In November 1944, at Third Army headquarters in France, a press briefing had been running for about 40 minutes. The briefing covered the usual ground: rates of advance, supply status, weather conditions, and the general shape of the campaign that week.
The reporters in the room were experienced war correspondents who had covered the European theater for months. They understood the limits of what they would be told, and the value of asking the right question at the right moment.
The reporter who raised his hand was not trying to embarrass Patton. He had covered the Army since the North Africa campaign and knew Patton well enough to recognize that this question might produce something worth printing.
He asked directly: was General Patton ever afraid of the Germans?
The other correspondents stopped writing. Patton looked at the man for a moment. Versions of this question had been put to him before, in different forms, and he had given different answers depending on his mood and his audience.
This version, asked in front of 20 reporters in a room where everything he said would reach millions of readers, required a particular kind of answer. He gave one.
"No," he said, "but they are afraid of me, and that is what matters."
Thomas Kerran had been covering the U.S. Army in Europe since the North Africa campaign in 1943. He had attended enough Patton appearances to understand the style Patton used when giving audiences what they had come to expect.
Kerran first met Patton in Tunisia, followed him through Sicily, and had been assigned to cover Third Army since its activation in France after the Normandy breakout. By November 1944, he had attended more Patton press briefings than any other correspondent on the European front.
Over that time, he had developed a fairly precise ability to distinguish between the Patton who was delivering publishable material for the record and the Patton who was doing something else for a moment.
The question was not entirely spontaneous. He had been thinking about it for weeks, considered different ways of phrasing it, and concluded that the most direct version was also the most useful, because it was the least likely to produce a prepared answer.
He was right about that in one respect. The first part of what Patton said was polished enough that it had been said before, or something very close to it. He was wrong in another way he had not expected.
Then Patton paused and added something that was absent from most published accounts that followed, because many of the reporters in the room chose not to include it. They found the first part sufficient, and the second part more complicated to print.
"I have been scared before," Patton said. "Any soldier who tells you he has never been scared is either a liar or he has never been anywhere worth being scared in. The question is not whether you are scared. The question is what you do about it. I have found that advancing forward very fast tends to solve the problem for me and for the Germans both."
The reporter who had asked the question wrote down both parts in his notebook as Patton spoke. He sent both to his editor in New York the same day in a cable written to include the full exchange, with enough context for the reader to understand why the second part mattered as much as the first.
The editor published the first part and cut the second. Not because it was inaccurate or unfit to print, but because the first part was the story, the headline, and the thing that would sell copies. The second part was the kind of qualification that makes headlines harder to write and stories harder to sell.
The version that appeared in newspapers the next day, "No, but they are afraid of me, and that is what matters," became one of the most repeated Patton quotes to come out of the European campaign. It was exactly the kind of thing people expected from Patton, which partly explains why it spread so quickly and partly explains why the second part was cut in the first place.
The answer that fit the established image of the man was easier to publish than an answer that complicated it. The second part was less quotable, not because it was less interesting, but because it required context.
"Any soldier who tells you he has never been scared is either a liar or he has never been anywhere worth being scared in" was a more useful sentence for understanding Patton than anything he said before or after it at that briefing. And that sentence was the one that disappeared from the record before most people had a chance to read it.
Kerran wrote in his memoir that he returned to his notes from that briefing many times in the years that followed, and that he remained convinced the second part of the answer was not an addition to the first but a correction of it.
The line about the Germans being afraid of him was a performance, while the honest explanation that followed was the truth, and presenting one without the other produced a version of the man that was accurate in its details and misleading in its overall effect.
Kerran wrote about the exchange in a memoir published in 1962, 17 years after the war. He wrote that he was angry at the time about the editor's decision: not because the deleted sentence was more dramatic, but because it was more honest, and because he felt that cutting it turned a complicated answer into a simple one and turned a complicated man into a simpler version of himself, easier to print but less accurate in reality.
He wrote that during his years covering Patton, he came to believe that the first part of the answer, the boast, the denial, and the sharp quotable line, was what Patton offered to rooms full of people and to an audience he was aware he was performing for. The second part was what Patton said when he briefly forgot he was still performing, or when he decided the man who asked deserved a real answer and trusted him enough to give one.
