Target (17 page)

The source was Professor Roman Smal-Stocki, a middle-aged Ukrainian scholar, diplomat and nationalist—very respected amongst academics for his ideas and writings. Skubik had him on an NKVD list of former Soviets the Russians wanted and was interviewing him at the Offenbach refugee center, near Frankfurt. A philologist who spoke more than a dozen languages and whose father had been a Ukrainian nationalist leader, Smal-Stocki, at a mere twenty-nine years of age, had been Ukraine’s ambassador to England during the country’s brief independence during WWI.
Skubik was impressed with him. “He was a true intellectual who chose his words most carefully. He asked me what I wanted from him. I told him that the U.S. Army was under orders to cooperate with the Soviet request to return East European citizens back to their native lands.” That seemed to frighten the professor, wrote Skubik, who nonetheless pressed him for why the NKVD wanted him. Smal-Stocki responded, “Perhaps because . . . of my involvement with the Promethean League.”

Skubik had never heard of the League. “He [Smal-Stocki] explained that after the newly independent nations of the old Russian Empire were reconquered by the communists [at the close of World War I] certain political, academic, military and intellectual leaders formed a secret society with twelve captive nations involved [those put under Soviet domination]. He [Smal-Stocki] was made president. He told me, ‘We had the very best intelligence organization in all of Europe . . . .The Soviet NKVD tried to destroy us, the Nazis also. Even the British tried to put us out of business. But we survived because we had many superior minds working with us.’” (The group’s purpose was to foment revolution in the ethnic territories, like Ukraine, according to literature about it.) Then he told Skubik, “My best intelligence tells me that the NKVD will soon attempt to kill General George Patton. Stalin wants him dead.”

Skubik told Smal-Stocki he had already heard this from Bandera but “American intelligence leaders just don’t believe the Ukrainians. They think the . . . Ukrainians want to destroy the relationship between the Soviet Union and the U.S.” Smal-Stocki, who is dead now, but who would later teach at Milwaukee’s Marquette University, replied, writes Skubik, “God help America.”
³⁰

At approximately the same time Skubik was receiving these warnings, Patton survived two mysterious near disastrous
“accidents” which, in hindsight, look very suspicious. The first occurred on April 20, 1945. Patton was visiting unit headquarters dispersed within his vast Third Army in Germany. He was doing so in a light observation plane, identified by his aide, General Gay, as an “L-5,”
³¹
and a “Cub” by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Codman,
³²
who was in another of the little, two-seat, single-engine planes flying right behind Patton. As the planes were low and only several miles from landing at III Corps headquarters, Reidfeld, near Munich, General Patton’s Cub was attacked by a much larger and faster aircraft—a fighter.

In
War as I Knew It
,
³³
his posthumously published memoir, Patton recalls:

Four planes circling above sounds like a classic ambush—send one guy in while the others provide lookout and cover. Only the skill of Patton’s pilot, whoever he was, saved the general. Where had the planes come from? Who was the attacking pilot? Who were in
the other planes and what were they doing circling like lookouts? Shortly after they landed, a search party was sent out to find the attackers’ wreckage.
³⁴
Patton, most probably with the results of that search in hand, later wrote in his diary that the Spitfires “were probably a Polish unit flying for the RAF. Why they were out of their area, I don’t know?”
³⁵
General Gay wrote: “The results and far-reaching repercussions of this event are not known at this time. In the first place, some explanation will have to be made as to why the RAF had a squadron in this area; in the second place, it will be hard for any aviator to claim that he does not—or did not—recognize an American L-5 plane.”
³⁶

