General George Patton and His Virginia Connections

General George Patton and His Virginia Connections

By Denis Cotter

George Smith Patton, Jr. (1885-1945), the legendary World War II U.S. Army general, had many connections in Virginia.

His paternal grandfather, also George S. Patton, was a Confederate colonel and died at the Third Battle of Winchester in September, 1864. A younger brother of that grandfather, Waller Patton, also fought and died at Gettysburg in July, 1863, part of Pickett’s Charge.

Both men are buried in a shared grave at Winchester’s Mount Hebron Cemetery, in the Stonewall Confederate section. Throughout his life, General Patton would visit the cemetery to pay his respects.

General Patton’s grandfather was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, the colonel’s widow, Patton’s grandmother moved to San Gabriel, California near Los Angeles with her four children to be close to relatives who had migrated west.

General Patton’s father, also George, followed in Col. Patton’s footsteps and graduated from Virginia Military Academy in Lexington. He did not pursue a military career and returned to California to become a lawyer and start a family.

His eldest son, naturally enough, was yet another George Patton, the World War II hero.

Growing up, Patton played with his grandfather’s sword from Third Winchester. He learned to ride on his grandfather’s saddle, the one the colonel was using when he was mortally wounded.

A very close connection between General Patton and the Middleburg area occurred through a friend of his attorney father, another attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Francisco. That attorney would be none other than Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the legendary leader of the Confederate Mosby’s Rangers.

Mosby (1830-1916) was a regular visitor to the Patton ranch in southern California. General Patton’s father had married quite well and owned extensive property. The old Confederate warrior mesmerized the young Patton with tales of daring raids and stunning cavalry attacks from the Civil War era. He acquainted Patton with Mosby’s Rangers, a group of highly effective guerrilla fighters he founded at Rector’s Cross Roads in 1863. He mostly operated in Fauquier, Loudoun, and other surrounding Virginia counties.

General Patton was enchanted by “The Grey Ghost of the Confederacy,” the man who, it was said, could simply disappear after lightning-quick and lethal surprise attacks on Union forces.

Astride their horses in San Gabriel, Mosby and his hero-worshipping apprentice often re-enacted Civil War battles. General Patton played Robert E. Lee; Mosby played himself. Like his father and grandfather before him, young Patton also enrolled at VMI, then left after a year when he received an appointment to West Point.

An excellent horseman, when he graduated in 1909 he was commissioned, naturally enough, as a second lieutenant in the Cavalry, the mounted force of the U.S. Army. Three years later, he represented the U.S. at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, in the pentathlon – swimming, running, shooting, fencing, and riding—and finished fifth overall.

Lieutenant Patton’s first brush with real combat came when he was as an aide to Brigadier General John Pershing in the 1916 Pancho Villa Expedition into Mexico. Using Dodge convertible touring cars, Patton led America’s first motorized military action in that conflict.

When the U.S. entered World War I a year later, Patton again served with Pershing. He helped develop the Army’s Tank School and armored tactics, and rode into action leading the U.S. Army’s brand-new Tank Corps.

After WWI, Patton was a warrior without a war until the outbreak of World War II. In the two-plus decades between the two wars, he remained an avid equestrian. Polo was his passion

“It makes a man think fast while excited,” he once said. “It reduces his natural respect for his own safety, that is – it makes him bold. It teaches restraint under exciting circumstances…nearest to mounted combat; makes riding worthwhile; keeps a man hard and teaches better horse management.”

He was equally enthralled with fox hunting. While serving as executive officer of the Third Cavalry Regiment at Fort Meyer in Arlington in the 1930s, Patton and his wife, Beatrice, joined the Cobbler Hunt in Delaplane, founded in 1929.

Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs. Patton quickly became co-masters of the hunt, and he kept detailed accounts of its adventures. A typical entry from his Cobbler Hunt diaries reads as follows:

“Saturday, Feb. 11, 1933, Pleasant Vale Church11:00 A.M. Weather warm and mild--no wind. There was a large field of Orange County and Piedmont people who had been disappointed on the three previous days. Went up the Paris road about a mile and then drew west into Mr. Remies place where a mythical fox is supposed to live. Failed to find him. Drew south through the Gaddis’ and Tripplett’s places going very bad with many refusals due to slipping in the snow and mud. Just before we entered Texas Mountain all of the visitors left. We had gone almost through the cover when half the hounds went away on what appeared to be a rabbit. As they kept going, we decided it was a fox and followed but it was too late and they were lost. However, while looking for them, we started another fox which ran south along the creek, west of the woods and then through the Marshall place onto the Orleans road, then north on the road. In spite of the fact that an automobile fouled the line, the hounds worked him up the road about two miles. Blue did most of the work. Horses: Self, Keaau (who threw a curb); Thornton, Hoapili; Kent, Keanakolu.”

When the U.S. declared war after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941 and five days later joined the fight against Nazi Germany, General Patton was back in combat. He was an expert in tank warfare in the Mediterranean and European theaters, leading to victories in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany.

At the very end of the war in Europe, in May, 1945, Patton successfully executed “Operation Cowboy” to rescue 300 Lipizzaner breeding mares from Nazioccupied Czechoslovakia and return them to the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

After V-E Day, Patton wanted to move to the Pacific theater, but he was kept in Germany to deNazify Bavaria. A few months later, on Dec. 9, 1945, he was involved in an automobile accident in Germany that broke his neck, injured his spinal cord, and left him paralyzed from the neck down.

He asked the doctors if he would ever ride a horse again or resume normal life. They told him he would not and he remarked that it was a hell of a way to die.

General Patton passed away 12 days after the wreck, four days before Christmas of 1945. A week later, Middleburg’s Chronicle newspaper (later renamed The Chronicle of the Horse) wrote that the sporting world had lost one of its best-known participants.

The paper mentioned Patton’s lifelong passion for horse sports. “He not only was connected with horses during his Army career, but in private life he had ridden races, shown horses and was M.F.H. of the Cobbler Hunt at Delaplane, Virginia where he showed a great sport in the field.”