Target (25 page)

After considerable searching, I located a veteran I thought might just be the mysterious Vanlandingham. It was not a common name. His first name was Arlis Vanlandingham. He fought in Germany at the end of the war. A photo of him as a company platoon leader in the 90
^th
Infantry Division,
⁴¹
whose commander was pictured with Patton, led me to his son, Glen Vanlandingham of Round Rock, Texas. Glen was a Baptist choir director and said his father had died ten years earlier but he remembered watching a movie about Patton showing the accident and his usually quiet dad saying, “I was there.” But little else. Apparently he never talked about the war. Glen said he had papers tucked away that showed his Dad had won some medals. He would go through them and send what he could.

Arlis turned out to be an authentic hero. Like Babalas, he had been at Normandy, and gone through France and into the Rhineland with Patton’s Third Army. He had won four Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, which is pretty impressive. One of the medals was awarded for leading his men against Nazi night attacks after being separated from his main unit. Despite his being wounded, they captured two hundred enemy prisoners.

This was the type of bold courage sought by intelligence groups like the OSS for special operations, which may or may not have been in a soldier’s records. When I got to the end of the papers, however, it said that he departed Europe 11 Sept. ’45, which was roughly three months before Patton’s accident. Further notations, however raised more questions. While they implied he was in the U.S. and “unassigned” through 1946, one notation said, “officer
promoted to captain 19 December 45”—not even two weeks after Patton’s accident. Was he still in the service? Why was he promoted after coming home? The military is notorious for discharging soldiers as quickly as possible in order to minimize future government benefits. A promotion guaranteed more benefits—and for an idle soldier? Were the dates and places authentic? Or were they fake like others I have seen which cover clandestine assignments? That was the way organizations like the OSS—and the CIA today—hid secret missions. Whatever the truth, Arlis, his son insisted, had told him, “I was there.”

Still another MP said to have been at the accident was Lieutenant Joseph Shanahan, identified by Farago as “a former deputy Provost Marshal in Patton’s Third Army.” The provost was said to have conducted its own investigation into the crash. The results of that investigation remain a mystery as they are nowhere to be found. In 1979, Shanahan, of Lambertville, New Jersey, told his hometown newspaper that the reason no on-scene report of the accident was made was that the accident was “trivial”—the limousine’s windows were not even broken—and Patton was unhurt.
⁴²
But the medical record, plus references to the on-scene accident report and later accident investigations unearthed in formerly secret documents belie that witness. Patton
was
hurt. Reports
were
made. Shanahan has not been heard from since—at least as far as I know. I could not find him. He joins the other mystery men, silent and unable to be found, as part of the chaotic, contradictory, shadowy accident scene.

And I have not yet addressed Technician Fifth Class (T/5) Robert L. Thompson, driver of the truck which turned in front of Patton’s limousine. As if stalking the Cadillac—as Woodring’s description of the truck “waiting” implies—as well as abruptly turning in front of Patton’s car in clear daylight on an untraveled road
was not suspicious enough, the veteran driver who had safely piloted vehicles through dangerous war zones for nearly two years prior
⁴³
was allowed to vanish from the scene and, for the most part, disappear. The same goes for his two unlawful passengers—if that was the number in his cab—one of whom was identified in a confidential Seventh Army Public Relations Officer (PRO) document
⁴⁴
as “Frank Krummer, a civilian employe [sic] of the signal company.” Both Thompson and Krummer, according to the document, worked at the 141
^st
Signal Company of the 1
^st
Armored Division at Gmund, some fifty miles south of Mannheim, near Stuttgart. What were they doing that far north on a shutdown Sunday? According to Farago, Thompson was “in violation of the rules” in having two passengers in the cab and “out of his own routine. He had no orders to go anywhere this Sunday morning.”
⁴⁵

Apparently another officer at the scene—also not heard from again—took a sworn statement from Thompson. Second Lieutenant Hugh O. Layton of Babalas’s 818 MP Company in Mannheim is listed in a further Seventh Army PRO document
⁴⁶
as having arrived after Babalas and interviewed Thompson under oath: “At approximately 1200 hours [I] was traveling north on Highway N38,” the document says Thompson told Layton. “I was approaching the Class II and IV QM [quartermaster] depot. In making my left turn from the highway I noticed a general’s car approaching me. As I had already started my turn I could not avoid the car hitting the rear of the . . . truck. I did not notice the car until I had started to turn.”

Was he blind?

At least one reporter claims to have talked to Thompson after the crash: In a story datelined “Frankfurt, Dec. 13,” which appeared in U.S. papers a day later,
⁴⁷
journalist Kingsbury Smith, who
would later become widely known as ABC television reporter and anchor Howard K. Smith, would write that “in discussing the tragic event for the first time,” Thompson told him, “The general’s car was speeding . . . or he wouldn’t have hit me so hard.” He was making the turn “into a side street,” Thompson told Smith, and didn’t see the collision coming until “it was too late . . . . If I had tried to straighten out, I would have hit Patton’s car head on. Patton’s driver slammed on the brakes and slid about forty feet before he smacked me, knocking my. . . truck about five feet . . . .” The limousine was speeding? Woodring, wrote Smith, denied the charge. He was not speeding. However, in a deviation from future recollections about the pre-crash moments, Woodring, according to Smith, told him that contrary to actually halting at the railroad tracks, he had just slowed “to five miles an hour” to cross them. “We were then about 300 yards from the scene of the accident. I could not have picked up much speed by the time I reached the truck,”
⁴⁸
he said. Gay’s memoir also says they slowed rather than stopped.

In addition to being different from what Woodring would later say, it was a weak denial.

