Author: Grumpy
General George S. Patton acknowledges the cheers of the welcoming crowds in Los Angeles, California, during his visit on June 9, 1945. Image: NARA
I met the man in my medical clinic. He was skinny and old. He looked like everybody’s grandfather. His right forearm was a mass of scars. I naturally inquired where he had acquired those.
A lifetime ago this small quiet man was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion huddled down inside a British-crewed LCA (Landing Craft Assault) boat churning toward Omaha Beach in the first wave. Have you seen Saving Private Ryan? Yeah, he really did that.
The man obviously survived the invasion as well as the hellish slog through the bocage country that followed. He lost two toes at the Battle of the Bulge and fought through the Hurtgen Forest. Along the way, he met General George Patton twice.
My friend said that Patton had an odd high-pitched voice that seemed incongruous with his alpha male persona. He told me that the man was as profane and flamboyant in person as the movie made him out to be. At one point my buddy was standing outside of a tent that had recently played host to a command briefing orchestrated by General Eisenhower. All the major players were there, to include Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery. As the meeting concluded, Patton and another General walked past. They were engaged in an animated discussion about what they had just heard, oblivious to their surroundings.
My friend related that he heard Patton say, “Ike doesn’t know how to fight a damn war! We need to hit ‘em in the flanks, and we need to pound them down until they don’t have any fight left in ‘em.”
Back then, being a general obviously did not require quite as much political sensitivity as might be the case nowadays. Patton would not make it past captain in today’s army. However, my buddy’s first-person observations help put meat on the bones of the historical figure that was arguably America’s most audacious General.
Origin Story
George Smith Patton, Jr. was born in Los Angeles in 1885. He had a younger sister, Nita, who was, for a time, engaged to marry John J. “Blackjack” Pershing. When he was young, Patton had great difficulty learning to read and write. He had to repeat a year at West Point when he was unable to pass mathematics. However, the young officer had other latent skills that made him an exceptionally capable combat leader.
In addition to a diagnosable excess of ego, Patton was terrified he might miss out on war. He called in every favor he could find and was eventually assigned as Pershing’s aide during the 1916 Punitive Expedition to fight Pancho Villa. That was where he first saw the elephant.
Like most young men, 2LT Patton was full of fire and vinegar. Once he arrived in theater he found a place filled with danger and intrigue. Mexican bandits were everywhere, and American soldiers had to be forever on their guard. As a result, when the young officer hit a local watering hole with his mates all wearing civilian clothes, he stuffed his M1911 pistol in his belt, just in case.
Patton already exhibited some exceptional skill at arms. He held the title “Master of the Sword” based upon his facility with a cavalry saber and was an Olympian who placed fifth in the 1912 pentathlon. Had he been given credit for two rounds that likely passed through the same hole while firing his .38-caliber Colt target revolver he would have taken gold. However, once he got lubricated at the bar, something untoward occurred and his M1911 accidentally discharged.
No one was hurt, but the young man soured on John Browning’s esteemed hogleg. As a result, he sent off for a Single Action Army revolver for which he paid $50. He later had the gun fitted with ivory grips and extensively engraved. He carried the weapon with an empty chamber under the hammer and used it to kill a pair of Mexican bandits. I saw the gun on display in the Patton Museum when I was kid, replete with the appropriate notches in the grips.
Serious War
Patton followed Pershing to Europe for World War I where he developed a keen interest in the burgeoning science of tanks. He toured the French Renault plant where the FT tanks were being produced and received a block of instruction on their operation. When the first 10 tanks were presented to the US Army, Patton personally backed seven of them off the train. He was the only soldier in the US Army with any tank-driving experience.
Patton led the first US armored forces into combat at Saint Mihiel in 1918, often walking in front of the vehicles under fire to guide their drivers. In the heat of battle, he struck an American soldier over the head with a shovel to motivate him to dig and later admitted that he may have killed the man. A gunshot wound to the pelvis took him out of the rest of the war.
The Big Time
World War II was without precedent in human history. In 1939, there were 174,000 troops in the US Army. At its apogee during the height of the war, that number reached 8 million. Such explosive expansion offered unprecedented opportunities for advancement. George Patton rode that wave.
