Killing Patton Part 19

There is no medical staff waiting to rush Patton into surgery, no crack team of spinal specialists a.s.sembled to deal with this life-threatening traumatic injury. For some reason, no one at the hospital answered the radio call from the accident site. So it is just a sleepy Sunday afternoon in Heidelberg, where the Neckar River flows slow and green past the legendary Philosophers' Walk.

When the ambulance arrives, all this changes.

Patton mumbles something as a young doctor leans over him.

"Is there anything you want, sir?" the doctor asks.

"I don't want a d.a.m.ned thing, Captain," Patton tells him. "I was just saying Jesus Christ, what a nice way to start a vacation."

George S. Patton is wheeled into an examining room, and eventually Allied authorities are given the top-secret information that one of America's great heroes is incapacitated. Two days later, his wife, Beatrice, and a spinal cord specialist arrive in Germany to be at his side. Doctors believe the strong general will survive his injuries and might be able to regain some mobility.

At the very least, he should be able to travel soon.

They are wrong.

28.

MORGUE.

U.S. ARMY 130TH STATION HOSPITAL.

HEIDELBERG, GERMANY.

DECEMBER 21, 1945.

7:00 P.M.

George Patton's body is wheeled down to a makes.h.i.+ft morgue in the hospital bas.e.m.e.nt. The room was a horse stall back in the days when this building was a German cavalry barracks. It might have made more sense simply to keep Patton in Room 110, where he died, but the humiliation of his body being stored in a stall is nothing compared to the grisly spectacle that will unfold if a photograph of the dead general's body is splashed across front pages of newspapers worldwide. Hiding Patton in the bas.e.m.e.nt is the best way to avoid the horde of journalists that has descended upon this tiny military hospital. Sergeant Meeks makes the concealment complete by bringing Patton's personal four-star flag to the hospital, where he s.h.i.+elds the general's body by draping the flag over his corpse.

There will be no autopsy, at the demand of Beatrice Patton. The doctors quietly insist, but she will not bend on this issue. Beatrice cannot bear the thought of her beloved Georgie being carved up. Instead, she mourns him by making plans for Patton's funeral. There are many issues that need to be confronted immediately. For instance, the hospital has no morticians, and thus no one capable of preparing the body for burial. There are also no caskets, so one will have to be flown in from London. Finally, there is the matter of where George Patton will be laid to rest.

Beatrice wants him buried at West Point, where he can be surrounded by soldiers for eternity.

The army says no. Of all the thousands of Americans who have died on foreign soil during the Second World War, not a single man has been s.h.i.+pped home for burial, due to the cost. Vast cemeteries in Europe and Asia now hold the American dead. As distinguished as Patton might be, allowing him to be buried anyplace other than Europe would set a dangerous precedent.

"Of course he must be buried here," Beatrice Patton says when she is informed of this policy. "I know that George would want to lie beside the men of his army who have fallen."

Christmas is just days away. The decision is made to bury Patton before the holiday, rather than wait until afterward. He is laid to rest at the American Military Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg. Neither Gen. Dwight Eisenhower nor President Harry Truman attends. One German newspaper, the Sddeutsche Zeitung of Munich, will write eloquently about their former enemy's burial: "In spite of the pouring rain, thousands lined the streets from the central railroad station along the tracks to the cemetery, in order to render this last homage to the dead general. Hundreds of people walked from the capital to attend the burial ceremonies. Representatives of nine countries and highest-ranking officers of the American troops stationed in Europe followed the coffin ... While the gun carriage with the coffin was on its way from the railroad station to the cemetery, a French battery fired a seventeen-round volley of salute. During the burial, a military band played the Third Army March. After a brief religious service, the coffin was lowered into the grave."

Pallbearers carrying Patton's casket in Luxembourg Patton once wrote, "I certainly think it is worth going into the army just to get a military funeral. I would like to get killed in a great victory and then have my body born [sic] between the ranks of my defeated enemy, escorted by my own regiment, and have my spirit come down and revel in hearing what people thought of me."

