Target (42 page)

When the Yalta meeting ended, Stalin had won almost everything he wanted. His only requirement was to give assurance that the Soviet Union would declare war on Japan three months after victory in Europe—an assurance that guaranteed him huge spoils, like Japanese territory, which he would hardly have to fight for since the U.S. had been the overwhelming force in the Pacific War. By Yalta, the outcome was already determined. Chief amongst Stalin’s wins was formal acceptance by the U.S. and Britain of Soviet
domination over Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, half of Germany, and other sovereign areas that together would provide an unbroken half moon-like swath of territorial protection for the USSR. The swath stretched roughly from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic in the south, invasion buffer that it was. He also secured the agreement that all former residents of the vast and polyglot USSR, regardless of their wishes, would be returned to the Soviet Union. “The Allies understood that they were sentencing hundreds of thousands of men, and quite a few women and children, to death and misery,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in the
National Review
. “Many of these refugees went to extraordinary lengths to end the war in British and American custody only to be forcibly—i.e., at gunpoint—returned to the Soviets for liquidation. Many killed themselves and their families rather than go back.”
²³

It was these kinds of treacherous
²⁴
giveaways that Patton objected to most. He was a fierce fighter, but he was not vengeful. He had pity for those who had suffered through the war and preferred freedom to the Gulags or worse, most because of their ethnicity or circumstances beyond their control, such as becoming POWs which Stalin considered treason. The treachery and shortsightedness of Yalta and the U.S. administration’s deference to the Soviet Union came vividly home to Patton in the last months of the war when his mighty army was approximately fifty miles from Berlin, and Eisenhower, prompted by OSS reports, diverted him south to Czechoslovakia to chase what turned out to be a phantom Nazi force dubbed “Redoubt,” a purported last-ditch mountain strong-hold of die-hards. He saw the deference again in the very last days of the war when he and his army, fully capable of liberation, were within sight of Prague, Czechoslovakia, one of the grand old capitals of Europe, and its Czech citizens begged for help against a Soviet occupation, but Eisenhower, in contact with an angry
Soviet general demanding Patton’s halt, again ordered him to stop. Stalin had successfully negotiated a line beyond which the other allies were not supposed to cross—but could have because of the vagaries of war. It conveniently left half of Germany, including Berlin, to the Soviets.

What really happened to keep the Western Allies from taking Berlin—as important a prize as, for instance, Baghdad in the 2003 American-Iraqi War—is still, more than sixty years later, a debated mystery. Eisenhower, upon whom the decision supposedly fell, maintained after the war that with victory all but assured, he had no intention of losing more Americans for a “symbol” that had, in his opinion, lost its “strategic importance.” Yet, as late as September 1944, he had considered the German capitol his major objective, during which time he endorsed Montgomery’s failed Market-Garden offensive, the ultimate objective of which was the capture of Berlin. Many of his commanders, such as General James M. Gavin, still thought as late as March 1945 that Berlin was the objective. That was the last Gavin had heard as he detailed in
On to Berlin
, his 1978 book. What had changed? One answer is Yalta. The meeting in the Crimea had served notice that Stalin and the Soviets were in charge—at least if the U.S. wanted their cooperation, as so many believed was essential, in beating the Japanese and building a better post-war world. They did not want the Western Allies in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower was so cautious not to offend the Soviets that he actually contacted Stalin to offer him Berlin, telling the Soviet dictator he did not think it was now important. The wily Stalin, seeing another Yalta-like coup dropped in his hands, pretended to agree, and then “within moments of [the] communication,” according to Patton scholar Charles Province, “ordered five tank armies and 25,000 artillery pieces, all under the command of Marshal G. K. Zhukov, who
would become a good friend of Eisenhower’s and bring him to Moscow, to attack the German capital.”
²⁵
If Eisenhower did not think the city important, Stalin certainly did.

Some, like Province, think the failure to take Berlin may have been Eisenhower’s “greatest error,” if not “one of the greatest political blunders in history.”
²⁶
By adhering to the line of advance Stalin proposed at Yalta—the Oder River, west of Berlin—the Western Allies left themselves no routes to the city, which was the heart and soul of what had been fought for. They were to get occupation zones in Berlin, which would become part of free West Germany, but no way to get to them except through roads controlled by the Soviets. Berlin, in effect, was left an island in the midst of Soviet dominated Europe. The Soviets were therefore able to isolate the city and thus cause crises such as the one sparking the 1948 to 1949 Berlin Airlift, the Soviet attempt to starve the city’s West Berlin inhabitants into submission, and to easily and brutally quell the 1956 Hungarian revolution. But had Eisenhower alone made the decision about Berlin? Or had it come from his superior Marshall, or even the ailing FDR? With new information emerging about the war, scholars continue to debate that question. Military historian Bruce Lee, for instance, citing newly unearthed formerly secret documents, says it was Marshall who ordered Eisenhower not to take Berlin and to confer with Stalin about all military matters concerning Europe. By that time, Marshall, primarily concerned with winning the war in the Pacific and counting on Stalin’s help in fighting Japan, wanted Eisenhower to wrap things up as soon as possible in Europe and avoid angering the Soviets.
²⁷
Lee says Marshall actually tried to cover up the fact that he had made the decision about Berlin.
²⁸

Whatever the truth, there had been major, inexcusable mistakes made in the European war. The reining of Patton, the failure to
close the Falaise Gap and anticipate or detect the surprise German offensive leading to the nearly catastrophic Battle of the Bulge were huge errors. The war could have ended perhaps six months sooner had such mistakes not occurred. General Albin Irzyk lists twelve major high command mistakes in his
Gasoline for Patton
, including Eisenhower’s continual choice of Montgomery and Bradley over Patton when Patton’s record was better, “failure to plan for the deadly terrain” which slowed the Allied advance right after D-Day, Eisenhower keeping his headquarters far from the front instead of close to the fighting, and Eisenhower approving Montgomery’s Market Garden plan as well as concurring in the mistakes Montgomery made leading to its failure.
²⁹
Add to these the concession of Eastern Europe to Stalin, and these “blunders,” as British correspondent Tom Agoston characterizes them,
³⁰
can be attributed to the highest levels.

