Target (41 page)

So why the VIN obliteration and the phony body tag? Was it just the result of some shady car switch deal on Germany’s black market, a way to secretly sell the authentic car to a private collector, as historical artifacts sometimes are sold, and represent the substitute as real? If so, would not the real car have surfaced by now? One can only speculate, but it seems that like the missing accident reports, the accident car is missing too—and by design. Clearly deception was involved. Why? Did the car contain incriminating evidence?

Following the Bulge victory,
Patton was enthused. He wanted to take the Third Army into Germany and stab at its heart. He had the momentum. The Nazis were again reeling and, this time, definitely on their last legs. After Ardennes, they had few reserves left. But “he was told to cool it,” wrote Farago.
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Bradley delivered the news. “Unfortunately, ‘higher authority’ [Eisenhower and the joint chiefs of Staff led by General Marshall] had already decided to make the main effort elsewhere”—or at least, curiously (preposterously, when one thinks of his record), not to put their money on Patton. They were holding him back again. He was dumbfounded. He had just saved Eisenhower from catastrophic defeat. And it had not been the first time. “I’ll be damned if I see why we have divisions if not to use them,” he wrote. “One would think people would like to win a war. . . we will be criticized by history, and rightly so, for having sat still so long.”
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Defiant, and with Bradley’s tacit but cautionary
approval—because Bradley basically agreed with him—he decided to proceed on his own, cajoling, conniving, and sneaking forward as best he could. “What a war,” he wrote. “I’ve never been stopped either by orders or the enemy yet”
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—only by his own commanders.

In early 1945, Patton took the ancient German city of Trier, retorting to Eisenhower’s order, received after the fact, not to attack it unless he had more troops with, “What do you want me to do? Give it back?” In Patton’s mind, the gloves were off. The city was a key part of the Siegfried Line and conquering it yielded 7,000 prisoners.
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Grateful for the breakthrough, “higher authority” decided to let him continue. Later that month—again without authorization—his troops were the first Allied soldiers to cross the mighty Rhine, the enemy’s last natural defense. They had made it ahead of rival Montgomery, who, despite his recent failures nevertheless had been promoted to field marshal, the British army’s highest rank. Montgomery had also officially been given the Rhine fording mission. Beating his rival again must have energized Patton, who, strangely, had
not
been promoted while Bradley and his other contemporaries had. As Farago describes it, “On March 23, 1945,” as Bradley finished his morning coffee, “he took Patton’s call and almost dropped the cup. ‘Brad,’ he heard Patton say, ‘don’t tell anyone but I’m across.’ ‘Across what?’. . . . ‘Across the Rhine, Brad.’ ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’”
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To celebrate, Patton stopped in the middle of the pontoon bridge his engineers had hastily constructed and urinated in the enemy river, an act caught in a photo sent somewhat shockingly (for those times) around the world.
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Summoned to Bastogne by Eisenhower, he thought he was going to be cashiered for his unauthorized advance—maybe even for stealing Montgomery’s thunder again. But instead he was complimented—the first time ever by the supreme commander. As
Farago points out, “It was Ike who received the kudos for the ‘unauthorized’ campaigns west of the Rhine even as John Jervis was given the peerage and pension for Nelson’s [19
^th
Century Trafalgar] victory.”
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But then he made a mistake, sending a too-lightly armored force into enemy territory near Hammelberg, Germany, to liberate American prisoners of war. (The territory was still in German hands.) One of the POWs was his son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John K. Waters, who had been captured by the Germans in Tunisia in 1943. Not only was the mission unauthorized, but the POW camp was destined to be overrun by Allies shortly. Worst of all, the raid basically failed, resulting in the deaths of 25 of the 294 rescuers and the wounding or capture of most of the rest—including the POWs it had been organized to liberate.
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Waters was one of the lucky few who made it to freedom but was wounded badly. Patton maintained he was never sure his son-in-law was at the camp and that his main purpose was only to free the prisoners because he was close enough to do so and to occupy the Germans as he made stronger thrusts elsewhere. But few believed him. Detractors, including politicians at home, charged he was risking American lives for purely personal reasons—and it appeared they were right. It became worse when he tried to keep the story quiet by firing a censor who was going to let details be published. The move backfired since he lacked the authority. Eisenhower wrote General Marshall, “Patton is a problem child.... He sent off a little expedition on a wild goose chase . . . . The upshot was that he got twenty-five prisoners back and lost a full company of medium tanks and a platoon of light tanks.” And oh, by the way, “his son-in-law was one of the twenty-five released,” which, of course, looked terrible. “Foolishly, he then imposed censorship on the [raid].... The story has now been released and I hope the
newspapers do not make too much of it”—a worry Marshall and Eisenhower always shared.
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But they did. Patton later admitted he had made a mistake, although the apology was mostly that he had sent too small a force. The damage, however, was done. Marshall, by now an open Patton detractor amongst his (Marshall’s) intimates, was not happy. Eisenhower followed suit. “Eisenhower thought that a baffling change had come over Patton,” wrote Farago. “Something was driving him into callous and arbitrary acts; he was arrogating undue privileges to himself; and he was behaving as if his assured place in history had filled him with reckless arrogance.”
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Farago, like most authors since, was following the assumed logic that Patton had finally gone too far and Eisenhower was reluctantly doing what he had to. But military historian Charles Whiting adds a larger perspective:

No, by this time, in the opinion of his growing number of enemies, he was a war-mongering, strident fascist
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—Eisenhower’s
rabid attack dog, as General James Doolittle remembered he was regarded, unleashed when needed and then promptly muzzled.
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But he was also a powerful renegade dangerously at odds with the Allies’ cautious yet punitive strategies for defeating and burying Germany and also their growing deference to Stalin. The demand for unconditional surrender, for instance, in Patton’s view, was causing fanatical resistance by the Germans who, because of it, saw no way out but to keep fighting. His men were dying needlessly because of the policy. Deference to the USSR and Stalin was allowing a loss of liberty across Eastern Europe that, in Patton’s eyes, made a mockery of the Allies’ soon-to-be victory. He saw the Russians as enslavers and wanted to fight them before it was too late. And, as he argued to Under Secretary of Defense Patterson, whose reaction was shock at Patton’s outspokenness, the Allies had liberated Europe only to give it over to a new, more brutal conqueror, Russia. He was right—as the ensuing Cold War would prove. But almost no one in power at the end of the war agreed. They thought him out of touch with the “new reality,” narrow-minded, and even crazy.

