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It seems so. Patton, in the vernacular of the time, was “behind the eight-ball,” persona non grata. Eisenhower and Marshall did not trust him; obviously did not want him leading the final, crucial drive. Could it be, as they got closer to the Soviets, they were afraid they could not control him? The question is as good an answer as any yet provided. The need for a closer supply base is often
given as the reason Eisenhower went with Montgomery—that, and the promise of a quick end to the war. But that reasoning is challenged by the fact that Patton, by hook and crook, was, despite the supply problems, maintaining an extraordinary pace—a pace putting Montgomery to shame. Air drops and intermediate supply bases were aiding Patton. Montgomery did not secure Antwerp as a supply base quickly anyway, which is one of the reasons Market-Garden failed.
^bo
A Patton offensive also offered a quick end to the war. Patton, more than Montgomery, had proven he could win—and win fast. At best, going with Montgomery over Patton was just a bad decision by Eisenhower—another, like Falaise, that would hold up the winning of the war, result in months more fighting and lives lost, and give the fleeing Germans time to regroup and come back hard in the Battle of the Bulge as they did three months later.

Patton himself took it personally, dropping whatever pretense left that he had toward conciliatory cooperation and reverting to the Patton of old. “To hell with Monty,” he wrote in his diary September 17. He would not be halted. He determined to go forward with whatever he could muster. “I must get so involved [in operations] that they can’t stop me.”
²³
To his men, he openly began referring to Eisenhower as “the best general the British had,” a knock that General Gavin wrote soon got back to the Supreme Commander and his staff, further alienating Patton from them.
²⁴
He did not care. They would need him and he knew it. In his diary he wrote, “Monty does what he pleases and Ike says ‘yes, sir.’”
²⁵
It angered him. To his wife, Beatrice, he penned, “I have to battle for every yard but it is not the enemy who is trying to stop me, it
is ‘They’.... Look at the map! If I could only steal some gas, I could win this war.”
²⁶

And steal he did—or at least he intimates he did. “There was a rumor,” he wrote, “which, officially,” he added, tongue-in-cheek, “I hoped was not true, that some of our Ordnance people passed themselves off as members of the First Army [detached to Montgomery] and secured quite a bit of gasoline from one of the dumps of that unit.”
²⁷
In addition, troops of his had captured large stores of enemy gas and supplies and Bradley had been able to scrounge up more and had given him permission to cross the Moselle, thirty miles ahead, and go for the German border—all unknown to Eisenhower. Patton, in effect, would launch his own offensive. Eventually, he even told Bradley not to call him during certain periods in order to shut down the possibility of receiving countermanding orders. But the stop-Patton move by that time had already done its damage. In war, sometimes hours, even seconds, make the difference. Taking advantage of Patton’s halt, Hitler had rushed a new commander, Field Marshall Walter Model, hero of the Russian fighting, to the crumbling Western front. Model had already begun reorganizing and invigorating the retreating Germans, as well as bringing in new troops, green but eager. Hitler was especially afraid of Patton. While Patton’s troops had crossed the Moselle in certain places on September 6, their hold was tenuous as they met increasingly stiffer resistance as a result of reinforcements and found themselves bogged down in fierce fighting all along the river. Worst, the autumn rains began, adding mud—a great hindrance to tanks—and eventually an epidemic of debilitating trench foot
^bp
to the shortages of gas, ammunition,
replacement troops, and other crucial supplies already bedeviling the Third Army. The Germans, repositioned and revitalized, were dug in, and now, with the knowledge that they were defending their home soil, found new purpose for fighting—which they did, as Blumenson writes, with increasing “skill and tenacity.” They were not just waging a war. They were defending their nearby families from what they considered revenge-seeking hordes. The Third Army blitzkrieg was over—at least for the time being.

Prior to Market-Garden’s failure, however, the mood at SHAEF—hundreds of miles from the front—was decidedly optimistic. The war seemed like it would soon be over. So relaxed and confident was the mood, that groups of foreign Allies were given authorization to observe their counterparts. For instance, on September 16, as Montgomery readied the huge air and land operation, Patton wrote that a party of ten Soviets was due to visit the Third Army the next day—obviously part of SHAEF’s continuing accommodation to the Soviets. But Patton had no intention of hosting them. “I won’t be here,” he wrote. “I decided to go to the front. I had a map prepared for them which showed exactly nothing in a big way,” because, he wrote, “This is what they do to
us
.”
²⁸
His absence and lack of cooperation must have angered Ike and SHAEF—more proof to them of his intolerable obstinance, inability to be controlled, even insanity.
Tough
, would have been Patton’s response. He was not going to kow-tow to soldiers he did not trust or respect. Besides, he was actually needed at the front, was happy to be there, and became involved in the actual fighting, directing attacks, sacking slackers, patting backs, and dodging bullets and artillery. An attack against Metz, the capitol of Lorraine and a heavily fortified town in front of the Siegfried Line, produced some of the toughest fighting of the Allied advance. Because of the weather, lack of replacements and supplies, almost impenetrable
forts and the fanatical defense, it became a drawn out siege. These were hard days for Patton, who hated slow slog-fighting, believing it benefited defenders and cost casualties and, ultimately, victories.

