I think the simplest way to describe George S. Patton is in his own words: as “an outgoing introvert”. He was a poet and a life long klutz, constantly bruising himself and falling off his polo ponies. An Olympic athlete and swimmer, he lost a marksmanship competition in the Stockholm games of 1912 because he was too accurate - the judges ruled his later bulls eye shots which went through the same holes as his earlier bulls-eyes, were misses.
In 1932 he led the U.S. Army’s last cavalry charge - against a “bonus army” of protesting U.S. army veterans. He was a lifelong anti-Semite, 
who smuggled a copy of Hitler’s anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws” back to the United States so it would be preserved as an example of the dangers of bigotry. His father served under Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, and a great-uncle was wounded at Picket’s Charge, defending black slavery. But while others refused, Patton requested a regiment of Black tankers 
be assigned to his Third Army. In late May of 1945, when he made a brief trip home to Los Angeles, he was greeted by a cheering crowd of 100,000 at the coliseum. But despite his contributions to the victory over Germany, on October 2nd , 1945 he was removed from command because he refused allow Germany to starve (Joint Chiefs of Staff directive #1067). And on December 21st 1945, America’s greatest combat general of the 20th century died as a result of a low speed automobile accident. It was, again in Patton’s own words, “A hell of a way to die.” 
The terms of his dismissal were insulting. Patton was ordered by General Eisenhower not to make any public statements or speak to the press. As a result there had been no explanation as to why he had suddenly lost his beloved Third Army, but he was still assigned to Europe which kept him out of sight. On the Saturday before he was scheduled to return to the United States for the Christmas holidays Patton had dinner with his chief-of-staff, Major General Hobart R. “Hap” Gay. According to Gay, Patton had reached a momentous decision. After a lifetime of service, “I am going to resign from the Army,” Gay quoted Patton as saying. “For the years that are left to me, I am determined to be free to live as I want to and to say what I want to”. Patton had inherited a family fortune and he now intended to use the independence the money provided to finish his memoir, “War As I Knew It”, and “tell the unvarnished truth” about Eisenhower and General Marshall. 
The next day, Sunday December 10th , Gay and Patton set off at 7 A.M. for a hunting trip in the forests outside of the Bavarian Cathedral town of Spry. It was a cold and overcast morning. They traveled in two vehicles, a half ton truck driven by Sergeant Joe Spruce and a 
12 foot long 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, all steel and chrome with a spacious interior, powered by a Detroit V-8 block engine, and driven by Patton’s regular driver, 20 year old Private first class Horace L. Woodring. Fewer than 600 of these cars had been built and how this one got to Europe is unknown Part of the limousine’s stylish additions included a window and divider between the driver’s and passengers’ compartments and a small rectangular silver plaque on the divider with the word “Fleetwood ” embossed in sweeping script. 
About 11:30 they exited the autobahn at Mannerheim and took route 38 south. On the outskirts of the devastated city the two vehicle convoy came to the multiple tracks of the railroad yards. Here Sergeant Spruce sped ahead, while the Cadillac was required to stop for a short freight. 
Woodring then crossed the tracks and resumed his speed of about 30 miles an hour. He wrote later that the road was clear ahead except for an approaching 2 ½ ton truck – a deuce and a half – about a half mile up the road. Stretching along both sides of the road was a quartermaster’s tank repair depot, and burned and broken tanks littered both sides of the road. As they sped past this detritus Patton, who was sitting on the right side of the bench seat, commented on the wastage of war. One tank caught his attention and he turned his body and pointed off to the left, saying, “And look at that heap of rubbish”. Gay turned to look to look and so did Woodring, the driver. It was 11:48 A.M. The approaching truck suddenly turned to its left, across the path of the Cadillac. Woodring slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. At impact the truck was going no more than 15 miles an hour - the Cadillac probably less than twenty-five. But nobody in either vehicle was wearing a seat belt.
The big Cadillac slid a few feet and then thudded into the external fuel tank of the truck. The impact was so light that tank was not cracked. The front chrome grill of the Cadillac however was shattered like a boxers front teeth, and the left front wheel hub was twisted and broken off, revealing the tire beneath. But the massive steel frame of the Cadillac performed its unintended function and transferred most of the force of the accident directly to the passengers’ bodies. 
Sitting in the backseat, General Gay was thrown forward and then back against the seat. And Patton, who was already leaning forward and half turned to his left, was thrown off the bench seat and fell against the divider, his forehead striking the plaque, tearing a small section of skin and bending his neck sharply backward. In recoil he then fell across Gay.
