Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (5 page)

Last night, Gerrie tried to turn the tables by venturing into the killing zone to locate the men of Company G and organize them into a cohesive fighting unit. But he could find only half his soldiers. The rest are either missing or dead; the rooftop is not a place for taking prisoners. The time has come for Jack Gerrie to dispel once and for all any delusions that this battle is winnable.

“The situation is critical,” Gerrie tells Patton in writing. He uses a pencil, trying to be legible even as the fatigue and the need to remain battle-ready muddy his thoughts. This letter will become, quite possibly, one of the most brutally honest communiqués ever posted from the field of battle. “A couple more barrages and a counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot, and we just can’t go on. The troops in Company G are done. They are just there, what’s left of them. Enemy has infiltrated and pinned what is here down. We cannot advance … We cannot delay any longer in replacement. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions.”

All around Gerrie’s shell hole, American corpses sprawl where they died, the bodies already fleeced for additional ammunition and explosives by the surviving GIs.

Gerrie continues his letter: “There is only one answer, the way things stand. First, either to withdraw and saturate [the fort] with heavy bombers or reinforce with a hell of a strong force. This strong force might hold here, but eventually they’ll get it by artillery fire. They have all these places zeroed in by artillery. The forts have 5–6 feet walls inside and 15-foot roofs of reinforced concrete. All our charges have been useless against this stuff. The few leaders are trying to keep left what is intact and that’s all they can do. The troops are just not sufficiently trained and what is more they have no training in even basic infantry. Everything is committed and we cannot follow attack plan. This is just a suggestion, but if we want this damned fort let’s get the stuff required to take it and then go.”

“Right now,” Gerrie concludes, aiming his words directly at Third Army commander George S. Patton, “you haven’t got it.”

*   *   *

Patton ignores Captain Gerrie’s letter—but only for a time. A week after the attack began, Patton admits that this battle cannot be won. He makes the decision to call off the assault on Fort Driant. On the night of October 12, American combat engineers booby-trap an escape route that will successfully take American troops back out of Fort Driant. They lay three tons of explosives, with fuses timed to go off at irregular intervals, in order to discourage the Germans from following for up to six hours.

Capt. Jack Gerrie survives the battle, and receives the Distinguished Service Cross a week later for his exploits crossing the Seine in August.

Thanks to his quick action with the Bangalore torpedo, PFC Robert W. Holmlund is also awarded the army’s second-highest award for valor—albeit posthumously.

After four days under fire, the men of Easy Company crawl out of their foxholes and make it back to the safety of the American lines. Of the 140 men who began the offensive, just 85 are physically unscathed.

The emotional toll of Easy’s harrowing time under fire, however, will not be counted for many years to come.

*   *   *

George S. Patton walks the battlefields of his youth, even as the time has come to admit defeat at Fort Driant. Just hours before the retreat is to begin, he visits the World War I battlefields at Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne, where he fought as a young tank commander. Now these rolling fields are peaceful and still. Death seems so far away. But it was here, on the muddy pastures of eastern France, that the final Allied offensive began in the summer of 1918. Almost thirty thousand Americans died in a hail of German machine-gun bullets and deadly mustard gas, but the battle (and the war) was ultimately won.

That the Battle of Meuse-Argonne was launched on September 26, almost twenty-six years to the day that Patton ordered elements of the Third Army to take Fort Driant, is an irony not lost on a man who is deeply steeped in history, and the history of war in particular. Now, instead of launching the final drive into Germany that would end the Second World War, he commands an army that is going nowhere.

That irony is not lost on Patton, either.

In all, he has just suffered nearly 800 casualties. Almost half the men who took part in the Battle of Fort Driant are dead or wounded. Some 187 men are classified as “missing,” a vague euphemism that defines a prisoner of war, a deserter, or a man whose body has been completely obliterated by an artillery shell.

Patton studies the topography of Meuse-Argonne alongside a visiting political dignitary, J. F. Byrnes of South Carolina. Byrnes is a close confidant of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, so Patton must rein in his tongue at a time when he would most like to lash out. The two men, however, have become quick friends, and walking the battlefield with him is a form of solace for Patton.

But beneath his external calm, Patton is furious. He seethes about the politics that saw his army halted in its tracks, and that then deprived him of the manpower and firepower he needed to win at Driant. Field Marshal Montgomery, his British rival who was the recipient of the scarce fuel and ammunition, chose to call off his assault on Germany at the height of the Driant assault. If Patton and his men had the supplies Montgomery is now hoarding, there would have been no defeat. By the end of the Driant attack, Patton’s big guns possess so little ammunition that they can fire only seven rounds per day. Patton believes his army is unbeatable if given enough gas, guns, and ammo.

Since arriving in France in early August, his army has killed more enemy, gained more ground, and lost fewer men than any command in Europe. The Third Army has been unstoppable, pressing the attack from one side of France to the other without losing a battle. But Patton has now failed miserably. The U.S. newsreel cameras that filmed Patton meeting with Eisenhower on the eve of the Metz offensive, sensing yet another great victory for America’s best general, must now report back to the American public that the great George Patton is not invincible after all.

On October 13, Patton moves his headquarters south to the French city of Nancy, where he finally follows Eisenhower’s order to stop his army and regroup. And so begins the “October Pause.” The lull in the action is a foolish move on the part of Eisenhower. The American army might be using the lull to reinforce, but so are the Germans. Unbeknownst to the Americans, Adolf Hitler is planning a major attack of his own.

