Target (26 page)

Was this large and ugly wound that had prompted Lieutenent Babalas—if Babalas can be trusted—to decide to look further at what happened and make a report—the report Lieutenant Shanahan insisted was unnecessary?

An examination of the car would have likely ended such speculation—had there been any real urgency to make such a
determination, which there does not appear to have been. It could have shown where flesh and blood had been left, or a dent had been made, and thereby help pinpoint, if not definitively establish, where and what Patton might—or might not—have hit. But the doctors accepted the explanations sight unseen. They seemed logical. Their job was not to investigate what had happened at the accident but to try to fix the resulting damage, however it was caused. And by early afternoon, the car seems to have been towed from the accident scene, which, according to available evidence, was done rather quickly. Within hours of the accident, it was already on its way to an unknown
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military junkyard where precisely what happened to it would become yet another mystery.

The exact nature and direction of Patton’s face wound is in question. According to an unsigned “Case summary,” dated 12 December 1945, Patton’s “scalp peeled forward
down
to the bridge of the nose.” This appears to contrast with Dr. Hill’s December 9 admittance-day description that the wound began at the nose and traveled
upward
. Dr. Kent supports Hill, writing that it “ascended” to the scalp, but differs in that he says it began at “mid-forehead” and traversed the scalp all the way “to the rear.”
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Just like accounts from the accident, there are contradictions. What is the truth? Memories are frequently faulty. Did it begin on his face or his scalp? At his nose or his mid-forehead? Was the unsigned description, terse as it is, just a phraseology that did not really mean to imply initial direction? In the absence of definitive proof, such details are important in order to determine exactly how and by what Patton was cut.
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For his shock, a potentially deadly condition on its own, Patton was warmed with blankets and given a series of blood transfusions. Before the day ended, he would receive 300 cc of blood and 1500 cc of plasma.
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The little hospital had to recruit donors on
the spot but the infusions did the trick. Dissipation of symptoms began almost immediately. Patton’s color returned. His blood pressure rose eventually to acceptable numbers. He was started on regular injections of penicillin and other antibiotics, new in medicine in those days, and eventually an indwelling catheter was inserted into his urinary tract.
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Under medical questioning, he disclosed he had last urinated up at the Roman ruins around 10:00 a.m.
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Such information, along with the time of the accident, variously given as around 11:45 a.m., helps establish a time line for the trip with its reported stops from Bad Nauheim.

As soon as Dr. Hill started working on Patton, General Gay, accompanied by a “Brigadier General,”
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according to the hospital’s administrator, Colonel Lawrence C. Ball, went directly to Ball’s office and “made some telephone calls.”
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Presumably, as a result, at 2:30 p.m., having rushed to the hospital by plane, medical brass from Frankfurt arrived. They included Major General Albert W. Kenner, chief army surgeon in Europe, and Colonel Earl E. Lowery, head consulting surgeon in Frankfurt and Hill’s immediate medical superior up the chain of command. After consultation, a portable X-ray machine was brought into the emergency room rather than moving Patton and chance worsening his injuries. Eventually it confirmed much of what was suspected. Patton’s neck was dislocated at the junction of the third and fourth vertebrae in the neck. There was “approximately 4 mm displacement,” accounting for his distention. A small piece of the bone on the underside of the third vertebrae had fractured and broken away. The doctors felt the spinal cord had been cut but probably not completely because of the feeble movements observed and his ability to breathe. Not even the X-rays could tell them if the cord had been completely severed. They decided to supplant a temporary traction apparatus they applied to his neck
with “Crutchfield tongs.” These were rather brutal-looking clamps with sharp, pointed ends, similar to old-fashioned ice tongs. The tongs curled into the skull from a helmet-like apparatus with a lever holding five pounds of weight. It was placed on Patton’s head. Under local anesthetic, small holes were drilled into his skull where the tong tips were inserted. The tongs, lifting his head toward their helmet base, were designed to reduce compaction of the neck bones due to the injury and hopefully realign them to their proper place. Only time would tell if the treatment would be successful. It was uncomfortable, to say the least, but Patton did not complain. In fact, he made a joke, according to Dr. Kent, about it feeling “drafty” in his head where they were drilling.
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Patton was described as a “model patient.”