Patton immediately asked Gay if he was hurt. “Not a bit, Sir”, Gay assured him. “And you, General?” Patton immediately replied, “I think I’m paralyzed. I’m having trouble breathing, Hap.” Woodring helped Gay out from beneath Patton, made sure help had been summoned and then approached the driver of the truck, Private Robert Thompson. Woodring would later contend that Thompson was drunk, but Patton insisted that no actions be taken against the truck’s driver.
A doctor and ambulance quickly arrived, and at 12:45 Patton was admitted to 130th Station Hospital at Heidelberg. An x-ray instantly revealed what the doctors suspected; a simple fracture of the third vertebra with a posterior dislocation of the fourth vertebra. In short, Patton had broken his neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. There was still a chance he could recover, but that would not be known until the swelling of his spinal cord had gone down. He was taken to surgery and two “Crutcheld” (fishhook) tongs were inserted below his cheek bones to apply traction to his neck. By the next morning the traction had reduced the dislocation, but the swelling had not yet gone down.
To the constant parade of senior officers who visited him, Patton was cheerful. In private to his nurse he was depressed and frightened. Eisenhower did not visit, nor did General Bradley, Patton's immediate superior. Then on the morning of the 12th Patton reported that he could move his left index finger, slightly. His wife arrived that morning, having been flown from California. She warned the doctors that the General had a history of embolisms. 
On the 13th Patton showed strength in his left arm and right leg. But that was as far as the improvements were to go. Slowly the sixty-one year old began losing ground. He was given plasma and protein, as albumen. On the 20th of December Patton reported trouble breathing. An X-ray confirmed that he had a blood clot in his right upper lung. He was now suffering from Pneumonia and was placed on Oxygen. Late on the 21st of December Patton whispered to his wife, “It’s too dark. I mean too late.” Shortly afterward he died. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure. 
On Christmas Eve, 1945, in a pouring rain, General George S. Patton was laid to rest in the U.S. military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg. As the casket was lowered a chaplain repeated one Patton's favorite sayings: "Death is as light as a feather." But I prefer to remember General George S. Patton by something else he said. “Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.” 
- 30 -
In October of 1992 the duckies, frogs and beavers began washing up on beaches near Sitka, Alaska. Between November ’92 and August of 1993 they washed ashore between Cordova and Coronation Island on the Gulf of Alaska. From here Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer has calculated (
Eventually that includes even the very bottom of the ocean: which in the Pacific is the Challenger Deep, a section of the Marianas Trench 35,827 feet below the waves. Mount Everest, dropped into the trench, would still be 8,000 below the surface. The pressure here is a thousand times greater than at sea level. Humans have visited the Challenger Deep just once, on January 23, 1960, when US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss citizen Jacques Piccard spent 20 minutes on the bottom, staring out at the featureless ooze. They did not find a "Rubber Duckie" but a flat flounder did wiggle past their porthole. 
Tom Petters, the 51 year old High School graduate behind The Petters Group World Wide (“Partnership Defined”), a self described $2.3 billion investment group with 3,200 employees, founded his first company when he was just sixteen. He leased an office in downtown St. Cloud, Minnesota, out of which he sold stereo equipment to college students. When his father found out about the venture the budding entrepreneur was pulled up by his short hairs and forced to close it all down. But Tom was just starting slow. 
Tom’s entire house of cards folded like…well, like a house of cards. Just a month prior to his personal Goetterdaemerung, Tom explained to the fawning students of the Carlson School of Management, “You’ve got to figure out how to leverage and move things forward and not backwards. Sometimes sideways and left and not always how you had anticipated.” But evidently Tom did anticipate what was coming because he is heard on one of the F.B.I tapes admitting that that he cheated on his taxes, and used an employee to create false documents for investors, but that he “didn’t know what choice” he had. I guess honesty was not a viable choice.
The Feds allege that for ten years Tom has been showing investors purchase orders to prove he was selling merchandise to Walmart. But when one investor finally checked with Walmart they said the P.O. numbers were fake and they had never bought anything from any of Tom’s many, many companies. This revelation led to a Federal audit of PGW that showed $1.9 billion in the “in” drawer and $3.5 billion in bills, the “out” drawer. And since the Feds lack the imagination of the Wall Street types, owing more than you own equals bankruptcy. Ah, if they only had the imagination of Tom Petters or Charles Ponzi they would know that being in debt was just another opportunity. 
