The Poem General Patton Did Not Write

The True Story of Merton Quirk, Morton Quirk, and General George S. Patton, Jr.

General George S. Patton, Jr.

W. Sterling Atwater (1934 photo)

Transcript (+ updated*) (Click to enlarge)

REFERENCE:  B  AND  B  3c-24614
FILE: INV. FORM  A62B-M. Q.

As Head of the Division of Provision for Revision

Was a man of prompt decision – Merton Quirk.

Ph.D. in Calisthenics, P. D. Q. in Pathogenics

He has just the proper background for the work.

From the pastoral aroma of Aloma, Oklahoma

With a pittance of a salary in hand

His acceptance had been whetted, even aided and abetted

By emolument that netted some five grand.

So, with energy ecstatic this fanatic left his attic

And hastened on to Washington, D.C.

Where with the vigor of a tracker, he went hunting for the slacker

In the lab'rinth of the W. P. B.

After months of patient process Merton's spicular proboscis

Had unearthed a reprehensible hiatus

In reply by Blair and Blair to his thirteenth questionnaire

In connection with their inventory status.

They had written – “Your directive when effective was defective

In its ultimate objective – and what's more

Neolithic hieroglyphic is, to us, much more specific

Than the drivel you keep dumping at our door.”

This sacrilege discovered, Merton fainted – but recovered

Sufficiently to write, “We are convinced

That sabotage is camouflaged behind perverted persiflage –

Expect me on the 22nd inst.”

But first he sent a checker, then he sent a checker's checker.

Still nothing was disclosed as being wrong.

So a checker's checker's checker came to check the checker's checker

And the process was laborious and long.

Then followed a procession of the follow-up profession

Through the records of the firm of Blair and Blair.

From breakfast until supper some new super-follow-upper

Tore his hair because of Merton's questionnaire.

The file is closed, completed, though our Hero, undefeated

Carries on in some Department as before.

And Victory is in sight, not because of – but in spite

Of Merton's mighty efforts in the War.

— W. S. A.

(Click to enlarge)

By Ron Clark and Merritt Clark
(contact info)

This article is an analysis of the publication history of the poem titled
    “REFERENCE: B AND B 3c-24614
      FILE: INV. FORM A62B-M. Q.”
The authorship of this poem has been incorrectly attributed to General George S. Patton, but it was actually written by W. Sterling Atwater, the great-uncle of this article's authors, and first published in April, 1943. The poem is shown in the sidebars to the right.

We also now know that the poem was widely re-printed in many newspapers and periodicals during the period 1943-1945, often under other titles, and mostly without any author credit. The publication history of the poem has only recently been able to be researched, due to the large number of old newspapers and books becoming available in digital format on the internet. This publication history, in over 100 worldwide newspapers and periodicals, is documented in this article. To use a modern term, the poem “went viral.”

There are interesting back-stories that describe how and why the investigation of this poem's history came about, but the important point is that the poem was published in a 1991 book of the collected poems of General George S. Patton, and has made its way onto a variety of internet websites, with Patton listed as the author. This authorship credit has been proven incorrect, and so acknowledged by the editor of the Patton poetry book.

Discussion of this poem, its versions, its many publications, and our investigations spreads in many directions. More detailed discussion is organized into the following sections:

• Overview
• Attribution to General Patton
• Discovering the poem 'went viral': W.S. Atwater's poem re-published, 1943-1960
• Evidence of widespread recognition
• The original 1998 investigation - Details
• Finding re-prints of the poem: 2016 and 2023
• Variations, modifications, & interesting cases
• Full list of publications of the poem
• W. Sterling Atwater's Second Poem

Overview: the original poem, attribution to General Patton, & our investigations

The poem was originally published on April 13, 1943 on page 1 of the Boston News Bureau, a now-defunct Boston newspaper. Microfilm archives exist at the New York Public Library. A copy of the poem as published on page 1 is shown in the sidebar to the lower right (click to enlarge), and in the transcript to the above right (click to enlarge). (Note: this transcript has a one-line update of language, explained later).
The initials “W.S.A.” appear with the poem, which is known (from family history) to be W. Sterling Atwater.

The poem was also published the next day, April 14, 1943, in the New Haven Register newspaper, with the initials “W.S.A.”, and the line “from the Boston News Bureau”.

We know from family oral history that W. Sterling Atwater enjoyed writing poetry and submitted poems to newspapers for publication. He told family members he wrote the subject poem, and gave an original clipping of the New Haven Register poem to his great-nephew around 1944, who memorized it and has enjoyed reciting it for many years. W. Sterling Atwater also had at least one other poem published by the Boston News Bureau newspaper, in 1944. This second poem was much more serious, and had its own sad story surrounding it; this part of the story is included at the very end of this article.