Yet the insanity was all around Patton.

When a report ordered by Roosevelt to determine responsibility for the murder of thousands of important Polish soldiers and civilians
^bs
determined the assassins to be the Soviet NKVD, Roosevelt himself suppressed it, banishing the author, a respected U.S. Naval officer, rather than making it public and condemning the Soviets. The massacre, in 1940, had been at the order of Stalin, according to a CIA report,
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but Stalin and the Soviets had fervently maintained the Nazis were the killers. It was a shameless and calculated lie. They had committed the crime to eradicate
Polish leadership and make the country a puppet. Not until the post-USSR Russian government admitted guilt and apologized in 1990 was the matter finally settled. Poland, bordering the Soviet Union on the west, was a vital part of one of Stalin’s main World War II aims—to build a buffer of slave states between the motherland and Western Europe and thereby blunt any future invasions from that direction. The other aim was to spread communism. And Roosevelt, Patton’s commander in chief, was complicit. He naïvely thought Stalin—“Uncle Joe,” as he called him, one of the worst political mass murderers in history—was a man of peace and benevolence needed to keep the postwar world free of conflict.

So intent was FDR on maintaining good relations with the Soviets that he actually proposed that the Red army be given personal representation on the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, according to historian Bradley F. Smith in
Sharing Secrets with Stalin
. It would have been an unprecedented up-close intrusion. The joint chiefs were, with Roosevelt’s consent, running the war. Not surprisingly—if for no other reason than they resented anyone, regardless of reason, interfering in their sacred sanctum—they nixed it.
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Of course, there was little need on the Russians’ part by that time to have such a representative. Through their many high-placed Soviet spies and informers, the Soviets knew almost everything important going on in the U.S. anyway. And even if they had not infiltrated the White House and OSS, among other key venues, the joint chiefs, while rejecting Soviet attendance at their secret meetings, were, in the person of their leader—General George Marshall—basically of the same mind as Roosevelt.

As early as 1943, as American military assignees went to Moscow in preparation for the first “Big Three” meeting in Teheran, joint chiefs’ head Marshall had instructed his team “to do all in its power to cooperate with the Soviets,” according to
Smith.
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By January 1945, as Patton continued his unauthorized fight into Germany—Eisenhower reaping the accolades—and preparations for the important Yalta Conference, the next “Big Three” meeting, commenced. Marshall was, as were most of the other top administration officials, completely under the Soviet sway. Thus, on that score alone, they were on a collision course with Patton, the only high-ranking officer with the guts or audacity (depending on the view) to publicly challenge his superiors. “Marshall and Eisenhower ‘were among the last to agree that we couldn’t get along with Stalin,’” former White House correspondent Steve Neal quotes wartime U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Averell Harriman, a New Dealer himself, in
Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World
. It is one of the latest books on the crucial but little studied immediate-postwar period.
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Other noted military historians and scholars agree.
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Marshall was “primarily a military man” with “little knowledge of... the skill with which the communists pervert great and noble aspirations for social justice into support of their own diabolic purposes,” wrote General Wedemeyer, Marshall’s aide.
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Marshall was concerned with Germany and Japan. Consequently, he was committed to FDR’s policy of courtship and deference to Stalin. He saw it as his duty, wrote Wedemeyer, and by Yalta, February 4-12, 1945, Roosevelt was so sick—he would die within two months (on April 12)—Marshall was running the war, and because the war was America’s overwhelming business, he was, in effect, running the country. Roosevelt had been fading since mid-1944, his mounting ailments putting him in stupors and clouding his judgment.
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While FDR figuratively presided at Yalta, Stalin, now heady with his armies’ recent victories over the Nazis, ran the show. This was not only because of Roosevelt’s ill health and fawning
acquiescence, but because the U.S. desperately wanted the Soviet Union to declare war on Japan—a plum Stalin, prior to the introduction of the atomic bomb, dangled in front of them—and Stalin pulled no punches in making sure he would prevail. “Stalin was even better informed about his allies at Yalta than he had been at Tehran,” wrote Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, in their books based on rare access to KGB archives.
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The lavish Crimean castles Roosevelt, Churchill, and their staffs stayed in were bugged. The Russians heard all their private discussions. As if that was not enough, as earlier noted, Alger Hiss was part of the American delegation and was secretly briefing the Soviets regarding American positions. The “Cambridge Five,” Britain’s cadre of English-born, top-level Soviet spies—including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby—were supplying Churchill’s positions. Stalin, therefore, according to Andrew and Mitrokhin, was well aware of the importance the Allies put on having at least “some ‘democratic’ politicians [put] into the puppet Polish provisional government already [forced on Poland] by the Russians”—a token that would at least show concern for their subjugated ally. “On this point, after initial [fake] resistance [like a Poker player holding the winning hand], Stalin graciously conceded, knowing that the ‘democrats’ could subsequently be excluded [and probably later murdered].”
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