the United States had entered World War II, making this the first time in United States Army history that a father and a son had both commanded the same division. Brigadier General Patton was Deputy Post Commander at Fort Knox, Kentucky during 1972. He was also Assistant Commandant of the Armor School at the same time. Patton was assigned to the VII Corps in Germany, as the Deputy Commander. He was stationed near Stuttgart, where Manfred Rommel, son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, was a government official who later became the city's mayor. The sons of the two former adversaries entered a much publicized friendship, which continued until Patton's death in 2004. The two men shared the same birthday, December 24. From 5 August 1975 to 3 November 1977, he commanded the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas. Awards and decorations Patton's military awards include: Badges Decorations Unit Award Service Medals Foreign Awards Post-military work and death In the years after his 1980 retirement, Patton turned an estate owned by his father located north of Boston into the Green Meadows Farm, where he named the fields after soldiers who died under his command in Vietnam. During the first years after his retirement from the Army, Patton was interviewed by journalist Kim Willenson for his book The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, which was published in June 1987. In the 1990s, Patton worked alongside author Brian Sobel to write The Fighting Pattons, a book that serves as an official family biography of his father as well as a comparison between the military of his father's generation and that of his own, a time which covered five conflicts and almost 70 years of combined service. The Fighting Pattons was published in 1997. He died from a form of Parkinson's disease at the age of 80 in 2004. Family name Patton was the fourth in his line to be named George Smith Patton. His great-grandfather, the first George Smith Patton, was a colonel in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Commanding a brigade at the Battle of Opequon, also known as the Third Battle of Winchester on September 19, 1864, he was wounded, captured and died. True to what would be a Patton family characteristic of never admitting defeat, Patton was mortally wounded in a nearly hopeless attempt to rally his men after his brigade