The old man laughed when he talked about dropping a jeep engine in forty minutes.

“I took an engine out in 40 minutes,” he said, holding up his hands as if the wrench was still there. “Four bolts off the transmission, radiator out, disconnect the manifold—pull the engine. Forty minutes. The guy from Willys made me a special little wrench so I could get my hand in there.”

He wasn’t bragging. He was remembering. And for John “Jeep” Mims, that knack with tools was the unlikely gateway to one of the most incredible vantage points of the Second World War: the driver’s seat for General George S. Patton Jr.

From 1944 to 1945, through France, across Europe, all the way to the end of the war, he sat just feet away from the most talked-about American commander of the conflict. He saw Patton up close—not the movie version with speeches, flags, and fanfare, but the man in dusty boots, the one cracking jokes, losing his temper, studying maps in silence, and sometimes sitting in a jeep with tears in his eyes when the war didn’t give him the ending he wanted.

This is Patton’s war, told from the front seat.

From the Motor Pool to the Front Seat

Mims was a mechanic first and a driver second. Born in 1918, he came of age between two world wars. By the time America entered the second, he could do more with a jeep than most men could do with a toolbox.

“You could drive it, sure,” he said. “But you could also open the hood and do whatever you needed under there.”

That mattered in an army that ran on wheels. It mattered even more when your passenger could not afford to break down at the side of a muddy French road. One good wrench, a set of calloused hands, and a talent for keeping vehicles alive under impossible conditions put Mims in a place very few men ever occupied—behind the wheel with Patton in the seat next to him.

He would later joke that he didn’t know anybody important in the war—“except that Patton.”

But that “except” changed everything.

A Side-Stage View of Patton

Most people saw Patton in newsreels, standing up in a jeep, helmet gleaming, his voice carrying over ranks of soldiers. Mims saw all of that too—but from three feet away, with mud on the tires and dust in the air.

“He liked the small car,” Mims said. “Easy to get around. While the others were on the half-tracks, I was with him. I saw the most of him.”

Patton didn’t talk much in the jeep. He rarely discussed home. Mims remembers that he knew the names of Patton’s wife and daughter, but that was about it.

“He never talked about home,” Mims said. “Always about the military. Always thinking. He’d look around and say, ‘Slow down. Turn here.’ And then he’d go quiet again.”

Quiet—but not idle. Mims could hear Patton thinking out loud at times, catching snatches of his internal debates.

“Sometimes he’d say, ‘No, that ain’t going to work,’” Mims recalled. “He was figuring something, then he’d just drop it. If it wasn’t right, he didn’t do it.”

There were flashes of humor, too.

Mims remembered once when Patton had just collected a pile of money—confiscated from a group of local women working around the troops. “I told him, ‘You should give me that money,’” Mims laughed. “And he says, ‘Well, if you want a check, I’ll make you out a check right now.’”

The general everyone feared could also be unexpectedly playful with the man who drove him.

Among the Men: Blood, Guts, and Respect

The image of Patton as “Old Blood and Guts” was real enough. The soldiers used to say, “Our blood, his guts,” and they didn’t always mean it kindly. But Mims insists they liked him more than they let on.

“The men liked him,” he said. “When he spoke to them, they clapped for a long time. He didn’t talk down to them. When he had fifteen or twenty guys around, he was just like you and me—man to man. The stars didn’t mean nothing at that time. If you had a better idea, he’d listen.”

Mims saw Patton get out of the jeep to help stuck vehicles, direct traffic through mud, and pitch in where the work was.

“One time the trucks were stuck in the mud,” Mims remembered. “He was out there, directing traffic, trying to get them out. Bradley saw him and said, ‘George, you’d make one hell of a good cop.’”

It wasn’t all speeches and swagger. In the field, Patton could be as hands-on as any sergeant.

The Helmet That Never Dull

If you’ve ever seen a photograph of Patton, you’ve probably noticed the helmet: glossy, almost too bright, with stars glittering on the side.

Mims helped make it that way.

“There’s the helmet, and then there’s the inner liner,” he explained. “He had three helmets. But this shiny one—that’s the one he always wanted to wear when he went out. He wanted it looking good.”

The crew went to work. A senior officer flew to a town and found lacquer. Lots of lacquer.

“We put eight coats on that helmet,” Mims said, laughing. “You could put anything on it—water, mud—and it just rolled right off. One guy dropped an egg on it and the egg just slid off.”

The stars on the jeep got similar attention. Mims kept two jeep stars as souvenirs. “He was a three-star then,” he said. “I took the stars off, kept two, gave one to another driver. I still have the two at home.”

As for the famous “pearl-handled” pistols? Mims grinned.

“They weren’t pearl,” he said. “They were plastic.”

He had found thick plastic scraps in a wrecked factory in Belgium and brought them to a craftsman in the unit. They carved and sanded the grips, painted them white, then coated them in lacquer until they shone like mother-of-pearl.

