In what is reported to be an historically accurate version of Patton’s typical speech to his troops (rather than the watered down version in the movie), Patton says:
“An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking!”
So, who were these (by Patton) roundly vilified fellows writing for the SEP? And what was it, exactly, that they wrote?
No – therre was a series of articles about some Army group and a charismatic leader where they talked about the individuality of each member of his team. I’ve come across references to this, but never read the articles, and now I can’t remember the guy’s name. I tried a Search, but I keep getting copies of the Patton speech (my God, there’s a lot of copies of the speech out there.)
No – therre was a series of articles about some Army group and a charismatic leader where they talked about the individuality of each member of his team. I’ve come across references to this, but never read the articles, and now I can’t remember the guy’s name. I tried a Search, but I keep getting copies of the Patton speech (my God, there’s a lot of copies of the speech out there.)
Ah, that would make sense. (And IIRC Patton covered a lot of actual battles and in fact died under Japanese fire in 1945, so presumably he did know something about “real fighting”.) Good luck finding the cite.