November 11th, aside from being Veteran’s Day, is also General George S. Patton’s birthday. It seems a complete coincidence that one of America’s greatest military commanders would share his birthday with America’s holiday celebrating its war veterans, but sometimes history just works out that way.

Patton served with distinction in the war that gave us Veteran’s Day — the Great War of 1914–1918. He was one of the U.S. Army’s first tank commanders, on the cutting edge of a new type of mechanized warfare that called for a fresh approach and bold thinking. He was wounded just days before the armistice, which fell on Patton’s 33rd birthday.

After World War II started, the Great War would forever be known as World War I. No one in 1918 could have imagined that such a brutal meat grinder would be repeated (and greatly surpassed) just 21 years later. Which was partly why the Great War was also known at the time as the War to End All Wars.

Patton didn’t buy all that “war to end all wars” business. He had no taste for politics and no love for politicians who had a nasty habit of leaving the military with yet one more war to fight. This is a view he would hold all his life, and it would come back to haunt him in later years.

Patton spent his time between the wars learning everything he could about modern warfare and sharing his findings with the military hierarchy. Unfortunately, the U.S. had little appetite for maintaining a strong peacetime Army, so Patton’s work was not greatly appreciated, much to his frustration.

Few people were as thoroughly martial in their view of the world as George Patton. The military ran deep in his blood. He could trace relatives back to the Revolutionary war. His paternal grandfather fought and died for the Union during the Civil War, and an uncle was killed during the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Young Patton was enamored of his family’s legacy, and he never wanted to do anything else in life except serve in the military. It was said that he got off to a slow start in school, but Patton later became something of a savant, reading voraciously and absorbing anything that had to do with military history and theory.

Patton went to West Point, and he also participated in the first pentathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. In 1916, he took part in the first motorized attack in the history of U.S warfare when the Army went after Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Patton’s firm belief in the power of the tank in battle and the utility of mechanized warfare made him the foremost authority on the subject in the American Army. It was for this reason that Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower turned to Patton to lead American forces in North Africa in 1942.

It was at this point that the myth of Patton began to take shape. Patton was always something of an outlier. Steeped in classical literature and culture, he fancied himself something of a romantic, an anachronism from a forgotten age. He believed in reincarnation, sensing prior lives in which he fought and died in some of history’s most consequential battles. He even wrote poems of such “experiences.”

When he got to North Africa, General Patton brought all his idiosyncrasies with him. He also brought with him a hard charging command style that earned him the nickname Old Blood and Guts. His staff, his men, and to a certain extent his superiors all put up with Patton’s outsized personality and his quirks because he produced results.

General Patton’s landing in North Africa is where the classic 1970 film Patton begins. Considered by many to be one of the greatest war movies ever made, and at the same time one of the most authentic biopics of a major historical figure, Patton is a marvel of filmmaking and storytelling, and it also makes for a decent history lesson.

Film producers had labored since the 1950s to bring Patton’s life to the screen. Pre-World War II George Patton in life had become something of a legend in the military community, but it wasn’t until his exploits in North Africa and Sicily during the first half of the war that the American public came to know Patton as we now remember him — a profane, controversial, bombastic, passionate man of action. It is for this reason that the film focuses exclusively on Patton’s exploits during World War II, even though his earlier life would still have made for a compelling feature.

The screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund North is based on Ladislas Farago’s Patton: Ordeal and Triumph and Gen. Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story. Bradley, who served under Patton and would later be his superior officer during the war’s final months, was also a consultant on the film. There is some controversy as to Bradley’s relationship to Patton and how much of Bradley’s own biases seeped into the film, but Coppola and North give viewers a serious examination of a man who truly loved what he did despite the carnage and devastation that his work wrought.

The words on the page might not have carried nearly as far had they not been given life by a spot-on cast led by George C. Scott in what would be his greatest role. He so embodied Patton that everyone who has grown up since the movie came out sees Scott when they think of the general.

