Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (27 page)

The man who lives for battle wants to be judged by his actions, not his words. The war will end soon. Patton would love nothing more than for the spotlight to shine on his accomplishments at least one more time.

Doing so at Bernard Law Montgomery’s expense, of course, would make the experience all the richer.

“He advertises so damn much that they know where he is,” Patton sneers of Montgomery, contrasting their leadership styles by alluding to the German high command’s constant awareness of his rival’s location. “I fool them.”

At Patton’s command, the Third Army romps through the Palatinate on what Col. Abe Abrams of the Fourth Armored Division calls the “Rhine Rat Race.” They travel with ample supplies of metal decking and pontoons, allowing them to build temporary bridges across the Rhine—it is hoped, well ahead of Montgomery and his Twenty-First Army Group.

American armored divisions have already succeeded in crossing the Rhine, in the city of Remagen, eighty-six miles north of Trier. The incredulous Americans could not believe that the bridge remained intact, and crossed immediately. And while they were not able to advance beyond a small toehold on the Rhine’s eastern shore, the symbolism of the Allied achievement struck such fear into the minds of the Nazi high command that Adolf Hitler ordered the firing squad executions of the four officers he considered responsible for not having destroyed the bridge.
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The men were forced to kneel, and then were shot in the back of the neck. The final letters they had written to family and lovers were then burned.

Hitler then ordered the great commando Otto Skorzeny to assemble a team of swimmers who would float down the Rhine and attach explosives to the Remagen Bridge. The mission failed when all of Skorzeny’s amphibious commandos were discovered by sharp-eyed American sentries along the shore, and were either killed or captured.

The Allies still hold the bridge, but are unable to advance farther without the assistance of a greater fighting force.

George S. Patton understands the significance of Remagen. “Ninth Armored Division of the Third Corps,” he writes in his journal on March 7, “got a bridge intact over the Rhine at Remagen. This may have a fine influence on our future movements. I hope we get one also.”

But even if he can’t find an intact bridge, Patton is determined to beat Montgomery across the Rhine.

He has just ten days.

*   *   *

Two weeks ago, the Third Army captured the ancient German fortress of Trier, attacking quickly and suffering few casualties. His victory complete, Patton now takes the opportunity to visit the conquered city.

Many are convinced that the Second World War will be the war to end all wars, but Patton knows better. As a reminder to himself that war is inevitable, he has been reading Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
each night before bed. The memoir recounts Caesar’s battles in Gaul
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and Germany from 58 to 51 BC. The words rise up off the page for Patton, and he feels a personal connection to the action.

As he drives to the decimated Trier, he studies the ancient highway carefully, absorbing its every nuance. It is not the sight of the swollen Moselle River that mesmerizes him, or even that of Allied engineers scurrying to corduroy
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the muddy country thoroughfare before Allied vehicles accidentally tumble down the steep hillside and into the raging torrent.

No, it is the belief that he traveled this road two thousand years ago.

Patton is convinced that he was a soldier and a great general in his many past lives. He once stood shoulder to shoulder with Alexander the Great and Napoléon. He crossed the Alps on an elephant while residing in the body of the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal. Patton also is quite certain that he once fought for the great Caesar as a Roman legionary, marching into battle on this very same road from Wasserbillig to Trier. Even as a biting wind chaps his exposed face, Patton can “smell the coppery sweat and see the low dust clouds” of legionaries advancing on the Germanic hordes along the Moselle.

Patton has no problems meshing his Protestant faith with his belief in reincarnation. He simply believes that he has a powerful connection with the supernatural. This belief was reinforced by two very prominent occurrences during World War I. On one occasion, he found himself pressed to the ground during a battle, terrified to stand and fight. He believed that he saw the faces of his dead grandfather and several uncles demanding that he stop being a coward. The other instance took place in Langres, France, once occupied by the ancient Romans. Though he had never visited the city, Patton was able to navigate his way without the help of his French liaison officer. He gave the Frenchman a tour of the Roman ruins, including the amphitheater, parade ground, and various temples dedicated to a deity. He also drove straight to the spot where Caesar had once camped, and pointed to where the Roman leader had once pitched his tent.

Now, like Caesar in 57 BC, Patton has conquered Trier.

Over the week that it took to reduce the strategically vital city to rubble, the Germans fought tenaciously. Twenty Allied bombing raids pounded the Wehrmacht defenders, until it became only a matter of time before the Germans fled, and tanks from the American Tenth Armored Division rolled past the ancient Roman amphitheater on the eastern edge of town. The fact that this structure remains standing while all else has crumbled is not lost on Patton. “One of the few things undestroyed in Trier is the entrance to the old Roman amphitheater which still stands in sturdy magnificence.”

Shortly after the conquest on March 1, Patton received a message from Allied headquarters. “Bypass Trier. It will take four divisions to capture it,” read the order.

“Have taken Trier with two divisions,” an acerbic Patton responded. “What do you want me to do? Give it back?”

One week later, Patton’s plan to invade the Palatinate was approved by Eisenhower.

Following the old adage that it is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission, Patton does not plan on asking for permission to ford the Rhine, should the opportunity present itself.

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Patton’s barbed sense of humor is not accidental. He is weary of the ineffectual leadership of General Eisenhower, who he believes consistently sabotages his success. He feels the same way about Omar Bradley, his immediate superior.

