Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (40 page)

The landscape is now far different from the wooded stretch where Patton’s journey began. Bad Nauheim was untouched during the war. But now Patton sees vivid reminders of the war’s destruction. Countless disabled trucks, jeeps, and tanks line the road. Just before Woodring stopped for the train, Patton got a glimpse of a Polish displaced persons camp housing thousands of people who now lack a country. He has visited many of these facilities and witnessed firsthand the filthy living conditions the residents must endure. As they wait for the long train to pass, Patton sits on the edge of his seat, as if poised to leap out of the vehicle. He peers out the window at the destruction, and simply tells Gay, “How awful war is.”

At 11:45, the crossing bar goes up as the train disappears.

Woodring slowly accelerates.

Six hundred yards in the distance, on the side of the road, two U.S. Army “deuce and a half” (2.5 ton) vehicles are parked on the shoulder. As Patton’s limousine approaches, the trucks pull onto the highway.

*   *   *

Behind the wheel of the first truck, Tech Sgt. Robert L. Thompson is a little drunk. He is a nervous man whose thick glasses give him an intellectual appearance. He wears his olive-drab uniform cap at a jaunty angle. His pants are bloused into his boots, and he wears a thick army-issue coat and gloves.

Thompson stayed up all night drinking beer with a couple of military buddies. He will later tell investigators that they spontaneously commandeered a Signal Corps deuce and a half for a few hours of joyriding through the German countryside.

But in fact there is evidence that Sergeant Thompson has stolen the truck. With the war over, and the black market providing a lucrative way to make a few extra bucks, there is a very good chance that this vehicle will never be returned to the Signal Corps. Stealing an army vehicle, of course, is a strict violation of regulations. Another violation is in Thompson’s two pals riding in the cab with him, both of them apparently hungover. Army rules strictly state that only two soldiers may ride in the front seat of army trucks.

But Tech Sgt. Robert L. Thompson will go completely unpunished for the violations. Soon he will vanish without a trace, as will the official accident report detailing the destruction he will cause.

*   *   *

Sergeant Scruce’s jeep overtakes Patton’s limousine. Scruce is the only one in the hunting party who knows the way to the special fields outside Mannheim where Patton likes to hunt; Woodring will follow Scruce the rest of the way.

Woodring is driving just twenty miles per hour. George Patton is looking out the right-side window of the limo, while Hap Gay stares out the left. No one has time to react when Robert Thompson abruptly swerves hard to the left, driving his vehicle directly into the path of Patton’s Cadillac. His motives for making the abrupt turn are unclear—there is no driveway or road in the direction he is pointing the heavy army truck. “To this day,” Woodring will remember years later, “I don’t know where the truck was going.” The sudden turn comes without warning, and both Gay and Woodring will later note that Thompson did not signal before taking the action.
²

PFC Horace Woodring, for all his years behind the wheel, cannot avoid the collision. He slams hard on the brakes, bracing for impact, and grips the steering wheel tightly with two hands. “He just turned into my car,” Woodring will later tell the military police, who will soon evaluate the evidence and conclude that the collision was simply an accident. “I saw him in time to hit my brakes, but not in time to do anything else. I was not more than twenty feet from him when he began to turn.”

In the truck, Sgt. Robert Thompson makes no attempt to brake. Instead, he steps on the gas.

As the truck’s front bumper crashes into the Cadillac, Woodring hears the thump of flying bodies in the compartment behind him. General Gay, remembering that the best way to avoid injury when falling from a horse is to completely relax his body, does just that. He falls to the floor behind Woodring, uninjured.

In the right backseat, George Patton is thrown forward, his head slamming violently into the steel partition between Woodring’s driver’s compartment and the backseat. His nose breaks. He feels a sharp pain in the back of his neck, but no sensation in his lower body. Instantly, George Patton knows he is paralyzed.

Ever the leader, Patton immediately checks on his men. “Is anyone hurt?”

After being assured that Gay and Woodring are fine, Patton says in a weak voice, “I believe I am paralyzed.”

He sits slumped in an upright position. Hap Gay has his right arm around him, directing Patton’s head to his shoulder. “Work my fingers for me, Hap,” Patton commands Gay.

General Patton’s car after the accident

After five long minutes, an MP named Lt. Peter K. Babalas of Boston, Massachusetts, happens on the scene. He opens the rear door to the Cadillac and is shocked to find himself staring at George S. Patton, still being supported in an upright seated position by General Gay. “My neck hurts,” Patton tells the lieutenant.

A distraught Private Woodring is outside the car surveying the damage, and standing guard until an ambulance arrives. Radiator fluid leaks on the ground, the car’s right fender is crumpled, and the engine has been dislodged from its mount. But the rest of the Cadillac is untouched. The windshield is not even cracked. “Do you realize who you hit?” Woodring screams at Thompson, who has stepped down from the truck. Woodring is close enough to smell the liquor on the private’s breath. “This is General Patton and he is critically injured.”

Thompson grins drunkenly. “General Patton,” he says to his companions. “Do you believe it?”

Others have now been alerted to the crash and race to the scene. Members of the 290th Engineer Combat Battalion soon arrive with an ambulance and a doctor.

Meanwhile, blood pours from the top of Patton’s head, where a flap of skin extending from the bridge of his nose to the peak of his forehead has peeled back from his skull as if he has been scalped.

“I’m having trouble breathing, Hap,” Patton tells his chief of staff. Gay turns to look at Patton with his good eye. In 1922, Gay was blinded in one eye in a polo match and has fooled army doctors about his condition ever since. Now he stares at Patton out of his left eye and studies his bleeding friend.

“Work my fingers for me,” Patton commands Gay once more. “Take and rub my arms and shoulders and rub them hard.”

Gay does as he is told.

*   *   *

At 12:43 p.m., George Patton’s ambulance arrives outside the brand-new U.S. Army 130th Station Hospital. Patton has not spoken a word throughout the twenty-five-minute ride from Mannheim. His face is growing pale, and his feet are extremely cold—although he himself cannot feel them.

*   *   *

There is no medical staff waiting to rush Patton into surgery, no crack team of spinal specialists assembled 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 damned 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

M
ORGUE

U.S. A
RMY
130
TH
S
TATION
H
OSPITAL

H
EIDELBERG,
G
ERMANY

D
ECEMBER
21, 1945

7:00
P.M.

George Patton’s body is wheeled down to a makeshift morgue in the hospital basement. 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 basement 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 shields 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 shipped 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
Süddeutsche 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.