George Patton did not suffer the death he once longed for. But his body has been borne through the streets of a defeated Germany, and on this day he has had his military funeral.

Afterword.

If you have read Killing Kennedy, you know that Martin Dugard and I are not conspiracy theorists. We write from a factual point of view with no agenda.

But the death of General George S. Patton presents a disturbing picture if one fully accepts history's contention that his demise was simply the result of an accident.

We begin with Sgt. Robert Thompson and his two friends, who were responsible for plowing into Patton's car. Shortly after the accident, Thompson claims to have been flown to England by army intelligence for his own safety, due to the number of American soldiers who wors.h.i.+pped Patton and would perhaps have wanted to cause Thompson physical harm. However, just four days after the collision, Thompson mysteriously makes his way back to Germany. There, he is interviewed by American journalist Howard K. Smith. In the wire service story Smith files on December 13, Thompson claims that Patton's driver was speeding and at fault.

Thompson also a.s.serts that he was alone in the truck when it struck Patton's limo, but Gen. Hap Gay and PFC Horace Woodring swear there were two other people in the truck with Thompson. Indeed, a report dated December 18, 1945, by the Seventh Army provost marshal specifies that a German civilian employee of the 141st Signal Company of the First Armored Division (Thompson's company) named Frank Krummer was in the truck at the time of the accident. The name of the other pa.s.senger was not mentioned.

But that report, like every other doc.u.ment relating to the accident, has disappeared. So the veracity of Thompson's story was never officially challenged. His version of events was not vetted by the military police. He was not arrested or detained for anything having to do with the accident.

Robert Thompson soon vanishes from the historical record, surfacing only after he dies in Camden, New Jersey, on June 5, 1994. Frank Krummer also disappears. And if there was a third occupant of the vehicle, his name remains unknown to this day.

Despite Patton's rank and fame, the military police doc.u.menting the accident treated it as nothing more than a fender bender. The crime scene investigation was conducted by Lt. Peter K. Babalas, the MP who arrived first on the scene. Military police from his 818th MP Battalion at Mannheim questioned both drivers, made notes about the damage to both vehicles, and wrote up a standard accident report. Though Patton's driver testified that "the driver and his pa.s.sengers were drunk and feeling no pain," Sgt. Robert Thompson's blood alcohol levels were never tested and he was never charged with driving under the influence. Thompson's possession of the Signal Company's truck also went unquestioned, despite the fact that he was almost sixty miles north of his duty station, with no apparent reason for being in Mannheim on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. His a.s.sertion that at the time of the accident he was turning into a quartermaster's depot to return the truck does not hold up, as the depot was still several hundred yards down the road. George Patton, in fact, commented about the depot when Woodring drove past it.

Thompson's drunkenness, negligence, and apparent larceny went unquestioned. In fact, the first MP on the scene attempted to arrest Private Woodring, Patton's driver. It was only through the intercession of Gen. Hap Gay that the MP let Woodring go free.

The case was then declared closed. There was no formal inquest, no attempt to speak to Patton in the hospital about his version of events, and no inquiry after his death. Sgt. Robert Thompson's military records, which might have detailed any further actions that were taken against him, were burned on July 12, 1973, when fire swept through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroying nearly eighteen million official military personnel files.

Incredibly, Lieutenant Babalas's report has also vanished. A 1953 request for a copy of the report by the Gary, Indiana, Post-Tribune received an official response from the army noting that, first, the "Report of investigation is not on file;" second, "Casualty Branch has no papers on file regarding accident"; and third, "There is no information re the accident in General Gay's 201 [personnel] file."

Seeking more information about the death of his friend, Gen. Geoffrey Keyes, commander of the Seventh Army, immediately launched a probe of his own into the accident. But Keyes's report, too, went missing. In fact, the only report that remained in circulation was a curious doc.u.ment that was allegedly written in 1952 and signed by PFC Horace Woodring, Patton's driver. When asked about it in 1979, Woodring swore that he had never made any statements or signed his name to any such report. He believed the paperwork was completely fabricated.

