Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (13 page)

But Skorzeny’s soldiers will be wearing U.S. uniforms, and therefore will be classified as spies. The punishment for being captured while wearing an enemy uniform is death by firing squad.

Skorzeny gives the order to move out.

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Confusion reigns. The narrow, muddy roads leading from Germany into the Ardennes are now clogged with German tanks, trucks, horse-drawn carts, and halftracks as thirty German divisions flood toward the American lines. The front extends north to south through three countries, meaning that Wehrmacht forces are now on the attack in Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Their movement was supposed to be lightning quick. But with the roads too narrow to handle all the German vehicles, the biggest surprise attack of the war has become an enormous traffic jam.

Still, Hitler’s gamble is achieving some success. The American army has been caught off guard. Even as German infantry creep through the forest in their winter-white uniforms, the highest levels of Allied leadership still believe that Germany is incapable of launching a major offensive. Some dismiss this as a “spoiling attack”—a diversion that weakens the American lines by forcing them to shift men and supplies from some other location. Convinced that an attack through such wooded and mountainous terrain is impossible, Dwight Eisenhower considers the Ardennes to be a place of rest and sanctuary for weary American troops. “Of the many pathways that lead to France, the least penetrable is through the Ardennes,” notes Gen. Omar Bradley, the commander in charge of the American front lines. “For there the roads are much too scarce, the hills too wooded, and the valleys too limited for maneuver.”

Bradley is George Patton’s immediate superior, in command of the U.S. Twelfth Army group, which stands poised to invade Germany. Only Dwight Eisenhower has more power among American forces in Europe.

Yet before Patton’s troubles with his temper on the island of Sicily one year ago, Bradley was his subordinate. Patton now reports to Bradley. Even worse, Eisenhower has chosen Omar Bradley for several important assignments that before might have come Patton’s way. In particular, it was Bradley who was chosen to lead U.S. ground forces in the D-day invasion back in June. Meanwhile, Patton and the Third Army languished in England, not allowed to join the greatest ground force in history until two long months later.

Ike’s message to others was clear: Omar Bradley is predictable, easily controlled, and safe. Patton, as audacious and tactically brilliant as he might be, is too unpredictable to be given command of all American ground forces.

Yet Eisenhower’s pick quickly proved costly. Bradley’s decision to halt Patton’s troops instead of allowing them to attack prevented the encirclement of fifty thousand Wehrmacht soldiers and SS troops in mid-August. The Germans took heavy losses, but many more quickly escaped through what was called the Falaise Pocket. If Patton had had his way, his tanks would have slipped the noose around those trapped German troops, taking thousands of their best soldiers prisoner and seriously damaging the Wehrmacht’s ability to wage war. “We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army,” Bradley noted of the opportunity. “We’ll go all the way from here to the German border.”

General Omar Bradley (center) with General George Patton (left) and General Bernard Law Montgomery (right)

But in the end Bradley grew timid. He ordered Patton’s tanks to halt at the town of Argentan, leaving a gap between the American and Canadian units that would have encircled the Germans—a gap through which the Germans soon escaped.

Patton knew Bradley was wrong but had no choice but to obey orders. On August 16, Patton wrote in his diary that Bradley’s blunder was “of historical importance.” Those same German units that Patton nearly captured lived to fight another day. Many of those men are arrayed against the Allied forces on the German border at this very minute. Now, even as Bradley reassures himself that the German offensive in Ardennes is nothing more than a spoiling attack, many of those same Wehrmacht and SS fighters—among them a clever young SS tank commander named Joachim Peiper—are heading toward the American lines.

Nevertheless, Bradley, who graduated alongside Eisenhower in West Point’s class of 1915,
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and who commands the million men of the Twelfth Army Group, does not see the threat. In fact, he has allowed his troops to relax.

Meantime, Patton and his intelligence officers are anxious, well understanding that there is danger in the Ardennes. But again Patton can do nothing. And it is his own fault.

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Even as the furor over his Sicily slapping incidents was dying down, George Patton made a second great public relations blunder, on April 25, 1944. It happened in Knutsford, England, while he was speaking to a group comprised largely of British women. The occasion was the low-key opening of a “Welcome Club” for American soldiers, which would allow troops a place to unwind and meet their British hosts in a comfortable setting. Though Patton at first declined to attend, his headquarters was nearby, and he finally consented to drive over and say a few words. Yet his trepidation about the event was so great that he ordered his driver to arrive fifteen minutes late, hoping that the conference would already be over.

But the women of Knutsford were waiting for him.

Patton’s remarks were supposed to be brief, just a few paragraphs. After citing George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote that “the British and Americans are two people separated by a common language,” Patton reassured the ladies that the Americans and British would rule a postwar world. The women were thrilled, not understanding that Patton had slighted the Russians.

At the time, Patton was supposed to be keeping a low profile so that the Germans would be unclear of his whereabouts before the D-day invasion. So there was just a handful of reporters present that warm spring day in Knutsford, and the few photographers on hand swore not to publish their pictures of Patton. Yet the general’s comments somehow got leaked. His well-intentioned words made headlines around the world.

Stalin and the Russians were infuriated.

