BLOOD AND GUTS AND NO SEATBELT

 

I think the simplest way to describe George Smith Patton junior  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 eyes, which went through the same holes as his earlier bulls-eyes, were misses. They were not.

In 1932 Patton led the U.S. Army’s last cavalry charge - against a “bonus army” of protesting U.S. army  World War One 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 could be preserved as an example of the dangers of religious 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.  He put them in combat and praised their abilities.

Between mid-July  1944 and May 1945 Patton's 3rd Army moved further and faster than any army in history.  Patton's soldiers captured 765,000 German soldiers, killed 144,000 and wounded 387,000 more. In late May of 1945, when he made a brief trip home to Los Angeles, he was greeted by a parade and a cheering crowd of 100,000 at the coliseum.   But despite his contributions to the victory,  on 2 October, 1945 George Patton was removed from command because he refused allow Germany to starve (Joint Chiefs of Staff directive #1067).

The orders of his dismissal were insulting and they were meant to be. General Eisenhower forbid Patton from making any public statements or to speak to the press on any issue. As a result there was 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 and away from microphones back in America. It was as if General Eisenhower was already running for President.

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 that money provided to finish his memoir, “War As I Knew It”, and tell his “unvarnished truth” about Eisenhower and General Marshall and General Omar Bradley. Had he done so, there can be little doubt, Patton would have shown himself to be a complicated conservative politician. 

The next day, Sunday, 10 December 1945,  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 with their luggage and rifles, while the Generals rode in a 12 foot long 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, all steel and chrome with a spacious interior, powered by a Detroit V-6 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 and the passengers’ compartment, 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 bombed out railroad yards (above).  Here Sergeant Spruce sped ahead, while the Cadillac was required to stop for a short freight train.   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 on-coming 2 ½ ton truck – a deuce and a half – about a half mile up the road.  Stretching along both sides of the road was the overflow from a quartermaster’s tank repair depot - burned out and broken tanks parked on both shoulders.

As they sped past this detritus Patton, who was sitting on the right side of the rear 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 11:48am, local time

The approaching truck suddenly turned to its left, into the repair yard, directly 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. But nobody in either vehicle was wearing a seat belt. The big Cadillac slid a few feet and then thudded into the right side of the truck's  external fuel tank. The impact was so light that the fuel tank was not even cracked.

The front chrome grill of the Cadillac however was shattered like a boxer's front teeth, and the left front wheel hub was twisted and broken off, revealing the tire beneath (above). But the massive steel frame of the Cadillac then 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 Fleetwood plaque, tearing a small section of skin and bending his neck sharply backward. In recoil he then fell across Gay on the seat.

Patton (above left)  immediately asked Gay  (above right) if he was hurt. “Not a bit, Sir”, Gay assured him. Gay then asked, “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. He 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 an ambulance quickly arrived, and at 12:45 p.m. Patton was admitted to the 130th Station Hospital at Heidelberg, Germany.  An x-ray instantly revealed what the doctors suspected; a simple fracture of the third vertebra with a posterior dislocation of the fourth vertebra, also known as the Hangman's Fracture.

In short, Patton had broken his neck and was paralyzed from there down. There was still a chance he could recover, but the doctors could not be certain until the swelling of his spinal cord had gone down.

Patton 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 stream 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  Patton's immediate superior, General Bradley . Then on the morning of 12 December 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 13 December 1945, Patton showed strength in his left arm and right leg. But that was as far as the improvements were to go. Abruptly the sixty-one year old began losing ground. He was given plasma and protein, as albumen. On  20 of December Patton reported trouble breathing. An X-ray confirmed that he had a blood clot in his right lung. He was now suffering from pneumonia and was placed on oxygen. Late on 21 December, 1945  Patton whispered to his wife, “It’s too dark. I mean too late.” Shortly afterward he died, from injuries which could have been prevented with a simple seat belt.

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."

I would 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." But I fear I will always remember that but for a simple seat belt, it was, as he once predicted, “A hell of a way to die.”