Attempts by the authors of this book to find the official accident report were unsuccessful. If it does exist, it is well hidden.

In 1979, OSS Jedburgh Douglas Bazata made the astounding a.s.sertion that he was part of a hit team that lay in wait for Patton's limousine. He claimed that after the crash, he fired a low-velocity projectile into the back of Patton's neck in order to snap it. When Patton did not die immediately, Bazata said, the general was murdered in the hospital by NKVD agents using an odorless poison. Bazata also swore that Wild Bill Donovan paid him ten thousand dollars plus another eight hundred dollars in expenses for his role in Patton's death.

But many believe that Bazata's story is far-fetched. No projectiles were ever found, and surely Woodring and Hap Gay would have seen any a.s.sa.s.sination team. However, Bazata held to his story. On September 25, 1979, he described Patton's a.s.sa.s.sination to four hundred and fifty former OSS agents gathered for a reunion at the Was.h.i.+ngton Hilton.1 Bazata does have some credibility. He was heavily decorated for his service as a Jedburgh, winning the Distinguished Service Cross, four Purple Hearts, and France's Croix de Guerre with two palms.2 After the war ended and he left the army in 1947 as a major, Bazata led a flamboyant life. He remained in France, where he studied wine making and had a successful career as a painter, with the d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco each sponsoring a showing of his work. Bazata himself was the subject of a painting by the eccentric artist Salvador Dal, who put the former Jedburgh on canvas dressed up as Don Quixote. The British art critic Mark Webber, writing in 1969, noted that Bazata had "lived a life eventful enough for a dozen novels."

Among the former OSS members gathered in the ballroom of the Was.h.i.+ngton Hilton when Bazata made his claims to have killed Patton, there was much conversation. Some believed him. And even after the astounding claim, Bazata was hired to work for the U.S. government, during the Reagan administration, as special a.s.sistant to Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. Upon his death in 1999 at the age of eighty-eight, Bazata was the subject of a lengthy obituary in the New York Times that made no mention of the claims that he'd killed Patton, which were widely known.

However, in 1974 a work of fiction ent.i.tled The Algonquin Project, by British writer Frederick Nolan, was published that tells the story of an a.s.sa.s.sin who creeps up on Patton's vehicle immediately after the accident and shoots a low-velocity projectile into the general's neck. It has been confirmed that Bazata read this book. However, two former Jedburghs who knew Bazata well, along with journalist Joy Billington of the Was.h.i.+ngton Star, claim that he confided to them about the Patton a.s.sa.s.sination as early as 1972, two years before the book was published.

The strange death of George S. Patton should be reexamined by American military investigators. Although the trail is ice cold, technological advances could solve some of the puzzles.

There is no doubt that General Patton died a hero, and history certainly honors that to this day. But the tough old general did not go out on his own terms, and there are many unanswered questions surrounding his death. Those questions deserve to be addressed.

BILL O'REILLY MARTIN DUGARD.

MAY 2014.

Postscript George Patton once stated that he wished to be buried with his men, and so he is. Many of the five thousand interred at the American Military Cemetery just outside Luxembourg City are Third Army soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton's burial site became such a popular postwar attraction that the hordes of visitors made it impossible for gra.s.s to grow around his grave or those nearby. So on March 19, 1947, his body was exhumed and moved to the location where it now rests, in a solitary spot apart from the long rows of white crosses, at the very front of the cemetery. The location suggests that Patton is still leading his men.

A devastated Beatrice Patton flew home to America the day after her husband's funeral. It was Christmas, but she had given herself over to grief and mourning. There would be no holiday for her.

In their thirty-five years together, she and George Patton endured countless separations as he waged war in Mexico, Africa, France, and Germany. In the letters he wrote during these long times away from her, she came to know his innermost thoughts and his deep love. George Patton had dyslexia, which makes spelling, reading, and writing a ch.o.r.e, so the very act of writing was as much a symbol of his love as the words themselves.