Patton’s military service in WWII has been exhaustively documented elsewhere, but here’s an overview. He served in North Africa and subsequently commanded the Seventh Army during Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. The controversy surrounding Patton’s slapping of a soldier suffering from battle fatigue circled the globe. Additionally, Patton was implicated for his part in the infamous Biscari massacre wherein American troops shot Axis prisoners claiming the flamboyant General had directed them to do so during a motivational speech. However, an investigation by the Inspector General of the War Department cleared Patton of any wrongdoing in the matter.
Nevertheless, Patton was placed in command of the “Phantom Army” based in the UK and intended to draw German attention away from the D-Day landings.
Once Patton was unleashed upon the continent, his reputation as a fire-breather veritably exploded. Patton led his Third Army on a hell-for-leather charge across France and then helped break the back of the German assault during the Battle of the Bulge. By the end of the war, Patton was a four-star General and a legend in the eyes of the American people. He famously died in an auto accident at age 60 on 21 December 1945. Controversy orbits around the details to that event to this very day.
Ruminations
General George Patton was a visionary commander who thrived in the radical space of the war. Audacious, bold, and utterly addicted to war, Patton was a natural combat leader. Though his lack of political sensitivity nearly scuppered his career on numerous occasions, he was nonetheless one of the most effective military officers the United States has ever produced.
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 book The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson opined while observing his good friend Sherlock Holmes, “… that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”
In the late Victorian era, Holmes’ hair trigger was most likely a Webley British Bull Dog revolver. His box of Boxer cartridges most certainly came from England’s most prominent ammunition manufacturer—Eley.
Vintage Eley Brothers cartridge display board. (Photo courtesy of Christie’s, London.)
The Beginning
Some 30-odd years before Holmes took pot shots at the wall, brothers Charles and William Eley established an ammunition factory on Tile Kiln Lane, London. It quickly grew—both in size and reputation—that it became a key supplier to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Around the same time, its first .22 rimfire cartridges were produced.
During the years between the two World Wars, Eley merged with Nobel and Kynoch to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) which produced All-Range, a .22 rimfire competition cartridge, in an attempt to make a dent in a market dominated by U.S. companies. However, World War II put a stop to any research and development on improving All-Range. When smallbore competition resumed in Britain in 1946, Eley had little choice but to begin production of All-Range where it left off. That left British shooters who were unable to get U.S. ammunition at a severe disadvantage. U.S. products averaged about 1050 fps, while All-Range’s velocity was 1180 fps, making it very susceptible to wind.
ICI Tenex box. (Photo credit: “Tenex Story” published by the Eley Corporation.)
At the time, ICI sponsored a rifle club which had a stable of fine British shooters. It was not too successful though, having to use All-Range while other clubs were free to use U.S. products. This came to a head at the 1949 National Small-bore Rifle Association’s (NSRA) Scottish Meeting when Arthur Skinner, an ICI employee (but not a member of the ICI Club) shot a very rare 300×300. He was congratulated by ICI Ammunition Director J.B. Nevitt, who asked what ammunition he used. Nevitt was less than happy to find out the clean score was produced by Western Supermatch Mark II. Soon afterwards. Skinner was both a member of the ICI shooting team and heavily involved with the development of competition .22 ammunition.
Over the next two years, Skinner concentrated on designing production machinery and the facilities to house them. A major change was development of a wet styphnate priming compound and the machinery to spin it into the cartridge case rim. This was followed by research into finding an appropriate propellent. However, in an economy still recovering from war, circumstances dictated that a readily available supply of surplus military powder was obtained and reprocessed. While this was less than ideal, economics dictated that it would have to do for the time being.
What is old is new. Winchester produced the first know individual cartridge packaging in 1931 when they brought out Precision Five Star. A cardboard insert designed to hold the cartridges nose down both protected the bullet and provided a handy loading block as opposed to the old sardine can packaging for bullet to base. Eley improved on it about 70 years later.
