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He had done things militarily thought impossible. Just a year before, he had quickly turned the huge and unwieldy Third Army 90 degrees north from its easterly drive through France in snow and bitter cold to help save outnumbered and besieged U.S. paratroopers at Bastogne, Belgium. When he had proposed the rescue, his contemporaries said it could not be done. But he had been planning it for days. His drive across France and Germany was itself one of the most brilliant feats of the European War, and it broke the back of the Nazis’ last major offensive—the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest. It was rivaled only by D-Day, whose success he had ensured by acting as a decoy to convince the Germans he was readying a force to invade at Pas de Calais, far from Normandy. The ruse had worked spectacularly.
In the limousine with Patton on this fateful Sunday were Lieutenant General Hobart “Hap” Gay, long-time aide and former cavalry man, and nineteen-year-old Private First Class Horace “Woody” Woodring, his relatively new driver.2 Patton and Gay were in the back of the Cadillac as they left Bad Nauheim, with enough space between them on the big car’s rear seat for another passenger, and plenty of room in front of them. Behind and following the Cadillac in the cold was an open air half-ton jeep driven by a soldier always identified erroneously in later histories as Sergeant Joe Spruce. He was carrying rifles, a bird dog, and possibly other supplies. Patton was leaving Germany the next day. This trip—roughly a hundred miles south, past Frankfurt, to the woods beyond Mannheim—was to hunt pheasant. He loved hunting and had hunted many times while in Germany, so it was to be an enjoyable way to spend his final hours on the continent.
A voracious student of military history, Patton was by far the best tactician—and arguably strategist—of any of the Allied military leaders, including Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a long-time friend and contemporary whom he fought under in the recent war. But Patton, unflinchingly honest in public and infuriatingly impulsive, had repeatedly challenged his superiors’ tactical and strategic decisions, as well as the post-war U.S. occupation policy, and thus courted trouble from his bosses and the press. Hell, as he often said in his profane way, the press was his enemy—except when he could use them. The press, largely threatened by his brash and strutting warrior persona—a persona he deliberately assumed for its effect, as he believed, of raising the morale of his men—often criticized him, especially towards the end of the war. Largely unrecognized by most of the news writers was the fact that he used his trademark swift, relentless, and crushing attacks—what they generally deemed brutal and uncaring—to save lives by enabling victory to be more quickly attained. Hesitation, he preached, was a soldier’s worst enemy. A commander had to act swiftly and decisively in order to take advantage of fleeting, critical opportunities in battle. But his enemies, many of whom had never served and probably thanked God for it, thought him devoid of compassion—as if that were a requisite for fighting—and a warmonger. He did love war but, as most warriors do, he loved it as a crucible, a test of his prowess and courage and, in his own peculiar religious way, a fulfillment of his destiny.3 But he was fully mindful of war’s horrors and pointed them out often.
His rivalry with British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who outranked him but whom he regarded as timid and indecisive, was a volatile story that had gotten him public attention, good and bad. The two field commanders had clashed repeatedly, most publicly during the Sicilian Campaign in 1943 when Patton had beaten the cautious Viscount to Messina and had made sure the world knew it. The press relished the rivalry. Hell, Patton had, too! But it had been a headache for Eisenhower whose job it was to keep a united Allied front. And Eisenhower, whose reputation and political career had benefited from Patton’s victories—which the politically astute Supreme Commander had not shied from—had certainly informed Patton of his displeasure.
Next, Patton had been pilloried for slapping a shell-shocked U.S. soldier in Sicily. He felt the soldier, being treated in a hospital, was a coward. He had done something similar earlier in the war without incident. But when the press started slamming him for it, Eisenhower took notice and forced him to make a public apology. While the incident deprived Patton of a coveted D-Day invasion command—a prize he deeply regretted not getting—he came back full force after he was let loose on the French mainland and began his Third Army smash east through France towards Germany. He had raged at his superiors’ decisions to repeatedly halt his advances, most notably at Falaise where he could have killed thousands of Germans who escaped through a narrow pocket and returned to fight at the Battle of the Bulge; at the German border, where he could have crossed early and, he believed, shortened the war and saved American lives; and at the conclusion of the European conflict, just months before, when his pleas to go deeper into Eastern Europe and beat the Russians to crucial objectives, especially Berlin, had been sternly rejected. Fearing he might advance in spite of their orders not to, Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley, Patton’s immediate superior, several times cut off his gas supply. Imagine that, he said to subordinates, subverting their own forces!