Kerran wrote that he was never entirely sure which of the two it was. He asked Patton about it directly in a private conversation a few months after the briefing. Patton looked at him and said he did not remember saying it, which Kerran took not as a denial but as a description of the state he had been in when he said it.
Patton feared exactly one thing throughout the war. According to people who served closely enough with him to notice it over time, it was not the Germans. Not in the sense the question implied. Not in the sense of the physical danger they represented or the professional challenge they posed.
What he feared in a specific and consistent way, which those close to him recognized, was being removed from the fight. He feared the administrative and political processes that had pulled him from command once before, during the slapping incident in Sicily in 1943, and he was aware they could do it again if he gave them sufficient reason.
He feared, in practical terms, the machinery by which men who had fought wars were sometimes removed by men who had not. And he carried that fear with a specific awareness that it could fulfill itself if he allowed himself to change his behavior in ways that attracted the wrong kind of attention.
It was not a fear he discussed openly. It surfaced sometimes in private letters, in comments to trusted aides, and in rare unguarded moments during conversations that people present later wrote down.
It was the kind of fear he categorized differently from the physical fear he described to reporters at the briefing, the kind that plants your feet in place while something terrible approaches, rather than the kind that runs through your body while you move forward.
Kerran wrote that during his years covering Patton, he reached the conviction that the first part of the answer, the boast, the denial, and the sharp quotable line, was what Patton offered to rooms full of people and to an audience he was aware he was performing for at every moment they saw him.
The second part, the honest description of what fear is and what a soldier does with it, was what Patton said when he briefly forgot he was still performing, or when he decided the man who asked deserved a real answer and trusted him enough to try to give one.
Kerran asked Patton about it directly in a private conversation months after the briefing, explaining exactly what he meant and asking whether he remembered saying it. Patton looked at him for a long moment and said he did not remember saying it, which Kerran took not as a denial but as a description of the mental state he had been in when he said it. A state in which the manufactured answer and the real answer were close enough together that the boundary between them was briefly permeable.
Kerran's 1962 memoir, which included his account of the briefing and the later private conversation, sold modestly and did not significantly change the established record of Patton quotes left by the war. The first part of the answer, printed in November 1944, remained the most widely circulated version, available in military quotation collections and in public accounts of Patton's life.
The second part, which Kerran wrote down, submitted, and watched his editor cut, remained in Kerran's notes and in a memoir relatively few people read. The Patton the public knew was built from the parts that were printed and published. The Patton the people around him knew was built from everything that remained.
The other journalists in the briefing room that day had made the same calculations as Kerran's editor, and most of them made them independently. Of the 20 correspondents present, four included some version of the second part of Patton's answer in their reports. Editors at three of those four cut it before publication.
The fourth, a correspondent for a smaller regional paper whose editor cared less about the quotability of military copy for headlines, ran both parts together in an article that appeared two days after the briefing and received little circulation.
The full exchange was in the published record. Technically, if you knew where to look. But most people did not know where to look, because most people did not need to. The first part of the answer was sufficient for what most people wanted from the story, which was confirmation that Patton was as they already believed him to be.
The war produced this effect consistently. The public character that emerged from press coverage and from the accounts that were printed and broadcast became gradually less complicated and more useful as a symbol, and less accurate as a description of the actual man who said specific things in specific rooms.
Patton understood this process and had complicated feelings about it. He had deliberately and skillfully manufactured his own public version, and he resented it when that public version was the only version available, which was almost always the case.
Kerran's memoir, in its final reference to the briefing, noted that the last time he saw Patton before his death in December 1945 was at a different press briefing a few months after the November 1944 exchange. He did not ask about fear at that briefing. He asked about something operational and received an operational answer, which he wrote down, filed, and saw printed.
He wrote that he considered asking the fear question again in a different form, but decided against it on the grounds that the first time had produced the most honest answer he was likely to get, and that asking again would only produce a more prepared version of the same exchange.