A British Commander Tried to Steal the Credit for a Victory—Patton’s Response Was Brutal

Um, July 24th, 1943. A command tent outside Palermo, Sicily. General George S. Patton was reading a dispatch from Allied Headquarters in Tunisia, and his face was getting darker with every line. The dispatch came from General Harold Alexander, um, the British officer commanding all Allied ground forces in Sicily.

It reassigned Highway 124, the central road running toward Messina, from the American 7th Army to the British 8th Army. Um, it also handed Montgomery’s forces priority on a second route Patton’s men had been counting on. On paper, it was a routine logistics decision. In practice, it gave the entire glory road to Messina to the British.

Um, Patton set the dispatch down on the map table. He didn’t say anything for a moment. His aide, Captain Richard Jensen, had been with him long enough to know what the silence meant. “Sir, Monty is trying to steal the show.” Patton said. Um, his voice was quiet, which was worse than if he’d been shouting.

“And with the assistance of divine destiny, he may do so.” Jensen didn’t ask who Divine Destiny was. Um, everyone in 7th Army Headquarters knew Patton’s private nickname for Eisenhower. When Eisenhower sided with the British, Sicily was supposed to have been simple. Two armies, one British, one American, landed together, um, fighting north toward the towering shadow of Mount Etna, squeezing the German and Italian defenders into the northeastern corner of the island until they had nowhere left to retreat but across the Strait of

Messina to the Italian mainland. That was the plan on paper. The plan on the ground had become something else entirely. From the first week of the invasion, Montgomery’s 8th Army had been assigned the main thrust, the direct coastal route up through Catania toward Messina, um, the fastest and most obvious path to the prize.

Patton’s 7th Army had been given the supporting role. Protect Montgomery’s flank, hold the line, stay out of the way. Patton had accepted it for exactly as long as it took him to realize what it meant. Um, If the plan held, the British would take Messina. American newspapers would run photographs of British tanks rolling into the port city while American soldiers were photographed standing guard on a flank nobody back home had heard of.

After the Kasserine Pass in North Africa, after British generals had openly questioned whether American troops had, in their words, the will to fight, Patton was not going to let that happen again. Not on his watch. Not to his men, so he had improvised. He’d gone over Alexander’s head, flown to Tunisia without an appointment, and talked his way into a revised plan that let his army drive northwest to capture Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a city of real strategic and symbolic value.

It worked. Palermo fell to the Americans on July 22nd, 2 days before this dispatch arrived, and for one shining week, American newspapers had their headline. But Palermo wasn’t Messina. Messina was the real prize. The port that controlled the strait. The last German and Italian foothold on the island.

The place where the entire Sicilian campaign would officially end. Whoever took Messina would be remembered as the general who finished the job. And now this dispatch, reassigning the central roads, was Alexander’s way of making sure that general was Montgomery. Patton looked at his operations map. Highway 113 ran along the northern coast, narrower, harder terrain, fewer resources allocated to it, considered by everyone at headquarters to be the secondary route.

Everyone except Patton, who was now looking at it the way a man looks at the only door left open to him. “Get me Bradley,” he said. Omar Bradley arrived 20 minutes later. Patton showed him the dispatch. Bradley read it twice. “My god,” Bradley said, “you can’t allow him to do that.” “I’m not going to,” Patton said.

He picked up a grease pencil and traced a line along Highway 113 from Palermo, along the rugged northern coast all the way to Messina. It was longer than Montgomery’s route. It ran through worse terrain. It would be harder, slower, and bloodier. It was also the only path left where an American flag could reach Messina first.

This [clears throat] is a horse race now, Patton said, and I intend to win it. What happened over the next 3 weeks would become one of the most personal rivalries of the entire war, and it’s a story that very few people outside military history circles know the full truth of. If you want the real stories behind the men who shaped World War II, subscribe.

We dig into the ones the textbooks skip. The race up Highway 113 was nothing like a parade. Patton’s Seventh Army moved through terrain that mocked the word highway. Narrow coastal roads cut into cliffs. German rearguard units, the battle-hardened Hermann Göring Panzer Division among them, fought delaying actions at every defensible ridge, every river crossing, every mountain town.