Gas, however, this Sunday morning on the Autobahn, was no longer a problem. As a conquering general with only peacetime needs he now had all he wanted. But by war’s end, he had begun to resent Eisenhower and Bradley and others in higher places who, in return, had come to regard him as a kind of loose cannon, capable, alarmingly, of initiating controversial forays on his own without higher authorization. He had done exactly that at the end of the war in ordering a hasty, under-defensed raid on an out-of-the-way and dangerously situated German prisoner of war camp where his son-in-law was an inmate.4 He admitted such apparent favoritism for a family member was probably the wrong thing to display. But as he was often at odds with his superiors’ plans, he sometimes conveniently found ways to disregard their orders. For instance, on May 1, 1945, he went ahead and captured Trier, Germany, even though Eisenhower, thinking Patton did not have enough divisions to do so, had told him to stay put. Upon being called on the action, he signaled Ike, “What do you want me to do? Give it back?”5
He certainly could be impertinent to superiors. But he was not insubordinate as he was unfairly characterized. Commanders were usually given discretion in the field and most of his unauthorized actions had resulted in success—the ultimate measure of a commander’s worth. Nevertheless, the same commanders—namely Eisenhower and Bradley—whose faulty orders he ignored had no shame in reaping the credit. For the most part, Patton was unfailingly loyal and professional and obeyed orders even when he bitterly disagreed. A former jeep driver for him, Francis J. Sanza, remembers Patton’s eyes tearing up because he was so angry when he was denied permission to go to Berlin.6 But he obeyed, however reluctantly.
They had not traveled very far on the autobahn when the Cadillac stopped at an ancient Roman ruin, near Bad Homburg in Saalburg, roughly twenty miles south and west of Bad Nauheim. Patton’s quest for historical knowledge was insatiable, and since this was his final Sunday in Germany, it was probably his last chance to see it. Woodring therefore detoured and they parked, exited the limousine, and walked up a hill to inspect the ruin. It was a cold, wet slog to the snow-covered higher ground and they were glad, as Woodring later recalled, to get back to the limousine’s warmth and continue on their way.
Once the war ended, animosities Patton had engendered—mostly jealousy and competition from fellow generals, as well as post-war politics—had combined to deny him medals and accolades he certainly deserved. While Eisenhower and Bradley had been rapidly promoted, riding the victories he had mostly provided, his promotion was slow in coming. And he was relegated to what, basically, was a bureaucratic purgatory.
While he had wanted to go to the Pacific and fight the Japanese, he instead had been made governor of occupied Bavaria, a curious post for a soldier of his reputation with the die-hard Nipponese still to be conquered. He was a fighter, not a bureaucrat. Nevertheless, he had done well in the position, getting the vanquished Germans up off their knees. Germany was in shambles. War wreckage was piled high along the road on both sides of their traveling Cadillac. The vanquished country was barely able to meet basic needs like food, shelter, and the security required to cope with the chaos of displaced millions, fleeing hardcore Nazis, and conquering nations vying boldly but surreptitiously—sometimes even violently—for whatever part of the victor’s pie they could further wrench from each other.
Patton’s attempt to do his post-war job well had been part of his undoing. With typical American goodwill, once the war had ended, he forgave his enemies—not the hardcore Nazis whom he disdained, but the rank and file whom he considered more victims of Hitler than proponents. Out of necessity, he installed some of them in crucial positions, such as mayor or sanitation manager, because they had experience. It made sense. The country had to get working again, and Patton did not want to create the same conditions in the defeated country that had given rise to Hitler after World War I. But in Washington, the policy, rigidly enforced, was that no ex-Nazi, however marginal, could be installed in any position of authority unless he or she was demonstrably against the Hitler regime—like the surviving communist partisans.
