Target (47 page)

On October 15, Patton penned to his wife, “Ike is bitten with the presidential bug and is also yellow.... He will never be president !. . . I will resign when I have finished this job which will be not later than Dec. 26. I hate to do it but I have been gagged all my life, and whether they are appreciated or not, America needs some honest men who dare to say what they think, not what they think people want them to think.”
¹⁷
To retired Major General James Harbord, an old friend and advisor, he wrote:

Much of Patton’s short three months at Bad Nauheim was spent working on a book, later to be published as
War as I Knew It
, early chapters of which he was sending to various friends and relatives for advice and safe-keeping while stressing that it had to be kept secret. The book, based primarily on his diary, which itself was sometimes haphazardly kept on scraps of paper, eventually would be published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin in 1947.
Since word had gotten out that he kept a diary, the book was eagerly anticipated—with great trepidation by some of those he had served with or under who had reason to fear what it would contain. For instance, prior to publication, the Truman administration’s Robert Patterson, who, by then, had become secretary of war, wrote Mrs. Patton, who apparently had sent him a copy, “There are many passages . . . that are fairly severe . . . . The general was entirely candid in speaking his mind and giving his impressions, even though they reflected unfavorably on individuals . . . . The inclusion of these critical reflections in a published book, I am convinced, would not only be contrary to his desires, but would lead to bitter controversies and recriminations....” He urged her to purge the book, and she did edit it. While it generally, when published, gave his views, it was not as incriminating or shocking as Patterson implies. How Patton finished it is not clear, and one wonders what was edited out.
¹⁹
No unedited copies of the manuscript exist in any archives, but it is possible that Patton family members may have the original, although they do not mention it in their writings today.

He also spent time hunting, which he greatly enjoyed. Though some critics of the theory that Patton was assassinated charge that no one could have known he was going hunting that Sunday morning since it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, Patton was a frequent hunter. His driver, Horace Woodring said, “He [Patton] went hunting every Sunday morning.”
²⁰
Patton himself mentioned several hunting trips in November just weeks before his accident. In a letter to his wife on the 18
^th
, a Sunday, he wrote, “I am going shooting at Hannon this P.M.”
²¹
A day earlier, on November 17, he wrote Omar Bradley, “Since writing you I have been on a couple of other shoots in one of which I used the pump gun and in the other the over and under 16, which, as you recall,
I had made in Liege.”
²²
Patton was an avid hunter. Hunting was part of his routine; therefore, that certainly would have been taken into account by anyone planning to harm him.

Furthermore, it is unclear when the decision to go hunting was made. Some evidence indicates that the idea to go hunting that fateful Sunday was made only early that morning, thereby further shortening the time plotters had to get an assassination attempt together. But Colonel Robert S. Allen, one of Patton’s close staff officers, wrote that the decision was made the previous night. “How about going out tomorrow?” he quoted Gay as asking Patton. Patton responded, “You arrange to have the car and guns on hand early tomorrow and we’ll see how many birds we can bag.” Allen was a famous journalist, author of several books and the syndicated column “Inside Washington.” He was cognizant of the need to be accurate. Additionally, Patton’s driver Woodring told Suzy Shelton, “The trip was a last-minute decision the night before.”
²³
He said the same to Brian Sobel for Sobel’s book,
The Fighting Pattons
.
²⁴
But to others like Farago and Fugate, Woodring indicated he did not learn about the trip until that morning. The witness of General Keyes, who was with Patton the night before the accident, can go either way.
^ca

Even if the decision to go hunting was made that morning, foul play could still have been at work. There were spies all over, most of them Russian or working for the Russians. Bazata said he had
informants in Patton’s headquarters, which is not hard to believe since everyone from professional military to cooks were engaged in supplying information if the price or cause was right. Bazata himself was nearby. As mentioned earlier, Patton’s phones were tapped, certainly by the U.S., and most probably by the Soviets, as General McNarney and CIC’s Skubik believed.

The only timeline for the beginning of the December 9 trip is provided by Farago from interviews he conducted. He said “Woody remembers” that when he went out to ready the Cadillac, after being woken to do so by a phone call from Patton’s valet, Sergeant Meeks, a clock in the car “stood at three minutes to seven o’clock in the morning,”—6:57 a.m.
²⁵
Presuming that is correct, that meant, allowing time for dressing and possibly eating, he had gotten the call fifteen to forty-five minutes before, say at 6:30 a.m. The few sources that discuss it indicate the hunting party—Patton, Gay, and Woodring in the Cadillac; Scruce, a hunting dog, and the guns in the open jeep—left Bad Nauheim anywhere between approximately 7:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.
²⁶
(Farago says “between seven and eight”; Gay, in his memoir, says 8:50 a.m.) That gave any potential plotters between, roughly, a half hour to an hour and a half to get in motion; half a day, if they learned about the trip the night before. If they had been trying previously, as the many strange earlier accidents suggest, they already had the essentials in place—assassins, weapons, and method. It was just a matter of when and where. And if Douglas Bazata was the assassin, it is certainly relevant that he, as he and others who knew him stress, preferred quick action to lengthy planning. Speed and decisiveness were among his sought-after skills.

