by Alan Axelrod
The raiding party rushed headlong to Hammelburg, on the way engaging and defeating an enemy tank unit, destroying some locomotives and military equipment on flatcars, liberating 700 Soviet POWs, then fighting through to the camp. The commandant surrendered, sending out a surrender party of four, including Waters. A nervous German guard fired at the party, however, seriously wounding Waters. Baum liberated the camp and loaded as many of the freed prisoners into his vehicles as he could. On the return trip, however, the raiders were ambushed by a superior force. In a fierce firefight, Baum was wounded three times, and the rescue party, vastly outnumbered, surrendered. Most of the prisoners walked back to the camp. The raiders were taken back to Hammelburg, except for Stiller, who was sent to a prison in Nuremberg. A week after the raid, a number of officers who had managed to escape during the firefight found their way back to U.S. lines and confirmed that Waters was a prisoner. Just two days after this, on April 5, the 14th Armored Division reached Hammelburg and liberated the prisoners still there, including Waters. He recovered and continued his military career. Stiller was not liberated until later in April.
In some ways, the hardest-hit casualty of the operation was Patton. The same newspapers that, weeks earlier, had hailed him as Grant, Lee, and Napoleon rolled into one now carried stories of how Patton had sacrificed a heroic force of soldiers for the sake of his son-in-law. Both Eisenhower and Bradley were furious, but, this time, there would be no official repercussions. “I did not rebuke [Patton] for it,” Bradley wrote in his postwar memoir, A Soldier’s Story. “Failure itself was George’s own worst reprimand.”8
In Patton’s corner of the war, southern Germany, resistance was rapidly folding, and Third Army units were scooping up prisoners of war. By early April, their bag of more than 400,000 exceeded the number of prisoners captured by any other Allied army. By the end of April, the Third Army had processed more than a million POWs. That same month, Manton Eddy’s XII Corps liberated the Merkers industrial salt mine and there found the entire gold bullion reserve of the Third Reich. Eddy reported to Patton that the mine, some 2,100 feet underground, also contained vaults belonging to the Reichsbank. When Eddy hesitated to investigate, Patton in no uncertain terms ordered him to “blow open that fuckin’ fault and see what’s in it.”9
What was in it warranted a special tour by Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton. The three generals were lowered into the mine aboard a superannuated elevator suspended by single cable. As they slowly descended through the darkness, Patton could not resist the bravado of gallows humor: “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.”
Ike was not amused. “O.K., George, that’s enough. No more cracks until we are above ground again.”10
The generals beheld 4,500 25-pound gold bars (worth at the time about $57.6 million); millions more in currency, including marks, British pounds, and American dollars; and many hundreds of paintings that the Nazis had looted from the museums and great homes of the nations they had conquered. “We examined a few of the alleged art treasures,” Patton remarked. “The ones I saw were worth, in my opinion, about $2.50, and were of the type normally seen in bars in America.”11 The generals also saw something far more sinister: many thousands of gold and silver dental fillings, eyeglasses, and other gold and silver items taken from victims of what Hitler and his henchmen called the Final Solution and what the world would soon call the Holocaust.
Patton came face to face with it that very afternoon. Accompanied by Eisenhower and Bradley, he visited the just-liberated Ohrduf concentration camp. It was, Patton said, “the first horror camp any of us had ever seen. It was the most appalling sight imaginable.” The generals were shown the gallows, the whipping table (“which was about the height of the average man’s crotch. The feet were place in stocks on the ground and the man was pulled over the table . . . while he was beaten across the back and loins”), and pile upon pile of naked bodies, some out in the open, some jammed into a shed, all “in the last stages of emaciation.” The generals also saw “a sort of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation.” As the Americans had approached the camp, the German guards had ordered the inmates to exhume the many dead and pile the corpses on this “griddle.” The idea was to cremate the abundant evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. “The attempt,” Patton remarked, “was a bad failure. . . . one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue.”12
Just how powerfully Patton was affected by the sights and smells of the “horror camp” is not apparent from his diary, letters, or other writings. An American diplomat who was present at Buchenwald, which the Third Army also liberated and which Patton visited, noted that the general “went off to a corner thoroughly sick.”13
Patton’s tour of the death camps not only sickened him, it brought on renewed depression, which deepened further when Eisenhower assigned Third Army to turn away from Berlin and instead drive southeast into Czechoslovakia by way of Bavaria. It was believed that hard-line Nazis were gathering there for a last desperate stand. As for the German capital, Eisenhower informed Patton that Berlin would taken by neither the American nor the British army, but by the Red Army. Patton was shocked, disgusted, and dispirited by the news. He believed that the Soviets were an even bigger threat to the United States and its western allies than the Germans had been. To have won the war militarily only to lose politically by giving away so important a prize was, as he saw it, a tragedy of staggering dimensions.
Still reeling from the news about Berlin, Patton tuned to the BBC on the night of April 12 to get the correct time so that he could set his watch. That is how he heard of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia. Patton immediately conveyed the news to Eisenhower and Bradley, and, as he recorded in his diary, “we had quite a discussion as to what might happen.” A man without personal political ambitions, Patton was nevertheless, like most career officers, a conservative Republican (his father had been a Democrat), but he appreciated FDR’s charismatic style of leadership. He now complained to his diary about how, through “political preference, people are made Vice Presidents who were never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.” Patton would live just long enough, however, to come to a more balanced estimation of Harry S. Truman.14
Hoping to improve his gloomy mood, Patton, with Codman, flew to Paris to visit Waters in the hospital. Patton spent the night with Everett Hughes, who, at breakfast the next morning, passed him Stars and Stripes, the army’s official newspaper. Patton took a cursory look and passed it back. Hughes gave it to him again and, pointing to an article, said, “Read that.”