Have you ever noticed that none of these wise guys have any interest in history? To me that explains a lot. 
It was October 31st , 1917 – Halloween - when the British Army made a third try to break the Turkish line at Gaza. They had a new General, Allenby, and a new plan. Instead of attacking the barbed wire and trenches close to Gaza, Allenby decided to try the other end of the Turkish defenses, at Beersheba. It was a similar choice to the sweeping left hook sent against Iraq forces in 1991: then, fast armored columns were supported by fleets of fuel trucks. But the limiting factor in 1917 was not fuel but water. 
It is simply astonishing that a horse, a prey animal, a grass eater, could be so powerful a weapon of war. Since 4000 B.C. humans have trained horses to assist in killing other humans and other horses. We have ridden their backs into close combat where Equus caballus is shot with arrows, pierced with spears and slashed with swords: and beginning in the 18th century, cut by shrapnel and surrounded by deafening gunfire and explosions. And what is most astonishing is that for a horse, such combat is much more frightening than for a human. 
Horses have the largest eyes per body size of any land animal. The construction of those lovely huge eyes also gives them a field of vision of 350 degrees, far wider than a humans’. Their ears can rotate 180 degrees, giving them the equivalent of hearing depth perception. In short, hoses can see and hear much more of the horrors on a battlefield more accurately than a human can. And the sound of a pistol in their own riders’ hand is more frightening because it is closer. So given this higher level of horror why have horses joined us in war? 
It has been pointed out that war horses actually lived much more happy lives than their pampered domesticated stabled pets of today because a war horse was constantly surrounded with other horses – a herd. An army was a strict hierarchical social structure that mimicked the herd. And learning to use a horse in battle taught humans how to teach them selves to fight: every combat maneuver used by cavalry is based on herd behavior. A horse in column with willing follow the horse in front rather than run for safety alone, and a horse in a charge will run because all the other horses are running as well. 
But the actual charge of Napoleonic cavalry (and the Australian Light Horsemen of 1917) was a good deal slower than the paintings might suggest. Sabers might be wildly waving and lances glinting in the sunlight, but charging horses do not slam into enemy troops at the end of a charge. The “shock” effect of a cavalry charge was far more psychological then physical. And that is the great secret of combat; the objective is not to kill your opponent. The objective is to convince him that he is about to be killed or worse, about to be painfully mauled, so that he stops fighting. The reality is that nobody fights to the death, not even a kamikaze pilot or a suicide bomber. They fight until they are convinced they cannot win. And seeing, as one general famously described it, “…a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friends face…” has proven a very effect way of making people stop fighting. For every soldier killed a dozen will run away. And that is what humans learned by teaching horses to fight. 
They formed up to the east of Beersheba, the 11th and 12th regiments, behind a ridge out in the Negev desert. They were 800 mounted men under the direct command of Lieutenant Colonel Bourchier, trained to fight as mounted infantry but this afternoon with their rifles slung across their backs and their bayonets gripped tightly in their right hands, they were pure cavalry, straight from the ancient steppes of Eastern Europe and the rolling fields of Belgium. 
About two miles out they broke into a canter, about 15 miles an hour. The Turkish machine guns began to pepper the advancing cavalry. But most of the Turkish infantry were holding their fire, waiting for the horsemen to dismount and attack on foot. But instead, a half mile from the trenches, they broke into a gallop, and fell upon the Turkish soldiers at 30 miles an hour. 
Trooper Eric Elliot remembered, “It was the bravest, most awe inspiring sight I’ve ever witnessed ...the boys were wild-eyed and yelling their heads off.” And Trooper Vic Smith would write years later, “Of course we were scared, whishing to hell we weren’t there…But you couldn’t drop out and leave your mates to it; you had to keep going on.” In fact the infantry was so stunned by the cavalry’s audacity that they failed to adjust their sights and most of the Turkish fire that finally began went sailing over the horsemen’s heads. And suddenly it seemed to the Turkish soldiers’ that their gun sights were filled with the barrel chests of charging horses, each carrying a screaming mad man directly at each Turkish private and corporal. 
By five-thirty the battle was over. The Turkish Gaza line had been turned. But so surprised and stunned were the victors themselves that it was almost another hour before anyone thought to send word back headquarters. We have no listing of how many horses were killed or wounded. But afterward a trooper noted, “It was the horses that did it; those marvelous bloody horses.” 
