Target (48 page)

Just weeks before his fateful accident, retired General Charles P. Summerall, former army chief of staff, wrote Patton, “Your success has aroused jealousy and made enemies of those who profited by your victories. They have finished with you and now seek to destroy you.” On the same day as the date of that letter, November 24, 1945—which meant he probably received and read Summerall’s letter near the final week he was at Bad Nauheim—Patton wrote in his diary,

By early December, Patton was making open arrangements to return home, had resolved his indecision about the future, and definitely was going to resign and speak out in what he indicated were going to be dramatic ways.
²⁸

The stage was set.

No one can prove beyond
a reasonable doubt that General Patton was assassinated—at least not currently with the evidence now available. Perhaps no one will ever be able to prove it, given the layers of secrecy and the propensity of government leaders and those in the clandestine world to destroy incriminating evidence. But a pretty good case could be made that Patton was murdered, or that at least one, if not many, attempts to murder him occurred, and a prosecutor probably could get an indictment for either. There are simply too many unanswered questions. Motives abound. The circumstances surrounding his accident and death are suspicious—in some particulars, highly so. And in the sixty-plus years since the general died, two credible witnesses—Bazata and Skubik—both in the clandestine world—have emerged from the murky World War II darkness to claim they were part of a hidden story involving Patton’s death. Their witness is firsthand, not hearsay. What they say can be challenged, certainly, but cannot be summarily dismissed as has been done in
the past by historians and the curious concerning other piecemeal and elusive rumors about the possibility of Patton having been assassinated.

Besides the two new witnesses, who, together, represent a much stronger indictment than either would alone, other circumstances indicate there is more to the story of why Patton died than is widely recognized.

All known reports at the scene of the December 9 accident, as well as investigations of it later, have vanished. If it were just a matter of one, or even two such records, one might easily think their disappearance is not out of the ordinary. Records get lost, misplaced, and accidentally destroyed. But the number of known, primary records about Patton’s accident that are now missing is at least four, probably more. There could be even more we do not know about. Not a single one of the records known to be missing, according to numerous searches and official responses, can be found—only references to them survive. That suggests an intentional purge.

These known records include:
¹

What happened at the accident scene itself? Because of contradictory accounts and mysterious figures like Vanlandingham who have simply disappeared, the scene is still an enigma, and that includes how the accident itself occurred. No one disputes that the Thompson-driven truck abruptly turned without signal into the path of Patton’s Cadillac—a seemingly incriminating act to begin with. But were the truck’s occupants actually lying in wait for the Patton car before making the suspicious turn, as several of Woodring’s accounts suggest?

What was Thompson doing there in the first place? That question has never been satisfactorily answered. Why was he supposedly whisked to London and away from questions—indeed, into total obscurity—immediately after the accident, as his friend and lawyer, Robert Delsordo, now discloses? What was the high-level concern which it would take to effect such an unusual airlift in ostensibly a nonfatal, essentially routine traffic accident? Patton was only injured, not dead. Thompson was a lowly T/5
^cc
truck driver, a “goofy” kid, as he was described at the scene, known for dealing in the black market and other shady practices. Why did authorities care? Why is there no record of that strange and unprecedented evacuation in Thompson’s personnel file at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis? Why is nothing about the accident with General Patton mentioned at all? The records I obtained with help from his family show little more than name, rank, and serial number. Some of his records, of course, I was advised, were destroyed in the disastrous fire that ravaged the center in 1973.

What happened to Thompson’s mysterious passengers? Where is Frank Krummer?
Who
was Frank Krummer? Is that a real name or a cover? Who and where is the third unnamed passenger? Both are mentioned as being in the truck with Thompson in the formerly classified Seventh Army PRO documents, as well as to a lesser degree in Farago’s
Last Days
. Then they disappear. Were they also taken to London? One of them—it is not clear which—was described in the PRO documents as a “German civilian.” It appears to be Krummer. What was a German civilian doing in an army truck?

Sergeant Scruce, part of the hunting caravan, is a further mystery. Gay, in his memoir, and others who have investigated the accident, such as Farago, state that it was only seconds after Scruce’s jeep passed the Cadillac in order to take the lead that the accident occurred. Surely, at that minimal distance, he was aware of the crash right behind him and would have returned. He loved his hunting dogs like offspring, according to his daughter, and absolutely would have returned, she believes, solely out of concern for his dog alone. There are conflicting stories. Woodring, in one account, has Scruce crossing the railroad tracks just prior to the Cadillac having to stop, in which case he already would have been ahead of the Cadillac prior to its temporary delay at the railroad track. But then what did he do? Did he just drive on? Or did he pull over and wait, as would be expected of a sergeant charged with leading a four-star general to a destination? And if he went on, that meant the Cadillac’s occupants knew the way and the notion that only Scruce knew is erroneous.

