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George S. Patton Lesser Known Facts

Khalid Elhassan November 19, 2024 12 min

Patton - George S. Patton — George S. Patton. Europe Remembers

13. You Did Not Want to Mess With Patton

Patton was a force of nature. A hard-driving, bumptious, overbearing, often obnoxious, but usually effective force of nature. He was not above physically assaulting his soldiers, as evinced by the time he slapped around a pair of GIs down with malarial fever and PTSD. That almost got him cashiered out of the Army, but his undoubted effectiveness as a battlefield commander earned him a second chance. In short, Patton was not the kind of general that a lowly enlisted man wanted to stand up to. Yet that is precisely what GI cartoonist Bill Mauldin did, when Patton tried to pressure him into self-censorship.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.