Scruce, according to Woodring,
²⁷
left Bad Nauheim first and was to meet the Cadillac later at a checkpoint outside Mannheim—the one at which they supposedly transferred the
dog to Patton’s car. That means that if he had been in on any plot, he, too, had a chance to confer with conspirators in advance. But some suggest that the deviation from the autobahn by the later-leaving Cadillac to see the Roman ruins at Saalburg, another action believed to have been taken on the spur-of-the-moment, would make any possible plotters’ task almost impossible, presumably because it would hinder their timing. Why? If assassins were tailing the car, as Bazata says, or, in other ways monitoring its progress, as an insider like the mysterious Scruce could have done, such a deviation could have been discovered and subsequently factored in to the plan. There was one standard route to Mannheim via the autobahn. The Cadillac would eventually have had to come back to the autobahn to pick up the route through Kaeferthal where the accident occurred. Plotters, ahead or in tail, easily could have monitored the route and had adjustments ready in case of deviation. They may have even, had things not gone their way, just abandoned the plot, and gone after him at the hunting spot, or on the way back, or just let him go, in which case there would not have been an accident. Such deviations in route and timing do not
a priori
nullify any assassination plot.

A new piece of information I found related to the fateful trip is a letter written home by General Gay’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John A. Hadden. Addressed to his parents and dated November 27, 1945, it says, “This past Sunday General Gay and I went pheasant shooting down in our favorite spot south of Mannheim.” In other words, Gay, an avid hunter like Patton, was a regular visitor to a hunting place which sounds much like where they were all heading that fateful Sunday. The letter, sent to me by his widow, Elaine Hadden, calls into question the often repeated details of Patton’s last trip that the route to the hunting grounds was unknown
to everyone in the caravan except Sergeant Scruce, and that Scruce pulled out ahead of the Cadillac at the railroad track because he was the only one who knew the way. Gay, it appears, knew the way. Hadden’s letter may or may not be significant in the larger question of how Patton was injured, but in view of so many other mysteries regarding the accident, it needs to be considered too. Just how much of the standard accident story is true and how much is false? We do not really know.

Hadden, who died in 1994, also possibly sheds light on why Patton went to the Saalburg ruins in the first place, and how the legendary general’s death could profoundly affect those even peripherally involved, like Hadden. A Cleveland, Ohio native, Hadden returned to his home after the war, where, in time, he became a prominent child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, serving as staff psychiatrist for the Children’s Aid Society there and for the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court. He had hoped to write a psychological book about Patton and sometimes gave lectures about the general. His wife sent me a tape of one of the lectures. In it, he tells how Patton and Patton’s younger sister, “Nita,” were very close, wrote often, and that she had “stimulated his interest in some Roman ruins close to his headquarters.” This, then, probably factored into the decision to make the detour—if it was not the main reason the detour was made. And since Hadden was aware of it, plans to make the detour may have also been known by others, such as those wanting to harm Patton.

Other bits of Hadden’s letters and his lectures give a heretofore unseen, if small, snapshot of Patton’s last days. As part of his job, Hadden sometimes ate dinners and breakfasts with the general whom he wrote “is a rather talkative individual,” with a “prodigious memory,” who needs only “a well directed question or two to keep him going.” He was “anxious about the Russians and
furious at Ike because he didn’t let him take Berlin . . . .Listening to him is ten times as interesting as a history [lesson] ever could be . . . . He announced he was going to retire
^cb
and run for the Senate himself from California.”

There are other interesting snippets. Unfortunately, as the years passed, Hadden’s memories, unlike his letters, must have blurred and he began to imagine himself in the front seat alongside Woodring when Patton broke his neck. Hearing that is why I contacted his wife. I eventually was sent a 1985 taped lecture in which he indeed said he had been in the Cadillac with Patton when it collided with Thompson’s truck—in the front seat where the hunting dog was supposed to be. But a letter sent to his parents three days after the accident indicates he was not. Dated December 12, 1945, he wrote, “Such a lot has happened . . . Sunday morning I packed General Patton and General Gay off on the now famous hunting trip and settled down to moving my belongings from Gen. Gay’s house to General Patton’s house. Gen. P. had planned to leave early Monday morning and we were going to close our house and use only his.... I finished moving by lunch time and we had sat down to lunch when the call came that the generals had had an accident . . . .”

It is possible that other Patton stories which do not pan out were generated in the same probably well-meaning but confused way.

Hadden died of Alzheimers Disease.