Troina, a hill town the Germans turned into a fortress, cost the Americans 6 days and hundreds of casualties before it finally fell. Patton drove his men without mercy. He was at the front constantly, standing in his open car with his ivory-handled revolvers catching the Sicilian sun, pushing units forward, relieving commanders he felt were moving too slowly, ordering amphibious end-run landings behind German lines to break the deadlock whenever the coast road stalled.

He wrote to Major General Troy Middleton, commanding the 45th Infantry Division, in language that left no room for misinterpretation. >> [clears throat] >> This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake. We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race. It wasn’t subtle.

Patton wanted it on the record exactly how he felt. Meanwhile, on the eastern coast, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had run straight into the worst defensive ground on the island, the approaches to Mount Etna, where German positions in the rugged volcanic terrain were chewing through British and Canadian units at a brutal pace.

Montgomery’s famously methodical style, the same careful, deliberate approach that had ground down Rommel at El Alamein, was now working against him. He advanced carefully. He consolidated. He waited for full readiness before each push. Patton did none of that. He drove his exhausted divisions forward on 3 hours of sleep and bad coffee, accepting risks Montgomery would never have tolerated.

The British radio, the BBC, didn’t help matters. American soldiers fighting through the brutal northern coast road were hearing broadcasts. Soldiers bitterly nicknamed them badly biased comments, suggesting the Seventh Army had it easy in the west, picking grapes in Sicilian vineyards while the real fighting happened on Montgomery’s front.

For men who’d just spent 6 days clawing Troina out of German hands one ridge at a time, it was an insult that stuck. By early August, both armies were converging on the northeastern corner of the island, both racing the same finish line, and both racing something else, too, the clock. The Germans had begun a quiet, highly organized evacuation across the Strait of Messina, ferrying tens of thousands of soldiers and equipment back to the Italian mainland.

Every day the race continued, more of the German army on Sicily escaped to fight another day on another front. Patton knew this. He didn’t slow down because of it. If anything, it sharpened the urgency. There was glory in being first to Messina. There was also genuine military value in being first, in catching what was left of the German defenders before they slipped across the water.

On August 3rd, visiting a field hospital near the front, Patton’s volatile temper became its own headline. He encountered a soldier with no visible wounds sitting among the badly injured. Patton asked what was wrong with him. “I guess I just can’t take it.” the soldier said. He was suffering from what doctors then called battle neurosis, what today would be recognized immediately as combat-related psychological trauma. Patton exploded.

He called the soldier a coward, slapped him across the face with his gloves, and ordered him out of the tent. He would do it again a week later to a second soldier in a different hospital. It was the darkest moment of an otherwise driven, relentless campaign, a moment that would nearly end Patton’s career when journalists got hold of the story months later.

But in August 1943, it was still a private incident known only to those present, and Patton’s race to Messina continued without interruption. By the second week of August, the math was becoming clear to everyone at headquarters. Patton’s northern route, brutal as it had been, was going to reach Messina first. Montgomery’s eastern advance, slowed by Etna’s defenses, simply could not close the gap in time.

Montgomery, to his credit, recognized this before his own staff did. On July 24th, the same week the road dispute had begun, he had quietly suggested to Alexander that the American 7th Army take the lead role in the final push. A remarkable concession from a general not known for them. But Alexander’s command had been indecisive throughout the campaign, vacillating between backing Montgomery and allowing Patton to set his own course.

The confusion in the chain of command meant Patton never fully trusted that the glory wouldn’t be reassigned again at the last moment. So, he kept pushing, hard, faster than was strictly necessary, because he had learned by that point in the war that the only credit a commander could fully rely on was the credit he had already physically taken.

On August 16th, Patton launched a third amphibious assault near Spadafora, a final hooking maneuver designed to leapfrog the last German rearguard, and put American troops on the outskirts of Messina before anyone else could claim it. It worked. In the early hours of August 17th, 1943, advanced units of the US 3rd Infantry Division entered Messina.

