this country is at war with Germany. We shall go on to the end. I remember the

sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us for my guns.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the World War Two podcast.

I'm Angus Wallace. If you cast your memory back in episode 157 I was joined by Kevin

email. We discussed General Patton from the campaigns in the Mediterranean in 1942

through to just before his activation as third commander in 1944. Well Kevin is back. This time

we're going to be discussing Patton's arrival in France so to the Battle of the Bulge.

Kevin has worked as a historian for the US Army and he's also a tour guide for the Steven

Ambrose Historical Tourist. He's the author of Patton's Photographs War as he saw it and his

second book in What is to be a Trilogy is Patton's War and American General's Combat

Leadership Volume 2 August to December 1944. Kevin, welcome back. Now let's start with your

discovery about the Patton diaries. I mean this is a really important discovery for the

historiography of George Patton. And that was a big discovery and that was something that did not

make it into volume one. I discovered it in my volume two research and that is that in 1953

Beatrice Patton's wife put out a transcribed diary. You know all typed up for historians to be

able to use and basically every historian from 1953 to the present including myself have used

those diaries to write the Patton story. During the pandemic the Library of Congress

had this group called the For the People and what they did is they asked volunteers to transcribe

materials at the library and one of the projects they did was the Patton diaries and so they did a

word-for-word transcription of those diaries and it turns out that Beatrice put an entire paragraph

that Patton never wrote like major criticisms of other officers like General Lee who was in charge

of logistics predictions that Patton makes in the diaries that he never made you know glowing

...