He has become so obsessed that he is now incapable of existing in a world without war. Even the total nudity of dancers at the famous Folies Bergère dance revue, seen on a mid-February leave in Paris, could not distract Patton from thoughts of the fighting. Nor did being recognized everywhere he went in the city, which is normally a salve for his ego.

After a case of food poisoning made him violently ill—and led to a growing belief that his life was being threatened by unknown forces—Patton hurried back to his headquarters near the front, unable to stay away from the war even one day longer.

He knows that his last battle is soon to come—at least in this lifetime. Thus Patton seeks to prolong his role in the fighting. “I should like to be considered for any type of combat command, from a division up against the Japanese. I am sure that my method of fighting might be successful. I am also of such an age that this is my last war, and I would therefore like to see it through to the end,” Patton writes in a letter to the chief of the army, Gen. George Marshall, on March 13.

The mere thought that the fighting will soon end fills Patton with dread. “Peace is going to be hell on me,” he writes to his wife, Beatrice. “I will probably be a great nuisance.”

Patton wants to finish out the war on his own terms. That means go on the attack. “A great deal was owed to me,” he wrote of one conversation with Omar Bradley, after it was suggested that the Third Army once again go on the defensive. “Unless I could continue attacking I would have to be relieved.”

*   *   *

Dwight Eisenhower is quite confident that George Patton will never ask to be relieved. Yet he immediately follows up his February 10 order with a second command, allowing Patton to place his army on “aggressive defense.” Ike knows that Patton will interpret this order as permission to launch a series of low-profile attacks.

Such dithering is an example of Eisenhower’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness: compromise. He wants to make everyone happy, and believes that “public opinion wins wars.” Very often it seems Eisenhower would rather make the popular decision than the right one. This is the manner in which he has behaved throughout his entire army career, and it has served him well. At the start of the war he was a colonel, leading training exercises at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Now his penchant for compromise and diplomacy has allowed him to rise to prominence and power despite the glaring fact that he has never fought in battle, or even commanded troops in combat.

Eisenhower personally favors a “broad front” assault into Germany, much like the campaigns of Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the final days of the Civil War. By attacking Germany from both the north and south, Eisenhower can affect a pincer movement, trapping the Wehrmacht between the claws of his forces. Montgomery, however, prefers a single “full-blooded” thrust through the industrial Ruhr region of northern Germany. Naturally, Monty plans to be in charge, bringing the full weight of forty Allied divisions to bear on the Germans. Generals such as Patton will sit on the sidelines and watch.

At first Eisenhower privately mocked Montgomery’s strategy, joking that the plan was a “pencil-like thrust.” But Montgomery has worn him down. Monty is enormously popular in Britain, and many British people believe it is outrageously unjust, after all their suffering, that an American now commands all ground troops in Europe. Eisenhower has appeased Britain by placing Montgomery in charge of the Rhine offensive.

George Patton sees the underlying motives in Eisenhower’s determination to remain popular. “Before long, Ike will be running for President,” Patton tells one of his top generals. “You think I’m joking? Just wait and see.”

Patton will be proven correct. On November 4, 1952, Dwight Eisenhower will be elected the thirty-fourth president of the United States.6

On a tactical level, it is clear that Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy is the best possible method of attacking Germany. But in yet another example of attempting to make the popular choice, Eisenhower has temporarily discarded the strategy. Montgomery and Operation Plunder will be the focus of the Allied advance. But Montgomery’s notorious caution on the battlefield, combined with the likelihood that his plan to attack through the industrial and heavily populated Ruhr region of Germany will mean bitter fighting and heavy Allied casualties, could very well spell disaster. So Eisenhower knows he needs Patton as a backup in case the Montgomery offensive doesn’t work.

Thus, the war has once again become a personal competition between Patton and Montgomery—and once again, Monty seems to have the advantage.

Eisenhower is giving Monty and his Twenty-First Army Group all the manpower, ammunition, gasoline, and bridging supplies they need to cross the Rhine at the northern town of Wesel and push on to Berlin, while Patton and the Third Army stay south, content with destroying the Siegfried Line.

It looks like, this time, Montgomery will be the victor, making the decisive thrust across the Rhine and venturing the final three hundred miles to Berlin, and glory.

*   *   *

“If Ike stops holding Monty’s hand and gives me the supplies, I’ll go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose,” Patton has promised a British newspaper reporter.

As the days tick down to Operation Plunder, Patton’s army surrounds the Wehrmacht in southern Germany, capturing sixty thousand prisoners and ten thousand square miles of German countryside in two weeks. The Siegfried Line proves no match for the Third Army. Patton’s forces are everywhere. Even in remote regions such as the Hunsrück Mountains hundreds of tanks and infantry units are seen rolling down roads long considered “impassable to armor.”

“The enemy,” notes one American soldier, is “a beaten mass of men, women, and children, interspersed with diehard Nazis.”

Patton writes candidly to Beatrice about the condition of the German people. “I saw one woman with a perambulator full of her worldly goods sitting by it on a hill, crying. An old man with a wheelbarrow and three little children wringing his hands. A woman with five children and a tin cup crying. In hundreds of villages there is not a living thing, not even a chicken. Most of the houses are heaps and stones. They brought it on themselves, but these poor peasants are not responsible.

Beatrice Patton

“I am getting soft?” Patton asks Beatrice rhetorically.

*   *   *

Predictably, Montgomery waits. The British commander is assembling the largest amphibious operation since D-day. His staff checks and rechecks every detail, from the perceived numerical superiority of Allied forces to the number of assault boats that will be required to cross the Rhine, and even to the tonnage of munitions that British bombers will drop on Wesel to set it ablaze and thus root out any concealed German resistance.

Meanwhile, Patton attacks. His Palatinate campaign will go down in history as one of the great strategies of the war. Even the Germans will say so. And their praise for Patton is evidence of their enormous respect for the general. “The greatest threat,” a captured German officer reveals during his interrogation, “was the whereabouts of the feared U.S. Army.” George Patton is always the topic of military discussion. “Where is he? When will he attack? Where? How? With what?”

Lt. Col. Freiherr von Wangenheim will go on to add, “General Patton is the most feared general on all fronts … The tactics of General Patton are daring and unpredictable … He is the most modern general and the best commander of armored and infantry troops combined.”

Patton’s tanks are riding roughshod over the rugged countryside. After the staggering setback at Metz six months ago, Patton has shown what he’s made of at Bastogne and now at the Palatinate.