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In nine months and eight days of campaigning during World War II, the Third United States Army of George S. Patton Jr. moved faster and farther, killed or captured more of the enemy, and liberated more cities, towns, and villages than any other army in World War II and, quite possibly, in the history of warfare. In Patton’s Drive, acclaimed historian Alan Axelrod tells the story of how a young man who, in the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, was “born to be a soldier”—who believed himself to be the incarnation and summation of great warriors past—became a modern American general and one of the greatest field commanders of the twentieth century.
 
Beginning with a dramatic account of Patton’s magnificent drive across Europe during World War II, Alan Axelrod looks back to the decades before the war and traces the trajectory that revealed the commander’s fighting destiny. There was the youthful lieutenant who pursued the guerrillas of Pancho Villa deep into Mexico, and the colonel who, only a year later, led America’s first tank corps against the Germans in World War I. Axelrod also details how the two decades of peace between the world wars were, for Patton, a purgatory of physical and emotional torment, relieved only by what was for him the life-giving violence of desperate global combat.

 

For all that has been written about George S. Patton Jr., his formative years, though narrated by others, have escaped close analysis. In a refreshingly clear, colloquial voice, Axelrod leads us through the determining episodes of Patton’s life and the results they produced. In doing so he weaves a story rich with new insights—a story as absorbing as a great novel, but one in which history truly comes alive.