Patton had done it again. “This last incident was so trivial in nature,” a distraught Patton wrote in his journal, “but so terrible in its effect.”

As with the slapping incidents, there were public demands that Patton be fired. Controversy, it seemed, followed him everywhere.

Eisenhower elevated the agony by waiting almost a week to discuss the controversy and Patton’s future. The meeting would take place at Ike’s headquarters. The results were not likely to land in Patton’s favor. Friendly relations with the Soviets were of vital importance to President Franklin Roosevelt. “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS was working hard to maintain that friendship, as was Eisenhower’s boss back in Washington, Gen. George Marshall. A weary Eisenhower, exhausted from planning the D-day invasion, was furious at what he considered to be Patton’s immaturity. Those errant remarks in Knutsford, as simple as they might have been, had the potential to unravel a peaceful postwar world.

Patton drove five hours to be at the meeting with Eisenhower. The date was May 1, 1944. There was a very good chance he would be sent home to America, and even reduced in rank to colonel. Patton described the moments before entering Eisenhower’s office as a time of awaiting “possible execution.”

“It is sad and shocking to think that victory and the lives of thousands of men are pawns to the ‘fear of They,’ and the writings of a group of unprincipled reporters, and weak-kneed congressmen,” Patton wrote in his journal. “But so it is.”

Unbeknownst to Patton, it was Winston Churchill’s spies who had leaked his comments, so it was appropriate that the cunning prime minister himself weigh in on Patton’s side, stating that the general was “just speaking the truth.” The politically astute Eisenhower could read between the lines in Churchill’s comments.
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So while the meeting with Patton began badly, Eisenhower had to admit that he sorely needed the general’s skills as a battlefield commander. As Patton himself once predicted, referring to the partnership between two legendary Confederate generals in the Civil War, “Ike, you will be the Lee of the next war, and I will be your Jackson.”

Eisenhower knows his military history. He knows that Stonewall Jackson was brilliant and unpredictable. And he is also well aware that Robert E. Lee’s army was never the same after a Confederate sentry accidentally shot and mortally wounded General Jackson.

So George S. Patton was spared—but damaged. From May 1, 1944, forward, Patton’s chances of leading all U.S. forces in Europe were nonexistent. He was too much of a political liability. His hopes of assuming a major postwar command in a world divided between the United States and the Soviet Union had all but vanished. The military career that George S. Patton loved so much would last only as long as the world needed his fighting skills.

“When I came out,” he wrote after the meeting, “I don’t think anyone could tell that I had just been killed. I feel like death, but I am not out yet. If they will let me fight, I will.”

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As the German offensive in the Ardennes gathers speed, George Patton keeps track of events from his headquarters sixty miles south, in Nancy. He is frustrated because his immediate boss is Gen. Omar Bradley, whom Patton considers his inferior and as completely lacking in the prescience and strategic forethought necessary to win a war.

The Ardennes proves it. Totally off guard, Bradley has allowed a group of professional American baseball players to tour the area the Germans are now attacking.
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The alluring film actress Marlene Dietrich is also on hand. She has just finished performing in the Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne. Tonight she is scheduled to put on a show for the men of the Ninety-Ninth Division in the Belgian hamlet of Honsfeld.

That concert has been abruptly canceled.

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The Ninety-Ninth Infantry Division of the American First Army is digging in, trying desperately to stop the elite Twelfth SS Panzer Division from capturing a spot on the map known as Elsenborn Ridge, a vast, treeless hill, beautiful in the summer when wild grasses cover its summit. But there is no beauty right now. Just frozen mud, corpses, and shell craters. Except for those moments when fog covers the hilltop or the powerful winds are driving rain and snow into their eyes—which is often—the men of the Ninety-Ninth have optimal fields of fire from their lazy semicircle of foxholes. Any German attack will require the enemy to cover a half mile of open ground, all while running uphill.

But one hundred yards down the slope, a thick forest offers the Germans complete concealment. The woods are dark and gloomy. A dense fog makes the Germans even less visible. The Ninety-Ninth are easy targets for the German artillery guns hidden in the forest below—including the high-velocity 88 mm guns, which fire a round that travels a half mile per second.

Many men in the Ninety-Ninth are new to combat and came to the Ardennes to ease into the frontline action. They lack winter-camouflaged uniforms, ammunition, and warm clothes, and yet they stand ready to hold the line at all costs.

Because if they don’t, Hitler’s crazy gamble in the Ardennes just might succeed.

Like the equally strategic nearby location known as the Losheim Gap, the Elsenborn Ridge represents a vital corridor that the German army must possess in order for Operation Watch on the Rhine to be successful. The Losheim Gap is a narrow valley through which the Third Reich successfully invaded France in 1940, and is known to be the pathway for funneling tanks through the rugged Ardennes. The ridge is critical because a network of key roads lies on the other side. Capture the ridge, gain access to the roads, and the Twelfth Panzer Division suddenly stands a very good chance of making it all the way to Antwerp.

The Ninety-Ninth must hold the line.

Just yesterday they were thinking about Mel Ott, Marlene Dietrich, and Christmas. Many were even living in a warm barrack that had once belonged to the Germans, where they slept in beds and ate hot meals each morning and night.