It was 6:30 in the morning. The last German forces had evacuated across the strait only hours earlier. The Americans had missed catching them, but they had not missed the city. Patton made his formal entrance at 10:30 that morning, riding in fully polished gear, helmet gleaming, exactly the kind of theatrical arrival his critics mocked and his soldiers, in their own complicated way, had come to expect from him.

He had won the race, officially by mere hours, personally by the only measure that mattered to him. Montgomery arrived in Messina not long after. There was no dramatic confrontation, no staged showdown of the kind later imagined by Hollywood. What actually happened was smaller and in its way sharper. A British Brigadier, J. C.

Currie, approached Patton, saluted, and offered a line of genuine sportsmanship. “General, it was a jolly good race. I congratulate you.” Montgomery himself, when the two men did cross paths, offered something colder, a dry, clipped remark delivered with the precise understatement the British were famous for.

“Don’t smirk, Patton. I shan’t kiss you.” Patton, never one to leave the last word to anyone, replied without missing a beat. “Pity,” he said, “because I shaved very close this morning in preparation of getting smacked by you.” It was a joke, but underneath the joke was 3 weeks of fury, of dispatches reassigning roads, of BBC broadcasts mocking his men’s effort, of a campaign that Alexander’s wavering leadership had turned into a genuine contest for credit between two allies who were supposed to be fighting the same war.

Patton’s final gesture was the one that made the moment unmistakable. As Montgomery’s 8th Army made its own formal entrance into Messina, complete with Scottish bagpipers leading the parade. Patton ordered his own band to strike up. Stars and Stripes Forever played loud enough to drown out the pipes entirely.

It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. The Sicilian campaign had cost the Allies roughly 24,000 casualties. It had cost the Axis nearly 30,000 killed or wounded and 140,000 Italian soldiers taken prisoner. It had also, >> [clears throat] >> because of the indecision at the top of the Allied command, allowed roughly 100,000 German and Italian troops, along with thousands of vehicles and tons of equipment, to escape across the strait to fight again in Italy.

Historians would later place real blame for that escape on Alexander’s failure to coordinate the two armies decisively from the start. The same failure that had triggered the road dispute in the first place. For Patton personally, Messina was vindication. After Kasserine Pass, after the BBC’s mockery, after watching road after road quietly re-assigned to the British, he had driven his army through some of the worst terrain of the entire war and arrived first on his own terms, with the proof standing in the street

for everyone to see. He addressed his troops afterward in a victory speech that for once wasn’t really about himself. “You have borne your honors bravely,” he told them. “Now the eyes of the world are upon you.” It was true. The American press ran the story everywhere. The Seventh Army, dismissed weeks earlier as the army eating grapes in the west, had taken both Palermo and Messina.

The reputation Patton had been fighting for, not just for himself but for every American soldier who had been told at Kasserine Pass that they didn’t have the will to fight, had been answered in the most public way possible. It would not be the last time Patton and Montgomery competed for the same finish line. Their rivalry followed both men through Normandy, through the race across France, through the bitter arguments over resources and strategy that defined the final year of the war in Europe.

But Messina was where it started in earnest. The moment two of the allies most gifted, most difficult generals discovered that they were not just fighting the same enemy. They were fighting each other for what history would remember. Years later, military historians would point out that the famous confrontation depicted in films, Montgomery rolling into Messina to find Patton already there with a smirk, never actually happened that way.

Montgomery wasn’t even present for the moment most people picture. The real scene was quieter, drier, more British in its restraint, and in some ways more telling. A brigadier’s polite congratulations. A dry remark about not being kissed. A trumpet section drowning out bagpipes. That was how the United States Army announced in August of 1943 that it had arrived as a serious force in this war.

Not with a speech, but with a brass band loud enough to be heard over an ally trying to take the credit. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from and whether anyone in your family served in it. We read everyone. And if you want more of the rivalries, the egos, and the personal battles fought behind the front lines of World War II, subscribe.

There’s a lot more to this story than the textbooks ever told you.