With the new ammunition to debut at the NSRA’s 1951 Scottish Meeting, a name was needed. U.S. ammunition came in boxes with confidence inspiring names like Peters “Tack Hole” and “Dewar Match,” Remington produced “Palma Match,” Winchester had “Precision” and “EZXS,” and finally Western “Super Match.” Eley needed something more emphatic. Arthur Traies, the shooting promotion officer, came up with it—Tenex.
Tenex did well in Scotland, winning the Class A aggregate as well as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph Trophies. Eley management was cautiously jubilant awaiting the results of the Bisley Meeting a month later. They were overjoyed when the major events, the Earl Roberts British Championship and the Bisley Grand Aggregate, were won by Tenex, marking the first time that ICI ammunition had won either event.
Lones Wigger’s Favorite Ammunition
Despite its success Tenex was still new. Until the mid -960s, when U.S. manufacturers began to back out of the match ammunition business, it shared the spotlight with U.S. ammunition. Tenex grew in popularity and soon became the gold standard for smallbore competitive ammunition. Much of its popularity was due to its use by the legendary Lones Wigger who built his shooting sports career on Tenex. The only exceptions are when he was using RWS in the 1964 Olympics, and a short period when the patriotic rifleman backed the U.S.-made Federal match cartridge. Such was Wigger’s influence, it was said that if he won the national championship wearing bib overalls and a straw hat, the shelves of clothing stores in Port Clinton would be stripped bare of those items by morning. The same may be said of Wigger and Tenex. It is a rare photograph taken at a shooting match where he is not prominently displaying the Eley logo on hat or shirt.
Lones Wigger.
By way of improvement, ICI’s Nobel Division developed Acurex powder to replace the reprocessed military surplus powder. After six Eley employees were killed in an explosion in 1973, the company focused on developing a new primer compound. The development of Eleyprime, a dry priming compound in 1979, as well as special tooling for injection of it in each cartridge case in a tightly controlled and evenly distributed amount, contributed to increased employee safety. Not only that, it was a major improvement in the quality of the ammunition.
Eleyprime wasn’t the only change for Tenex in 1979. The familiar 50-round cardboard box, “Pasteboard” Eley, was replaced by the now ubiquitous plastic box, which also serves as a convenient loading block. Quite the innovation at the time, it too has evolved from a simple tray and cover, held in place by a label, to a more secure sliding tray whose label displays lot number and velocity. (See the evolution of Tenex packaging from “Pasteboard” Eley to the newest plastic slide drawer box in the photo at the top of this article.)
Being British, Eley management was probably not aware of Satchel Paige, Hall of Fame pitcher and philosopher, whose Six Rules for a Happy Life included, “Don’t look back, someone may be gaining on you.” By the late 1990s, a look back might have helped as Tenex was losing market share. One serious challenger was Dynamit Nobel’s R50. Other competitors were the Russians—who were manufacturing small amounts of Olymp (Olimp) rimfire ammunition for its world class shooters and those lucky few who had both the contacts and rubles to get it—as well as Federal’s Gold Medal Ultra Match, Finland’s Lapua and Italy’s Fiocchi.
Several brands of U.S. match ammunition that Eley ended up replacing.
Next Generation
Feeling the pressure, Eley marshaled its formidable technical and engineering expertise to improve Tenex performance. In March 2001, 50 years after its introduction, Eley unveiled the newest iteration of its flagship product. Gone was the traditional round nose bullet, replaced by a wad cutter shape lubricated with Eley’s proprietary beeswax tallow formula. Cases featured a new crimping, and powder was measured electronically for consistency. To showcase the new cartridge Eley doubled down on Arthur Traies’ Tenex—touting it as Tenex Ultimate EPS, the EPS standing for Eley Priming System.
Tenex approaches its 70th birthday with an enviable reputation. It has been used to win 125 Olympic medals since 1964, not to mention countless medals at World Championships and regional games, numerous U.S. championships, and even more NRA Regionals and Sectionals.
Eley’s patented flat nose profile provides stability to the bullet during flight.
And today, just perhaps, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes might unlimber his Westlake Britarms .22 Long Pistol, one of the few pistols still allowed a subject of the Crown, reel a target down range at his shooting club, and with a couple of boxes of Tenex, adorn it with a patriotic E. R. II. (The royal cypher of Queen Elizabeth II.)
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