April 1945, somewhere in the fractured heart of Therinjia, where American and Soviet advance units were days from shaking hands across the carcass of the Reich, a Soviet major stood at the threshold of a liberated concentration camp, watching American jeeps roll through the gates with their cargo of chocolate bars and cigarettes for the skeletal survivors. He turned to his political officer and smirked.

“Look at them,” he said in Russian, assuming no one would understand. Cowboys playing liberator. They think this war ends with handshakes and photographs. They have no idea what revolution costs. They’re soft, sentimental. They’ll go home and forget. And we’ll reshape this continent while they sleep. He laughed. A cold bark that echoed off the barb wire.

They beat the Germans. We’ll inherit Europe. Before we dive in, make sure you’re subscribed. Every week, we uncover the stories the world forgot. What he didn’t know was that one American officer standing 10 yards away spoke fluent Russian. And that officer’s name was George S. Patton Jr. And what that Soviet major didn’t know.

What none of them knew yet was that Patton had already seen this ending coming for months. He’d read it in the rubble of Warsaw, in the silence of the Polish underground fighters who vanished after liberation, and the way Soviet commanders drew lines on maps with the confidence of men who intended to stay. The war against Germany was ending.

But Patton was already convinced another war was loading in the chamber, and he was about to become the loudest, angriest, most politically radioactive voice warning that America was about to hand half of Europe to a tyranny as dangerous as the one it had just destroyed. This is not the story of tanks and bridges.

This is the story of a general who saw the future, tried to scream it into existence, and got silence for it. This is the story of how George Patton went from America’s most celebrated battlefield commander to a pariah begging Eisenhower to let him drive on Moscow. And it’s the story of why. 70 years later, some historians still wonder if he was a madman or a prophet. The seeds were planted long before Germany fell.

By the winter of 1944, the Red Army had torn through Eastern Europe like a typhoon, pushing the Weremach back across Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. Patton’s third army was hammering eastward from France, tearing through the Seagreed line, bleeding and freezing in the snows of the Arden.

But while Bradley and Montgomery focused on killing Germans, Patton was watching the maps and asking questions no one wanted to hear. Where were the Soviets stopping? Why were they fortifying positions in Poland as if they owned it? Why were they executing Polish resistance leaders who’d fought the Nazis on the Allied side? In December, during the chaos of the Battle of the Bulge, Patton pulled his intelligence chief aside and said it plainly.

We’re going to have to fight them sooner or later. Why not now while our army is intact and we’re already here? His staff thought he was venting. Patton wasn’t venting. He was calculating. He’d spent months watching Soviet behavior through intelligence reports, through interrogations of German prisoners who described the Eastern Front not as liberation but as apocalypse.

He read reports of mass deportations, of entire Polish villages emptied, of the NKVD shadow apparatus moving in behind every Red Army spearhead. He saw it with his own eyes when his advanced units linked up with Soviet forces in April 1945 at the Ela River. The handshakes were stiff. The smiles were rehearsed. The Soviets wanted no American patrols crossing into their zones.

They wanted no journalists photographing the columns of German refugees fleeing west, trying to surrender to Americans rather than face Soviet revenge. Patton watched at all and wrote to his wife, Beatatrice. I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them.

The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European but an Asiatic and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese or a Japanese. And from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. It was incendiary.

It was politically catastrophic. It was also by his own reading of history accurate. Patton believed in civilizations the way a medievalist believes in kingdoms. He saw the Soviets not as allies of convenience but as ideological barbarians wearing the skin of a modern state. And he believed the only language they understood was force. He was not subtle about it. He was not diplomatic.

At a press conference in May after Germany surrender, a reporter asked him about relations with the Soviets. Patton grinned like a man who’d been waiting for the question. The Russian has no regard for human life and is an allout son of a barbarian, and chronic drunk. I’ve seen their camps. I’ve seen how they treat their own. Don’t kid yourself. We’re going to have to fight them. The only question is when.

The reporters scribbled furiously. Eisenhower, sitting in Supreme Headquarters hundreds of miles away, felt his stomach drop. Marshall read the transcript in Washington and closed his eyes. Truman, barely 3 weeks into the presidency after Roosevelt’s death, was trying to negotiate postwar borders and reparations with Stalin at Potdam.

