True. However, in this regard he was an idiot. As FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and everybody else in power fully realized.
His idea was to make a separate peace with the Germans, then ally with them to fight the Russians.
While this might in theory have been a wise military/political strategy, it utterly ignores the way America works. Here we are just winding up a major war, looking to go home, and the president pitches us into an even larger war with no end in sight, against a former ally.
This might have been a viable strategy for Louis XIV or Frederick the Great. Had FDR or Truman tried it, the only result would have been Congress cutting off funds, or possibly a successful impeachement and removal from office.
And that isn’t even recognizing its effect on the American military itself. Our Army wasn’t then, and isn’t now, simply a robotic force the president can deploy exactly as he chooses. How do you think American soldiers in western Germany would have reacted to being told they now were faced with fighting USSR? Which had turned out so very well for Germany.
“His idea was to make a separate peace with the Germans, then ally with them to fight the Russians.”
Did he ever seriously propose that, or was it just some bravado big talk that he knew wasn’t practical? Even a cursory look at the Nazi armies at the end of the war shows a destroyed, exhausted and shattered force.
Not to mention they were so abysmal morally that an alliance side by side would have been an anathema.
How do you expect men who saw the death camps, the SS, Orador, Malmedy, etc to suddenly operate jointly with those monsters?
This was Patton just pipedreaming, theres no way he was serious.
And the overarching goal of the Russians was no more invasions from Europe as had happened numerous times. So they decided to hold and rule the areas invasions came from. Simple as that. Nothing short of an American Barbarossa could have stopped that goal.
On the other hand, we could have gone nuclear very soon. Cool parlor game, and I suspect that’s exactly what Patton was doing.