Communists? It offended his very being. They were enemies of democracy. At least Patton felt that way.
De facto punishment for all Germans was the official Washington goal. One particularly brutal plan eagerly put forth by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, a powerful member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” cabinet, was to reduce Germany to being solely an agrarian society so it never again would have the industry to make war. Patton vehemently criticized the Morgenthau Plan as unjust, publicly and privately,7 but President Roosevelt supported it until other, chiefly military, advisors prevailed. But even after Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, the policy of wholesale German repression continued under President Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, and Patton, without apology, had continued to oppose it, further angering the administration and his military bosses.
Also damning in most of New Deal Washington’s eyes was Patton’s attitude toward the Soviet Union. Post-war Washington in 1945 was a lopsided political battleground. The stronger “Left,” led by Democrats—the party of Roosevelt and Truman and thus the party in power—believed that communist Russia, led by Joseph Stalin, was sincere in its pronouncements of peace, justice, and a better world for all. It deserved, they believed, the “buffer” states of Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and other war-torn Eastern European countries which, as a result of the fighting and Allied agreements, it now occupied and was ruthlessly exploiting. President Roosevelt had been chief amongst those who believed that the Russians had borne the brunt of the fight against the Nazis, especially in terms of numbers of dead, and therefore were entitled to such a spoil. He admired “Uncle Joe,” as he had affectionately called Stalin. He had looked favorably on the Russians throughout the war, even to the point of showing more respect for the Russian premier than he did for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the “Big Three” conference held at Tehran, Iran, in 1943.8
In addition, influential members of the American Left believed in at least some of the tenets of socialism,9 if not full-blown communism itself—the great opponent of Western capitalism—which Soviet Russia and Stalin exemplified. They had emerged from the Great Depression of the 1930s, which had spawned the New Deal, believing that a utopia of sorts had been building in Soviet Russia under communism. Thus enamored, they naïvely viewed the Stalinist regime, on the whole, as benevolent, and wished understandably, now that the fighting was over, to continue the alliance created during the war—an alliance that was threatened by Patton’s aggressive stance and inflammatory comments against Russia.
On the other side of the political battleground was the weaker Republican “Right,” who saw the Soviets and communists as ruthless, exploitive, brutal enemies of personal and national freedom, and who could never be a true friend of the West. Patton had emerged as one of the Right’s most vocal leaders—certainly one of its most famous—showing contempt for the Russians to their faces even before hostilities had ceased. A longtime anti-communist, he had been made aware anew, through his intelligence network and personal contacts, of the Stalin-sanctioned raping and pillaging conducted by the Russian troops and the loss of freedoms imposed on conquered populations as the communists fought their way victoriously west through Poland and into Germany and Berlin. A luncheon guest, Lieutenant General Bishop Gowlina of the Polish Army, had personally briefed Patton on how, in order to get a Polish prelate to incriminate two of his priests, Russian interrogators had tortured a young girl to death in front of the prelate, and made a recording of the girl’s screams to use against others.10 Though there were isolated instances of abuses by American troops, there had been nothing like the type and scale perpetrated by the Russians. Entire factories had been dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union. The ill-supplied Russian army was living off the conquered territories, confiscating everything, respecting nothing. Displaced persons (DPs), prisoners of war (POWs), even American soldiers caught in the Eastern Block countries at war’s end had been sent to Russia en masse as slave labor or to be executed11—all with Washington’s acquiescent blind eye to its Russian friends.