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A NUTCRACKER CHRISTMAS

 

I find it curious that Ernst Theodore Hoffman (above) is considered a romantic. I think of him as a manic depressive, and justified as one considering that Napoleon spent most of Ernest’s life turning Europe into a slaughterhouse. As a young man Ernst did fall in love, but the lady was married. And when she turned up pregnant Ernest’s family shipped him off to Poland, where he labored as a petty bureaucrat.  But he spent his free time composing classical music and writing vaguely creepy stories. 

One of his more successful tales was a sort of 19^th century “Jaws”, except instead of a 25 foot Great White Shark, Ernest’s villain was a mouse bent upon revenge. In Hoffman's story seven year old Maria receives a mechanical doll as a Christmas present, which her older brother Fritz promptly breaks. She sits up late trying to repair the toy, until an army of mice attack her doll.  She saves the toy by throwing her shoe at the rodents.  Now, maybe I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I think this idea has ballet written all over it.  Interestingly, that idea never occurred to Ernst.

Nor did it occur to Alexander Dumas (above), the vulgar and prolific son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave woman. See, Alex liked the Parisian good life a lot more than he liked writing. He had at least 40 mistresses, but he made enough to afford his profligate lifestyle by out doing Andy Warhol at marketing his art. Alex kept a warehouse full of writers who ground out stories under his direction, such as “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers”, and its sequels. 

And one of his minor best sellers was a direct steal of Ernst's hallucination, which Dumas changed just enough to avoid a lawsuit – like changing Maria's name to Clara.

Then, seventy years after Ernst died of syphilis (the ultimate romance disease), and 12 years after Dumas died of a stroke in 1870, the ballet idea finally did occur to Marius Petpa (above), celebrated head of the Bolshoi Ballet Company in Russia. 

In 1882 the Imperial Theaters hired Marius and Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky (above) to create the “Sleeping Beauty” ballet. This was such a critical and financial success that it established the Bolshoi as the world's premier ballet company, and Marius as a world class genius. 

And then like a modern Hollywood studio looking for a project to fit it's marquee talent, in 1890, the theatre brought the pair together again.  But this time, having over inflated these two monumental egos, the management merely suggested a sort of theatrical sandwich – a double header, both a serious but short opera and a light, meaning short,  ballet staged on the same night.. Marius would script the story for both, and Pyotr would put them both to music. 

The one act opera was clearly intended to be the meat in this theatrical happy meal, and being the foremost Russian composer of the day, Pyotr (above) got first choice of subject matter. He decided on a Danish story of a blind princess named Iolanta.. 

But then, early in February of 1891, in Saint Petersburg (above), Marius handed Pyotr a detailed synopsis and bar-by-musical bar outline for a two act classical ballet based on the story Dumas had filched.

Pyotr was appalled. He though it childish and unworthy of serious application. But, if it meant he got paid to write another opera, he would somehow make this silly ballet work. After struggling for a month he tried to remain optimistic. He wrote to one of his brothers, “I am working with all my strength and reconciling myself to the subject of the ballet.” But he also admitted “I am experiencing a kind of crisis.” This was good, since Pyotr had a lot of experience with those.

See, Pyotr had a secret which held the potential to turn every problem in his life into a crises. He was approaching fifty, and had reached an uneasy equilibrium with his homosexuality. 

He had tried to go straight but his marriage to Antonina Ivanova (above) had blown up after little more than a month. This raised again the threat of exposure by envious and bigoted Czarist court and church officials, who at any moment could end his career.  Each contract, including this one, could be his last. 

What little stability existed in his life was supplied by his younger sister Aleksandra (above, left) and her seven children with Lev Davydov (above, right). Pyotr wrote many of his 11 operas, six symphonies and three ballets on their Ukrainian estate near Kamenka. And now, in March, while on his way to a concert tour of America, and still trying to come up with something presentable for Marius's ballet, he learned of Aleksandra's death.

He had just seen Aleksandra (above) over the Christmas holidays, so he must have known how ill she was. Still, Pyotr was hysterical. And then, pausing in Rouen, France, he managed his grief  by putting it to work.  