Patton’s head lacerations were also cleaned and then stitched under local anesthesia, an operation Patton seemed to take some pride in, remarking that the first stitch by Dr. Lowry was his seventy-second lifetime stitch and that he would like them to keep count.
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At 6:45 p.m., the doctors finished their initial work. Patton had a temperature of 102 degrees but was “stable.” He was given morphine for pain
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and was moved to a small first floor room across the hall from the operating theater, his condition listed as “critical” and “guarded.”

Long before that, as early as 2:00 p.m., according to Farago, “the calm” of the 130
^th
had been “shattered.” In addition to “a dozen generals . . . every correspondent, reporter, stringer, freelance rubberneck and photographer” in the theater had descended on the hospital.
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The atmosphere outside the emergency room turned tense. After delivering Patton, Captain Snyder, outside the main hospital building, said he was “accosted” by “a diminutive brigadier” who cautioned him to “keep my mouth shut about the
accident... and later to go along with the Army release of information.”
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What did that mean? Was it just typical military precaution or was something else afoot?

Had they told other doctors to go along with army releases, too?

Why such a shutdown of information?

The next day, according to one of the first newspaper stories to appear about the crash, the United Press, a news agency comparable in power and audience to any of today’s major television networks, reported that Patton was “under a twenty-four-hour daily guard by white-helmeted soldiers. The guard was set up,” said the story, “after Patton, who was conscious and still at least partially like his old self heard someone talking about him in the hall and said he did not like it.”
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What had he heard?

Were the guards just to keep the press out? Or were there greater fears?

Regardless, the guards were not able to stop the onslaught. Farago wrote that reporters posed as patients, donned hospital gowns to try to look like medical personnel, and attempted to bribe the designated hospital cook—privileged to serve Patton by himself—with cartons of Lucky Strikes, nylon stockings, and Hershey bars in order to be able to take a meal to the general, all in pursuit of exclusive stories and hopefully, the prize—access to Patton’s room and the general himself. At least one, according to Farago, got through the cordon. He wrote that an Associated Press reporter, “Richard H. O’Regan by name,” obtained an “exclusive by posing as a patient.” A nurse, just wanting to ease concerns about Patton’s well-being amongst patients and not realizing O’Regan’s ruse, apparently disclosed to him that the general was
sipping whisky in his room, which, left out of the story, had been prescribed by doctors in minute amounts, and thus was, not to worry, his crusty old self. The resultant story caused an uproar. “Flat on His Back, Skull Clamped, Patton Calls for Shot of Whisky” said one of the headlines. The story showed his mood swinging from jokes and being “cute” with his nurse, to saying, “I probably will be dead by morning.”
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By Monday—the day after Patton was admitted—the number of press people assaulting the hospital had swelled to thirty,
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“straining [the] meager facilities beyond the breaking point.” The reporters were loud, demanding, and were “stepping on each other’s toes” to get access. “No precautionary measures could keep all of them out all of the time”
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—this in a country where nylons could buy love, and a little more could buy even murder. In such an atmosphere—had there been a plot—anyone could have been an imposter, especially those trained and equipped for it. Press cards, forged and real, were easily obtainable on the German Black Market. Posing as a nurse, medical technician, or even doctor, would have been relatively easy, especially for a professional with skill and nerve. It had been—and would be—done often, even by amateurs. Guards or no guards, Patton, paralyzed and continually medicated, was vulnerable as he lay in that first floor hospital room.

