August 31st, 1944, General George Patton stood in his headquarters staring at the fuel allocation reports. His Third Army had just completed the most stunning advance in American military history, 400 m across France in one month. And now his tanks were sitting with empty fuel tanks 100 miles from Germany.
A tank is a monster that lives on gasoline. When it runs out, it becomes 30 tons of useless steel. For Patton, that silence was deafening. That night, Patton opened his diary and wrote something he would never say in public. Something about the man who had just cut his fuel, his oldest friend in the army. The decision that followed has been well documented.
Eisenhower chose Montgomery over Patton for the main effort. Operation Market Garden got everything. Fuel, ammunition, transport aircraft, three airborne divisions. Patton’s Third Army got enough to hold their positions, not enough to advance. The fastest army in Europe was ordered to stop. But this isn’t about Market Garden.
It’s about what Patton wrote in the pages he never expected anyone to read. August 31st, 1944. The diary entry. Patton noted that Eisenhower was not as rugged as he used to be. He observed that Ike seemed very impressed with the British. Then he wrote the line that captured everything. It was a cold day, he said, when he could not whip the Germans.
But it was a difficult matter to whip the Germans and the Allied high command at the same time. He wasn’t just fighting the enemy anymore. He was fighting his own leadership. 2 days later on September 2nd, another entry. He wrote that he had to fight the British and the French and the Americans and the Germans.
At the moment, he concluded the Americans were the most difficult. He would later call Eisenhower’s decision to halt Third Army the most momentous mistake of the war. Patton’s diary was never meant for publication. He wrote with brutal honesty because he believed no one would ever read these words. He was wrong about that, too.
What made this worse was the history between them. Patton and Eisenhower had known each other for over 20 years. They met in 1919 at Camp Me, Maryland. Both were young officers fascinated by tanks and mobile warfare. But in 1919, Patton was the senior officer. He was the one with combat experience from the Great War.
He mentored Eisenhower on tank tactics and armored doctrine. Mying now the roles were reversed. The man Patton had taught was telling him to turn off his engines. They had become close friends. Their families socialized together. They discussed tactics and strategy for hours. Eisenhower rose through staff positions, aid to MacArthur, war planner under Marshall.
He had never commanded troops in combat. Patton rose through command positions, tanks in World War I, cavalry between the wars, armor as World War II began. He had spent his entire career preparing to lead men in battle. When Eisenhower took personal command of ground forces that September, Patton’s contempt deepened.
He wrote that Ike had never commanded anything before in his whole career. Now, for the first time, he had elected to take direct command of a very largecale operation, and he did not know how to do it. The friendship made the betrayal personal. Patton had a private nickname for Eisenhower. He called him divine destiny. sometimes divine Ike.
It was a play on Eisenhower’s initials, DD D, but the sarcasm cut deeper than word play. Patton believed Eisenhower had risen through luck and political skill rather than battlefield ability. Divine destiny implied that Ike’s success came from fate rather than merit. The nickname appeared repeatedly throughout Patton’s 1944 diary entries and letters to Beatatrice. It wasn’t a one-time joke.
It was a recurring title he used to highlight what he saw as Eisenhower’s unwarranted luck. He used Divine Ike specifically in Letters to Beatatrice when complaining about Eisenhower’s favorable press coverage. While Patton fought battles, Ike posed for photographs. In one entry, Patton noted that Montgomery was trying to steal the show, and with the assistance of Divine Destiny, he might succeed.
Patton never used this nickname in public. He never said it to Eisenhower’s face, but the contempt was real, and it was growing. Among Patton’s inner circle, another phrase circulated. Eisenhower, they said, was the best general the British have. The meaning was unmistakable. Patton believed Eisenhower had become so focused on Allied unity, on keeping Montgomery happy, on maintaining the British alliance that he had essentially become a British asset.
American objectives were being sacrificed for coalition politics. In a letter to his wife Beatatrice, Patton was even more direct. He wrote that Eisenhower was under the thumb of the British and didn’t even know it. He described too many safety first people running the war. He called Ike too much of a politician and too little of a soldier.
So afraid of being criticized, Patton wrote, that hewouldn’t take a chance. These were devastating assessments, and Patton committed them to paper where they could be found. When Patton learned the details of Market Garden, he made a prediction. On September 17th, 1944, he wrote in his diary that the British had a new plan to use the airborne army to get the Rine.
It was a very poor plan, he continued. Too far north would take too long. In private correspondence, he was even harsher. He called the operation piddling and vague. He saw the flaws immediately. The plan had no flexibility. It depended on everything going perfectly. and everything never went perfectly in war.
Meanwhile, through his field glasses, Patton could see the Germans working. They were dragging concrete and wire into position along the Ziggfrieded line. Every day, his armor remained tethered. The defenses grew stronger. He knew what this meant. For every day of delay, more American boys would have to die breaking those lines later.
Market Garden failed exactly as Patton predicted. The bridge too far, the armor that never arrived. 17,000 Allied casualties. The Rine remained uncrossed. The war would not end by Christmas. There is no vindication in war. When Market Garden collapsed, Patton didn’t feel triumphant. He felt sick.
He knew the cost of that failure wouldn’t be paid by the generals in their heated headquarters. It would be paid by frozen infantrymen who would now have to fight a winter war that should have been over. Patton believed the halt was catastrophic until the day he died. In his final assessment written months later, he stated that at the time they were halted, there was no question they could have gone through and across the Rine within 10 days.
That would have saved a great many thousand men. He concluded the fuel that went to Montgomery’s disaster could have supported Third Army’s advance. The three weeks lost waiting could never be recovered. German defenses that had been weak in early September were now strong. The opportunity to end the war in 1944 had passed. Neither Eisenhower nor Bradley ever agreed with this assessment publicly, but neither could prove him wrong.
The Germans who escaped destruction in September 1944 were the same Germans who attacked through the Arden 3 months later. The war Patton believed could have ended before winter instead continued until May 1945. The diary he never intended to publish was eventually released. The world learned what he really thought about divine destiny.
But by then Patton was dead and Eisenhower was on his way to the White House. The fuel crisis of September 1944 became a footnote in official histories. Just another strategic disagreement between generals. Patton’s diary told a different story.
