When Eisenhower hung up, Bradley looked at him carefully.
“Did you just give him permission to advance as far as he wants?”
Eisenhower’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost a grimace.
“No,” he said. “I gave him permission to advance until he runs out of fuel… which should happen in about three days. Then we’ll see if Patton can work another miracle.”
Miracles, however, are often just audacity plus timing.
August 19th, the Seine.
The original Allied timeline had predicted the Seine would be reached in mid-September. Instead, reports came in that Third Army had reached it weeks early, and not only reached it—crossed it.
German forces tried to establish defenses on the far bank, hoping water would do what their battered divisions could not: slow the Americans. Patton’s engineers improvised crossings. Tanks forded shallow points. Infantry commandeered boats—anything that floated became a weapon. Within thirty-six hours, major elements of Third Army were across.
A German commander receiving the report muttered, “Patton can’t be across already. We just confirmed he was fifty miles away.”
“That was yesterday,” an aide replied.
The commander stared, and in that stare was the feeling of fighting something that does not obey ordinary rules. Fighting Patton was like trying to hit wind with a hammer.
Back at SHAEF, Eisenhower gathered his staff.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “Third Army has crossed the Seine on August nineteenth.”
He let the date sit in the air, because dates were the language of planning, and this date was an insult to the plan.
“Our timeline predicted mid-September,” he continued. “Patton is four weeks ahead.”
Silence.
Eisenhower looked down at the map again, at the arrows pointing toward Germany like spearheads. His voice softened—not with sentimentality, but with the sober recognition of what speed meant in human terms.
“That means we’re four weeks closer to ending this war,” he said. “That means thousands of lives saved. Cities not destroyed. Months of suffering avoided.”
He paused, then admitted something commanders rarely admitted out loud.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” Eisenhower said. “But George proved me wrong.”
And yet the war, stubborn as ever, had one more lesson to teach: no matter how fast you are, gasoline is still gasoline.
By August 25th, Third Army began to grind to a halt. Not because German resistance had suddenly stiffened, but because the fuel finally ran out.
Tanks sat silent by the roadside, their crews smoking and cursing, staring east as if sheer hatred could move steel. Entire divisions paused, not by order but by necessity.
The quartermaster reported what everyone feared.
“Sir,” he said, “we’re completely out.”
Patton’s anger was volcanic—not at his men, not even at his staff, but at the fact that victory itself could be stalled by something as mundane as fuel.
“How long?” Patton demanded.
“Maybe three days,” the quartermaster said. “Maybe a week. Depends on allocation priorities.”
“A week?” Patton exploded. “In a week the Germans will rebuild defenses. We could be in Germany right now if we had fuel!”
He called Eisenhower at once.
“Sir, I need fuel,” Patton said. “Every gallon you can spare. Third Army is sitting still and we can’t move.”
Eisenhower’s response came heavy with the responsibilities Patton did not have to carry.
“I know, George,” he said. “But fuel is limited.”
“Montgomery is sitting still!” Patton snapped. “I’m sixty miles from the Rhine. Give me the fuel meant for Monty and I can be across in three days.”
“George,” Eisenhower said, voice tight, “I can’t.”
Patton argued like a man trying to force a door with his shoulder. He spoke of ending the war before winter, before the Germans regrouped, before the Allied momentum cooled. He spoke of opportunity again, the way he always did, as if opportunity were a living creature that had to be hunted before it fled.
Eisenhower listened. Then he made a decision that would be argued over for decades.
“I’m giving priority to Montgomery’s operation,” Eisenhower said. “I’m sorry, George, but that’s my decision.”
Patton hung up.
For a moment he sat in silence. The kind of silence that is not calm but controlled, like a fist clenched so hard the knuckles whiten.
Then he turned to his staff and said words that sounded like a vow.
“Scrounge every gallon,” he ordered. “Captured German supplies. Abandoned vehicles. Anything. We’re not stopping. Not when we’re this close.”
But sometimes even Patton’s will could not conjure fuel from thin air. September arrived. Third Army sat, burning with frustration. Soldiers could see German positions in the distance—so close they felt like a taunt. It was like reaching the finish line and being forced to stand still.
Patton visited forward units, trying to keep morale from collapsing under the weight of the pause.
“We’ll get fuel,” he promised. “And when we do, we’re going all the way to Berlin.”
But privately, he wrote words that carried a bitterness history cannot erase:
We could have ended this war by Christmas. We had the Germans on the run. All we needed was fuel. But instead we stopped and now they’ll have time to rebuild.
Whether he was right—whether giving him fuel priority could have ended the war earlier, whether the risks would have been worth it—remains the kind of argument historians love because it can never be fully proven. War is not a laboratory; it does not allow reruns.
What is certain is what happened in August 1944: Patton moved faster than most commanders believed an army could move. He captured the advantage of chaos and squeezed it until it produced results. He advanced so rapidly that the enemy could not orient itself, and sometimes even his own allies could not update maps quickly enough to reflect reality.
His speed did not merely gain territory. It gained time. And time, in war, is measured in lives.
After the war, analysts would tally the figures like accountants trying to balance a ledger written in blood and gasoline. The distance covered, the prisoners taken, the towns liberated, the German units disrupted. They would marvel at how low Allied casualties could be when the enemy was never given the chance to form a coherent defense. They would write phrases that tried to capture what had happened: “one of the fastest sustained military advances in history.” They would compare him to ancient commanders and modern ones, to Napoleon and Hannibal, measuring speed the way men measure storms.
And German generals interviewed after the war would admit something in tones that carried both respect and dread.
“We could handle Montgomery,” one would say. “He was predictable. Methodical. But Patton—Patton appeared where he shouldn’t be. He moved faster than seemed possible. Fighting him was like fighting a ghost.”
Maybe that was the best way to understand it. Patton made himself difficult to fight not by becoming invisible, but by becoming too fast to be seen clearly. By the time you focused on where he was, he was already somewhere else, turning your plans into stale paper.
Which brings us back to that map table at Versailles, the pins that shouldn’t have been so far forward, the coffee cup set down carefully, the commander in chief staring at arrows that outran his own expectations.
“Good God,” Eisenhower said. “He’s already there.”
It wasn’t only surprise. It was admiration laced with frustration. It was disbelief threaded with relief. It was a recognition that Patton had done something that planning alone could not produce.
He had refused to accept that “impossible” meant “impossible.”
When told an advance couldn’t be made that fast, he made it anyway.
When told supply lines couldn’t support it, he improvised until they did.
When told to slow down and consolidate, he sped up.
And for a brief, blazing stretch of late summer in 1944, while other armies measured progress in miles per day, Patton measured it in miles per hour—until the war’s oldest truth finally caught him, not in the form of enemy bullets, but in the form of an empty fuel tank.
Even then, the legend remained: the general who was always ahead of schedule, ahead of expectations, ahead of what anyone thought possible.
The general whose movement forced even Eisenhower—steady, cautious, burdened with the whole war—to look down at the map and say, with a mixture of awe and alarm:
“Good God… he’s already there.”