And while the Führer has a deep hatred for the Americans, he also fears and respects George S. Patton, who has laid waste to so many German soldiers. These plans are designed to make sure that Old Blood and Guts is kept off the battlefield at all costs.

2

T
HE
W
OLF’S
L
AIR

E
AST
P
RUSSIA

O
CTOBER
21, 1944

9:30
A.M.

The Wolf limps through the woods.

The autumn air is chill and damp. As he does each morning at just about this time, Adolf Hitler emerges from the artificial light of his concrete bunker into the morning sun. He holds his two-year-old German shepherd Blondi on a short leash for their daily walk through the thick birch forest. A fussy man of modest height and weight who is prone to emotional outbursts, Hitler wears his dark brown hair parted on the right and keeps his Charlie Chaplin mustache carefully combed and trimmed.

Hitler spends more time at the Wolf’s Lair than in Berlin—some eight hundred days in the last three years alone. The Führer is fond of saying that his military planners chose the “most marshy, mosquito-ridden, and climatically unpleasant place possible” for this hidden headquarters. On humid summer days, the air is so heavy and thick with clouds of mosquitoes that Hitler remains in the cool confines of his bunker all day long.

But autumn is different. The forests of East Prussia have a charm all their own this time of year, and Hitler needs no convincing to venture outside for his daily walk. These long morning strolls offer him a chance to compose his thoughts before long afternoons of war strategizing and policy meetings. Sometimes he amuses himself by teaching Blondi tricks, such as climbing a ladder or balancing on a narrow pole. While frivolous on the surface, Hitler’s time alone with his beloved Blondi is actually a vital part of his day. The Führer suffers from a condition known as meteorism, the primary symptom of which is uncontrollable flatulence. Time alone in the fresh air allows him to manage the discomfort without wrinkling the noses of his staff, which would be an acute embarrassment to the exalted leader.

Adolf Hitler in 1944

The journey through the dictator’s six-hundred-acre wooded hideaway takes Hitler and Blondi past concrete bunkers, personal residences, soldiers’ barracks, a power plant, and even the demolished conference room where, just three short months ago, Hitler was almost killed by an assassin’s bomb. But despite all these visible reminders that the Wolf’s Lair is in fact a military headquarters, the fifty-five-year-old Nazi dictator who likes the nickname Wolf strolls with an outward air of contentment, utterly lost in thought.

But Hitler is not tranquil. His right eardrum was ruptured in the bomb blast during the assassination attempt and has only recently stopped bleeding. That same blast hurled him to a concrete floor, bruising his buttocks “as blue as a baboon’s behind” and filling his legs with wooden splinters as it ripped his black uniform pants to shreds.

However, the failed assassination plot, engineered by members of the German military who no longer believed that Hitler was fit to rule Germany, did not cause all the Führer’s health issues. His hands and left leg have long trembled from anxiety. He is prone to dizziness, high blood pressure, and stomach cramps. The skin beneath his uniform is the whitest white, thanks to his fondness for remaining indoors and keeping a nocturnal schedule. And his energy is often so low that his longtime personal physician, the extremely obese and medically unorthodox Dr. Theodor Morell, makes it a practice to inject Hitler each day with methamphetamines. A second doctor, Dr. Erwin Geising, also places drops containing cocaine in each of the Führer’s dark blue eyes, in order to give the dictator a daily rush of euphoria.

Despite recent German setbacks on the battlefield, the Wolf still has hope that his plans for global domination will yet be realized. His greatest goal is the eradication of the Jewish people, with whom he is obsessed, despite not having had any intentional contact with a Jew in twenty years. “This war can end two ways,” he said in a January 30, 1942, address to the German parliament. “Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.”

Prior to the war, Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies led hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens to emigrate from Germany, a number that includes 83 percent of all German Jews under the age of twenty-one. But no more were allowed to leave once the war began. Now, trapped within Germany and each of the countries that the Nazis have conquered, the remaining Europeans of Jewish ancestry are being systematically rounded up and murdered.

Hitler fancies himself a military strategist, despite no formal training in field tactics. He takes full credit for Patton’s defeat at Fort Driant, because it was his decision to send reinforcements to Metz rather than let the city fall. He is also cheered by the news that Nazi scientists are developing a bomb with nuclear capacity, a weapon that would allow Hitler to wipe his enemies off the face of the earth. In addition, Hitler is quite sure that the audacious surprise attack he will unveil to his top commanders in a few hours will push the Allied armies back across France, and allow Germany to regain control of the European Theater.

And most encouraging of all, Adolf Hitler is finally rid of those top generals who have long despised him. SS death squads were relentless in discovering the identities of each of the men who took part in the July 20 assassination plot, then hunting them down and taking them into custody. Some were shot immediately, which infuriated Hitler, because such a death was far too quick. On his orders, the others were hanged. The executions were done individually, with each man marched into a small room. They entered stripped to the waist, wearing handcuffs. The hangman’s noose was then draped over the condemned man’s shoulders and slowly pulled tight. The other end of the rope was thrown over a hook affixed high up on the wall and left to dangle. A cameraman filmed the event for Hitler’s enjoyment. To ensure maximum embarrassment when the graphic movie was shown, each man’s pants were yanked down to his ankles.