General Patton kicking a GI cartoon

A great Maldin Resource


Couple of my alltime faves:


"Able Fox Five to Able Fox. I got a target but ya gotta be patient."



Good - if longish - 1971 article on WWII Stars & Stripes staff

This is a good point--a lot of quotes are attributed to Patton that upon further investigation, turn out to have no other source than that movie. One of the most notorious shows George C. Scott (for the naive, that was an actor, it wasn't really Georgie Patton) looking at advancing German armor and infantry, marching to the front as if on a parade ground. The Patton characters says: "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, i read your book !"

No such battle ever took place. The closest that Patton and Rommel ever got to one another was in Tunisia, and Patton took command of II Corps after Americans had been driven back by the Germans--Patton and Rommel never actually confronted one another on the battlefield. By the way, in The Rommel Papers, edited by B. H. Liddel Hart, Rommel states that he was frustrated by lack of initiative and caution on the part of German field grade officers (the Majors, Lt. Colonels and Colonels, in the American system), which is an inference about the bad influence of Nazism to the perceptive German reader--initiative by lower ranking officers, by all soldiers really, had been encouraged and rewared since the days of Frederick the Great, but was slowly being stifled under the Nazis, because people feared to stick their necks out. Rommel also commented the Americans showed precisely that sort of initiative and in large measure foiled the German advance into Kasserine Pass even though tactically beaten on the battlefield.

So that entire image is bullshit. But even more than that, the one book Rommel did write was Infanterie greift an--which roughly translates as "On Infantry Tactics." This was written between the wars, when Rommel was a poor instructor in a military school, and was based upon his service with the Austrians on the Italian front. The tactics he used were the hot new operational methods used by Max von Hoffman and other young officers in the Baltic region when they drove the Russians back so fast their army collapsed--in 1917. By 1942, which was when the Americans landed in North Africa, there was nothing novel or surprising about what Rommel had written in that book--or if it were novel or surprising to any officer, the officer didn't deserve high command responsibility.

Mauldin himself commented that he had recycled this cartoon. The earliest version was for the 45th Division newsletter before the war, and was one of his first published cartoons--i tried to find a copy of the original, but couldn't.

Where we stand...
Okay, now we have implications that the cartooon is apochryphal, but also that Mauldin copped to "recycling" it, both by Setanta

Both cannot be true. If you can get a copy of the movie, the cartoon is clearly visible in what appears to be some newspaper of the day, as I described above.

Apparently, you're expeiencing a bit of problem with your reading and comprehension there, thedoc ... try a little harder.

Re: Where we stand...


The cartoon to which i referred when i said that Mauldin had used it before referred to the "shooting the jeep" cartoon--and doesn't refer to any Patton kicking a GI cartoon. But i do want to thank you for assuming that i'd be so witless as to assert that Mauldin never drew such a cartoon, and then claim it were recycled.

Charmed, i'm sure . . .