And now his most famous general was publicly calling the Soviets barbarians. The political establishment wanted Patton muzzled. Eisenhower wanted him muzzled, but Patton didn’t know how to muzzle himself. He doubled down. By June, he was in Bavaria commanding the occupation zone and the friction was escalating.

Soviet liaison officers demanded American forces pull back from certain sectors. Citing Yelta agreements that carved Europe into spheres. Patton refused unless he saw written orders from Eisenhower. He authorized his intelligence officers to debrief German where mocked officers about Soviet tactics, Soviet strengths, Soviet supply lines. He told his staff to retain German PSWs who’d fought on the Eastern Front in case we need them.

He began thinking about the unthinkable, rearming German units to fight alongside Americans against the Soviets. He never ordered it. He floated it in private conversations, testing reactions, building scenarios. One aid remembered him jabbing a finger at a map of Soviet occupied Europe and saying, “We should go to the odor line and tell them to get back where they belong.

I’ll be godamned if we’re going to let them take half of Germany and all of Poland and pretend it’s liberation. His rationale was strategic, not sentimental. The Red Army in the summer of 1945 was enormous, loaded, exhausted, but still deployed forward. Stalin had over 12 million men under arms, thousands of tanks, an air force rebuilt with Leniss aircraft. But Patton knew what others didn’t want to admit. The Soviets were brittle.

Their logistics were a nightmare. Their tank divisions ran on captured German fuel and American trucks. Their infantry was poorly trained, driven forward by NKVD blocking detachments. Patton believed, and some of his intelligence officers agreed, that if the United States struck immediately while it held air superiority, nuclear weapons, and forward positions in Germany, it could shatter Soviet power in Europe in 6 months. It would be bloody. Casualties would be catastrophic.

But Patton thought the alternative was worse. Letting the Soviets consolidate control, rebuild, and start another war in five or 10 years when America had demobilized and the nuclear monopoly was gone. He said as much to Eisenhower during a meeting in Frankfurt in late June.

Eisenhower listened with the patience of a man who’d learned to manage Patton’s outbursts. When Patton finished, Eisenhower leaned back and said, “George, you’ve lost your mind. We just finished one war. The American people want their boys home. Congress is already demanding demobilization. And you want to start another war with our allies? It’s insane.

” Patton stared at him. They’re not our allies, Ike. They never were. They used us to destroy Germany, and now they’re going to do to Europe what Hitler dreamed of. If we don’t stop them now, we’ll fight them later and it’ll be worse. Eisenhower shook his head. You’re not a politician, George. You’re a soldier. You don’t get to make these decisions.

Patton’s voice dropped. Dangerous and quiet. Then who does? Truman. He doesn’t even know what Stalin is. Roosevelt gave them half of Europe at Yaltta because he thought he could trust them. Now Roosevelt’s dead and we’re stuck with his mess. Someone has to say it. Ike. Eisenhower stood. That someone is not you. Drop it. Patton did not drop it.

He went back to Bavaria and started giving speeches to American occupation troops, telling them they’d won the wrong war, that they should have destroyed the Soviets while they had the chance. He told war correspondents off the record that the real enemy had always been the Communists, not the Nazis. He called the denazification program a waste of time.

Argued that low-level Nazi party members were no different than Democrats or Republicans in America, just people trying to get along. He said it publicly. He said it repeatedly. And in September 1945, Eisenhower had finally had enough.

He relieved patent of command of the Third Army and reassigned him to a meaningless paper command overseeing military history. It was a public humiliation. Patton, the man who’d driven across France faster than anyone thought possible, who’d broken the siege at Baston, who’d crossed the Rine and torn into Germany’s heartland, was now shuffling papers in an office. He was furious. He was heartbroken. And he was convinced history would prove him right.

In his diary, he wrote with the bitterness of a man who’d seen the future and been ignored. We promised the Europeans freedom. It would be worse than dishonorable not to see they have it. This might mean war with the Russians, but what of it? They have no air force anymore. Their gasoline and ammunition supplies are low.