But there would be no more letters from George Patton. As his body was lowered into the cold, wet ground of Luxembourg, Beatrice Patton's grief was almost overwhelming.

Patton's grave Her beloved Georgie was no more.

Beatrice Patton never remarried. Her grandson James Patton Totten, speaking in 2008, admitted that she hired several private detectives to look into her husband's death. Each of these investigations was unsuccessful in finding any hard evidence of an a.s.sa.s.sination.

A lifelong equestrienne, Beatrice suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm while galloping across a field outside Hamilton, Ma.s.sachusetts, eight years after her husband's death. Though Mrs. Patton immediately fell from the horse, she was dead before hitting the ground. As noted earlier, she had long made it clear that she wished to be buried with her husband. When the U.S. Army refused to allow her to be interred at the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, her children smuggled her ashes to Europe and sprinkled them atop the grave of George Patton.

The hospital where Patton died remained a U.S. Army installation until July 1, 2013. At that time, the 130th Station Hospital, or Nachrichten Kaserne as it later became known, was closed and handed over to the German government. With the exception of a small ceremonial plaque that was hung outside the door, Room 110 was not treated with any fanfare after Patton's death, and was long used as a radiology lab. In the course of researching this book, a visit was paid to the facility to see this very special room. The place where Patton died was quite ordinary. Coincidentally, this visit occurred just hours before the decommissioning, making Martin Dugard the last American visitor to enter Patton's hospital room before it was handed over to the Germans.

PFC Horace Woodring, driver of Patton's Cadillac at the time of the accident, returned home to Kentucky after the war. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower took the time to a.s.sure him personally that he had not been at fault in the auto accident that paralyzed the general. Nevertheless, Woodring was devastated by Patton's death. "I felt like a kid who had lost his father," he later remembered, "because that's how I felt about him. I had every admiration in the world for the man. I just thought he was the greatest." When Woodring's wife gave birth to a son, they gave him the middle name of Patton. Woodring and his family moved to Michigan in 1963, where he sold cars and rode snowmobiles to indulge his penchant for speed. Woodring died of heart disease in a Detroit hospital in November 2003. He was seventy-seven years old. Until the day he died, Woodring a.s.serted that the accident that killed Patton was inexplicable.

The hero of the Battle of Fort Driant, Pvt. Robert W. Holmlund, who won the Distinguished Service Cross, was promoted posthumously to staff sergeant. Strangely, he has become a historical mystery. Staff Sergeant Holmlund is not listed as being buried in any of the American military cemeteries in Europe; nor is he buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Capt. Jack Gerrie was sent home to Wisconsin for a thirty-day leave after the battle for Fort Driant. On his way back into Europe, he pa.s.sed through a depot, to await transportation to his unit. While there, on December 29, 1944, Gerrie was killed when a captured German gun he was examining fired into his head.

German generals Ernst Maisel and Wilhelm Emanuel Burgdorf, who came to Erwin Rommel's home bearing the field marshal's fatal suicide pill, lived two very different lives after that day. Maisel was promoted to lieutenant general (Generalleutnant) in the waning days of the war and placed in command of the Sixty-Eighth Infantry Division. He was captured by American forces on May 7, 1945, released two years later, and lived out his days in the mountains of German Bavaria, where he died on December 16, 1978, at the age of eighty-two.

Burgdorf was long dead by then. In fact, he had committed suicide five days before Maisel was taken prisoner. Called to Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker during the final days of the war, Burgdorf witnessed the Fhrer's signing of his last will and testament. Three days later, Burgdorf shot himself in the head rather than be captured by Soviet troops.