As the official announcement of the German surrender was made on May 10, 1945, there is some indication that such mistakes, unknown at the time to the public, were on Eisenhower’s mind. On that date, Eisenhower hosted his top generals in a private lunch. Afterward, he made a speech “designed to coordinate their postwar accounts and assure that none of them would be talking out of turn.” He “spoke very confidentially of ‘the need for solidarity’” in case “any of them might be called before Congressional committees probing the conduct of the war.”
³¹
General Irzyk writes he “strongly intimated that they should not criticize publicly the way the campaign in Europe had been fought.”
³²
After the meeting, Patton wrote that the speech “had to me the symptoms of political aspirations . . . . It is my opinion that this talking cooperation is for the purpose of covering up probable criticism of strategic blunders which he unquestionably committed during the campaign. Whether or not these were his own or
due to too much cooperation with the British, I don’t know. I am inclined to think that he over-cooperated.”
³³

And those already mentioned probably were not the only secrets Patton knew. General Irzyk concludes,

Patton, unlike others, would not have been cowed by a threat. Physically, he was fearless. This was around the time—war’s end, as he railed against the Soviets and Stalin—that the “Polish” Spitfires jumped his Piper Cub, that he was almost decapitated in a strange jeep accident, and a “runaway” ox cart nearly gored him. He was a man of principal, who could not be swayed to compromise his beliefs. Independently wealthy, he could afford to eliminate his pension and could not be bought.

For pro-Soviets and Stalin, as well as those who had run the war, among them individuals with political aspirations, Patton was a big problem—and growing bigger.

Worst of all, he wanted to go to war with Russia.

In order to get a clearer picture of Patton’s accident, I asked Toni Wolf, a Los Angeles Police Department investigator with over fifteen years of experience, to evaluate the pictures and stories I had accumulated. She said she would give me an opinion. Her subsequent report to me was not much help—which was no fault of hers. She said she could not tell much without official, professional accident reports and interviews done no later than forty-eight hours after the incident. “It has been proven that memory of a traumatic event lapses with the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If the interviews had been conducted within this time frame, with a qualified investigator, I believe that there would have been a clearer understanding of what transpired so many years ago,” she wrote. Perhaps that was the reason the original reports are gone. They were the most truthful while the later ones—the recollections, memoirs, and author investigations that have survived—did not have the spontaneous, still-vivid verisimilitude that might incriminate.

The copies of photos I supplied of both the Cadillac and the larger truck caused particular problems. “None of [the photos] show the same damage,” she wrote. They “were taken at angles which distort the amount of damage as well as the location of the damage done to both vehicles....This can make the damage appear worse or less, depending on the angle” and “raises questions in my mind as to what the vehicle actually looked like just after the collision and why... the damage [varied] from photograph to photograph.” Welcome to the club, I thought. The photos I supplied are the main ones found in every book or article that discusses the accident. There are not many. There just is no professional record of any kind—reports, photos, or interviews—available on which to base unequivocal, inarguable deductions about what happened on that German roadway December 9, 1945.

Nevertheless, she ventured a few opinions. The accident was
not
a “minor” collision. Stressing that there was no way, given the
lack of official, competent data, to positively know the speeds of the vehicles involved, Wolf wrote, “If I assume the driver [Woodring] was indeed traveling at 30 mph [as most accounts indicate],” given “the average perception and reaction time for an experienced driver as 1 ½ seconds . . . . [Woodring] would have hit the much larger much heavier truck at a speed very close to 30 mph. At 30 mph I would expect to see significant damage and moderate to major injuries.” Okay, that perhaps explains Patton, but what about Gay and Woodring? They escaped even moderate injury, unless Band-aids qualify. The car at the museum features hand grips by the back windows. Maybe Gay, although he never mentioned it, was holding onto one of those while Patton was not? But Woodring had no grips except the wheel he was holding. A trauma doctor I talked with said the natural inclination in such situations was to use the hands and arms for protection and throw them up to shield from injury. But none of them, including Patton, showed signs of that in the subsequent medical examinations.

In any case, most interesting to me in Wolfe’s report was her evaluation of the forces in the car at impact. In all accounts—books, articles, and interviews—the speculation is always that Patton, sitting on the edge of the seat (an erroneous assumption if Woodring is to be believed),
³⁶
is thrown forward in the passenger cab to hit either a fixture on the roof or a clock in the middle of the far partition directly behind the driver. Again, I use the word speculation because, as stated earlier, no one claims to have actually seen him hurtling forward or hitting whatever caused his injuries, nor is there ever mention in any account of the accident of a damaged fixture or clock.
^bt
But the speculation is frequent, sometimes stated as fact. The Patton Museum, for instance, stated emphatically on a plaque near the car that Patton “hit the clock
mounted on the rear of the front seat.” Wolfe, however, indicates that from what she can deduce, it is more likely that Patton was propelled at impact toward the door beside him—the one holding the window he was reportedly looking out of—rather than toward the farther partition.