cover image The Fighting Pattons

The Fighting Pattons

Brian M. Sobel. Praeger Publishers, $106.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-275-95714-8

Sobel, a journalist and media consultant, has produced a book that succeeds in spite of itself. The author's intention was to compare the military careers of George Patton and his son (who contributes the book's foreword). Sobel's treatment of the elder Patton, relying heavily on the memories of family and friends, adds nothing significant to the standard biographies by Martin Blumenson and Carlo D'Este. But the son tells much of his own story, including how he made his own way in a series of staff and command assignments. The most familiar of these was as colonel of the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam during 1968, when the media attempted to cast him in the ""blood and guts"" image of his father. While assertive and ambitious, the younger Patton appears here as concerned for the welfare of his men and the army, and frustrated by what he saw as a post-Vietnam emphasis on public relations and political correctness. Through his story, Patton opens a window to the Cold War army's ""lost generation"" of senior officers. By the time of Vietnam, they were senior enough to be caught in the war's riptides yet they had no responsibility for shaping strategy, and their skills as conventional-war commanders were irrelevant. They were high in rank--and sometimes too set in their ways--to be part of the process of reconstruction that culminated in Desert Storm. But Patton and his counterparts did much to hold the line during the Cold War. If their concepts of service and duty appear unsophisticated in an age of uniformed spin doctors, their heritage remains honorable, worthy of the kind of memorial provided by this book (which Prager classifies as an ""academic monograph""; hence the high price). (Apr.)