I’ve seen their miserable supply trains, mostly wagons drawn by beaten up old horses or oxen. I’ll say this, the third army alone, with very little help and with damned few casualties, could lick what is left of the Russians in 6 weeks. You mark my words. Don’t ever forget them. Someday we will have to fight them and it will take six years and cost us six million lives.

It was prophecy wrapped in rage. And three months later in December 1945, Patton was paralyzed in a car accident near Mannheim, a low-speed collision that broke his neck. He died 12 days later, never having walked again, never having seen his warning proven or disproven. Some of his admirers would later whisper conspiracy theories that the Soviets had him killed, that American intelligence wanted him silenced.

There’s no evidence. What there is instead is a paper trail of cables and memos and diary entries showing that Patton had become a political liability so severe that even his friends wanted him quiet. But here’s the thing history doesn’t let go of. Patton wasn’t entirely wrong. Within 2 years, the Soviets had blockaded Berlin, forcing the United States into the airlift that nearly triggered World War II.

Within 5 years, they detonated their first atomic bomb and turned Eastern Europe into a prison. Within a decade, American boys were dying in Korea, fighting communist expansion. The Cold War patent predicted lasted 45 years, cost trillions of dollars, killed millions in proxy wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, and ended only when the Soviet system finally collapsed under its own weight in 1991.

Whether fighting in 1945 would have been better or worse is unknowable. But Patton had seen the shape of it before almost anyone else in the American command structure, and he tried to force the issue. The question that haunts the story is not whether Patton was right about the Soviets.

Most everyone came to that conclusion eventually. The question is whether he was right about the timing. Could the United States have won a war against the Soviet Union in 1945? The military historians argue both sides. Yes, the US had air superiority, nukes, better logistics, a professional officer corps, and Stalin’s own purges had gutted Soviet military leadership.

No, the Red Army was enormous, dug in, and America’s will to fight was shattered after four years of global war. The casualty projections for a US Soviet war in 1945 ranged from half a million to 2 million American dead, depending on how fast the Soviets collapsed or how long they ground forward. Truman wasn’t willing to bet those lives on a maybe.

Eisenhower wasn’t willing to gamble his reputation on a hunch. Marshall, the architect of victory, wanted peace, not another apocalypse. Patton wanted clarity. He believed in decisive action, in striking the enemy when they were vulnerable, in not letting sentiment cloud strategy. He saw the Soviets as existential threats, not temporary partners.

And he saw the American reluctance to confront that reality as weakness that would cost more lives later. He was not a diplomat. He was not a statesman. He was a killer who believed in winning wars completely and he thought the war wasn’t over. The irony is that Patton’s actual combat record against the Soviets was zero. He never fired a shot at them, never maneuvered against them. His entire argument was built on observation, intelligence, and instinct.

But his instinct was the product of a lifetime studying warfare. He’d read Caesar, Napoleon, Clausivitz. He trained his whole career to recognize when an enemy was postured for offense. And in the summer of 1945, he looked at Soviet deployments in Eastern Europe and saw an army that had no intention of going home.

He saw the same predatory patience he’d seen in German planning before the war, the same ideological absolutism, the same willingness to spend human lives like currency. and he believed that if America didn’t kill that threat while it was wounded, it would heal and grow and become unkillable. Eisenhower’s counterargument was equally simple.

You cannot ask soldiers to die for a hypothetical. The men who’d stormed Normandy and fought through the bulge had earned their trip home. They had defeated the clear and present enemy. The Soviet Union had not attacked America. It had not invaded Western Europe.

Starting a preemptive war of that scale would have destroyed the moral authority America had spent for years building. Eisenhower believed in alliances, in international order, in the slow grind of diplomacy. Patton believed in force. They were both brilliant. They were both patriots and they could not have been more opposed. The American public never really knew the depth of the split.

The press coverage of Patton’s relief was framed as a consequence of his loose talk about Nazis, not his fixation on the Soviets. But inside the Pentagon, inside the intelligence community, Patton’s warnings were circulating. Some officers quietly agreed. Others thought he was insane. By 1947, when the Cold War became official policy, when George Kennan’s long telegram and the Truman doctrine reframed the Soviets as adversaries, some of those same officers pulled out Patton’s old memos and wondered what would have happened if

they’d listened. The doctrine that emerged, containment, was Patton’s nightmare. It was not decisive. It was reactive. It let the Soviets dig in and spread and probe and bleed America in a thousand small cuts from Berlin to Saigon. Patton had wanted a single massive blow in 1945 that would decide the century.

