Autograph Letter Signed, to his mother, Ruth Wilson Patton, December 14, 1917, [Chaumont, France]. 2 pp., 8.25" x 10.625". Expected folds; very good.

Complete Transcript

Dec 14 17

Dear Mama:

I have been off for a two days trip with John Rogers of Lowell  I had nothing much to do so I got told to take him and guide him the way he should go and I did but it was quite interesting [outing?].  I am sorry that I can’t get hold of any presents but I sent B. a bunch of my pictures and told her to send you all some for Christmas. I hope this [one?] will be more pleasant than last year as I do not look back at it with great pleasure. I think we shall be quite comfortable here and believe we will.

There have been quite a few colds but they don’t amount to much and we are all over them here.

The Chief of Staff and I go riding every morning and are getting very thick  he is a fine man of as high principles as any one I have ever met and very bright.

I suppose by the time this reaches you it will be New Years at least. I hope you and Nita go to Thomasville as it will be nice for all concerned, and will really be a godsend to B.

face is quite well and there is hardly any now.

to all your devoted son,

George S Patton Jr

Historical Background

John Rogers (1881-1925) was a Republican Congressman from Massachusetts. As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he traveled to the United Kingdom and France to observe the conditions of World War I firsthand. On December 12, Patton took him to Neufchateau, thirty miles northeast of Chaumont, then on to Gondrecourt, fifteen miles north of Neufchateau the next day. There, Patton got medals for his wife Beatrice Ayer Patton (1886-1953) and their two daughters “for Rogers to take.” They then returned to Langres to see the staff college. Rogers left for Paris late in the afternoon of December 13.  Patton’s diary entry for the date of this letter reads, “Fooled around all day wrote letters.”

Patton spent Christmas of 1916 in Mexico as part of the “Pancho Villa Expedition,” and he clearly preferred France to Mexico for the holidays. On Christmas Day, 1917, Patton recorded in his diary that he “took bath” and after dining in Langres, he traveled to Chaumont, twenty miles away, “in blizzard very cold.” There he had dinner with General John J. Pershing and members of Pershing’s staff. Major Robert Bacon (1860-1919), Headquarters Commandant, gave Patton a box of Corona cigars, and they all drank to being together for Christmas 1918.

In October and early November, Patton had been very ill with jaundice and spent October 17 to November 3 in the hospital in Chaumont.

From August 1917 to May 1918, the Chief of Staff of the American Expeditionary Forces was Colonel then Brigadier General James G. Harbord (1866-1947). When Patton’s son George S. Patton IV (1923-2004) was born, Harbord served as his godfather.

Patton also urged his mother and sister “Nita” to go to Thomasville, Georgia, where his in-laws and many other northern industrialists had winter homes. His mother did visit Thomasville, and Patton’s father-in-law Frederick Ayer (1822-1918) died there on March 14, 1918, at age 95. Three weeks later, Beatrice Patton’s mother Ellen Barrows Banning Ayer (1853-1918) died at their home in Massachusetts.

George S. Patton Jr. (1885-1945) was born in California and educated at the Virginia Military Institute and United States Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1909. An avid horseback rider, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the cavalry. In 1910, he married Beatrice Banning Ayer (1886-1953), the daughter of a wealthy Boston businessman. He competed in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, in the modern pentathlon, where he finished fifth behind four Swedes. He then traveled to France, where he learned fencing techniques. Returning to the United States, he redesigned cavalry saber combat doctrine and designed a new sword. In 1915 and 1916, Patton participated in the Pancho Villa Expedition in Mexico as Commander John J. Pershing’s aide. In the spring of 1917, he accompanied Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, to Europe. Patton took an interest in tanks and was soon training crews to operate them. By 1918, he was in command of a tank brigade. After World War I, he served in various army posts and began to develop the methods of mechanized warfare. At the beginning of World War II, Patton worked to develop and train armored divisions in the army. In the summer of 1942, he commanded the Western Task Force in the Allied invasion of French North Africa. He commanded the Seventh U.S. Army in the successful invasion of Sicily in July 1943. After the Normandy invasion of June 1944, Patton’s Third Army sailed to France and formed on the extreme right of Allied land forces. Through speed and aggressive offensive action, the Third Army continuously pressed retreating German forces until it ran out of fuel near Metz in northeastern France at the end of August. When the German army counterattacked in the battle of the Bulge in mid-December 1944, Patton’s ability to reposition six full divisions to relieve besieged Allied forces in Bastogne was one of the most remarkable achievements of the war. As the Germans retreated, Patton’s Third Army advanced, killing, wounding, or capturing 240,000 German soldiers in seven weeks before crossing the Rhine on March 22. After the end of the war in Europe, Patton hoped for a command in the Pacific but after a visit to the United States returned to Europe for occupation duty in Bavaria. In December 1945, the car in which he was riding collided with an American army truck at low speed, but Patton hit his head on a glass partition, breaking his neck and paralyzing him. He died twelve days later at a hospital in Germany. He was buried among some of his men of the Third Army in an American cemetery in Luxembourg.

Ruth Wilson Patton (1861-1928) was born in California. Her father was a pioneer and real estate developer in southern California, serving as mayor of Pueblo de Los Angeles around 1850. She married George William Patton (1856-1927), the son of a Confederate colonel and graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, in 1884. They settled at Lake Vineyard, California, where they raised produce and operated a winery. In 1902, he began working for Henry E. Huntington’s real estate development company, and he served as the first mayor of San Marino from 1913 to April 1922 and again from October 1922 to 1924. They had two children, George S. Patton Jr. and Anne Wilson “Nita” Patton (1887-1971).

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