While cogitating on Abe Lincoln’s voice, I got to thinking about George “Blood and Guts” Patton and his voice. Patton’s voice is historically morphing in our minds into that of George C. Scott. Who doesn’t remember the scene in the movie Patton where George C. Scott, as Patton, appears before a gigantic American and address the troops in England in June 1944? One of the great moments in film, that.

The bad news is that, just as Lincoln surely did not sound anything like Raymond Massey, General Patton didn’t sound anything like George C. Scott. Patton, like Lincoln, had a rather high-pitched voice.

The good news is that you can still hear a clip of Patton’s real voice .

The really excellent news is the text of the actual speech General Patton made to the troops in June 1944 has been discovered, and it is quite something. Turns out that the version for the movie had to be “cleaned up” quite a bit, because General Patton was not shy about using profanity, including the liberal dropping of “F-Bombs.”

Here are some excerpts:

All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call “chicken shit drilling”. That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier. I don’t give a fuck for a man who’s not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn’t be here. You are ready for what’s to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you’re not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-asshole-bitch is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sockful of shit!

(snip)

An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about fucking!

(snip)

I don’t want to get any messages saying, “I am holding my position.” We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!

Read the entire speech (and the background of its discovery) here.

I can only imagine what General Patton would think of the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.