Director Franklin J. Schaffner takes Coppola’s and North’s script and Scott’s performance and makes a classic film that was a box office hit, was loved by critics, and cleaned up at the Oscars. It was certainly in heavy rotation over this most recent Veteran’s Day holiday, which is a nice birthday gift to Old Blood and Guts.

The battle scenes are epic in scope and unlike anything audiences had seen up to that time, with maybe the one exception being 1962’s The Longest Day. While Schaffner takes full advantage of the 70mm canvas to put us right in the middle of World War II chaos, he still makes the simpler scenes of human interaction feel intimate. You would think that Scott as Patton would bust out of every frame, making the larger than life figure appear like a buffoon on screen. This is not the case. We get insight into Patton’s thinking, his beliefs, and his frailty. We are reminded that even the largest among us are still humans after all.

Not that Patton would have wanted it this way. He liked being the enigma, the unpredictable man, the mysterious figure. This is reflected in the film at one point when he dresses down his staff after getting pushback on his latest battle plan, shouting, “If we’re not victorious, let no man come back alive.”

One of Patton’s aides whispers to him, “You know General, sometimes the men don’t know when you’re acting.”

Patton turns to him with a smirk. “It’s not important for them to know. It’s only important for me to know.”

The Germans certainly bought the full package, and the film stresses this point several times with interludes at German headquarters where a young officer debates with Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces High Command. The officer is tasked with studying Patton to try and learn his next move. It is in these scenes, spoken in German with English subtitles, that we get some key points of Patton’s backstory, his early achievements, and the events that shaped his thinking and worldview.

The German military leaders respected Patton’s command abilities, his warrior mentality, and his disdain for mixing politics with warfare. In the film, it sometimes seems as if they are more sympathetic of Patton’s frustrations than his own commanders. His public slips of the tongue, his open disdain for America’s Russian allies, and his constant bickering with British Gen. Bernard Montgomery keep the Allied command staff on its toes. Patton’s behavior is more than some can stand.

When Patton slaps an enlisted soldier in Sicily for being a coward (in real life, he did this more than once), it is almost the last straw. Patton ends up on probation and sent to England to cool his heels while planning for the invasion of Europe goes on without him.

Schaffner’s film uses the slapping incident as the main character’s nadir, his symbolic death for all you drama students out there. Just at the moment when he thinks he is going to be sent home in disgrace, Patton rebounds. He is given command of the Third Army in Europe after D-Day, and kicks serious German ass. The film makes a point of noting that under Patton, the Third Army moved farther and faster and engaged more enemy divisions than any other army in U.S. history. It’s a record that still holds.

But the film, much like Patton’s life, does not end on a high note. The Germans are defeated and Patton is glorified, but he must share his victory with the Russians, who Patton is convinced are a bigger threat than the Nazis.

I don’t know how true to life the film’s final scenes are, but we are led to believe that Patton is so convinced that the communists must be stopped, that he suggests to Eisenhower’s chief of staff that America should rearm the Germans and get them to fight the Russians then and there while they still have the troops and the equipment ready to go. Patton is told he is “absolutely mad,” and shuffled off to oversee the de-nazification of Germany. His hopes of going to the Pacific Theater to fight the Japanese are quashed. In truth, that may have never been an option. The Pacific was not nearly big enough for Douglas MacArthur and George Patton.

Patton died in a car accident in December 1945, just as the post-war Cold War world that he helped usher in started to take shape. The movie ends before sharing that indignity with us, but Patton’s death is alluded to in the film’s final moments when he is almost crushed by a runaway ox cart. He laughs off the incident, remarking how odd it would be after all he’s been through to be killed by an ox cart.

I don’t often recommend Hollywood films as a way to learn about American history. Patton is an exception. It captures the life of one of America’s great military leaders in a way that, while not completely accurate, does respect its source material and offers a balanced account that many agenda-driven biopics fail to deliver. It’s a film that is almost, almost as big as its subject.