In nine months and eight days of campaigning during World
War II, the Third United States Army of George S. Patton Jr.
moved faster and farther, killed or captured more of the
enemy, and liberated more cities and towns than any other
army in the history of warfare. Patton's Drive tells the
story of how a young man born to war became a modern
American general, and one of the greatest field commanders
of the twentieth century. Beginning with Patton's
magnificent drive across Europe during World War II, Alan
Axelrod, Ph.D., traces the trajectory that revealed the
commander's destiny. There was the youthful captain who
pursued Pancho Villa's guerrillas deep into Mexico, and the
colonel who led America's first tank corps against the
Germans in World War I. Dr. Axelrod also details how the two
decades of peace between the world wars were, for Patton, a
purgatory of physical and emotional torment.