George Patton

The sensory life came first and never stopped. He rode in the 1912 Olympic modern pentathlon at Stockholm, studied swordsmanship in France, and redesigned the US Army’s cavalry sabre — the Patton sword of 1913 — around an argument about the physics of the thrust. In 1916 he chased Pancho Villa across Mexico in three Dodge touring cars and shot it out with Villa’s bodyguard at a ranch, an escapade that produced the first motorised action in American military history and, not incidentally, a great deal of press. Machinery that moved fast enough to be felt was the thing he loved.

So the tank found him. In 1917 he built the American Expeditionary Force’s first tank school from nothing at Bourg, learned the vehicles by driving and repairing them, and at Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne walked ahead of his own tanks under machine-gun fire until a bullet went through his thigh. Twenty-six years later nothing had changed except the scale. In Sicily, denied the glamorous drive on Messina, he improvised a series of amphibious hops along the north coast and got there first anyway. In France he was habitually at the head of a column rather than behind it.

What that proximity bought was speed of recognition. When Bradley’s Cobra bombardment cracked the line at Saint-Lô, Patton did not wait for the situation to clarify; he shoved armour through the Avranches corridor on a single road while the gap was still notional and accepted an exposed flank two hundred miles long as the price of momentum. It was reckless by every doctrinal standard and it worked, because he could see — not deduce, see — that the German front had stopped being a front and become a crowd.

The showman was also, in private, one of the most seriously read soldiers of his generation. His library ran to hundreds of annotated volumes — Caesar, Xenophon, Napoleon’s correspondence, the cavalry theorists, Rommel’s own Infanterie greift an — and he read them not for edification but for extractable principle. He worked out for himself, against the prevailing doctrine of his own army, that armour was not an infantry-support arm but an independent instrument of penetration, and he was saying so in professional journals in the 1930s when the American tank corps had been legislated out of existence.

Auxiliary Ti is what makes the difference between a brawler and Patton. The dash across France was improvised in its particulars and rigorously consistent in its logic: never reinforce failure, always feed the flank that is moving, keep the enemy’s decision cycle behind your own, hold ground only long enough to leave it. He could explain the reasoning at length to anyone who asked and frequently to people who had not. His profanity-soaked speeches to the troops concealed an argument — that casualties are caused by hesitation, that the fastest army is the safest army — which he had genuinely thought through and genuinely believed.

Ti also accounts for his contempt of procedure. He did not disdain staff work out of laziness; he disdained it because a rule that had stopped tracking the situation was, to his mind, simply false, and he saw no reason to obey a false thing. That is a coherent position. It also makes a man nearly ungovernable inside a coalition army whose entire operating premise was that everyone obeys the boundary lines.

Tertiary Fe is a loud, unreliable instrument, and Patton used it like a weapon he had not quite calibrated. He constructed “Old Blood and Guts” deliberately — practised the scowl in a mirror, cultivated the profanity, wore the pistols — because he had concluded that soldiers fight harder for a figure they can picture. It worked. Third Army’s morale in the winter of 1944 was a real strategic asset, and the men who complained loudest about him also boasted loudest about having served under him.

But an underdeveloped Fe reads a room by mood rather than by principle, and Patton’s failures were all failures of that instrument. In the Sicilian hospitals in August 1943 he encountered two men with no visible wounds, concluded on the spot that they were cowards infecting the wounded around them, slapped them, and screamed at the medical staff. He was not being cruel by policy; he was doing what he thought a commander must be seen to do, and his sense of what an audience needed was catastrophically wrong. Eisenhower forced apologies out of him — to the men, to the hospitals, to entire assembled divisions — and Patton performed each one, and the American press ended his chance of an army group.

He never learned. At Knutsford in April 1944 he told a small gathering that Britain and America — and, after a pause, Russia — would rule the postwar world, and the resulting furore came within a signature of sending him home. He wept in Eisenhower’s office. He was genuinely devastated by disapproval he had genuinely invited, which is Fe in the tertiary position exactly: enormously sensitive to the audience and almost incapable of predicting it.

Where an ESTP’s inferior intuition surfaces, it tends to arrive as conviction rather than analysis, and Patton’s took an unusually literal form: he believed he had lived before. He wrote poems about dying as a legionary and a Napoleonic cavalryman, told colleagues he recognised battlefields he had never visited, and spoke of having been recalled for a purpose he would recognise when it came. This was not a joke he was making. It was the mystical residue of a mind that had no ordinary channel for thinking about the future.

Operationally it left a real gap. He was a supreme corps and army commander and would have been a doubtful theatre commander, because he could not hold the whole board in mind — the shipping, the coalition politics, the postwar shape of Europe — and grew visibly bored when forced to. He raged at fuel priorities given to Montgomery without ever quite conceding that someone had to allocate them. He was a solver of the situation in front of him and a poor judge of situations that had not yet arrived.

The last year is Ni failing loudly. In occupied Bavaria he kept former Nazi administrators in office because they were the people who knew how the waterworks ran, then compared denazification to an American election squabble at a press conference and was relieved of Third Army. He began arguing that the Soviets should be fought immediately, which was intuition running unregulated in a mind with no apparatus for it. On 9 December 1945 his staff car collided with a truck near Mannheim; he broke his neck and died twelve days later, aged sixty, in a hospital bed — the one death he had never imagined for himself.

Why ESTP Over ESTJ

The clinching evidence is Falaise. Patton, moving, wanted to close the pocket by driving north past his own army boundary and annihilate an entire German army group. Bradley stopped him at Argentan because the rule existed and a collision between converging allied armies was the risk the rule was written against. Both men were being entirely themselves. One saw an opportunity that would be gone in a day; the other saw a system that would have to survive the whole war. History has mostly sided with Patton on the merits of that particular afternoon, and mostly with Bradley on the question of who should be running an army group — which is as fair a summary of the ESTP at high command as anyone is likely to write.