I read this article so differently now than I would have back before it was written.
The Problem With Trump’s Admiration of General Patton
“Old Blood and Guts” was undeniably a winner. The real trouble came after he won.
By ARTHUR ALLEN December 26, 2016
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/trump-general-patton-admiration-214545/
"…The orders from above—Eisenhower wanted him to confiscate the houses of wealthy Germans so Jewish survivors could live in them—embittered Patton. His beloved Third Army was decaying as troops decamped for home, discipline vanished, and meanwhile, “the displaced sons-of-bitches in the various camps are blooming like green trees,” he wrote a friend.
He saw journalists’ criticism of his handling of the Jews and the return of Nazis to high official positions as a result of Jewish and Communist plots. The New York Times and other publications were “trying to do two things,” he wrote, “First, implement Communism, and second, see that all business men of German ancestry and non-Jewish antecedents are thrown out of their jobs.”
As reports on the conditions in Bavaria began to alarm Truman, Eisenhower came down from Frankfurt on September 17 to join Patton on a tour of the camps where Jewish refugees were housed. He was horrified to find that some of the guards were former SS men. During the tour, Patton remarked that the camps had been clean and decent before the arrival of the Jewish “DPs” (displaced persons), who were “pissing and crapping all over the place.” Eisenhower told Patton to shut up, but he continued his diatribe, telling Eisenhower he planned to make a nearby German village “a concentration camp for some of these goddam Jews.”
While Eisenhower ordered him to stop “mollycoddling Nazis,” Patton lashed out at journalists and others he viewed as enemies. “The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting and with good success to implement a further dismemberment of Germany,” he said.
Patton’s callousness, anti-Semitism and indifference to the job of re-education were bad enough, but what really worried Eisenhower and Truman was Patton’s desire to start another war. The Soviet Union had been a close U.S. ally against the Nazis, but Patton was an early, fervent anti-Communist who loathed “Genghis Khan’s degenerate descendants” and felt Roosevelt had surrendered too much European turf to the Russians. He was obsessed with pushing them back out of Germany.
After bugging his office and phone, Eisenhower’s aides heard him discussing ways to gin up a war to drive out the Russians “with the help of the German troops we have.” The Germans, Patton said, were “the only decent people left in Europe.”
On September 25, Eisenhower removed him from his command. During their last showdown, Patton admitted faults but said his greatest virtue was his honesty and lack of ulterior motive. Ike responded that Patton’s greatest virtue and his greatest fault was his audacity.
His accidental death three months later may have been a blessing to Patton’s historical image, since it kept him from becoming just another one of America’s fanatical McCarthyites, the conspiratorial anti-Communists who tangled the country up in witch hunts for a decade after the war.
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For some, Patton has come to embody a certain kind of American hero—the maverick warrior who rejects political correctness and ultimately trusts only himself…"