General Patton's Warning
At the end of World War II, one of America's top military leaders accurately assessed the shift in the balance of world power which that war had produced and foresaw the enormous danger of communist aggression against the West. Alone among U.S. leaders he warned that America should act immediately, while her supremacy was unchallengeable, to end that danger. Unfortunately, his warning went unheeded, and he was quickly silenced by a convenient "accident" which took his life.
Thirty-two years ago, in the terrible summer of 1945, the U.S. Army had just completed the destruction of Europe and had set up a government of military occupation amid the ruins to rule the starving Germans and deal out victors' justice to the vanquished. General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. Third Army, became military governor of the greater portion of the American occupation zone of Germany.
Patton was regarded as the "fightingest" general in all the Allied forces. He was considerably more audacious and aggressive than most commanders, and his martial ferocity may very well have been the deciding factor which led to the Allied victory. He personally commanded his forces in many of the toughest and most decisive battles of the war: in Tunisia, in Sicily, in the cracking of the Siegried Line, in holding back the German advance during the Battle of the Bulge, in the exceptionally bloody fighting around Bastogne in December 1944 and January 1945.
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