Historians do not say much about this incident. Farago does not even mention the attack in
Last Days of Patton
, although he gives it a few lines in
Ordeal and Triumph
.
³⁷
The incident is certainly mysterious and suspicious. A Polish unit flying for the Brits? Though Polish pilots had escaped the Nazi invasion of their homeland in 1939 and formed separate squadrons under Polish command within the Royal Air Force, an aviation researcher I contacted in Poland wrote me that the only Polish pilots he could find flying in Germany at that time were in the “Polish Wing 131 (including Squadrons 302,308,317)” stationed at Nordhorn, on the north German coast, and so, because of the distance, it was “impossible that Polish Spitfire was trying to shoot down Patton.” In addition, he wrote, official archives he searched showed that the Polish Air Force lost no planes or pilots on April 20, 1945.
³⁸
On the other hand, the Russians by then had overrun Poland and the Poles under them were doing Soviet bidding. The Russians, too, had been given Spitfires by the British.
³⁹
If the Spitfire that day
was
on an assassination mission, the Soviets certainly would not have sent a clearly identifiable Russian aircraft. Not only would that have been stupid, but their assassination style in countries
outside their borders was to use locals under Russian direction.
⁴⁰

While there were no official reports about this attack that I could find in official U.S. archives—suggesting the incident had been buried—some of the scant mentioning of it I did find, like in Codman’s
Drive
, indicate that a story went out that the Polish pilot was inexperienced and had made a mistake—a perfect cover for what really might have transpired. Even so, if, as Codman speculates, the pilot
had
made a mistake and had just wanted to shoot down a German plane, why had not he attacked Codman’s plane as well?

Two weeks later, on May 3, Patton was riding shotgun in an open, traveling jeep somewhere in Occupied territory
⁴¹
when he was almost decapitated by a farmer’s wagon with some sort of scythe-like implement dangerously protruding from it. “We were very nearly killed by a bull-cart, which came [at us] out of a side street so that the pole missed us only by about an inch,” wrote Patton in his diary. But rather than condemn or question whoever was at fault, he concluded: “The American soldier is absolutely incapable of enforcing the rule that civilians stay off the roads during active operations. His goodness of heart is a credit to him, but I am sure it has cost us many casualties. In war, time is vital, and bull-carts cause waste of time and therefore death.”
⁴²

Without elaborating, Skubik says that Patton was informed by CIC that he was on an NKVD hit list. “He didn’t seem to worry about the threat. He enjoyed the fact that Stalin wanted to kill him.” But “the two suspicious [near-death] events made a believer out of Patton.”
⁴³
I have not been able to find corroboration that he had been told of the threats by either Skubik or Bazata. But that does not mean he was not. He sought intelligence from many different sources. That was part of the reason he was so good on
the battlefield. He knew much about his enemies. And much of the unofficial intelligence he got was verbal, not written. Skubik indicates that gathering intelligence was one of the reasons Patton met with Eastern Europeans, several of whom are mentioned in his diaries. Interestingly, although writers have only associated it with Nazi assassination threats, most Patton biographers detail how, at about this time, he became fatalistic, often talking about his impending death. His bodyguard was upped and he began sleeping with ready weapons at his side. Could the Skubik or Bazata warnings have played a part in that? It has always been puzzling that when Patton went home for the last time—for a month in June of 1945—even though he received a hero’s welcome from the American people and enjoyed himself immensely, he told family members it would be the last time they would see him. “My luck has all run out,” he steadfastly maintained over their protestations. “I don’t know how it is going to happen. But I’m going to die over there.”
⁴⁴

This was
after
the war in Europe was over—not when he was returning to face more combat.

How could he be so sure?

