Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (11 page)

Not everyone believes this to be true. Many believed that FDR’s strategy of government-funded jobs and the public works projects of the New Deal were socialistic, even though they may have rescued the nation from the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the presidential election of 1944, New York governor Thomas Dewey, has relentlessly attacked FDR for promoting a form of “communism.”

But Franklin Roosevelt is not a Communist any more than Thomas Dewey plays center field for the Yankees. FDR is a natural leader whose foremost objective is to push the nation in a positive direction, first as governor of New York in 1928, and then during the legendary “First 100 Days” as president in 1933, when he realized that drastic experiments in government were required to halt a four-year economic slide that was being called the Great Depression.

The American Dream had evaporated. One fourth of all American workers were out of a job. Banks were failing. Poverty was epidemic. The American people felt that they were on their own. The government to whom they paid taxes and the men they voted into office were either unwilling or unable to fix the problems. Millions of Americans were desperate, families were falling apart, and prosperity looked as if it might never return.

Working closely with Congress, Roosevelt crafted a series of fifteen bills that fixed the banking system and made possible a number of monumental public works projects designed to put Americans on the job. Thus began the long climb back to prosperity. Republicans and Democrats set aside their differences and worked closely to get Roosevelt’s ideas passed into law. They enacted the legislation so quickly that comedian Will Rogers joked on the radio that Congress didn’t vote on the bills, “they just wave at the bills as they go by.”

FDR’s social experiments have worked. The American Dream has been revived, and the nation is reaching new heights of prosperity because of the production necessary during World War II. But those new laws also drastically expanded the size and reach of the federal government. This has made some voters angry. More than 150 years since Americans fought for independence and deposed a king, the specter of a powerful authority controlling private lives is alienating many citizens, and Dewey feeds that discontent by comparing large government with the oppression of communism.

Tonight in Fenway, Roosevelt fires back. He speaks out against communism, distancing himself and his administration from what many in the world—even Adolf Hitler—perceive as the world’s greatest threat. “We want neither communism nor monarchy,” Roosevelt tells the crowd. “We want to live under our Constitution.”

But Roosevelt says nothing about which sort of government will rule postwar Europe. One thing is for certain: thanks in part to him, communism will play a very large role.

Winston Churchill isn’t the only one making deals with Joseph Stalin. Franklin Roosevelt has made any number of secret arrangements with the Soviet leader dividing the postwar world between America and the Communist Soviet Union. Giving eastern Poland to the Soviets is just a start.

The high-stakes nature of the global intrigue being played out in Washington, Moscow, London, and Berlin means that FDR can trust very few people. It’s quite clear, however, that he needs someone to represent him in this new, turbulent world. Even if FDR were not president of the United States, his physical handicaps do not allow him to parachute behind enemy lines. His world-famous jaunty profile does not allow him to go undercover. And the constraints of his office do not allow him to perform the unethical work of political assassination or other messy intrigues.

But war is war, and lethal things must be done. So Roosevelt has appointed one special individual to do the dirty work. The man’s name is William “Wild Bill” Donovan.

At age sixty-one, Donovan is just a year younger than the president. The two have known each other since they were classmates at Columbia Law School. But there the similarities end. Roosevelt is a liberal while Donovan is a staunch conservative Republican. Roosevelt is in failing health; Donovan is so robust and larger-than-life that he seems bulletproof. And while Roosevelt is happiest basking in the adulation of a large crowd, the swaggering Donovan prefers to work in the shadows. Even before the war began, Roosevelt brought in this quick-thinking former attorney and Medal of Honor
²
winner to be his global eyes and ears—and Donovan has done a spectacular job.

As Roosevelt gives his speech in Fenway on this cold Saturday night, Wild Bill is busy sabotaging America’s relationship with Winston Churchill and Great Britain—in order that the United States and the Soviet Union can achieve a tighter bond.

Donovan’s location seems innocuous enough. He is at home in Washington, DC, safe and secure in his tony Georgetown mansion on Thirtieth Street. Donovan has a sizable fortune, and lives a lavish lifestyle that would make few suspect he is America’s top spy.

