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What also worries her is the way he died. It was on his birthday, March 11, 1952. He and Glenice had a little house by then. It was in Blackstone, Virginia, a small town—at least in those days—near the base. Two weeks before the birthday, Glenice wanted to plan a celebration. “She says, ‘Joe, I’d like to have a nice party for your birthday. You have the day off, don’t you?’” He seemed troubled. “He looked at her and said, ‘No Glenice. No party. I won’t live to see it.’” She could tell he wasn’t joking. “She was horrified. ‘Why do you say such a mean thing? You know it will hurt me.’” He tried to gloss it over. “He said, ‘I’m sorry. Calm down. I just don’t want a party. I want to wake up on my birthday, make love to my beautiful wife. I want you to feed me cake and coffee for breakfast and then play with our child, the love of my life.”

Was he ill?

According to Angela, “He could run miles without even panting. My mother said he never complained of anything more than an occasional headache—and nothing big. He’d take an aspirin and that would be it.”

On the day of his birthday, she did just what he wanted. “What happened was she said they woke up. They started making love. And all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘Glenice, I can’t feel anything in my left body. I’m going numb. I’m paralyzed. Call the doctor.’” She jumped from bed and began dialing. Then he told her to forget the doctor and call an ambulance. She redialed for an operator begging for help. By the time she turned around, he was hemorrhaging. “Blood was everywhere. She was screaming and crying and hugging him and blood was all over both of them and
she said I was in the other room crying hysterically. She didn’t know what to do. She just kept screaming.”

It took the ambulance half an hour to forty-five minutes to get there—probably the result, she says, of their Blackstone house being in the country and help being relatively far away from where the ambulance was dispatched. But she wonders, was the delay on purpose? By then he was dead. Army doctors later told her mother he had suffered a brain aneurysm—a burst blood vessel. Symptoms include a sudden, severe headache, which he did not have, but sometimes paralysis on one side of the body, which he did. Such gushing of blood, however, I could not find in any description of the illness. As in Patton’s death, there was no autopsy.
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Could he have been seeing a doctor without telling Glenice?

“Then there should be some reference to it,” she said, and showed me some army medical checkups he had had in the past. There was only one dismissal from duty for one day in all the records.

Months later, with the help of information from his official records,
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she got in touch with and met what was left of Scruce’s family—mostly elderly cousins of hers descended from the brother who had originally come to America with him. They revered her father, whom most of them remembered vividly, and it was an emotional time for her. “My cousins are great, though not much help as far as [the Patton story]” she wrote me. “I just don’t think Joe ever told
anyone
of that fateful day.”
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Why would he keep it a secret?

And what about Frank Krummer, the German civilian reported in the Seventh Army documents to have been in Thompson’s
truck? Seventh Army had jurisdiction over the accident. The papers discuss an investigation of the crash that has never been found.

Are we just to dismiss the documents?

I have not been able to locate Krummer or any of his family, which is not surprising given the meager information I have and the fact that Krummer is a fairly common German name. It is also possible that whatever effort I did expend was for naught because, like “Spruce,” the name might have been mistakenly or purposely misspelled.

And what about the possible third passenger others have written was in Thompson’s truck?

Despite attorney Delsordo’s insistence that Thompson had no passengers, Delsordo, like the rest of us, was not there, as he concedes. He only knows what Thompson told him, some of which he refuses to reveal so it can not be addressed. And the story he does relate on Thompson’s behalf is inconsistent in several respects from what correspondent Howard K. Smith reported Thompson told him only four days after the accident. In that exclusive interview, Thompson made no mention of any hill or of his truck being stalled on the road. In fact, the closest document to an official report about the accident yet discovered—the Seventh Army memo,
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which purports to be based on the official report (now missing)—states flatly that “the smash occurred as the truck was making a left turn,” not after it had already completed the left turn (as Delsordo argues). Considering Scruce’s strange disappearance from the accident scene and later aftermath, and his—and even Thompson’s—mysterious deaths, something seems not right about all of it.

When Patton returned to war
on July 6, 1944—touching down on a Normandy airfield exactly one month after D-Day—he was determined to avoid trouble lest his chance at fulfilling what he believed was his destiny—to become a revered military hero—be removed.

Eisenhower had warned that one more controversy and he would send Patton home.

He was on his best behavior.

Forget that he been passed over as commander of American troops at D-Day despite having successfully led the U.S. contingents of the North African and Sicilian campaigns and had more military experience, especially in combat, than Omar Bradley, a subordinate, whom Eisenhower had chosen over him.

Forget that Bradley, once ashore after D-Day and bogged down in stalemate, had used Patton’s ideas to formulate a plan, codenamed “Cobra,” to break out of the stalemate and then had taken sole credit for the plan.
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Patton did not care. He was back in the fight. While he had been the idle decoy in England—a role he found humiliating but had dutifully accepted—he had read
The Norman Conquest
by Freeman, “paying particular attention to the roads William the Conqueror used in his operations in Normandy and Brittany.”
²
He had served in France in World War I and earlier, as a military student in France, had actually reconnoitered many of the areas he expected to be fighting in. These factors combined with his fluency in French meant he was seriously prepared on the eve of his dash across Northern France which would ultimately spearhead that country’s liberation and send the Germans fleeing for home.

