George S. Patton

George S. Patton is presented through a series of speeches that gave the 45th Infantry Division its “Killer Division” identity and urged its soldiers to kill rather than take prisoners. The account’s force comes from the contrast between Patton’s public praise of the unit and the contemporaneous cases of two of its soldiers who faced courts-martial for killing unarmed prisoners.

Identity and Setting

In the book, George S. Patton enters the narrative as a commanding general addressing the 45th Infantry Division before and during its deployment overseas. The first speech described took place in fall 1942 at a theater in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, while the troops were still training in the United States. They were young men, many away from home for the first time, and had not yet been sent to fight. Patton told them that their division had a special role in the war.

The book does not offer a general biography of George S. Patton; it concentrates instead on what his speeches told the soldiers to do and the language through which he defined their role. The accounts are attributed to people present or to a staff officer, while the surrounding wartime recollection is also conveyed through the perspective of a soldier in the division.

The “Killer Division”

In an account attributed to Colonel George E. Martin, chief of staff to the division’s commanding officer, George S. Patton used an example of British infantry bypassing German positions, only to find the enemy attacking from behind. He told the 45th Infantry Division that if German soldiers later laid down their weapons and surrendered, the Americans should not accept their surrender but should kill them. The speech combined a tactical example with an explicit instruction against taking prisoners.

George S. Patton also told the men that their division would probably see more combat than any other American division and that he wanted the Germans to know it as the “Killer Division.” The name made killing more than an instruction for a particular encounter: it became the identity he proposed for the unit.

On June 27, in Algiers, George S. Patton returned to the same message. According to an officer who was present, he urged the men “to kill and to continue to kill,” arguing that killing more enemy soldiers now would mean fewer to kill later. He warned against taking prisoners because they would have to be fed and characterized a dead German as the only good one. Another officer’s account extended the reported brutality to civilians: if people in cities remained near the fighting and were enemies, Patton said they should be killed ruthlessly and removed from the way.

Praise and the Prisoner-Killing Cases

In August 1943, after the division’s combat success in Sicily, George S. Patton addressed its men and officers outdoors and praised it as “one of the best if not the best division in the history of American arms.” The book interprets this praise as reinforcing his faith in the “Killer Division”: the unit, in that reading, was doing things as he wanted and as he had instructed in earlier speeches.

The timing sharpens the significance of the praise. On July 14, after the battle to take Biscari airfield in Sicily, Captain John T. Compton had ordered the shooting of approximately forty unarmed prisoners of war, including two civilians. In a separate incident following the same battle, Sergeant Horace T. West had machine-gunned thirty-six unarmed prisoners. At the time of George S. Patton’s August speech, both men were facing courts-martial for murder. The account places these proceedings beside his commendation of the division but does not say that he ordered either killing or establish what he knew about the cases.

Narrative Significance

George S. Patton’s speeches form a recurring thread in the book’s account of the division: the 1942 address establishes its purpose, the June speech renews the demand to kill, and the August praise returns after the Sicilian campaign. The sequence sets his exhortations alongside reported battlefield killings and the subsequent legal cases. It presents the “Killer Division” not merely as a nickname but as an identity repeatedly articulated by its commanding general, while keeping distinct the documented attribution of particular prisoner killings to Compton and West.