In 1991, the poem was included in the book “The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr.: Lines of Fire”, edited by Carmine A. Prioli. The version of the poem in this book had several small differences from the original April 1943 version, discussed later.

In 1998, two relatives of W. Sterling Atwater wrote to Dr. Prioli about this apparent incorrect attribution of the poem to General Patton, and Dr. Prioli acknowledged the error. In a letter of reply dated November 24, 1998, he wrote

“I must thank you for setting the record straight. It seems incontrovertible that your great uncle, W. Sterling Atwater, must have been the author of “Reference,” the poem I mistakenly attributed to General Patton.”

This poem was found on a typewritten sheet, among Patton's papers, along with many other poems written by him. The inclusion of the poem in the book of Patton's poetry was a simple mistake in attribution, at a time when none of the material currently on the internet was available. More detail about the attribution of the poem to General Patton is contained in the later section “The Patton Version of the Poem”.

Note: While this article focuses on the one poem that General Patton did not write, it should be noted that he was an avid amateur poet, as the 85 other poems published in Dr. Prioli's book demonstrate. Although Patton's poems were not published as a collection until 1991, his papers were publicly available to biographers in the Library of Congress, and the movie Patton (1970) contains a scene in which Patton recites several lines from one of his own poems, “Through a Glass Darkly”. (See this scene on YouTube, click here.)

The whole story of the investigation that led to the exchange of letters with Dr. Prioli is told later in this article, and Dr. Prioli's letter is reproduced.

In 1998, when the initial investigation took place, the only copies of this poem on the internet were taken from Dr. Prioli's book, and were located on a few websites devoted to information about General George S. Patton. Although crediting Patton as the author was incorrect, we did not undertake then to correct this misinformation.

When we came back 18 years later in 2016 to renew an interest in the history of the poem, we found two important changes:

• The digitization of old newspapers, books, and periodicals by companies such as Google, newspapers.com, and others has revealed a far more complex and interesting publication history of this poem than we could have imagined in 1998. In 2016, we found approximately 50 published copies of the poem between 1943 and 1960, mostly in the period 1943-1945. When we again re-visited this history in 2023, we found about 50 more published copies, snippets of the poem, and allusions to it.
• The incorrect credit to Patton as the poem's author continues to propagate on the internet, including an excerpt published recently (2016) in an article titled “What Patton's poems tell us about today” in the online magazine Foreign Policy, and

We have decided it's time to publicly set the record straight, with this article on the internet serving as documentation about the poem and its history.

It is requested that websites and other re-publications of this poem which propagate the incorrect authorship credit to George S. Patton make some note of the correct author credit. They are free to cite this article as a reference.

Attribution to General Patton

In 1991, the poem was included in the book The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr.: Lines of Fire, edited by Carmine A. Prioli.

In correspondence about the poem, in 1998, Dr. Prioli explained how the poem was included in the book of Patton's poetry.

As soon as I read your letter I went back to my files and located my copies of the Patton manuscripts. The poems themselves are deposited in two collections, one at the Library of Congress and the other at the US military academy at West Point. They exist in handwritten and typewritten form. The manuscript of “Reference” is contained in the Library of Congress archives along with most of Patton's other poems. I've enclosed a Xerox copy, so you can see that it's one of the typewritten poems. There are a few relatively minor differences between this version and the one that you sent me, but the major difference is that the copy in the Patton papers does not display the initials “W.S.A.” Had these initials been there, I would not have included the poem among those composed by Patton. (He did not always append his name to his poems, but whenever he did he used the initials “G.S.P.” or sometimes just “-G-.” The numbers in the margin are the ones I wrote on my copy of the poem.) However, since the poem was among Patton's other poems and there was no attribution to anyone else, I simply assumed it was written by the General.

I did have some reservations, though. The poem struck me as more polished than most of the General's other verses, even though the humor was very like his own. There were other minor problems, too, especially the reference to “the firm of Blair and Blair.” When I shared the poem with Patton's daughter, Ruth Ellen, she couldn't identify the reference either. But she knew her father's poetry better than anyone, and did not say that the poem was not his. In a way, I took her acceptance of the poem as an additional evidence of her father's authorship.