Instead, America spent 50 years locked in a gray war of espionage and brinkmanship and proxy blood baths that never fully resolved until the Soviet economy imploded. Was that better than the millions who might have died in 1945? Was it worse? History doesn’t give clean answers. What history does give is the image of Patton paralyzed in a hospital bed in H Highidleberg, dictating letters and wondering if anyone would remember what he tried to say. He knew he was dying. He knew his career was over.

And he knew that his last fight had been with his own side, not the enemy. I’m probably going to die of this injury, he told his chief of staff. But if I do, remember what I said about the Russians. Somebody has to remember they did. Not enough to change anything, but enough to argue about it forever. The machinery of Patton’s argument wasn’t just rhetoric.

It was built on cold numbers, tactical assessments, and a reading of Soviet vulnerabilities that his intelligence staff had been compiling since the linkup at the Elba. While Eisenhower saw a victorious ally, Patton’s G, two officers saw an army held together by coercion and American gasoline. The statistics were damning if you knew where to look.

The Red Army’s tank divisions, terrifying on paper with their T-34s and Joseph Stalins were running on fumes. Soviet fuel production had collapsed during the German invasion and never recovered. By the summer of 1945, nearly 60% of Soviet fuel supplies came from American Lenley shipments. Cut that pipeline, Patton argued, and the Red Army grinds to a halt in two weeks.

Their vaunted mobility becomes a formation of steel monuments rusting in Polish fields. The same logic applied to their logistics. American intelligence officers touring Soviet rear areas reported supply trains that looked like museum pieces, horsedrawn wagons, oxarts, captured German trucks held together with wire and prayer. The Soviets had lost 27 million people during the war.

Their infrastructure was rubble. Their factories in the eurals were producing, yes, but the distribution network was medieval. Patton saw this and calculated that if the United States Air Force with its fleets of B7s and B24s and the new B 29 superfortresses struck Soviet rail hubs and fuel depots for 2 weeks straight, the Red Army would be immobilized before it could mass for a counteroffensive.

They’ve got the men, he told his operations officer, but they can’t move them. and an army that can’t move is just a crowd waiting to be bombed. His plan sketched out in those final months before his relief was terrifyingly simple. Use the third army and seventh army as the anvil dug into defensive positions along the line from Lubec to Lind, blocking any Soviet westward thrust.

Use Patton’s old armor doctrine, mobility, envelopment, speed to launch pinser movements from the north and south, cutting off Soviet forward elements in Germany and Czechoslovakia. Use air power not for strategic bombing of Soviet cities, which would take months and harden civilian resolve, but for tactical destruction of logistics and command, and use the atomic bomb.

Patton never said it explicitly in writing because the bomb was still classified when he was relieved. But his private conversations after Hiroshima make it clear. He believed two or three atomic strikes on Soviet troop concentrations or key rail hubs would shatter Stalin’s will to fight. The Russians can’t take what we just gave Japan, he said to an aid in August. They’ve already lost 27 million.

How many more will Stalin spend when he sees a whole division evaporate in a flash? It was monstrous. It was pragmatic. It was the logic of a man who’d spent 30 years learning how to kill efficiently and had no illusions about the cost. Patton didn’t see war as glorious. He saw it as necessary surgery.

And he believed that the longer you waited to cut, the worse the infection became. His estimation was that a war against the Soviets in 1945, prosecuted with American firepower and speed, would cost 200,000 American casualties, half a million Soviet casualties and 6 months. A war delayed 10 years, fought after the Soviets had atomic weapons, and rebuilt their industrial base would cost millions. He wasn’t a mad man.

He was a calculator running a brutal equation. But the equation required something America didn’t have in 1945. The will to start another war. Patton understood tactics and logistics. He did not understand politics. He didn’t grasp that Roosevelt’s vision of the United Nations and post-war cooperation had captured the imagination of the American public, that people wanted to believe the Soviets could be partners, that the alternative was too exhausting to contemplate. He didn’t see that Truman, thrust into the presidency with no

preparation, needed time to learn the game, needed Stalin as a partner at Potam to legitimize the new order. Patton saw all of that as weakness, as sentimentality that would get people killed later. And he was probably right, but being right doesn’t win political battles.