Yet Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS, as this covert group of top-secret operatives he commands is known) is in constant contact with him. While he might be relaxing at home, Donovan is well aware that troops of the Soviet Red Army are rolling into Yugoslavia on board American tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Donovan soon orders that ten tons of medical supplies be flown into the Balkans at U.S. expense, an extravagance that will assist the Communist takeover. The OSS is also sowing seeds of discord in Greece, the country that Winston Churchill covets more than any other.

Thus begins a sideshow to the war itself: the undercover battle led by William Donovan and the OSS to ensure that Eastern Europe fall into the hands of Soviet Russia. Above all else, FDR does not want a confrontation with the Soviet Union. He thinks of Joseph Stalin as his friend, and a true ally. Better to let Stalin have a part of the world where the United States has few interests. And even when Winston Churchill complains that the Soviet expansion is hurting England, it is explained to him that Donovan is out of control—and unstoppable. “I have always been worried by his predilection for political intrigue,” Gen. Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, one of Dwight Eisenhower’s top staff members, writes to Churchill about Donovan, “and have kept a firm hand on him so he keeps away from me as much as possible.”

But Wild Bill Donovan reports only to the president of the United States.

*   *   *

Two weeks after that triumphant night in Fenway Park, Franklin Delano Roosevelt relaxes in the White House, safely reelected to a fourth term. No other American president has ever served this long.

Roosevelt sits at his Oval Office desk in his wheelchair, the one specially built to look as much as possible like a normal piece of office furniture. The day is not a busy one, not beginning until almost noon with a private meeting with British admiral James Somerville, a war hero who has just been assigned to Washington as head of Britain’s naval delegation. Later on there will be a brief reception with a group of female newspaper correspondents and a small formal dinner for fourteen guests in the cavernous East Room of the White House. The affair will be short, lasting from 7:30 to precisely 9:00 p.m. Roosevelt will rattle around the White House for three more hours after that, but the time will be unstructured, unplanned, and completely his own. November 18, 1944, will mark that rarest of all days for a wartime president: one without crisis.

But today will one day be seen to hold monumental significance, thanks to a memo Roosevelt now grasps in his hand. Typed and organized into a single sheet in the form of a letter, it arrived between appointments. The memo comes straight from the desk of Wild Bill Donovan, who has scrawled his signature at the bottom. Roosevelt personally requested this piece of paper on October 31. Its highly confidential contents will soon get leaked, through no fault of Roosevelt’s, and he will be forced to defend Donovan when the newspapers report that the OSS chief is trying to create an “American gestapo.”

When that moment comes, Roosevelt will have no choice but to distance himself from Donovan in the same manner as Beetle Smith. Noting to an aide that Donovan loves “power for its own sake,” Roosevelt will try to “find a way to harness that guy, because if we don’t he’ll be doing a lot of things other than what we want him to do.”

But Roosevelt has no intention of stopping Donovan, because Wild Bill is doing what FDR wants.

“Pursuant to your note of October 31, 1944,” Donovan writes, “I have given consideration to the formation of an intelligence service for the postwar period.

“Though in the mist of war, we are also in a period of transition,” he adds. “We have now in the government a trained and specialized personnel needed for the task.”

Neither Roosevelt nor Donovan has any further concern about the German army. The war will soon be won; that is a foregone conclusion. And just as Donovan once traveled the globe at Roosevelt’s behest in the days before Pearl Harbor, warning that the United States should expand its navy and army in anticipation of the day it would join the war, Roosevelt now asks him to see the future once again. Both men anticipate that another great conflict might follow once Germany is defeated. But rather than suffer another surprise attack, as at Pearl Harbor, Donovan is pressing Roosevelt to allow him to design a new postwar intelligence agency that will anticipate clear and present dangers. In the absence of openly belligerent enemies, this new agency’s role will be to spy on America’s friends as well as her adversaries.

Roosevelt endorses the new group. His typewritten reply is signed, simply, “FDR.”

And so the Central Intelligence Agency is born.

