Killing Patton

In Killing Patton descriptions of physical appearance, health, and virility feature prominently. O’Reilly uses attractiveness of the book’s heroes, and especially their height, as a proxy for the soundness of moral character. Patton “is tall and athletic” (352), while Stalin’s “face is pockmarked, his left arm shorter than the right, and he is the tiniest man in the box” (73). For example, book stresses that Roosevelt was six foot two. The same goes for physical health. Hitler “suffers from irritable bowel syndrome, has an irregular heartbeat, and has long had a problem with skin lesions on his legs” (175). It is almost as if O’Reilly believes Hitler’s moral and political degeneracy manifested in his body. Describing Eisenhower, whom O’Reilly clearly sees as unsympathetically relying on diplomacy and political maneuvering over battle and action, O’Reilly emphasizes that “he carries a small paunch and walks with his shoulders rolled forward” (54). His sedentary attitude to life and war manifested itself in physical corruption.

O’Reilly is also fixated on the sexual prowess of solely male historical figures he depicts. He describes Patton as highly virile, and alleges that by 1944, Hitler was impotent. Yet this virile ideal conflicts with other values, like marital fidelity. Stalin had multiple affairs, Patton and FDR also cheated on their wives and lied about it—only really Churchill and, in his own way, Hitler, remained faithful. The book does not want to fully embrace the rhetoric of masculine sexuality as the ideal of war, full of thrust, penetration, and conquest. The rapes carried out by Red Army soldiers in Eastern Europe show the dangers of taking this idea of virility in warfare too literally.

The book explores another aspect of the male body—fragility, a reminder that even the most powerful men have an essential vulnerability. Stalin suffered heart attacks at Potsdam. Roosevelt, crippled by polio, died of a cerebral hemorrhage a month before the war’s end. An army truck crushed and paralyzed Patton, one of the war’s great tank commanders. As Patton said in his speech before D-Day, “Death, in time, comes to all men” (17). Generals suffer and die just like privates, and the body of the man who once had 25 medals on his uniform ends up in beneath an obscure military hospital in Heidelberg.