With the failure of Market Garden, Patton returned to prominence. Eisenhower, with Bradley back in the fold, had, on Bradley’s recommendation, decided on a more cautionary strategy of advancement into Germany—a broad line offensive stretching roughly from the North Sea down to Switzerland. The armies on the front would press roughly equally towards the Siegfried Line, thereby forcing the enemy to defend all parts of the line equally and not mass their forces.They would have to spread thin—or so Eisenhower thought. But he wanted a breech as well and learned with great relief that Patton was already out front and hammering. As part of the strategy, Eisenhower decided he wanted to maximize the effort to break through into Germany that began in early November and he authorized a bombardment to blast a passage through the Siegfried Line ahead of Patton so the Third Army could rush through. But the weather was getting worse; rain and increasing mud and cold hampered movement. Patton postponed the launch for several days. Finally, in the pre-dawn of November 8, he decided he could wait no longer. Despite the weather, he launched. “At 0745, Bradley called up to see if we were attacking,” he wrote. “I had not let him know for fear I might get a stop order. He seemed delighted that we were going ahead. Then General Eisenhower came on the phone and said, ‘I expect a lot of you; carry the ball all the way.’”
²⁹
With the chips down, Eisenhower was counting on his star again, even encouraging him. It was all Patton, a loyalist if there ever was one, needed to get the job done. He was starved for recognition from his superiors.

Unfortunately, given the weather and fierce German resistance, it was not until November 22 that Metz, with its medieval-like defenses, finally fell. But so, too, did the snows of winter—a further hindrance to operations. Now the earlier Patton halt, failure of Market Garden, and relaxed optimism of SHAEF—all delaying the Allied time table for months—produced its fruit. But that fruit was for the Germans. And as Patton prepared a major assault on the Siegfried Line just beyond Metz, the Nazis, taking advantage of the overall slowdown to muster a major fighting force and sneak into position under cover of storm clouds through which Allied reconnoitering airplanes could only occasionally see, launched their last-ditch counterattack in the snow and cold-drenched Ardennes Forest—the infamous Battle of the Bulge. Patton, briefed by his able and worried intelligence chief, Oscar W. Koch, actually predicted the attack, just as he had, interestingly, the Japanese Pearl Harbor sneak attack years before it occurred.
^bq
But at SHAEF, Eisenhower disregarded the warnings. So unconcerned was SHAEF about the threat, according to Patton historian Charles Province, that they had set up a rest and recuperation area in the Ardennes.
³⁰
And on December 16, fast-moving German tanks and infantry maintaining radio silence hit unprepared troops of the First Army in Belgium with such surprise that thousands of Americans were killed or captured as the salient quickly produced a large breakdown and “bulge” in the lax American line. In London, where Eisenhower and his surprised SHAEF officers—playing cards, as Province describes them—looked aghast at what was happening, it quickly became apparent that the Germans were driving to split the Allied forces along the line and cut off Antwerp
which had finally become operative as the hub of a network of new Allied supply depots. If they succeeded, the Allies would be cut off and possibly annihilated or thrown back into the sea, losing all territory they had won. It would be Dunkirk, Britain’s 1940 defeat, all over again.

Desperate, Eisenhower again turned to Patton—the only one of his commanders convened at an emergency meeting to have an answer. Because Koch had warned him of the tenuous situation along the line, Patton, weeks before, had tasked his staff to come up with contingency plans for just such a surprise German assault. Although he was deep in the preparations for the earlier ordered attack on the Siegfried Line, he told the Supreme Commander he could redirect his huge war machine north in a matter of days and mount a rescue of paratroopers and others who had temporarily halted the German advance through the forest but were in desperate need of help. No one at the meeting could believe he could do it quickly enough. As Province writes, “The Third Army had to stop a full scale attack they had started to the east, pull back the entire army, swing around ninety degrees to the north and then begin another full scale attack on the southern flank of the German forces. Nothing like that had ever been done in the history of warfare.”
³¹

Patton did it. His troops arrived in a matter of days and were the crucial factor in pushing the bulge back into Germany. Snow and cold, added to a ferocious last-ditch effort by the Germans, extended the fighting in the area for a month, although once Patton’s troops arrived, the issue was no longer in doubt. Overall, the U.S. suffered an estimated 81,000 casualties in the Battle of the Bulge, 19,000 of them dead—all as a result of Eisenhower’s lax precautions.
³²

Luckily, Patton bailed him out again.

The irony, as Province points out—or perhaps better stated, the
portent of things to come
—was that Eisenhower never even thanked him.

The car Patton was traveling
in the day of his accident could provide valuable clues about what happened to the general. It is in the Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor at Fort Knox, Kentucky. The museum’s website stated that it “has the finest collection of Patton artifacts in the world including his trademark ivory gripped Colt pistol and the Cadillac staff car in which he was fatally injured.”
¹
At last I could look at a tangible piece of evidence in this mystery—the veritable scene of the crime. Would there be blood stains? A dent or broken fixture which would show how he injured his head? I remembered a sudden insight I had while visiting the ancient Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Jesus had actually walked by these huge stones. Patton certainly was not Jesus, but the principle was the same. It would probably be the closest I would ever get to my subject—if his writings were not that.

But then some preliminary research began to call the Cadillac at Fort Knox into question. Noting certain inconsistencies of the
Patton Cadillac in pictures right after the accident and pictures of the car at Ft. Knox, Doug Houston, a classic car expert, had written an article in 1980 in
Torque
²
stating his belief that the Ft. Knox Cadillac was a 1939 model, not the 1938 in which it is known Patton had been injured. Certain “glaring discrepancies,” such as different front bumpers and grill design, had caused him, he wrote in the article, to call Horace Woodring, Patton’s driver, who, by 1980, was running a car dealership in Morganfield, Kentucky. “I asked Woodring if the display car is the Patton car, and he answered, ‘No, and I’ve told [the museum] that it isn’t.’ It is the writer’s feeling that the car should be billed as ‘similar to the Patton car,’”—not the actual car itself—“but such is not the case.”
³
I located Houston in Detroit and he verified what I had read. “The display car is a true ’39 export model,” he wrote in email exchanges with me. It had been a long time since he had been to the museum, he cautioned, but that was his belief based on what he had seen.