The evidence that Patton’s instincts were sound came in pieces over the next 5 years. Each one a small vindication that arrived too late. In March 1946, Winston Churchill stood in Fulton, Missouri, and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Patton had been saying it since April 1945. In June 1948, the Soviets blockaded Berlin, cutting off 2 million civilians and daring the United States to start a war over it.

Truman chose the airlift, a logistical marvel that delivered food and coal by the ton for 11 months until Stalin blinked. It worked, but Patton would have asked why it was necessary in the first place. If the Soviets had been beaten back in 1945, there’d be no blockade, no airlift, no crisis. In August 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb, years ahead of American estimates, ending the nuclear monopoly. Patton had warned that the window was closing. Now it was shut and then Korea.

In June 1950, North Korean forces armed, trained, and directed by the Soviets poured across the 38 parallel and nearly drove American forces into the sea. 54,000 Americans would die over the next three years, fighting a stalemated war that ended exactly where it started. Patton’s ghost haunted the Pentagon during those years.

officers who’d served under him, who’d heard him rant about the Soviets back in Bavaria, now found themselves in frozen foxholes in Korea, wondering if he’d been right. If we’d fought them in 1945, would we be here now? The question had no answer, but it wouldn’t go away.

The Red Army’s own documents, declassified decades later, suggest Patton’s assessment of their vulnerabilities was accurate. Soviet generals in 1945 were terrified of a western betrayal of the Anglo-Americans turning on them while the Red Army was extended and exhausted. Marshall Zukov in his memoirs admitted that Soviet forces were in no condition for another major war.

They’d won against Germany through attrition and brutality by feeding men into the meat grinder faster than the Germans could kill them. against the United States with its air power and industrial base intact. That calculus didn’t work. Zhukov knew it. Stalin knew it. That’s why Stalin was so careful in 1945 and 1946. Why he advanced through political subversion and coups rather than open invasion.

He was buying time rebuilding, waiting for the Americans to go home. Patton saw the window. He just couldn’t get anyone to climb through it. The irony is that Eisenhower, the man who shut Patton down, would spend eight years as president navigating the Cold War Patton predicted. Ike built NATO, stare down the Soviets in Berlin and Hungary, and authorized covert operations from Iran to Guatemala to contain communist expansion.

He never invaded the Soviet Union. He never launched a preemptive war, but he spent his presidency managing the consequences of not doing so. in 1945. Did he regret shutting Patton down? There’s no evidence he ever said so publicly. In private, some aids reported that Eisenhower would occasionally mention Patton during National Security Council meetings, usually with frustration.

George would have wanted to roll the tanks tomorrow. Whether that was nostalgia or acknowledgement of a missed opportunity is unknowable. What is knowable is the cost of the path America chose. The Cold War consumed six trillion dollars over 45 years. It killed millions in proxy wars. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and a dozen smaller conflicts where superpowers armed local factions to bleed each other.

It brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It poisoned American politics with McCarthyism and paranoia. It turned entire generations into weapons in an ideological struggle that neither side could win decisively. And it only ended when the Soviet economy, rotted by central planning and military overspending, finally imploded in 1991.

Patton’s war would have ended in 6 months one way or another. The war America actually fought lasted half a century. But Patton also would have paid a price no one was willing to pay in 1945. His plan would have required American soldiers to kill Soviets who’ just helped them defeat Germany.

It would have required explaining to the parents of dead GS why their sons died fighting an ally. It would have required the atomic bomb used not as a last resort against a fanatical enemy, but as a first strike weapon against a rival great power.

It would have shattered the United Nations before it began, destroyed any hope of international law, and reduced the postwar order to a smoking binary. American Empire or Soviet Empire with no middle ground. Patton was fine with that. He believed in empires if they were American. He believed in winning completely in making the enemies so terrified of your return that they never challenged you again.

It was Roman logic 1945 style and it had no place in the world Truman and Marshall were trying to build. The soldiers who served under Patton in the Third Army, who driven with him from Normandy to Czechoslovakia, had mixed feelings. Some thought he’d lost his mind, that his obsession with the Soviets, was poisoning his judgment. Others thought he was the only one telling the truth.