“They did a beautiful job,” he said. “He loved them. Walked around with those handles showing. I don’t know if he knew they were plastic. Maybe he did. Where are you going to get real pearl in a war?”

“Hell, the Hell I Can’t”

Mims says Patton’s favorite word was “hell.”

“When they told him he couldn’t do something, he’d say, ‘Hell, the hell I can’t. To hell with them.’ That was his word. Hell.”

Moderation was not his style. That drive—reckless to some, inspiring to others—made him both formidable and difficult.

Mims saw that fire in small moments few others witnessed. One of them came late in the war, when Patton got a call in the jeep.

“We had a radio,” Mims said. “Most of the time he kept it off. He didn’t want to hear that noise. ‘I know what I’ve got to do,’ he’d say. But sometimes he’d tell me, ‘Turn around,’ and we’d go back to a signal station and see if they had any messages.”

On this day, the message was from Bradley. The advance had gone as far as it would go. Agreements with the Soviets and high-level decisions meant that Berlin would not be in Patton’s hands. The Red Army would take the city.

“I remember, clear as anything,” Mims said softly. “He got that call, and you could see the drop in him. You could see tears coming out of his eyes. This is what he fought for. He wanted to get to Berlin.”

For all the bluster and for all the jokes, Mims saw a man who genuinely wanted to finish the job—who felt the refusal to let him take Berlin as a wound.

“He never went in, not that I know of,” Mims said. “We were right there, but he never went.”

Discipline, Timing, and That Meeting in the Red Schoolhouse

Patton was famous for demanding discipline, but Mims remembers a more precise kind of strictness: timing.

“If he said four o’clock, you better be there,” Mims said. “But sometimes he’d be earlier. He’d come over himself and shake you awake. ‘Let’s go.’ No bugler. Just Patton.”

One morning, they had to drive to the “red schoolhouse”—the building where German forces in the West would eventually surrender.

“He told me, ‘Do you know where that is?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I know.’ He said, ‘We’ve got to be there at three in the morning.’ So we went.”

When they arrived, the parking lot was full: Eisenhower, Bradley, Marshall, Hodges. The top of the American command.

“Ike came in a big Cadillac,” Mims recalled. “Patton saw him and said, ‘Drive over to his car.’ So we did.”

What happened next was pure Patton and pure Eisenhower.

“Ike says, ‘George, where’s your helmet?’ Patton says, ‘I don’t have to wear a helmet.’ Eisenhower says, ‘Your headquarters is closer to the front than anyone’s. You wear a helmet or there’s no meeting.’”

Patton turned around, got back in the jeep, and left.

“He said, ‘I guess I stuck my foot in my mouth again,’” Mims remembered. Later, properly helmeted, Patton returned and the meeting went ahead.

“He got mad sometimes,” Mims said. “But if he was wrong, he knew it. He’d say so, at least to himself.”

The Slapping Story—From Someone Who Wasn’t There

The slapping incidents that almost ended Patton’s career happened in North Africa, before Mims joined him. But the driver heard the story many times and had his own version of events, passed around among those who served close to Patton.

“Everybody says he hit that soldier,” Mims said. “From what I heard, the kid was nervous, shaking. Patton asked what was wrong. The kid said something, and Patton slapped him on the helmet with his gloves. Hit the helmet, not him. It was wrong, sure, but the media made it bigger.”

Mims believes it hurt Patton deeply, deeper than the public ever saw.

“It stayed with him,” he said. “He never talked about it to me. But you could see it. You could see him worry. We were all scared sometimes. You did what you had to do. You ducked when you had to duck. But he couldn’t tolerate someone giving up.”

A Man the Men Would Follow

Why did the troops follow him?

“He talked to them straight,” Mims said. “The stars didn’t mean nothing when he was with them. If you had something smart to say, he listened. He’d get out and help. He’d go up front first, before they even got there sometimes. They called him ‘Blood and Guts,’ but they liked him. They really did.”

Mims remembers the rough edges, the temper, the word “hell” punctuating sentences. He remembers worrying that the general would have a heart attack from how red his face got. He remembers being scared himself sometimes. But he also remembers a man who was always thinking, always pushing, and never asked his men to go somewhere he wouldn’t.

“He was a great general,” Mims said simply. “And a wonderful person. He liked his men. And they liked him back.”

Somewhere between the lacquered helmet, the plastic pearl grips, the carefully timed meetings, the quiet radio, the jokes in the mud, and the tears in a jeep when Berlin slipped away, the icon becomes human.

From the driver’s seat, George S. Patton Jr. was not a poster or a statue. He was a man—brilliant, flawed, intense, funny, driven—a man who could wake you up before dawn, argue with a five-star general, and then spend an afternoon helping dig vehicles out of the mud.

And for John Mims, that was the man he remembers.