One of the first outsiders to learn of the accident was Patton’s wife, Beatrice, back in Boston, where the Pattons had their permanent home. According to formerly confidential War Department documents,
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Mrs. Patton was informed by an Associated Press reporter “on the morning of 9 December”—an amazing feat since the accident had only occurred that morning. But it was made possible by the time differences between the U.S. and Germany. The reporter was looking for details which, of course,
Patton’s daughter, Ruth Ellen Totten, who had answered the phone and relayed the inquiry to her mother, did not have. The daughter immediately called authorities in Washington. They gave her the few details available—broken neck, “unknown if the spinal cord was cut”—and offered to fly her mother to Heidelberg, a courtesy Mrs. Patton quickly accepted. A noted U.S. neurosurgeon, Dr. R. Glen Spurling, who had earlier returned from army medical service in Europe, was located on a train where he was en route to Washington D.C. to be separated from the service. He was literally plucked off the train so he could fly with Mrs. Patton who was leaving immediately. Colonel Spurling, a pioneer in spinal and nerve disease, was renowned in his field. In the meantime, another top neurosurgeon, British Brigadier Hugh Cairns, a professor at Oxford, had been flown in by the army from London. He had observed that the Crutchfield tongs were slipping because of the shape of Patton’s head, and recommended instead that zygomatic hooks be applied for better traction. These were clasps resembling ordinary fish hooks that were inserted into Patton’s cheekbones on the sides of the face for a better hold. Dangling from another head apparatus were ten pounds of weight, double the amount on the Crutchfield tongs. The apparatus, in addition to being more painful than the “ice hooks,” was also more cumbersome. But Patton is said to have endured its application under local anesthetic without complaint.

Patton’s first nights were rough. He dozed intermittently, getting little real sleep. His neck was painful, his temperature ranged from 100 to 102 degrees, and most of the time an intravenous setup (IV) dripped fluids often times unknown to him into his veins. At 5:00 a.m. the first night, according to his “Nurse’s Notes,” he was “apprehensive—feels a ‘choking’ sensation when falling asleep.” His breathing with only half a diaphragm working was labored.
The other half was paralyzed. He was given the sedative Luminal and finally dozed for about an hour around 6:00 a.m. With short periods of improvement, treatment continued throughout the day. The next night, December 11, at approximately 1:00 a.m., the nurse noted, “Patient resting well but is unable to sleep—appears apprehensive over IV bottle dripping which he is able to see. Asking questions concerning IV fluids—‘When will it be finished?—I don’t think it’s going through—I can’t feel it.’” She disconnected the IV and it calmed him. He went to sleep “ten minutes later.” The danger of an IV to a vulnerable patient—should he be targeted for malevolence—is that anything can be injected into the needle port without the patient feeling it, or, if the IV is out of view, even knowing it until the effects begin. Then it can be too late to counter. In the case of Patton, paralyzed as he was, he could be stuck with a needle almost anywhere below his shoulders and not know it.

Farago tells of Patton’s depression and concern about death during this time and then, in the afternoon of December 11, his wife and Dr. Spurling arrived. The doctors had hoped his wife’s arrival would buoy Patton and they were not disappointed. By Patton’s request, the first thing his wife did upon coming to the hospital was spend a half hour alone with him. What was discussed will probably never be known by the public. It was private. But she emerged from his room confident and, according to Farago, with a list of books her husband requested. Farago quotes her as optimistically saying, “I’ve seen Georgie in these scrapes before. He always comes out all right.” She added that he requested his visitors be curtailed. “The strain is getting too much for him.” In other words, visitors had previously been allowed. Certainly, it is assumed, they would have been frisked before entry. But who knows? Nor was it explained why Patton wanted them
stopped, although it is indicated that he did not want others, especially acquaintances, seeing him incapacitated. Writes Farago, Mrs. Patton’s “voice hardened.... Under no circumstances does he want to be visited by General Bedell Smith,”
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Eisenhower’s powerful chief of staff whom Patton disliked intensely. He considered the soon-to-be ambassador to Russia (1946-1949) and director of the early CIA (1950 to 1953) a personal enemy. When Eisenhower had fired Patton from the Third Army just months before, at the end of September, it had been Ike’s “hatchet man” Smith who had phoned Patton with the bad news. “I did not trust Beedle [sic] Smith,” Patton had written in his diary October 2, 1945. And nearly two weeks later, he told Eisenhower, “I could not hereafter eat at the same table with Beedle [sic] Smith.”
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