That summer, sometime after July 1 when Skubik, his two CIC partners Ralph E. May and Harry B. Toombs, had been forced to move their headquarters from Zwickau to Schluechtern by the occupying Russians, Skubik got a third warning—again from a Ukrainian. General Pavlo Shandruk was a distinguished Ukrainian soldier. His memoir,
Arms of Valor
,
⁴⁵
reads like a Russian epic, full of the turmoil, fighting, and brutality that raged over Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. An officer of the Imperial Tsar’s army in World War I, Shandruk, because of his abilities and allegiances, was variously courted and then hunted by both sides during the Bolshevik Revolution, eventually landing in Poland
where he joined the Polish army and fought against the invading Germans in 1939. Injured and captured by the Nazis, he managed, probably because of his stature, to get out of prison and live incognito until the Germans, desperate for help in 1944, changed their policies of oppression toward Slavs and began enticing them to fight against the encroaching Red Army—a policy nationalistic Ukrainians were quick to entertain. Several Ukrainian armies were raised. On March 17, 1945, Shandruk was given command of one of them, the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army. But he was not a Nazi, and with the Germans on the run by then, he had his soldiers swear allegiance to Ukraine and to fight communism, and after some brief, badly supplied actions for the Germans, surrendered to the Allies, hoping to fight the Russians for the victors. But at that point, it was not to be. Thus Shandruk, like Bandera and Smal-Stocki, was either in some kind of displaced persons capacity or POW status trying to avoid repatriation when Skubik interviewed him:

“He was very diplomatic and had a fine political sense . . . .His knowledge of the history of Germany, of the United States and especially of the Russian Empire came through as we spoke. He told me that he was concerned about America becoming too much involved with the Soviet Union . . . .He said that General Eisenhower should be wary of tricks played by Stalin through [Marshall] Zhukov [who had become friends with Eisenhower]. Then he said, ‘Please tell General Patton to be on guard. He is at the top of the NKVD list to be killed.’ I promised to try and warn General Patton.”
⁴⁶

In
Arms of Valor
, Shandruk says he first met Skubik at the CIC office in Hoechst and that the meeting was amicable.
⁴⁷
But that must have been earlier because Skubik writes that the interview he had with Shandruk involving the Patton warning was conducted at Regensburg, a German city closer to Munich than
Hoechst. Munich was where many exiled Ukrainians, like Bandera, were gathering in secrecy after the war. Regensburg appears to have been the site of a regional CIC headquarters—one of those nearest the Soviet Zone. As he left the building where he and the general had met, Skubik writes, “I noticed two men across the street looking at me. I figured they were the general’s people.” But as it turned out, they were not. He eventually decided they were Soviet agents tailing Shandruk. “I should have confronted them but I wasn’t spoiling for a fight.”
⁴⁸
He had already had several run-ins with the Russians. Not only were such confrontations dangerous, they had become a source of trouble for him from his own side.

Back in May, while his team was still in Zwickau, he was told by two former SS minions about five notebooks containing the names, destinations, even codes to be used, of over 1,000 escaping Nazis. The minions, a man and a woman, had been at the secret meeting where the books were compiled and were willing to show Skubik where they were. They had been buried in a wooded area near Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and would be a prize for Nazi hunters. Skubik had decided to take the two east with him into the Pilsen area, which the Russians occupied, and find the books. This was before the official occupation zones had been set up and he did not expect any problem.

Nevertheless, armed with two pistols, he loaded a jeep with some hand grenades, “a grease gun with five clips,” and an M-1 rifle and started out. In a village near Pilsen, anticipating that he would need help, he got a Czech colonel to follow him with a truckload of German POWs to help with the labor. The two SS informers found the wooded site easily but were not sure precisely where the box containing the books was buried. But the POWS, systematically digging with their shovels, found the notebooks
within three hours. Hoping to return to Zwickau before dark, he decided to take a different, shorter route back.

Mistake.

The further he drove the more Russians he saw. Soon he was passing manned checkpoints. At first the guards waved him on. But at the fourth barrier he was stopped, taken to a headquarters, and questioned by a Russian major who wanted to know what he was doing there. Concealing his real mission, he said his informers—now afraid they were going to be given to the Russians—were two Nazi prisoners he was transporting. The major was skeptical and made him go back to the jeep and wait with the two while he called Prague. When he returned, he said they would have to go to Prague. The commanding general there wanted to talk with them. “He assured me that I could keep my guns and take the prisoners with me. Not to worry. Well I was not worried. I was scared.”