WAS General George S Patton, known as the GI General and Ol' Blood And Guts, really the kind of folk hero America needed?

Autocratic, with an arrogance bordering on contempt, especially towards his superior, Eisenhower, he delighted in referring to the British field marshal, Montgomery, as 'the little fart'.

York war historian Charles Whiting traces the life of this enigmatic soldier in Patton's Last Battle, the eighth title in the Spellmount Siegfried Line Series, and goes a long way to try to unravel this complex character.

The book takes us through the dramatic battles in Europe in 1945, the last year of the war, when after the victory of the Battle Of The Bulge, Patton's 3rd U.S. Army raced through Germany in an effort to beat Montgomery to the Rhine.

The year ended with dismissal, despair and, eventually, death for this aristocratic, pistol packin', coarse, fighting man whose agility in leaping back and forth between vulgarity and shocking profanity and cultured, gentlemanly speech was bewildering.

The man who feared his wife more than the German Army and who fervently desired to die on the field of battle, expired peacefully in a hospital bed after being injured in a car crash in Germany in December, 1945.

His last journey to a cemetery in Luxembourg, where his body lies with those of 6,000 men who paid the supreme sacrifice, I found strangely moving.

Updated: 09:40 Wednesday, October 30, 2002