What Churchill Said When He Learned Patton Was Relieved of Command

On October 2nd, 1945, Winston Churchill was at Chartwell when his secretary brought him a wire report. George Patton had been relieved of command of the Third Army. Churchill read it standing up. Read it a second time sitting down. Then he took a forty-minute walk on the grounds without saying a word — which his detective described as "extraordinarily long by any standard applicable to the Prime Minister." When he came back inside, he sat at his desk and wrote a letter. Not a press statement. A private letter to his personal physician, Lord Moran. Four paragraphs. The last one is the one people quote. "What I cannot make my peace with is the symmetry of it. The man is sent to govern because we have run out of things for him to destroy. He is removed from governing because he cannot be trusted to be diplomatic. And so we file him under History, which is where we put the people we admire too much to use and too much to forget." Churchill had followed Patton's advance through Germany with the attention of a man who had been a soldier himself. He knew what 28 casualties to cross the Rhine meant. He knew what 45,000 prisoners for 216 dead in the Harz Mountains meant. He had done that arithmetic. And he had watched the same man, three months later, compare the Nazi Party to a Republican-Democrat election fight. On the record. In front of journalists. Four months after the liberation of the death camps. His verdict, assembled from private letters and diary notes never meant to be published, was not what anyone expected from the man who had managed the Anglo-American alliance for four years. "He gave them the mechanism. He always gave them the mechanism eventually. The remarkable thing is how long it took each time." 🔔 Subscribe for more untold military history everyday.