Target (4 page)

After a period of adjustment, he regained some of his optimism and decided on a new course of action for the near future. He knew his career as a warfighter was over—at least under the Truman administration. They were just more of the same. He was nearing retirement age. Obviously he was not being cheered by those in power. He told staff, like Gay, riding in the back with him now, that he was going to resign—not retire as was normal for an exiting officer in order to retain pensions and benefits—but resign so he would have no army restraints. He was independently wealthy and did not need the pension or benefits. He would then be free to speak his mind and give his version of the war and what had happened to him—the truth as he saw it. And his side would
be a blockbuster. He knew secrets and had revelations, he said, he was sure would “make big headlines.”
¹⁴

What those headlines would have been can only now be guessed. Perhaps he meant to go public with the shocking cost of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s poor decisions. Perhaps he meant to reveal explosive details about why his Third Army’s race through France after D-Day had been repeatedly halted by his superiors, most notably at Falaise, where he could have killed thousands of Germans, delays which he and later historians, many of them military men, believed had lengthened the war—perhaps by a year—and cost untold American lives. Perhaps one of his revelations would have been how Eisenhower and Bradley, in Patton’s mind, had subverted their own army. Perhaps he meant to defend his policies in Occupied Germany, denounce crooked dealings by the Allies, and condemn what he believed was Washington’s complicity in the takeover of Eastern Europe and favoritism for the Soviet Union and communists.

Patton had been at the forefront at the most crucial times. He knew as much as any insider. Were there other dark secrets he could have revealed?

By this time, he regarded his old friend Eisenhower as purely an opportunist seeking the U.S. presidency.
¹⁵
Perhaps he meant to challenge him. Patton had returned home on leave in the summer of 1945 and been toasted and feted by throngs of cheering Americans, some of whom had urged him to run for office, even for the presidency, but he said, then, that he was not interested. Public office would have given him an entirely new and powerful voice, perhaps even a deciding hand in Washington policy. It was certainly a possibility in his future. At the least, he planned to write and lecture and develop a powerful public voice. He was looking forward to it.

And so, as the limousine slowed to enter the outskirts of Mannheim, a town situated on the banks of the Rhine River into which, just months previous, he had publicly urinated as a theatrical statement of his contempt for Adolf Hitler, Patton was a fearless and incorruptible four-star general with secrets to tell that some in high places, jealous of or angry with him, did not want told. Even after suffering through the world’s most devastating war, he was willing to start an even worse conflict with the Russians. He was a hard-line conservative who had angered and threatened leaders of both the Left and the Right in the United States, Russia, and Great Britain. He was enjoying his last day in war-torn Germany—a hostile, unreliable environment filled with intrigue.

And in just a matter of moments he was to become the sole victim of an enigmatic car crash.

More than fifty years after
General Patton’s death, I was jogging in the Santa Monica mountains near Patton’s t birthplace (San Gabriel, 1885) with my cousin, Tim Wilcox, when he startled me by saying the famous general had been assassinated. He knew a man who had been involved.

“Assassinated?” I said. “I thought Patton had died in an auto accident?”

“Not according to Douglas Bazata.”

Tim is a private investigator—a gumshoe—and owner of Indianapolis-based International Investigators Inc., a respected detective agency which he built up after buying in 1970 from a group of former FBI agents.
¹
One of the practices Tim had continued was using ex-intelligence operatives, or “spooks,” as contracted investigators for major jobs. Bazata was one such contractor; a former World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS—forerunner of the CIA) officer and post-war mercenary whom Tim had hired for several major cases.

Tim had been impressed with the former OSS operative. He “was a big guy, smart and tough, as credible as you can get. And in my job you learn to trust your intuition.” Bazata had not told him a lot about the Patton case, but said he had passed a lie-detector test on the matter, “and I believe him. I use lie detectors. He knew things only someone familiar with them would.” Bazata was extremely resourceful, he said, and had always gotten the job done, no matter how complex.

I was intrigued with the implications of Tim’s claim. Patton assassinated? Could it be true? If so, it was a big story and would impact history. Patton was a vocal and determined anti-communist. He would have been the first major assassination victim of the long and disastrous Cold War. Patton was not only a great soldier but a man ahead of his time—strong, manly, and prescient. He was a throwback to the rugged individualists of America’s earlier history. He had foreseen the Soviet threat long before others, especially our blind, appeasing, and often opportunistic leaders at the end of the war.

I wanted to meet Bazata.

In the weeks that followed, I researched Patton’s death. He had not died in an auto accident as I had thought, but had been badly injured in one. He died several weeks later on December 21, 1945, in an army hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, where he had been taken with head lacerations and a broken neck following the accident. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down and had been in very serious condition for days. However, right before he died, he had actually made a substantial recovery for someone with such serious injuries. Preparations had been made to discharge him and fly him home to the states for Christmas. His belongings had even
been readied. But approximately twenty-four hours before he was to leave, he had an unexpected downturn. He started having trouble breathing. Moving blood clots called embolisms appeared to interfere with his lungs, taxing his heart.

After incessant coughing trying to raise fluid from his lungs, Patton became unconscious and died—a hell of a way to go for a great warrior like him who had yearned, it was always said, for the last bullet in the last battle.