After his death, veterans would gather at reunions and argue about it, the way old men argue about the wars they almost fought. One tank commander remembered Patton telling his officers in July 1945, “We’ve beaten the Germans, but we haven’t beaten the enemy.” The enemy is the idea that you can enslave people and call it progress.

The Nazis had that idea. The Soviets have it now, and if we don’t kill it here, we’ll be killing it somewhere else for the rest of your lives.” The commander said Patton’s voice was quiet when he said it. Not angry, just tired, like a man who’d seen the ending. and couldn’t stop it. The ending Patton saw came true, just not in the form he imagined.

The Cold War wasn’t a clean fight. It was a grinding, ambiguous, half-lit struggle where victory was measured in borders held and dominoes that didn’t fall. America won eventually, but not through the decisive blow patent wanted. It won through patience, through outspending and outproducing the Soviets until their system cracked. It was Eisenhower’s way, not Patton’s.

and it worked, but it took 50 years and cost a fortune in blood and treasure that Patton believed could have been saved with 6 months of hard war in 1945. The final testimony to Patton’s warning comes from an unlikely source, a Soviet intelligence officer named Pavle Sudaplative, who ran and KVD operations in Europe during the war.

In his memoirs published in the 1990s after the Soviet collapse, Pseudaplative admitted that Stalin’s greatest fear in 1945 was not a renewed German threat, but an American turn. We knew the Americans could destroy us if they chose to, he wrote. We had no answer to their atomic bomb, no ability to stop their bombers, no logistics to sustain a westward offensive if they attacked. Stalin’s strategy was to consolidate what we held and pray the Americans went home.

When Patton was relieved, we celebrated. He was the only one who understood the opportunity they had. It’s a chilling admission. The enemy Patton wanted to fight knew he was right, and they were grateful he lost. Today, in the museums where Patton’s personal effects are displayed, his ivory handled revolvers, his maps, his bloodstained uniform from the car crash. There’s usually a section dedicated to his final months.

The plaques mention his controversial statements and his relief from command, but they rarely dig into the substance of what he was saying. The full story is uncomfortable. It forces questions about roads not taken, about the calculus of preventive war, about whether democracy can act decisively when the danger is still forming.

Patton believed it could not, that democratic societies were too slow, too sentimental, too addicted to hope to strike preemptively. He might have been right. But the alternative, living in a world where the United States launched a massive war against the Soviet Union in 1945 on the hunch that it would save lives later, is almost unimaginable. And yet that hunch turned out to be correct.

The Soviets were the next war. They did enslave half of Europe. They did build an empire on coercion and terror. They did force America into a twilight struggle that consumed two generations and nearly ended in nuclear winter. Patton saw it all before almost anyone else in the American command.

And his reward was to be called a wararmonger, a lunatic, and a political liability. Three months later, he was dead, never knowing if history would vindicate him or bury him. History did both. The Cold War proved he was right about the Soviets. The fact that it never turned into World War II proved Eisenhower was right about restraint. Both men were brilliant.

Both were patriots. And both were playing a game with stakes so high that getting it wrong meant the end of civilization. Eisenhower chose caution. Patton chose clarity. We lived with Eisenhower’s choice for 50 years, and it worked barely. We’ll never know if Patton’s choice would have worked at all. But here’s what we do know.

In the summer of 1945, when the world was exhaling after the most destructive war in human history, when soldiers were dreaming of home and politicians were dreaming of peace, one American general looked east and saw the next nightmare loading. He tried to sound the alarm. He tried to force the issue. And he was shut down, sidelined, and silenced.

Whether that was wisdom or cowardice, strategy or tragedy depends on who you ask and what you think the Cold War cost. The last thing Patton wrote in his diary a week before the car accident was a line from a poem he loved. Something about old soldiers fading away, but he added his own kod scratched in pen at the bottom of the page. The Russians are the enemy.

We should have destroyed them. We will regret this mercy. He died believing it. And for 50 years, every time a crisis erupted, Berlin, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, someone in the Pentagon would pull out those old memos from Bavaria and wonder if the old man had been Right.