But that same drive and success would again put him in conflict with his superiors, beginning with what has come to be known as the “Falaise Gap.”

After the newly reorganized Third Army had been given the official go-ahead, on August 1, nearly two months after D-Day and following the tough breakout at St. Lo, France, Patton and his tanks hit the road roaring. In the next fourteen days, the Third Army, “advanced farther and faster than any army in all history,” wrote Colonel Robert S. Allen, Patton’s combat intelligence officer and celebrated Washington journalist.
³
Patton’s forces, along with General Courtney Hodges’s First Army, first turned west and cut off and neutralized Brittany, the huge French land mass jutting into the western Atlantic below the Cherbourg Peninsula. The Germans had concentrations of infantry, armor, and vital submarine pens in Brittany. But with their supply lines cut by Patton and Hodges, they were toothless. Hitler did not stand by. In a risky move, German Panzers and infantry, not yet under attack in eastern France, were ordered to thrust west towards Patton and Hodges with little regard to their flanks, and counterattack. Their mission was to split Allied forces which would be a major threat to the Allied advance.
But the Allies, aided by “Ultra,” their breaking of German codes, learned of the Nazi offensive. Both Patton and Hodges’s forces met the thrust at Avranches and Mortain, two towns at the base of the Cherbourg Peninsula which governed the area. Fighting raged for days. In a brilliant subsequent move, Patton, in consultation with Bradley, saw a chance to entrap all the Germans engaged. He would send Third Army elements deeper south and east to LeMans, gateway to Paris and headquarters of the German Seventh Army, most of which was in the fighting, and encircle the thrusting enemy. The elements went swooping down and around the counterattacking Germans, beginning the encirclement.

Encirclement is every battle commander’s dream. Once an enemy is surrounded—cut off from its supply lines with no route of escape—the surrounding force can dispose of it almost at will, tightening the noose with every kill. In modern warfare, much of the slaughter of a target so captured comes from planes. It is merciless—like throwing grenades at schools of fish in a pond. This was Patton’s intention: annihilate the enemy and his weapons in the pocket that was forming. Once LeMans was taken, he had only to swing sharply back up north towards the sea to link with Montgomery’s troops, who were supposed to be advancing due south from Caen, the British general’s first objective after D-Day. Falaise, a small town on the imaginary north-south line connecting Caen with LeMans, was projected as the meeting point. It would be there that the trap would be closed. However, Montgomery, who had been meeting stiff resistance and was having other problems advancing, many of his own making, was bogged down and way behind schedule. The invasion plan had called for him to retake Caen the first day. This was now two months later. When Patton’s troops reached Argentan, a village about twenty miles south of Falaise, Bradley, prior to linkup, had abruptly
halted Patton’s forces, leaving an opening—the twenty-mile wide “Falaise Gap”—through which Germans, being beaten at Avranches and Mortain and already sensing the trap, were started to retreat.

Why Bradley did so has long been controversial. Boundaries of operation for American and British troops had been preset by Montgomery, who was Eisenhower’s deputy for the invasion and thus the highest ground commander on Normandy at the time. Bradley, under Montgomery, at first said he was adhering to those boundaries.
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Patton frantically protested. They were losing time! They had a chance to crush an entire German army! It might win the war. Let him close the gap, he begged. “Nothing doing,” Brigadier General Albin F. Irzyk, a Patton tank commander, records Bradley retorted, “You’re not to go beyond Argentan,” which was Montgomery’s cutoff point for the American advance in that sector.
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As strange as they might have been—especially coming from Bradley who had sanctioned the encirclement and who was not a Montgomery fan—those were the orders.

Twice more Patton sought permission to close the gap. The second time, Bradley was with Eisenhower, who, by that time, had come over from England and was at Bradley’s headquarters prior to establishing his own in France. Irzyk records that Patton, his troops still poised at Argentan, probing units already on the outskirts of Falaise, could not get Bradley on the phone so he asked Bradley’s chief of staff, General Allen, to get Bradley to go to Montgomery directly and seek permission. But Bradley, in front of Eisenhower, “urged that the...boundary continue to be observed.”
Eisenhower, supreme commander, who should have been cognizant of the opportunity on his battlefield and closed the gap—said nothing. He missed ordering a decisive blow. “Once again, as in North Africa and Sicily,” writes Irzyk, “Ike appeared more like a bystander than a commander. He rubber-stamped Bradley”—and, by default, Montgomery.

In a third try, according to Irzyk, members of Bradley’s staff, seeing the urgency and apparently siding with Patton, had phoned directly to Montgomery’s headquarters for permission. But members of Montgomery’s staff had rebuffed them
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—not surprising since Patton scholars such as Charles M. Province feel Montgomery was the real culprit. Montgomery, as big a prima donna as Patton ever was, “insisted, or rather, demanded, that he be allowed to close the gap,” writes Province. “Monty wanted the glory and the credit for the ‘ripe plum’ situation which had been created by Patton’s brilliant leadership and Third Army’s speed and daring execution.”
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