So Bradley’s February 10 order to go on the defensive was soul crushing for Patton. He will be sixty this year, making him “the oldest leader in age and battle experience in the United States Army in Europe,” by his own estimation. The war is winding down, but it has taken its toll on George Patton.

He has become so obsessed that he is now incapable of existing in a world without war. Even the total nudity of dancers at the famous Folies Bergère dance revue, seen on a mid-February leave in Paris, could not distract Patton from thoughts of the fighting. Nor did being recognized everywhere he went in the city, which is normally a salve for his ego.

After a case of food poisoning made him violently ill—and led to a growing belief that his life was being threatened by unknown forces—Patton hurried back to his headquarters near the front, unable to stay away from the war even one day longer.

He knows that his last battle is soon to come—at least in this lifetime. Thus Patton seeks to prolong his role in the fighting. “I should like to be considered for any type of combat command, from a division up against the Japanese. I am sure that my method of fighting might be successful. I am also of such an age that this is my last war, and I would therefore like to see it through to the end,” Patton writes in a letter to the chief of the army, Gen. George Marshall, on March 13.

The mere thought that the fighting will soon end fills Patton with dread. “Peace is going to be hell on me,” he writes to his wife, Beatrice. “I will probably be a great nuisance.”

Patton wants to finish out the war on his own terms. That means go on the attack. “A great deal was owed to me,” he wrote of one conversation with Omar Bradley, after it was suggested that the Third Army once again go on the defensive. “Unless I could continue attacking I would have to be relieved.”

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Dwight Eisenhower is quite confident that George Patton will never ask to be relieved. Yet he immediately follows up his February 10 order with a second command, allowing Patton to place his army on “aggressive defense.” Ike knows that Patton will interpret this order as permission to launch a series of low-profile attacks.

Such dithering is an example of Eisenhower’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness: compromise. He wants to make everyone happy, and believes that “public opinion wins wars.” Very often it seems Eisenhower would rather make the popular decision than the right one. This is the manner in which he has behaved throughout his entire army career, and it has served him well. At the start of the war he was a colonel, leading training exercises at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Now his penchant for compromise and diplomacy has allowed him to rise to prominence and power despite the glaring fact that he has never fought in battle, or even commanded troops in combat.

Eisenhower personally favors a “broad front” assault into Germany, much like the campaigns of Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the final days of the Civil War. By attacking Germany from both the north and south, Eisenhower can affect a pincer movement, trapping the Wehrmacht between the claws of his forces. Montgomery, however, prefers a single “full-blooded” thrust through the industrial Ruhr region of northern Germany. Naturally, Monty plans to be in charge, bringing the full weight of forty Allied divisions to bear on the Germans. Generals such as Patton will sit on the sidelines and watch.

At first Eisenhower privately mocked Montgomery’s strategy, joking that the plan was a “pencil-like thrust.” But Montgomery has worn him down. Monty is enormously popular in Britain, and many British people believe it is outrageously unjust, after all their suffering, that an American now commands all ground troops in Europe. Eisenhower has appeased Britain by placing Montgomery in charge of the Rhine offensive.

George Patton sees the underlying motives in Eisenhower’s determination to remain popular. “Before long, Ike will be running for President,” Patton tells one of his top generals. “You think I’m joking? Just wait and see.”

Patton will be proven correct. On November 4, 1952, Dwight Eisenhower will be elected the thirty-fourth president of the United States.
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On a tactical level, it is clear that Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy is the best possible method of attacking Germany. But in yet another example of attempting to make the popular choice, Eisenhower has temporarily discarded the strategy. Montgomery and Operation Plunder will be the focus of the Allied advance. But Montgomery’s notorious caution on the battlefield, combined with the likelihood that his plan to attack through the industrial and heavily populated Ruhr region of Germany will mean bitter fighting and heavy Allied casualties, could very well spell disaster. So Eisenhower knows he needs Patton as a backup in case the Montgomery offensive doesn’t work.

Thus, the war has once again become a personal competition between Patton and Montgomery—and once again, Monty seems to have the advantage.

Eisenhower is giving Monty and his Twenty-First Army Group all the manpower, ammunition, gasoline, and bridging supplies they need to cross the Rhine at the northern town of Wesel and push on to Berlin, while Patton and the Third Army stay south, content with destroying the Siegfried Line.

It looks like, this time, Montgomery will be the victor, making the decisive thrust across the Rhine and venturing the final three hundred miles to Berlin, and glory.

*   *   *

“If Ike stops holding Monty’s hand and gives me the supplies, I’ll go through the Siegfried Line like shit through a goose,” Patton has promised a British newspaper reporter.

As the days tick down to Operation Plunder, Patton’s army surrounds the Wehrmacht in southern Germany, capturing sixty thousand prisoners and ten thousand square miles of German countryside in two weeks. The Siegfried Line proves no match for the Third Army. Patton’s forces are everywhere. Even in remote regions such as the Hunsrück Mountains hundreds of tanks and infantry units are seen rolling down roads long considered “impassable to armor.”

“The enemy,” notes one American soldier, is “a beaten mass of men, women, and children, interspersed with diehard Nazis.”

Patton writes candidly to Beatrice about the condition of the German people. “I saw one woman with a perambulator full of her worldly goods sitting by it on a hill, crying. An old man with a wheelbarrow and three little children wringing his hands. A woman with five children and a tin cup crying. In hundreds of villages there is not a living thing, not even a chicken. Most of the houses are heaps and stones. They brought it on themselves, but these poor peasants are not responsible.