While researching an article on Gen. George S. Patton, Kevin M. Hymel
made an astonishing discovery. Browsing the Library of Congress's Patton
index, he found lists of photo albums. Opening one, he found photos
Patton himself took during World War II, a gold mine of historical
photographs of which even Blumenson, Patton's official biographer, was
unaware. Patton photographed everything that interested him and produced
tableaux of the battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, and continental
Europe. For Patton, history was everything, and his Leica
camera-standard issue for reporters and historians in the U.S.
Army-ensured he could provide historians an accurate depiction of
events, free from interpretation. His photographs depict the victorious
face of war, with GIs on the move, military bridges under construction,
and tanks slicing through the countryside. They show defeat as
well-smashed German tanks, prisoners of war, and bodies strewn across
the landscape. Moreover, they provide a record of where Patton fought,
showcasing historic sights and the different terrain from North Africa
to Europe. Now, for the first time, many of Patton's personal
photographs are presented in one book for the reader to observe history
as Patton saw it. Hymel provides background information and captions for
the photographs and occasionally uses Patton's own words to describe the
sights. Patton claimed his hobby once saved his life. Stopping to take a
photograph in Italy, he witnessed a salvo of German shells exploding on
the roadway up ahead, where he likely would have been had he not
stopped. With Patton's Photographs, readers can now view that life
during the war through the eye of one of America's greatest commanders.