 

 

 

A British Commander Tried to Steal the Credit for a Victory—Patton’s Response Was Brutal

 

Um, July 24th, 1943. A command tent outside Palermo, Sicily. General George S. Patton was reading a dispatch from Allied Headquarters in Tunisia, and his face was getting darker with every line. The dispatch came from General Harold Alexander, um, the British officer commanding all Allied ground forces in Sicily.

It reassigned Highway 124, the central road running toward Messina, from the American 7th Army to the British 8th Army. Um, it also handed Montgomery’s forces priority on a second route Patton’s men had been counting on. On paper, it was a routine logistics decision. In practice, it gave the entire glory road to Messina to the British.

Um, Patton set the dispatch down on the map table. He didn’t say anything for a moment. His aide, Captain Richard Jensen, had been with him long enough to know what the silence meant. “Sir, Monty is trying to steal the show.” Patton said. Um, his voice was quiet, which was worse than if he’d been shouting.

“And with the assistance of divine destiny, he may do so.” Jensen didn’t ask who Divine Destiny was. Um, everyone in 7th Army Headquarters knew Patton’s private nickname for Eisenhower. When Eisenhower sided with the British, Sicily was supposed to have been simple. Two armies, one British, one American, landed together, um, fighting north toward the towering shadow of Mount Etna, squeezing the German and Italian defenders into the northeastern corner of the island until they had nowhere left to retreat but across the Strait of

Messina to the Italian mainland. That was the plan on paper. The plan on the ground had become something else entirely. From the first week of the invasion, Montgomery’s 8th Army had been assigned the main thrust, the direct coastal route up through Catania toward Messina, um, the fastest and most obvious path to the prize.

Patton’s 7th Army had been given the supporting role. Protect Montgomery’s flank, hold the line, stay out of the way. Patton had accepted it for exactly as long as it took him to realize what it meant. Um, If the plan held, the British would take Messina. American newspapers would run photographs of British tanks rolling into the port city while American soldiers were photographed standing guard on a flank nobody back home had heard of.

After the Kasserine Pass in North Africa, after British generals had openly questioned whether American troops had, in their words, the will to fight, Patton was not going to let that happen again. Not on his watch. Not to his men, so he had improvised. He’d gone over Alexander’s head, flown to Tunisia without an appointment, and talked his way into a revised plan that let his army drive northwest to capture Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a city of real strategic and symbolic value.

It worked. Palermo fell to the Americans on July 22nd, 2 days before this dispatch arrived, and for one shining week, American newspapers had their headline. But Palermo wasn’t Messina. Messina was the real prize. The port that controlled the strait. The last German and Italian foothold on the island.

The place where the entire Sicilian campaign would officially end. Whoever took Messina would be remembered as the general who finished the job. And now this dispatch, reassigning the central roads, was Alexander’s way of making sure that general was Montgomery. Patton looked at his operations map. Highway 113 ran along the northern coast, narrower, harder terrain, fewer resources allocated to it, considered by everyone at headquarters to be the secondary route.

Everyone except Patton, who was now looking at it the way a man looks at the only door left open to him. “Get me Bradley,” he said. Omar Bradley arrived 20 minutes later. Patton showed him the dispatch. Bradley read it twice. “My god,” Bradley said, “you can’t allow him to do that.” “I’m not going to,” Patton said.

He picked up a grease pencil and traced a line along Highway 113 from Palermo, along the rugged northern coast all the way to Messina. It was longer than Montgomery’s route. It ran through worse terrain. It would be harder, slower, and bloodier. It was also the only path left where an American flag could reach Messina first.

This [clears throat] is a horse race now, Patton said, and I intend to win it. What happened over the next 3 weeks would become one of the most personal rivalries of the entire war, and it’s a story that very few people outside military history circles know the full truth of. If you want the real stories behind the men who shaped World War II, subscribe.

We dig into the ones the textbooks skip. The race up Highway 113 was nothing like a parade. Patton’s Seventh Army moved through terrain that mocked the word highway. Narrow coastal roads cut into cliffs. German rearguard units, the battle-hardened Hermann Göring Panzer Division among them, fought delaying actions at every defensible ridge, every river crossing, every mountain town.