Though bound by Allied agreements, Patton hated to hand over displaced persons and prisoners of war to the Soviets, many of whom were worthy of American support and begged to not be returned. From anti-communists for whom “repatriation” was a certain death sentence, Soviet soldiers who knew that Stalin considered being taken a prisoner a treasonous act, to Germans on whom vengeance was certain, America had agreed to return all displaced persons and prisoners of war with no conclusive proof of reciprocal action from the Russians.
The Russians denied having Americans. But Patton had heard of unlucky American prisoners of war who were caught behind Russian lines and never heard from again. American POWs aside, repatriation of the others alone was merciless, even traitorous, in Patton’s eyes. But since many of the displaced persons had fought for the Nazis12 (considering the Russians worse), some on the Left thought it only just, given the horrors of the Nazi regime, (especially the persecution of Jews) for them to be returned to face whatever fate awaited them. The authorities were not going to let it become an issue that would undo the hard-won, fragile peace. Another war couldn’t be tolerated. Washington and Patton’s superiors stood firm against his protests.
After inspecting the liberated Nazi concentration camps Patton had become physically ill at the sights and smells of the piled-high, bulldozed bodies and the living skeletons huddled gaunt and dazed behind barbed wire. But he opposed the occupation policy of giving government-confiscated German homes exclusively to Jewish victims of the camps. “If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc?” he had argued.13 There had been millions of others besides Jews in the camps. He complained to higher-ups, some of whom told the press, and he had been branded anti-Semitic, a charge certainly suggested later in his diaries.cAnd as he increasingly made his contrary views known—on deNazification, repatriation, the evils of the Soviet Union, and how the Russians had to be stopped, preferably by war—those above him, like Eisenhower, who had warned him before, became angrier at him. They wanted him to shut up.
The situation had come to a head at a September 22 press conference, barely two and half months prior. Ignoring his staff’s warnings that a reporter’s question about why he was hiring Nazis in Bavaria was a trap, he offhandedly likened the controversy over such hirings to a typical “Democrat and Republican election fight.” The remark had been fleeting and secondary to more serious and thoughtful answers he had given on the subject. But the press made it sound like it had been his main point and outrage ensued. Nazis were devils—not just to the Left, but to the world at large. To compare them to Democrats and Republicans was blasphemy. Every previous charge against him surfaced. Members of Congress joined in. He was branded pro-Nazi—and not without some reason. Behind the scenes, he proposed using U.S.-friendly German troops, whom he admired as fighters and disciplined soldiers, to help attack the Soviets whom he felt would not for years have the resources to sustain another large war. In his head and his heart, he believed war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, so why not get on with it soon—when America had the best chance of winning?
Under pressure, he had apologized for the press conference remark but Eisenhower had summoned him to occupation headquarters in Frankfurt and fired him. It had been a shock because he felt he had not really done anything wrong. A few words taken out of context? It was a setup, he believed. He was angry about it. But the arguments fell on deaf ears. He was deposed as commander of his beloved Third Army and reassigned by Eisenhower as head of the Fifteenth at Bad Nauheim. In reality it was a “paper” army consisting of little more than clerks, typists, and researchers charged with writing the history of the war in Europe. He was a general officer; a fighting commander of proven worth—the best. And he had been relegated to a backwater? It was like benching the star quarterback and putting him in charge of inflating footballs. As he had taken up his new job at Bad Nauheim in October 1945, he was resentful. Pro-Nazi? What were they thinking, he wondered.d He had probably been responsible for the death of more Nazis than any other American.
After a period of adjustment, he regained some of his optimism and decided on a new course of action for the near future. He knew his career as a warfighter was over—at least under the Truman administration. They were just more of the same. He was nearing retirement age. Obviously he was not being cheered by those in power. He told staff, like Gay, riding in the back with him now, that he was going to resign—not retire as was normal for an exiting officer in order to retain pensions and benefits—but resign so he would have no army restraints. He was independently wealthy and did not need the pension or benefits. He would then be free to speak his mind and give his version of the war and what had happened to him—the truth as he saw it. And his side would be a blockbuster. He knew secrets and had revelations, he said, he was sure would “make big headlines.”14