Just prior to Burgdorf's suicide, fellow bunker residents Joseph and Magda Goebbels chose a most grisly death. On May 1, 1945, Magda Goebbels medicated her six children with a drink containing morphine. She then cracked a vial of cyanide into their mouths as they slept, killing them one by one. She and her husband later went up out of the bunker, where she bit into a cyanide pill and Joseph Goebbels fired a bullet into the back of her head. Goebbels then killed himself with a pill and a simultaneous gunshot.

The other elite members of the n.a.z.i Party died in similar fas.h.i.+on. SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who was captured by the British three weeks after fleeing Berlin, killed himself in prison with a hidden cyanide pill. Hermann Goering, the corpulent head of the Luftwaffe, was arrested by American troops on May 6, 1945. On September 30, 1946, he was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. But Goering, who openly laughed and joked during the Nuremberg Trials, and declared that gruesome films showing n.a.z.i concentration camp atrocities were faked, did not want to die a public death. With the unwitting help of Herbert Lee Stivers, a nineteen-year-old American army guard, a cyanide ampoule was smuggled into Goering's cell and he committed suicide. A local German girl who had caught Stivers's eye while he was off duty convinced him to carry "medicine" to Goering hidden inside a pen. Afterward, Stivers never saw the girl again. "I guess she used me," he lamented when Stivers finally admitted what had happened. He did so in 2005, sixty years after the fact, explaining that he was still bothered by a guilty conscience.

Goering's body was put on public display in Nuremberg before being cremated.

Manfred Rommel, son of Erwin Rommel, returned to his post as a Luftwaffe antiaircraft gunner shortly after his father's forced suicide. He soon deserted and surrendered to French forces. After his release from captivity, he went to college and then entered politics, where he became mayor of Stuttgart and a leading liberal voice in postwar Germany. Magnanimous and much admired, he refused to run for national office, despite the widespread belief that he could have risen to chancellor. Rommel formed friends.h.i.+ps with the sons of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and George S. Patton. He died on November 7, 2013, at the age of eighty-four.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower returned home a hero. He did not believe that a military officer should interest himself in politics. So despite widespread popular support for an Eisenhower presidential candidacy in 1948, he accepted a position as head of Columbia University, in New York City, rather than running for office. However, he soon changed his mind. He was elected president of the United States in 1952 and 1956, serving two terms. When doctors told him that his chain-smoking was a hazard to his health, Eisenhower quit the four-pack-a-day habit cold turkey. He died of heart failure on March 28, 1969. He was seventy-eight years old.

Kay Summersby, Ike's Irish wartime consort, did not share in Eisenhower's success. She married and soon divorced, then became engaged for a short time to a man who mistakenly thought she was wealthy. After that, she wrote two tell-all books about her relations.h.i.+p with Eisenhower. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the two continued to meet secretly. Kay Summersby died of liver cancer in 1975, at her home in Southampton, New York.

The life of Jean Gordon, Patton's wartime consort, ended on an even more tragic note. Shortly after the general's death, she and Beatrice Patton had a heated meeting in New York. The precise words that pa.s.sed between them are unknown. Jean Gordon committed suicide on January 8, 1946, by ga.s.sing herself in a friend's apartment. No suicide note was entered into evidence by police. However, Patton family legend states that a message found at the scene read, "I will be with Uncle Georgie in heaven, and will have him all to myself before Beatrice arrives."

Omar Bradley, the general with whom Patton sparred so often during the war, went on to serve for almost forty years in the army, rising to the rank of five-star general and serving as army chief of staff. He oversaw American forces in the Korean War, and later consulted with President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. He also served as a consultant on the movie Patton, which won the actor George C. Scott an Academy Award for his portrayal of the general. Bradley lived to be eighty-eight.