Troina, a hill town the Germans turned into a fortress, cost the Americans 6 days and hundreds of casualties before it finally fell. Patton drove his men without mercy. He was at the front constantly, standing in his open car with his ivory-handled revolvers catching the Sicilian sun, pushing units forward, relieving commanders he felt were moving too slowly, ordering amphibious end-run landings behind German lines to break the deadlock whenever the coast road stalled.

He wrote to Major General Troy Middleton, commanding the 45th Infantry Division, in language that left no room for misinterpretation. >> [clears throat] >> This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake. We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race. It wasn’t subtle.

Patton wanted it on the record exactly how he felt. Meanwhile, on the eastern coast, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had run straight into the worst defensive ground on the island, the approaches to Mount Etna, where German positions in the rugged volcanic terrain were chewing through British and Canadian units at a brutal pace.

Montgomery’s famously methodical style, the same careful, deliberate approach that had ground down Rommel at El Alamein, was now working against him. He advanced carefully. He consolidated. He waited for full readiness before each push. Patton did none of that. He drove his exhausted divisions forward on 3 hours of sleep and bad coffee, accepting risks Montgomery would never have tolerated.

The British radio, the BBC, didn’t help matters. American soldiers fighting through the brutal northern coast road were hearing broadcasts. Soldiers bitterly nicknamed them badly biased comments, suggesting the Seventh Army had it easy in the west, picking grapes in Sicilian vineyards while the real fighting happened on Montgomery’s front.

For men who’d just spent 6 days clawing Troina out of German hands one ridge at a time, it was an insult that stuck. By early August, both armies were converging on the northeastern corner of the island, both racing the same finish line, and both racing something else, too, the clock. The Germans had begun a quiet, highly organized evacuation across the Strait of Messina, ferrying tens of thousands of soldiers and equipment back to the Italian mainland.

Every day the race continued, more of the German army on Sicily escaped to fight another day on another front. Patton knew this. He didn’t slow down because of it. If anything, it sharpened the urgency. There was glory in being first to Messina. There was also genuine military value in being first, in catching what was left of the German defenders before they slipped across the water.

On August 3rd, visiting a field hospital near the front, Patton’s volatile temper became its own headline. He encountered a soldier with no visible wounds sitting among the badly injured. Patton asked what was wrong with him. “I guess I just can’t take it.” the soldier said. He was suffering from what doctors then called battle neurosis, what today would be recognized immediately as combat-related psychological trauma. Patton exploded.

He called the soldier a coward, slapped him across the face with his gloves, and ordered him out of the tent. He would do it again a week later to a second soldier in a different hospital. It was the darkest moment of an otherwise driven, relentless campaign, a moment that would nearly end Patton’s career when journalists got hold of the story months later.

But in August 1943, it was still a private incident known only to those present, and Patton’s race to Messina continued without interruption. By the second week of August, the math was becoming clear to everyone at headquarters. Patton’s northern route, brutal as it had been, was going to reach Messina first. Montgomery’s eastern advance, slowed by Etna’s defenses, simply could not close the gap in time.

Montgomery, to his credit, recognized this before his own staff did. On July 24th, the same week the road dispute had begun, he had quietly suggested to Alexander that the American 7th Army take the lead role in the final push. A remarkable concession from a general not known for them. But Alexander’s command had been indecisive throughout the campaign, vacillating between backing Montgomery and allowing Patton to set his own course.

The confusion in the chain of command meant Patton never fully trusted that the glory wouldn’t be reassigned again at the last moment. So, he kept pushing, hard, faster than was strictly necessary, because he had learned by that point in the war that the only credit a commander could fully rely on was the credit he had already physically taken.

On August 16th, Patton launched a third amphibious assault near Spadafora, a final hooking maneuver designed to leapfrog the last German rearguard, and put American troops on the outskirts of Messina before anyone else could claim it. It worked. In the early hours of August 17th, 1943, advanced units of the US 3rd Infantry Division entered Messina.