*   *   *

As history will show, both Roosevelt and Donovan are taking their eyes off the ball much too early. Adolf Hitler and the armies of Nazi Germany are far from conquered. As Wild Bill Donovan strategizes about postwar power consolidation, Wehrmacht soldiers, guns, and tanks are quietly grouping near the German border. They do so under strict radio silence, lest the Americans hear their chatter and anticipate the biggest surprise attack since Pearl Harbor.

The Germans face west, toward the American lines, and the thick wilderness in Belgium known as the Ardennes Forest. It is here that U.S. forces are weakest, because it is assumed that an attack through this primeval wood is impossible. To tilt the odds even further in the Germans’ favor, it has been ascertained that George Patton and his Third Army are more than one hundred miles southeast, still in dire need of gasoline, guns, and soldiers—and still unable to conquer Metz.

Hitler and his generals are sure that Operation Watch on the Rhine will be a successful counterattack that not even the great George Patton can thwart. The Nazis are poised to turn defeat into victory with this counterattack and the development of a new atomic weapon that Hitler believes is almost ready.

The Führer is still certain of ultimate victory.

Very certain.

6

W
AR
R
OOM

T
HIRD
A
RMY
H
EADQUARTERS

N
ANCY,
F
RANCE

D
ECEMBER
9, 1944

7:00
A.M.

Col. Oscar Koch thinks that Hitler is up to something.

The G-2, as General Patton’s top intelligence officer
¹
is known in military parlance, is certain that the German army is far from defeated. In fact, he is the only intelligence officer on the Allied side who believes that the Wehrmacht is poised to launch a withering Christmas counteroffensive.

Only, until now, nobody will listen to him.

The sun has not yet risen on what promises to be yet another bitter cold and wet day in eastern France. Koch stands amid the countless maps lining the walls of his beloved War Room, thirty miles south of the front lines. The forty-six-year-old career soldier stands ramrod straight. He is bald, and wears thick glasses that give him a professorial air.

Just a few feet away, George S. Patton sits in a straight-backed wooden chair as Koch begins the morning intelligence briefing. Patton wears a long overcoat and scarf to ward off the cold, even indoors. He is pensive, and eager to be once again on the attack. In just ten days, Patton is launching his Operation Tink, a bold new offensive that will take the Third Army into the heart of Nazi Germany for the first time. Metz has finally fallen after two long months of battle. Patton systematically worked his way toward Metz, bypassing the network of forts as needed, while at the same time depriving their inhabitants of food and water. Fort Driant surrendered on December 8, 1944. The invasion of Germany now awaits. Patton plans to cross the Rhine and press hard toward Frankfurt, then on to Berlin.

Unlike many generals, who plan an attack without first consulting their G-2, Patton relies heavily on Koch.

And with good reason. A humble veteran soldier who worked his way up through the ranks, Koch is perhaps the most driven man on Patton’s staff. He is consumed with the task of collecting information on every aspect of the battlefield. Koch arranges for reconnaissance planes to fly over enemy positions, and then has a team of draftsman construct precise terrain maps of the towns, rivers, railway lines, fence lines, creeks, farm buildings, bridges, and other obstacles that might slow down the Third Army’s advance.

Koch also arranges for German-speaking American soldiers to exchange their military uniforms for peasant clothing at night and travel behind enemy lines, mingling in bars and restaurants to collect information about Wehrmacht troop movements.

And Koch and his team carefully scrutinize data radioed back from the front lines by American patrols.

Every bit of that information comes together in the War Room’s centerpiece, an enormous series of maps detailing the entire Western Front. British, American, Canadian, French, and German positions are all carefully marked.

The maps’ transparent acetate coverings are marked in grease pencil, with special notations for armored, infantry, and artillery. Each unit is denoted by a special symbol. Once an army is on the move, its progress is closely tracked. A rag made wet with alcohol wipes the acetate clean, and a unit’s new location is once again marked in grease pencil. In this way, Col. Oscar Koch knows with almost pinpoint accuracy the location of every tank, howitzer, airfield, fuel dump, supply depot, railway station, and infantry detachment between Antwerp and Switzerland.