Such questions about Scruce occur because he, too, effectively disappears. He is only mentioned once after the accident, but not at the scene, nor afterwards in coverage of the accident and its aftermath. Lieutenant Hadden, Gay’s aide-de-camp, presumably refers to Scruce in writing the following in a letter home on December 12: “Sunday afternoon [the day of the accident] I stayed at the house and was kept busy on the telephone. The driver of the car got back with the sergeant who was taking the Gens. hunting late in the afternoon and Col. Harkins, [Patton’s] deputy chief of staff, and I talked to him to find out how the accident had happened. I don’t know what the press reports said, but from all that I have heard about it, it was not our driver’s fault. Gen. Gay was not hurt beyond a scraped knee and a wrenched wrist, which was fortunate.”

That implies that Scruce did come back to the scene.

Where are the after-accident reports generated by interviewing him?

The information about Gay’s wrist perhaps indicates that he was holding on to a safety strap in the car and that may have saved him from serious injury. In fact, Dr. Gerald Kent, who attended Patton and Gay at the hospital that day, wrote that is what happened.
⁵
But no more information about Scruce. He is a mystery. And I doubt if there ever will be more beyond what I was able to get from his military records which, like Thompson’s, were damaged in the 1973 fire at the records center in St. Louis. One bright spot is that as a result of this story, Scruce’s daughter, traumatically deprived of her father all her life, has been united with his family, including cousins, aunts, and uncles. She had no idea they had even existed. But their response when she visited them for the first time in 2007 was more of the same. Despite seeing him many times after the war, they knew nothing of Joe Scruce’s involvement in the Patton accident. “I just don’t think Joe ever told anyone of that fateful day,” she wrote to me.

That is strange. One would think that the story would have been one of the highlights of his career—something for a career soldier, a Bronze Service Star awardee, a noncommissioned immigrant who served his new country so well to repeat, reflect upon, and be quoted about. Yet he kept it to himself. Some might say he kept it hidden. Why? He was not the silent type, according to his daughter. He was the opposite. Was he simply doing what was required of the clandestine, keeping silence about operations? Was he involved in a plot, however peripherally? He was there and had what could be crucial knowledge. At the very least, if I was an investigating officer that fateful day, I would have wanted to know what he had seen of the strange accident, if he remembered the truck waiting on the side of the road as he passed by—if that, in
fact, is what happened. Where had he gone if he drove on? But he is never mentioned, at least with his name spelled correctly, except by Gay. And authors like Farago, who obviously did not talk to him, but got his name wrong from whatever source or sources they used, all but insured his anonymity after Patton’s death as subsequent historians and researchers followed their lead and made the same mistake.

On the surface, Patton’s death in the hospital seems natural. He had a broken neck, seldom an illness with a good prognosis. He died of complications from embolism, a danger to patients prone and immobile. He had suffered the same complication in a long hospital stay in 1937 (but recovered). Mysteriously, just before he died, he was doing so well that his doctors had decided he could go home to the states. Although that was a long and arduous trip in those days, travel arrangements were being made. Farago wrote, “[Patton’s] progress became even more pronounced on December 18. . . . Patton amazed his doctors with his basic health. Even under the enormous burden of his condition, his vital organs continued to function almost perfectly....Captain [Dr.] Kent said, ‘The heart tones were good . . . no murmurs were audible. His blood pressure was 108 over 70’. . . was it just one of those typical Patton miracles?”
⁶

Then came the sudden attack. He died alone. No autopsy was performed. But Mrs. Patton must have had second thoughts because her granddaughter, Helen Totten, an adult now, told Oliver North’s
War Stories
that her grandmother hired detectives to investigate his death.
⁷
They found nothing, she said, which is not surprising given the levels of secrecy and deception that must have been used at that time to cover up any plot. What had caused General Patton to request a guard outside his room, as reported in early stories about his hospitalization? The reason was never
explained—just that “he’d heard something he didn’t like.” What had he heard? What about the mysterious Russian colonel Mrs. Totten said approached her while she was abroad, claiming efforts had been made to induce pneumonia? She dismissed it on
War Stories
. Ultimately, it was the failure of Patton’s lungs from embolism that killed him.