Ironically, Winston Churchill enjoyed an even longer life. Though overweight, a heavy drinker, and rarely seen without a cigar, Britain's wartime prime minister lived to be ninety. He died on January 24, 1965, seventy years to the day after his father pa.s.sed. Potsdam was the last great moment of World War II for Churchill. He flew home from Potsdam on July 25. The next day, he learned that he'd lost the general election in a landslide to Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who was voted in by an electorate weary of all individuals a.s.sociated with the grueling war effort. The election results were a shock to Churchill's Conservative Party, who thought his wartime exploits made him a shoo-in, but polls later show that the British people believed Labour was better poised to rebuild the nation. The tables were turned in 1951, when Churchill was once again elected prime minister. He served from 1951 to 1955, whereupon he resigned, citing a series of strokes and his advanced age of eighty. In his later life, Churchill spoke candidly about the state of the world. His funeral was the largest such state ceremony in world history until that time, with delegates from 112 nations coming to pay their respects. As his casket was borne down the Thames aboard a barge, the dock cranes lining the waterway lowered their jibs in salute. He is buried in the Churchill family plot at St. Martin's Church in Bladon, next to his wife, Clementine. They were married for fifty-six years.

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for thirty years, dying at the age of seventy-four from a stroke and complications of heart disease brought on by years of heavy smoking. Ironically, his life might have been lengthened if doctors had reached him more quickly after his stroke, but Stalin's standing orders that his guards never enter his room worked against him. Though they thought it odd that he did not come down for breakfast or lunch on March 1, 1953, his guards refused to disobey his orders, thus delaying medical a.s.sistance. He died four days later. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but a subsequent examination of the body suggests that Stalin may have been murdered after someone slipped an odorless and tasteless rat poison named warfarin into his wine the evening before he collapsed. His body was embalmed, then placed in a mausoleum next to that of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, where it was on public display in Moscow's Red Square until October 31, 1961. Stalin's remains were then removed and interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Lenin's body is still on display.

Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov, the Russian general who won the Battle of Berlin and later shared a review stand with George Patton, lived a tempestuous life after the war. Long viewed as a political threat by Joseph Stalin, he was stripped of his job as commander of Soviet ground forces in early 1946 and rea.s.signed to a post far from Moscow, in Odessa. He was recalled to Moscow in 1953, and Stalin's death one month later allowed Zhukov once again to become a political force. Zhukov oversaw the arrest and execution of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, after which he became a close adviser to the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. On his sixtieth birthday, in 1964, Zhukov was named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He died of a stroke in 1974; his ashes are interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, moved to New York after her husband's death, where she lived for a time in suites at the Park Sheraton hotel while pursuing several prominent causes. She was one of the first delegates to the United Nations, where she oversaw the pa.s.sing of a doc.u.ment known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which promises basic freedoms to men and women throughout the world. Russia, quite notably, abstained from voting in its favor, due to a clause known as Article Thirteen, which a.s.serts people's right to travel freely from one country to another. Eleanor traveled widely, and gave more than one hundred lectures each year. She died on November 7, 1962, from a combination of aplastic anemia and bone marrow tuberculosis. She was seventy-eight. Eleanor Roosevelt was laid to rest next to FDR at their family home in Hyde Park, New York.

His time at the helm of the OSS marked the peak of Wild Bill Donovan's lifetime of adventure. He played a significant role in the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created by the National Security Act of 1947. However, President Truman was reluctant to allow him to lead the organization. Donovan returned to his law practice in New York, but once again left the law, in 1953, to a.s.sume the role of U.S. amba.s.sador to Thailand, at the behest of President Dwight Eisenhower. Donovan's mental faculties soon began to slip, and he spent the last years of his life in a state of dementia. He died on February 8, 1959, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Was.h.i.+ngton at the age of seventy-six. Wild Bill Donovan is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Gen. George Marshall, the man who served as army chief of staff during the war, died in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight. In his lifetime, he served as general of the army (the most senior soldier in the U.S. Army), secretary of state, and secretary of defense; was Time magazine's Man of the Year; and won the n.o.bel Peace Prize in 1953. His most enduring legacy was the creation of the Marshall Plan, which allowed Europe to rebuild itself after World War II with financial a.s.sistance from the United States. President Harry Truman once said that Marshall was the greatest man of his generation.