His genius was always his ability to combine the Russian musical themes with Western ones, and to subjugate his true identity into the restraints of his art. And in the “grand pas de deux” for the lead dance character of Clara, he weaved in threads from the Russian Orthodox funeral service  The musical themes of the entire ballet became darker and more nuanced. As one critic has put it, “In Clara, he found a parallel for his sister.”  A ballet about wealthy Victorian children, became, with the talent of Pyotr's genius, a work for people of all ages and for all time.

When Pyotr returned from his wildly successful 25 day American tour (he inaugurated Carnegie Hall in Manhattan) he delivered his musical score to Marius in St. Petersburg, to be animated.  

But as the opportunity approached, the world renown genius, Marius (above), suffered his own crises of self confidence. The primary symptom of this understandable panic was an attack of Pemphigus vulgaris, a debilitating skin disease, usually afflicting Ashkebazi Jews – of which Marius was one. Scratching his itching skin produced open sours, which made it impossible for Marius to concentrate on the ballet. So his assistant, Lev Ivanov, took over.

Lev (above) had been with the Bolshoi since he was eight, and had a natural talent as a musician, as well as being an excellent dancer. But where Marius was a classical ballet master, Lev was, like poor Ernest, a romantic. He followed Marius's general guidelines. He had to, the music had already been composed based on them.  But Lev also arranged his dancers like an impressionist painter, throwing patterns of sugar plumb fairies and swirling lines of snowflakes on point, about the stage. 

It was the shape and flow of the dance that interested Lev, and somehow the combination of all these hearts and souls, the romantic Ernst Hoffman and the hedonist Alexander Duma , the classicist Marius and the dark Pyotr, and now that other romantic Lev, they all gave birth, on 15 January, 1890, to the premier of “The Nutcracker” ballet at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The audiences seem to have been enthusiastic, giving five curtain calls to the Sugar Plum Fairy. The next morning Pyotr wrote to his brother, “The opera in particular was to everyone’s liking ... The productions of both...were superb” But it was a very long evening, with the Nutcracker not ending until well after midnight. 

The weary critics took it out on the dancers, calling the lead ballerina (above) corpulent and pudgy. The battle scene between the mice and the nutcracker confused them: “Disorderly pushing about from corner to corner and running backwards and forwards – quite amateurish.” 

The Grand Pas de Deux, so inspiring to the composer, was labeled ponderous and “completely insipid”. A week later Pyotr wrote to another brother, “Once again I am not embittered by such criticism. Nevertheless, I have been in a loathsome spirit, as I usually am...in such circumstances.” After 11 performances the double bill was closed.

Less than a year later, in October 1893 Pyotr would die during a cholera outbreak, his secret still secure. Although many have suggested he committed suicide, he did not. Lev Ivanov followed nine years later. Finances forced him to work until his death “in harness”, in December of 1901. About the same time the Bolshoi brought in the upstart Alexander Gorsky to replace the aging Marius (above) as director. While watching his intended replacement rehearsing on his stage, Marius was heard to shout, “Will someone tell that young man that I am not yet dead?!.” Within a year it did not matter; Marius was quietly retired. He did die in 1910, at the age of 92.

A year after its premier the opera Iolanta would be preformed by itself in Hamburg, Germany. But although still performed occasionally, it is now largely forgotten. The Nutcracker, on the other hand, had to wait almost 20 years before it would be performed again, staged this time by the Bolshoi's new director Alexander Gorsky, in Moscow. 

He saved it.  Alexander savaged Marius choices, paring away minor roles, replacing the children cast as Clara and the prince, with adults, thus adding a romantic story line for them.  Standing alone, the ballet was now far better received, and short enough for modern attention spans. And after the Second World War, it became the classical Christmas season production for every ballet company in the world, responsible for up to 40% of their income.

It just goes to show you – those silly romantics may be naive simpletons, but their ideas grow stronger with time because they are positive and simple, and keep being reinvented. When in doubt, we are always inspired by the romantics within us.

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