At the time the mistake was discovered, in 1998, Dr. Prioli offered a plausible explanation of how the poem might have ended up among Patton's papers, suggesting Mrs. Patton (who lived outside Boston during the war) saw the poem in the Boston News Bureau and re-typed it and sent it to her husband, who would have enjoyed the satiric commentary on Washington bureaucracy. Now, in hindsight it now seems almost certain that Patton's copy came from a different published copy of the poem, of which we now know there were many. And it was so widespread that anyone might have sent Patton a copy.

We have not tried to catalog the websites where the poem has been or currently is listed as one of Patton's poems. Websites come and go, and contents change. One can Google the phrase “division of provision for revision” or “checker's checker's checker”, plus “Patton” to find current websites containing the Patton version of the poem.

Discovering the poem 'went viral': W.S. Atwater's poem re-published, 1943-1960

The astonishing new news in 2016 when we revisited the poem story, and again in 2023, was the number of copies found on the internet in digitized old newspapers, journals and other periodicals, from the Washington Post to the Congressional Record, to The West Australian newspaper in Perth, Australia. The poem clearly resonated with many audiences during 1943-1945, and later. It seems to have found favor with anyone who interacted with the government bureaucracy during the war, which was of course nearly everyone. Based on the number of industry trade journals it has shown up in, the poem was especially popular in the industries supporting wartime production.

The list at the bottom of this page includes items from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. There are newspapers, trade magazines, law journals, and more. Amazingly, only a very few New England newspapers acknowledged it came from the Boston New Bureau and gave credit to “W.S.A.” as the author. In most re-prints, the author is mostly claimed to be anonomous, although a few indicate the poem was copied from another publication, or indicate the poem was submitted by a reader. A few seem to claim authorship for someone else entirely.

Evidence of Widespread Recognition

In addition to the many newspapers, journals, and other publications that printed the poem, later web searches have also uncovered a number of references to the poem that suggest it may have been widely known and recognizable, perhaps at least in certain industries or professions where the impact of bureaucarcy was felt. These sources for these examples are listed below under the heading References, Snippets and Other Uses. Examples include:

• A 1950 article in The Military Surgeon quoted the "checker's checker's checker" stanza, and said the poem "became popular in industry during the late war".
• In 1995 (!), a Penn. House of Representatives committee heard testimony that included a reference to "Merton Quirk" in the conetxt of excessive bureaucrary:

  "a bureaucrratic monstrosity that would impress even Merton Quirk".

  The speaker must have assumed his audience would understand the reference, as no explanation was offered.
• An interesting reference to the poem is contained in the publication Proceedings of the annual meeting of the American Warehousemen's Association (1943), in which a speaker is quoted as saying

  “It may still be mythical, but I heard about it coming east. I understand, Mr. McLain, that there is now going to be a Division of Provision for Revision. (Laughter) That alphabetical one hasn't come out yet, perhaps.”

  Laughter from the audience may indicate that there some recognition of the phrase among the audience.
• Examples or stories about other people who memorized the poem in the 1940's are even on the internet.
  • A interesting case is a YouTube video of a man reciting the poem. It can be viewed on this YouTube channel. Although the notes say Patton wrote the poem (presumably someone did an internet search), he very clearly says “spicular”, not “picular”, confirming he memorized some early published copy of the poem, not Patton's. (See Versions of the poem, later in this article).
  • A blog writer posted in 2019 a story about learning the poem from her father, who recited it from memory. See it here.

The original 1998 investigation - Details

The first phase of our investigation began in 1998. M. Clark, one of the co-authors of this article, memorized this poem around 1944, when he was given a newspaper clipping by the author, our great-uncle, W. Sterling Atwater. He has been able to recite it from memory ever since, and did so at a family gathering in 1998. As the conversation moved on to the topic of the relatively young World Wide Web - the internet - we jokingly wondered if “The Poem” had made its way onto the internet yet. We were amazed to get a “hit”, which turned out to be on a website devoted to information about General George S. Patton, Jr. Further investigation found the poem on this website had been taken from the book “The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr.: Lines of Fire”, edited by Carmine A. Prioli.

More research was needed using M. Clark’s original newspaper clipping, and it was found to have come from a local newspaper, The New Haven Register, April 14, 1943. The newspaper archives revealed what had been cut off the original clipping - an additional line that said “from the Boston News Bureau”. That original publication was eventually found, using the archives of the Boston News Bureau at the New York Public Library.