It was 6:30 in the morning. The last German forces had evacuated across the strait only hours earlier. The Americans had missed catching them, but they had not missed the city. Patton made his formal entrance at 10:30 that morning, riding in fully polished gear, helmet gleaming, exactly the kind of theatrical arrival his critics mocked and his soldiers, in their own complicated way, had come to expect from him.

He had won the race, officially by mere hours, personally by the only measure that mattered to him. Montgomery arrived in Messina not long after. There was no dramatic confrontation, no staged showdown of the kind later imagined by Hollywood. What actually happened was smaller and in its way sharper. A British Brigadier, J. C.

Currie, approached Patton, saluted, and offered a line of genuine sportsmanship. “General, it was a jolly good race. I congratulate you.” Montgomery himself, when the two men did cross paths, offered something colder, a dry, clipped remark delivered with the precise understatement the British were famous for.

“Don’t smirk, Patton. I shan’t kiss you.” Patton, never one to leave the last word to anyone, replied without missing a beat. “Pity,” he said, “because I shaved very close this morning in preparation of getting smacked by you.” It was a joke, but underneath the joke was 3 weeks of fury, of dispatches reassigning roads, of BBC broadcasts mocking his men’s effort, of a campaign that Alexander’s wavering leadership had turned into a genuine contest for credit between two allies who were supposed to be fighting the same war.

Patton’s final gesture was the one that made the moment unmistakable. As Montgomery’s 8th Army made its own formal entrance into Messina, complete with Scottish bagpipers leading the parade. Patton ordered his own band to strike up. Stars and Stripes Forever played loud enough to drown out the pipes entirely.

It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. The Sicilian campaign had cost the Allies roughly 24,000 casualties. It had cost the Axis nearly 30,000 killed or wounded and 140,000 Italian soldiers taken prisoner. It had also, >> [clears throat] >> because of the indecision at the top of the Allied command, allowed roughly 100,000 German and Italian troops, along with thousands of vehicles and tons of equipment, to escape across the strait to fight again in Italy.

Historians would later place real blame for that escape on Alexander’s failure to coordinate the two armies decisively from the start. The same failure that had triggered the road dispute in the first place. For Patton personally, Messina was vindication. After Kasserine Pass, after the BBC’s mockery, after watching road after road quietly re-assigned to the British, he had driven his army through some of the worst terrain of the entire war and arrived first on his own terms, with the proof standing in the street

for everyone to see. He addressed his troops afterward in a victory speech that for once wasn’t really about himself. “You have borne your honors bravely,” he told them. “Now the eyes of the world are upon you.” It was true. The American press ran the story everywhere. The Seventh Army, dismissed weeks earlier as the army eating grapes in the west, had taken both Palermo and Messina.

The reputation Patton had been fighting for, not just for himself but for every American soldier who had been told at Kasserine Pass that they didn’t have the will to fight, had been answered in the most public way possible. It would not be the last time Patton and Montgomery competed for the same finish line. Their rivalry followed both men through Normandy, through the race across France, through the bitter arguments over resources and strategy that defined the final year of the war in Europe.

But Messina was where it started in earnest. The moment two of the allies most gifted, most difficult generals discovered that they were not just fighting the same enemy. They were fighting each other for what history would remember. Years later, military historians would point out that the famous confrontation depicted in films, Montgomery rolling into Messina to find Patton already there with a smirk, never actually happened that way.

Montgomery wasn’t even present for the moment most people picture. The real scene was quieter, drier, more British in its restraint, and in some ways more telling. A brigadier’s polite congratulations. A dry remark about not being kissed. A trumpet section drowning out bagpipes. That was how the United States Army announced in August of 1943 that it had arrived as a serious force in this war.

Not with a speech, but with a brass band loud enough to be heard over an ally trying to take the credit. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from and whether anyone in your family served in it. We read everyone. And if you want more of the rivalries, the egos, and the personal battles fought behind the front lines of World War II, subscribe.

There’s a lot more to this story than the textbooks ever told you.