The following article on Patton in World War I is an excerpt from H.W Crocker III’s The Yanks Are Coming! A Military History of the United States in World War I. It is available for order now from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
George S. Patton is a legendary World War II general, but much of his character as a military man was formed in the Great War. His path to the numerous monumental events that he experienced there began after he finished at West Point. Patton benefited from having six years of formal military education. He graduated at twenty-four, accepting a commission in the cavalry and duty at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He liked the men, considered his commanding officer a true gentleman, but had doubts about some of the other officers, especially those who had come up from the ranks. In 1910, he was married to Beatrice Ayer, a family friend he had long courted. She, though Patton paid scant attention to this, came from a wealthy family. It wasn’t money that mattered to him, but the fact that she was poised, pretty, and polished (she had been educated in Europe, spoke French, as did he, and played the piano). He credited her strength of character with strengthening his own. She also helped his spelling, as he now took to writing articles on military subjects (as well as riding to hounds, playing polo, and other recreational endeavors appropriate for an officer and a gentleman). She bore him two daughters and a son.
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At the end of 1911, he was transferred to Fort Myer, Virginia, where many senior officers lived, making it a prime duty post for an ambitious cavalryman. But aside from his ardor for his duties and his active social life with the right sort of people, Patton was starting to make his mark as an athlete—indeed, in 1912 he represented the United States at the Olympics, competing in the modern pentathlon, which tested a competitor’s equestrian skills with a steeplechase, marksmanship with a pistol, fencing, swimming three hundred yards, and running cross country two and a half miles. The event reflected the actions that might be required of an officer delivering military dispatches. He came in fifth.
Back home, he wrote an article that led to the 1913 redesign of the U.S. Cavalry saber. In the fall of 1913, he was sent to the Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas, where he was to be both student and instructor, serving as “Master of the Sword.” At his own expense, he went to France to hone his swordsmanship before taking up his new post. When war erupted in France in 1914, Patton wanted to take up the sword in earnest, fighting in the French army. He wrote to General Leonard Wood asking for his advice and assistance. Wood replied, “We don’t want to waste youngsters of your sort in the service of foreign nations. . . . I know how you feel, but there is nothing to be done.”4 Patton, like a young Napoleon, had ambitiously hoped to be a brigadier general by twenty-seven. At twenty-nine, he was not yet a first lieutenant.
https://www.historyonthenet.com/patton-ww1