Description: The third and final volume of Kevin Hymel's Patton's War trilogy finds Lieutenant General George S. Patton on January 1, 1945, as the master of the battlefield in World War II Europe. Throughout the war, Patton showed the same kind of aggressive leadership and battlefield smarts that made his name synonymous with victory. Patton's leadership was almost flawless as he led his men through enemy fire and one of the worst winters in European history.
As with his previous volume, Hymel relies on Patton's original diaries (not the transcribed, embellished versions historians have relied on for many years) and personal letters to tell the general's story. Hymel also mined various archives to explain Patton's encounters with soldiers, government officials, civilians, and reporters to expand on his narrative. Throughout this three-volume work, Patton emerges not as a larger-than-life myth, but as a human being, one held back by the personal prejudices and antisemitism that ultimately proved to be his demise. Despite these personal failings, Patton was, above all, as Hymel reveals, a commander bent on winning, or, as the general himself might have put it, getting the enemy to dance to his tune.Review Quotes:
"Monumental . . . With the concluding volume of Patton's War, Kevin Hymel vaults himself to the top tier of the biographers of America's most enigmatic commander, a position previously occupied only by Martin Blumenson and Carlo D'Este. Despite the loss of Patton's original war diary from the time Third Army crossed the Rhine River on March 22, 1945, Hymel has produced the most comprehensive and most balanced assessment of the general whom General Dwight D. Eisenhower ranked as his most audacious and courageous Army commander. Patton's War is a tour de force of military biography and narrative history."--Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, USA-Ret., author of the New York Times bestseller Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters and Conversations with Major Dick Winters: Life Lessons from the Commander of the Band of Brothers