Following the collision, Thompson told Smith, “I got out of the truck and I was pretty mad . . . .I was going to tell them off. Then I saw the stars on General Gay’s shoulder and then on Patton’s. I nearly fainted. And I decided I’d better not argue.” Again, Woodring’s version differs. He has always maintained that Thompson and his passengers had been drinking. They “were drunk and feeling no pain,” he told Brian Sobel in
The Fighting Pattons
. “It seemed they were having a big time . . . .I asked him, ‘Do you realize who you hit? This is General Patton and he is critically injured. What the hell were you doing?. . . The driver said, ‘Oh, my God, General Patton,’ and made kind of clown-like gestures and turned around to his buddies and said, ‘General Patton, do you believe
it?’ It was stupid behavior and I was angry.’”
⁴⁹
Lester Gingold, who took the only photograph that has ever surfaced of Thompson purportedly at the scene, says he did not think the truck driver was drunk, just scared. But his photograph seems to support Woodring. Thompson’s hat is askew, his lowered hands appear to be flapping like birds, and he grins open-mouthed as if giggling.

What was the truth?

Neither driver was ever charged although documents and newspaper stories say both were driving recklessly.
⁵⁰
But, as Ladislas Farago wrote, “Thompson’s testimony could have been challenged in every one of his separate statements. But it was not. And the case was left at that. Although it was still nominally open and pending on December 21 [when Patton died] it was never pursued after that. The investigation of this historic accident was far less thorough than even that of a minor traffic incident that claimed no life and involved no figure even remotely as important as General Patton.”

One final puzzle involves Woodring’s account.

There apparently existed at one time a dubious report about the accident in government files. As already briefly mentioned earlier, Farago writes that in an early attempt to get information on the crash, the army wrote back to a questioner—who is not identified by Farago but which he implies is the
Post-Tribune
newspaper of Gary, Indiana—that it had on file an “unofficial report of the accident” consisting of a statement made and signed by Woodring in 1952. What is on the statement is not discussed. But when Farago says he asked Woodring about it in 1979, Woodring told him he had no recollection of “ever having made a statement” in 1952 or “having signed one” in that year.
⁵¹

In other words, as far as Woodring was concerned, it was a forgery.

A forgery?

Why, if Farago’s report is true, would there be a forged note about the accident in government files?
⁵²

The ambulance transporting
Snyder, Patton, and whoever else was inside arrived at the gates to the 130
^th
hospital’s main three-story building at approximately 12:30 p.m., according to the hospital’s commanding officer, Colonel Lawrence C. Ball, M.D.
¹
Hospital records state Patton was officially admitted at 12:45 p.m.
²
The head physician attending him in the hospital’s first floor emergency room was Lieutenant Colonel Paul S. Hill, Jr., the 39-year-old chief of surgery. Assisting was Dr. Kent of Cleveland, Ohio, who would later erroneously write that Patton had arrived in the Cadillac.
^ar
The two were at, or just concluding, lunch, according to their memoirs, when summoned to the emergency room by a corpsman.
³
“The general lay on a litter which had been placed on an operating table,” wrote Hill. With him was
General Gay and “a medical officer summoned to the scene of the accident,” probably Snyder. “He had lost quite a bit of blood,” was “very pale” and in “shock,” but “conscious and oriented.” Attendants carefully cut away his clothes but were reluctant to remove what remained beneath him for fear of jostling his injury. Patton managed to joke, “Relax, gentlemen, I am obviously in no condition to be a terror.”
⁴
His neck, because of his injury, was “flexed forward,” causing some pain, especially to the touch, but “it was obvious he had neither sensory nor motor function below the neck”—an initial observation, slightly modified later by tests, that established the bottom of his collar bone as the point below which he was paralyzed and without feeling. It was also later determined that he had some faint reflexes, shoulder tip sensation, could manage “a flicker” of movement in one leg and some toes, and, while one lung was not working, he could breathe with the other, which, of course, was crucial.
⁵

On his head was a “dressing” loosely “held down with adhesive tape.” Hill removed it and described the “severe laceration” to Patton’s “nose, forehead and scalp” as “a long, deep Y-shaped” wound extending “from the bridge of his nose running backward across the forehead” and onto the top of the head. It was “a ragged deep laceration with jagged ramifications, lifting a circular flap of [skin] and leaving bare the bone in its entire length . . . . A good view of the forward part of the skull was obtained thru [sic] the flap-like laceration.”
⁶

No bones below his neck appeared broken.

Speculation was that Patton had been hurled forward and hit his head on the top of the rear compartment or possibly somewhere on the dividing partition between the front and rear compartments. The partition contained a window that could be rolled down, which may or may not have been open. It also contained a
casing that protruded slightly around the window and, supposedly, a clock. Any of these, it was assumed, could have caused the “ghastly” wound, as Farago labeled it. Farago, who interviewed Hill, writes, “Patton himself told Colonel Hill that he thought he had fallen against a clock in the partition and was scalped by its sharp edges.”
⁷
But he did not know for sure. “He does not know if he became unconscious” at the time of the injury, wrote Hill. “But witnesses state that he was unconscious for about a minute.”
⁸

In fact, no one knew for sure how he had been so injured.

It was
all
conjecture.

Patton was speculated to have been sitting up on the edge of the seat and that was why he had been thrown forward. But Woodring later told author D. A. Lande, “he rarely
ever
sat on the edge of his seat.”
⁹
The idea that he was hurtled around violently in the limousine’s roomy passenger compartment yet had not broken any bones in his hands, arms, or legs is unusual. And his wound was quite nasty to have been caused by a small car clock, or a smooth and lined roof, or a slightly protruded window casing. It could have been caused if the window between the two sections of the car had been open and he had vaulted through it, scraping himself on its edge, depending on the sharpness of the edge and the casing. But surely his head would have been caught or at least further impacted in his return momentum from the collision which would have put additional wounds on his face.