Tag: Patton

On A Security Question

The World War 2 Battle of the Bulge marks the last major offensive of that war by the German Army. In December 1944, the Allies in the western theater of war felt that by that time the Germans lost the will to fight. The end of the war loomed, they believed. That’s when Hitler’s troops launched their surprise attack through the lightly defended sector of the Ardennes Forest, causing a retreat or bulge in that part of the Allied line, thus giving the battle its name.

The Germans had managed to hide the accumulation of the armament and men and supply/support staff needed to carry out the daring attack from the advancing Allies. If successful, the German advance would have split the Allied troops in two, and, while not changing the war’s eventual outcome, it could have prolonged the war by several months if not more.

Part of the plan involved sending German troops cleverly disguised as American and British troops behind Allied lines to create confusion and to cause as much havoc as they could. Hitler appointed Colonel Otto Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando leader, to head the operation. The year before, Skorzeny had famously pulled off a daring raid to rescue Italian leader Beninto Mussolini from a moutaintop prison where anti-Fascists had taken him. Skorzeny assembled several hundred men who spoke good English and outfitted them with captured Allied uniforms, putting them in stolen American Jeeps, and sent them towards the advancing Allied troops.

You can imagine the chaos such a group would create. The disguised Germans sent Allied troops in the wrong directions, they were given access to Allied supplies (some of which they destroyed), and they changed road and village signs, making it much more difficult for the Allies to mount a successful counter-attack against the regular German advance. The Allies soon realized that they must find a way to ensure the troops wearing their uniforms were, in fact, their troops. In addition, the masquerading Germans had sown paranoia as well as confusion and chaos. American troops in that area had no idea whom they could trust anymore.

And, in typical American fashion, a fool-proof method of verifying American troops developed. They would create checkpoints and ask simple security questions that every true American boy would know but ones that an imposter would not possibly know.

So, orders went out from General Eisenhower’s office to ask these specific security questions to all when going through the checkpoints. Even if the papers of the soliders looked to be in good order, the real test, the real security check was if the person knew the answers to specific questions. If the person couldn’t answer a particular question, that person was immediately arrested. And the security checks worked. The disguised Germans, realizing that they couldn’t teach their operatives the answers to the questions, quietly made their way back to the German lines. But the checkpoints remained on the Allied side, just to make sure.

One checkpoint managed to find an officer who seemed ok at first glance–oh, the Jeep looked right, the papers were in order, the uniform was perfect–but the man stammered when asked the security question. His eyes widend when he realized he couldn’t verify his loyalty because he didn’t know the answer. The guard at the checkpoint lowered his machine gun to point it at the officer in the Jeep, and the man raised his hands, outraged, and bellowed that this was a ridiculous way to verify him. “I showed you my papers, Goddam it!” the officer sputtered. “That’s exactly what a Kraut would say,” the young corporal calmly replied.

“Do you know who I am?” the officer yelled. The corporal grinned but kept the gun pointed at the officer. “I know who you say you are…sir. Now, keep your hands where I can see them.”

And so, in the Ardennes Forest, in the middle of World War 2, a young corporal held Brigadier General Bruce C. Clark–the real General Clark, the head of Patton’s Third Army Fourth Armored Division–at gunpoint for over 15 minutes until he could be verified because he didn’t know which professional baseball league the Chicago Cubs played in.

On A Trip to Mexico

The bullet bedecked gentleman in the photo above is Pancho Villa. During the decade from 1910 to 1920, Mr. Villa participated in the Mexican Revolution. Needing supplies, money, and weapons to fight in this effort, the resourceful Mr. Villa and his band of merry men turned to a handy and plentiful source of these items: The United States.

However, their methods for procuring these items caused no little consternation among the Americans. You see, Mr. Villa and his comrades simply crossed the US/Mexico border and helped themselves to the supplies. By 1916, their repeated  little forays into US territory from the Mexican state of Chihuahua not only resulted in stolen, lost, and destroyed property, but these raids also caused the deaths of dozens of Americans.

If such incidents occurred today, one can imagine the uproar among the Americans in the press, the public, and among the politicians. One hundred years ago, the reaction was much the same. Calls for punitive military action against the Mexican revolutionaries rose from every corner of the land. President Woodrow Wilson, who had a hand in the early days of the revolution by lending support to the anti-government forces, now decried the activities of Villa and his cronies. He ordered General John Pershing to the border with a large contingent of US troops, including air support (one of the first times airplanes were used in American military history), and he gave Pershing a specific directive: Bring Villa to justice.

Pershing failed to do so. However, he and the American troops fought a few skirmishes with Villa’s crew, and their efforts caused Villa to eventually seek elsewhere for supplies for his part of the revolution. Personally, Pershing declared the expedition a success even if his Commander in Chief didn’t.

One of Pershing’s aides, a young second lieutenant, obtained particular notoriety for an incident involving one of the Villa’s right hand men. It seems that this brash second lieutenant deployed three open Dodge motorcars full of 15 American soldiers and scouts and rode these mechanized “horses“ into a ranch compound in Mexico, guns a-blazing. When the smoke literally cleared, three of Pancho Villa’s men were dead, and no American was as much as scratched.

The lieutenant ordered that the three bodies would be strapped to the bumper and hood of his car and taken back to Pershing‘s headquarters for identification. He then reportedly carved three notches in his expensive pistol handles to mark the three men his part of the operation killed. Pershing, suitably impressed, nicknamed the young man, “Bandito.”

A year later, United States would declare war on Germany and officially enter World War I on the side of the Allies. The Pershing Expedition had served as a small dress rehearsal for the war that America now found itself in. Wilson tapped Pershing to be the leader of the American expeditionary force in France despite the fact the General didn’t capture Villa. “Black Jack” Pershing won international fame and admiration for his part in the Great War.

Wilson, who had  campaigned for reelection  in 1916 on a slogan that reminded voters that he had kept America out of the European entanglement, labeled himself as the savior of western civilization against the evil of war in general and German aggression specifically. His  plan for the peace after the war, called the 14 Points, became the basis for the League of Nations, a weak and ineffective forerunner to the United Nations.  A stroke in 1919 limited Wilson’s effectiveness in rallying America to ratify the Versailles Treaty ending the war; America eventually signed a separate peace treaty with Germany much later and never entered the League.

And that impetuous Second Looey?

He liked the idea of having mechanized infantry strike rapidly at an enemy as he had shown in Mexico. He liked it so much that he entered the tank corps. While he made a decent impression during his service in World War I, we probably remember him best for his accomplishments in the war after the War to End All Wars.

Pershing knew him as Bandito.

You know him as George S. Patton.