Notwithstanding his unexpected health improvements, Patton had a history of embolisms. They had struck him when he broke a leg and was hospitalized when he was younger. But that certainly could have been known and exploited by a would-be assassin.

There had been no autopsy.

One of Patton’s doctors requested one but Mrs. Patton declined. After losing her husband in another country, she could hardly be blamed for not wanting to prolong the ordeal.

However, that did not mean something sinister had not happened. Patton was a controversial figure, hated and resented by some, a hero to millions of others. He was such an important person on the world stage at the time that the failure of the authorities to ensure nothing untoward had occurred seems incredible—if not intentional—in retrospect.

The lack of an autopsy becomes even more of an issue in light of the blatant anomalies surrounding the car accident that caused Patton’s injuries.
^e
Patton was traveling in a 1938 Cadillac Series 75 limousine, a U.S. touring car specially designed for European motoring. It was one of the larger ones of the time,
boasting seating for seven passengers; it had space for two in the front seat, three in the backseat, and two stored chairs that were embedded in the floor but could be pulled up and used when needed. Presumably those hidden chairs were not deployed, so Patton and Gay had room in the back between themselves on the seat and a divider in front of them separating their larger compartment from the one containing the front seat and driver. The divider included a window that could be rolled down.

When they came into Kaeferthal, a war-torn and dilapidated industrial area on Mannheim’s northern outskirts, they stopped at a railroad track crossing to wait for a train to pass. When the last boxcar had gone by, they continued on their way. They were traveling on a two-lane road that was practically devoid of traffic that Sunday morning. It stretched out straight in front of them for roughly half a mile with good visibility for the driver, Woodring. Recounting it later, Woodring said he saw a two-and-a-half-ton GMC army truck, a large vehicle with ten wheels, eight on two rear axles below a canvas-covered cargo bed—standard-issue at the time in Occupied Germany—slowly advancing in his direction in the opposite lane. It was nothing out of the ordinary, so he did not give it much thought.

Behind the vehicle, the soldier identified in later histories as Joe Spruce, who was carrying the hunting equipment, pulled out and around the limousine in his half-ton jeep to lead the way to the hunting area which Woodring had never visited. Earlier, at a stop at a check point, according to some accounts, the single hunting dog riding in the open-air jeep was switched to the warmer Cadillac because of the cold. The dog presumably would have been in the front with Woodring as the big army truck in front of them slowly advanced. Woodring, however, listening to Patton’s backseat comments, was not paying much attention to the approaching vehicle.

The only book author, as far as I could tell, to ever go to Germany and try and retrace what happened in the accident was Ladislas Farago, a Hungarian-born former U.S. naval intelligence officer and author of the acclaimed
Patton: Ordeal and Triumph
,
²
the book from which the 1970 Academy Award-winning movie
³
starring George C. Scott had been made. He had conducted the personal investigation for his 1981 follow-up,
The Last Days of Patton
, which later had been made into a television movie,
⁴
also starring Scott.
^f
According to Farago, who interviewed some who had been at the scene and had access to other close-to-the-accident data that has now disappeared, Patton was looking out the limousine’s window, “his curious little eyes darting from left to right as he surveyed the countryside.” The roadsides around them were piled with litter and war ruin, “forming an endless canyon of junk . . . .Patton said, ‘How awful war is . . . . Look at all those derelict vehicles, Hap!’ Then he said, ‘And look at that heap of goddamn rubbish!’”
⁵

At that moment, without warning or signaling, the driver of the two-and-a-half-ton truck heading toward the limousine in the opposite lane suddenly turned abruptly, almost 90 degrees, into the opposite oncoming lane. The bulk of the large truck was squarely in front of the advancing Patton car.

Woodring later said he had time enough only to stomp on the brake while trying to turn the car to the left (toward the middle of
the road). But he was largely unsuccessful and Patton’s car hit the truck nearly head-on. The right front of the limousine hit the side of the truck just behind its elevated cab, damaging the right front fender and radiator.

Woodring was uninjured. But when he turned to see how the passengers in the back had fared, he saw a scene that made his heart skip.

Gay was not significantly injured. But Patton was lying across Gay on the backseat, cradled in Gay’s right arm and pinning him with his weight. He was bleeding profusely from a gash that extended from the bridge of his nose to almost midway up his scalp. Patton complained that his neck hurt, and then said, “I’m having trouble breathing, Hap. Work my fingers for me.” Gay did but Patton persisted, “Go ahead, Hap. Work my fingers.”

Patton was paralyzed.

The accident occurred around 11:45 a.m. Military police quickly arrived on the scene. Lieutenant Peter K. Babalas and his partner, Lieutenant John Metz, had passed the general’s convoy on the road heading in the opposite direction before the accident. They heard what they described as a muffled crash. Questioning Woodring and the driver of the truck, Technician 5
^th
Class (T/5) Robert L. Thompson, Babalas “concluded that the truck had made a sudden sharp turn to the left just as the Cadillac was moving up,” and the crash “had become unavoidable.” Although Gay said he was looking out his side of the window at impact and had not seen what happened to General Patton, and Woodring had been looking forward and so also had not seen what had happened to Patton, they theorized that the general had been thrown forward from the backseat to the barrier dividing the car, injured his head on the car’s roof or divider between the front and back compartments, and then bounced
back at an angle into Gay’s lap. There were no seatbelts in those days, so no one in the vehicle was restrained.