Meanwhile, M. Clark wrote to Dr. Prioli about the discrepancy, enclosing the New Haven Register clipping that included the initials “W.S.A.”. Dr. Prioli's reply is reproduced in this image. He agreed with the conclusion that W. Sterling Atwater was the author of the poem, as quoted earlier, and that the attribution to Patton was an error. He enclosed a copy of the typewritten poem as found in the Patton archives at the Library of Congress, and explained, as quoted earlier, why the poem was included in the book of Patton's poetry.

When and if a second edition of the Lines of Fire book is printed , it will correct this error. In 1998, we did not attempt to correct the information on websites that had taken a copy of the poem from the Lines of Fire book.

Finding re-prints of the poem: 2016 and 2023

The second phase of the investigation was in 2016, and focused on old newspapers and periodicals that had become available on the internet in digital format since 1998, and can be found using internet search tools such as Google, Google Books, Newspapers.com, and other search tools for specialized digital archives of old printed materials. This extensive searching was repeated in 2023, and even more digitized material was found.

One of the more interesting is The Gazette, from Montreal, October 30, 1943. The prologue to the poem, shown to the right, says

(Official publication, National Press Club, Washington)
(Editor's Note: The subjoined masterpiece appeared mysteriously and anonymously in the precincts of the War Production Board. It has been variously attributed to Donald Nelson and nearly every official under him.)

The publication of the poem in the National Press Club newsletter and other national publications (like The Washington Post, another secondary search result) could help explain how the poem came to be more widely re-published around the world.

Variations of the Poem

In 2016, we discovered almost 50 re-prints of the poem, in two primary variations described below. In addition, there were numerous minor changes in some re-prints, either small editorial changes, or typographical/transcription errors (One editor changed Merton's name to "Merton Jerque"). None of these re-prints were identical to the poem attributed to General Patton, which had its own unique typographical error, as described below.

There are three important versions of the poem:

• The original version as published in the Boston News Bureau and New Haven Register newspapers. The distinguishing markers in this version, compared to the others below, are the name of the character – “Merton Quirk” – and the last two lines, which do not contain the word “Doctor” (or “Dr.”). This version was also widely re-published (we now know) in 1943-1945.
• The second version was also widely published in 1943-1945, and we call it the “Morton” version. The character in the poem is “Morton Quirk”, and the last two lines are slightly different from the original, including the use of the word “Doctor”. We do not know how or why this variation of the poem originated.
• The third version is the “Patton version”. It almost matches the “Morton” version, but has the word “picular” in place of “spicular” in the other two versions. We speculate that this was a simple typographical error made by whoever typed the copy of the poem found in Patton's papers, starting from a “Morton” version.

* - We have changed one line in the transcript at the top of this article, substituting words that convey the original meaning without using offensive language. Several early published versions, as well as anyone who now recites the poem, make a change to the now dated and offensive phrase “. . . n*** in the woodpile ”.

List of Publications

The table below contains all the known publications of the poem, between 1943 and 1991, when the book “The Poems of General George S. Patton, Jr.: Lines of Fire” was published.

The table is a work in progress in several respects. Full citations, notes, and images of the publications are being worked on. There are also a few duplications, which may be the result of publications being digitized more than once and listed under slightly different titles in different catalogs.

Many of the images for Other Publications below are “snippet view” images from Google Books. Actual page images from these publications are not available online, even though the books have been digitized and indexed for searching.

W. Sterling Atwater's Second Poem in the Boston News Bureau

The other poem we know about, titled “The Time Will Come”, was published in 1944, on or about March 29. It is shown in the image to the right (click to enlarge), which is a later reprint of the poem that appeared in the Brown University Alumni magazine. A day or two after this poem appeared in the Boston News Bureau, the following article was published in the newspaper.

War sometimes carries its own strange touches of the dramatic or tragic, linked with the fates or fortunes of individual personalities caught in the great web of conflict. Occasionally there would seem to enter almost weirdly an element of prophecy or premonition.

Such an incident came yesterday to the notice of the Boston News Bureau in connection with a poem printed on its first page that day, entitled "The Time Will Come." That poem had feelingly told of the emotions which would greet those returning from battle or would lament the unreturning - the “tears of joy in welcome of the living” or else “the tears of sorrow for the dead,” - and also had bespoken the greater grief threatening a future world if those dead had died in vain and if the “hope and destiny of generations lie buried on the slope of Calvary.”

We learned that about noon yesterday, precisely when the author of those verses, W. S. Atwater, was showing the reprint to some of his associates in the Hope Webbing Company of Providence, R. I., was the moment when a telephone call came to him from the War Department informing him of the death in action in Italy of his son, Captain Charnley K. Atwater of the Air Corps.

Fate plays strange pranks.

(Click to enlarge)

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