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The trouble was that Patton was unpopular among Anglo–American biggies. He was rich, a womaniser, a seven-goal polo player, and spoke his mind — traits which lesser men dislike and envy. When my father named a ship after the general, he wondered why he, a Greek, was doing something Uncle Sam should have done before him. But Daddy was wrong. People like George Patton should have lived much earlier, when wimps and phoneys did not rule the roost.
Patton wanted to keep the Wehrmacht intact and turn it against the Soviets. People like Polly Toynbee might frown, but untold suffering would have been avoided and perhaps 25 million lives saved. It was not to be. Patton did not mince his words. He thought the Commies were primitive and uncouth, and said so openly. Toynbee-like, Ike and Truman were appalled. Montgomery and Churchill, however, were in agreement. Both Monty and Winnie wanted to take Berlin and extend democratic government to the Russian border. Actually, all Patton did was to pre-empt Nato and German rehabilitation.
Sixty years ago last week, my wife’s grandmother, Princess Shoenburg, born Oettingen-Wallerstein, and her cousin, Princess Lichtenstein, were dining in her Viennese palace when a British bomb killed them both. Her daughter, my wife’s aunt, escaped because she had run upstairs from the shelter to save her dog. Two of my grandmother-in-law’s sons were fighting on the Eastern Front under Manteuffel’s Army Group Vistula. One of them returned in the mid-Fifties. Had Patton been listened to, I’d be sitting in a beautiful red castle in Bohemia, rather than Chalet Palataki in Gstaad. (I know, it’s a rough life, but I’m not complaining.) Austria was liberated by Russian troops, and a ten-year Allied occupation followed. It is probably the most beautiful country in the world, and the Salzburg Festival begins this week. One of my fantasies is to have gone to Salzburg with Old Blood and Guts himself and to have listened to Mozart. And we would have taken Hasso von Manteuffel with us, although not in his marshal’s uniform. After all, the Germans did lose the war.
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