes speed!"“ Hustling back up to his Jeep, riding crop in hand, Patton gestured to his driver to get out of the way and hopped behind the wheel. He was determined at this point to show his men how it was done.
The captain, concerned for Patton’s safety, continued to protest.
Unfazed, Patton waved him out of the way, growling through clenched teeth. He backed the Jeep up about 50 feet, and accelerated toward the riverbed. As he reached the wet sand, things looked promising. Patton initially let out a raucous chuckle. He knew he was right. This would show ‘em!
Except he wasn’t. In an instant, everything changed. His Jeep reached a breakline beyond which the sand softened into mud. It looks the same on the surface, but an inch down it became the most unforgiving muck-ridden pool of quicksand any of these soldiers had ever seen. As Patton’s Jeep wheels sank deeper into the mud, his progress ground to a rapid halt, only the raised windscreen preventing him being thrown from the vehicle. His Jeep was deeper in the mire than any of the half dozen tanks and trucks already in the stream bed, and a nice new scratch on his helmet marked the spot where he’d have surely caved his own head in as he burrowed his staff car into the ground.
He had made a fool of himself. The captain told him to stay put while he marshalled a few men to go in and carry him out.
Patton’s response revealed his character.
Cutting against the image of George Patton we’ve come to accept — that of an ego-driven and thin-skinned prima donna who ruled his men with merciless authority — we glimpse here a very different leader. He demonstrates a rare and treasured leadership quality: humility.
The evidence on Patton, to include anecdotes like this one, is that he was hard-nosed, but not hard-headed. He operated on terms of intellectual equality. He did not presume himself more intelligent simply because he had more rank or experience. He believed he was right most of the time, but he was open to being wrong. And he was willing to admit when he’d made a mistake.
More than anything, he was a soldier. By showing his soldiers he was as capable of overconfidence and pratfalls as they were, he humanized himself and engendered their loyalty. He also sent the important signal that policies and rules could be wrong, and implicit in the duty of command was to question them where necessary.
Moreover, he didn’t surround himself with people he liked, or who liked him, or with whom he tended to agree. He chose his staff and key commanders based on one thing: performance.
Patton considered it his sacred duty that not one soldier in his command die needlessly. This was why he was a stickler for training and discipline. But it was also why he valued competence above all else in his subordinate leaders. This meant he routinely had similarly strong-willed generals and colonels on his direct staff, and in the fullness of time became skilled at harnessing and calibrating disagreement on key issues.
We’re living through a remarkable time. Authoritarian leadership has become fashionable. Being right is the big prize. Executives seldom invite challenge and almost never publicly admit to getting something wrong. Intellectual vanity seems to be everywhere in our politics, our business, our popular culture.
Patton’s ageless example provides a nice contrast, and gives us something to think about. Had he been a different sort of leader, how many of his soldiers would have died needlessly? How many of his campaigns would have been slowed, disrupted, or neutralized by false moves if he expected blind loyalty rather than independent judgment?
When everyone was out of the mud, Patton went over to the captain, threw his arm around the lad, and exclaimed “you are one fine son of a bitch.” A crowd of gathered soldiers erupted in laughter. Patton had entertained them. He had made their day. This is a level of positivity only reachable by leaders willing to test one another, be tested, and sometimes even be embarrassed.
Tony Carr is a retired American military commander and business leader with three decades experience in operational roles. He holds a graduate degree in security strategy from the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, where he focused much of his research on the organizational value of disagreement.