“Well,” Patton said, looking up from the paper. “I’ll be goddamned.” He had received the fourth star of a full general.15
Third Army’s V Corps, under Clarence Huebner, reached Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, on May 5. When Patton telephoned Bradley for permission to advance to Prague, Bradley, after checking with Eisenhower, said no. Pilsen would be the extent of Third Army’s advance. Patton had desperately wanted to liberate the Czech capital as Third Army’s final prize. He would not have the chance. At 2:41 in the morning of May 7, 1945, a delegation of German officers signed an unconditional surrender at Rheims.
Patton wanted urgently to be transferred to the Pacific theater, but, clearly, that part of the world was not big enough for both a Douglas MacArthur and a George S. Patton. As early as February, Patton had begged Marshall for a Pacific command, saying that he was willing to serve in any capacity, from division on up. Marshall replied that he would send him to China if the Chinese managed to secure a major port for his entry. That, Patton knew, was highly unlikely. Marshall’s reply, therefore, was the polite equivalent of no.
On May 8, Patton bade farewell to the Third Army war correspondents and invited their questions for the last time. One question would soon come back to haunt him. “
Are SS troops [taken prisoner] to be handled any differently?” Patton replied: “No. SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat in America—that is not to be quoted.” Yet again, Patton had made a politically inept statement to the press, briefly thought the better of it, but then went on to put his foot further into his mouth. “I mean by that initially the SS people were special sons-of-bitches, but as the war progressed, they ran out of sons-of-bitches and then they put anybody in there. Some of the top SS men will be treated as criminals, but there is no reason for trying someone who was drafted into this outfit.” The statement was part and parcel of Patton’s immediate postwar attitude toward the defeated enemy. He had seen and felt German savagery. He had been sickened by the death camps. And yet, in the coming days and weeks, he would propose privately to his military colleagues that Britain and America should now engage a defeated Germany as an ally against the Soviet Union. To the war correspondents on May 8, Patton also spoke of those who had given their lives “from North Africa to the Channel. ... I wonder how the dead will speak today when they know that for the first time in centuries we have opened Central and Western Europe to the forces of Genghis Khan”—by which he meant Joseph Stalin. “I wonder how they feel now that they know there will be no peace in our times and that Americans, some not yet born, will have to fight the Russians tomorrow, or ten, 15 or 20 years from tomorrow.”16
Toward the middle of May, Patton flew to Paris and then to London for rest. In June, he returned to the United States for an extended leave with his family before beginning his new assignment as the occupation forces’ military governor of Bavaria. He landed at Bedford Airport on June 7, outside of Boston, where Beatrice and his children were there to greet him. All along the 25-mile drive from Bedford to the city, cheering throngs lined the streets. Standing upright in the car, he waved to them all, all the way to Boston and the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade, where 20,000 people waited to hear him speak. The people of Boston, like those throughout America, were thankful for victory and craved the presence of heroes. All controversy dissolved—at least for the moment.
As usual, when he spoke publicly, Patton gave the credit for victory to the soldiers. Looking at some 400 wounded Third Army veterans, who were sitting in a specially reserved section at the front of the shell, he declared: “With your blood and bonds, we crushed the Germans before they got here. This ovation is not for me, George S. Patton—George S. Patton is simply a hook on which to hang the Third Army.” Then, to honor the wounded men, he said that most people believe the hero is the man who dies in battle. The truth is, Patton said, the man who dies in battle is often a fool. He pointed to the wounded veterans: “These men are the heroes.”17 Instead of bringing universal praise, the speech released an avalanche of angry and anguished letters from Gold Star mothers and fathers (the parents of slain soldiers were entitled to display a gold star in their window) to General Marshall, to Secretary of War Stimson, and to others in authority. Patton had managed, yet again, to create outrage in the midst of adulation.
Patton spent less than a month on leave in the States, visiting Boston, speaking in Denver, and appearing in Los Angeles to address a crowd of 100,000 at the city’s Coliseum before making an official visit to Washington. Patton then returned to Europe, arriving on July 4. Although he was relieved to be back among soldiers, he was not looking forward to performing an administrative and political task for which he, a fighter, not a bureaucrat, was eminently unsuited.
Indeed, it was peace itself for which Patton was unsuited. To those who had served with him in battle and were now serving with him in peace, he looked old and tired, a man doing his best just to go through the motions. When word came to him on August 10 that Japan had surrendered and World War II was over, he wrote to Beatrice: “Now the horrors of peace, pacafism, and unions will have unlimited sway. I wish I were young enough to fight in the next one . . . killing Mongols [the Russians].” In his diary, he expressed himself even more bleakly: “Another war has ended and with it my usefulness to the world. . . . Now all that is left to do is to sit around and await the arrival of the undertaker and posthumous immortality. Fortunately, I also have to occupy myself with the de-Nazifica-tion and government of Bavaria.”18
De-Nazification was precisely the issue that would be Patton’s final undoing. Under Allied military administration, the process proceeded rapidly throughout Germany. Nazi clergy were purged. Nazi street names were expunged. Nazi were memorials dismantled. Former Nazi party members were excluded from business, banking, and industry as well as from the professions. The communications sector—radio, telegraph, and tele-phone—was swept clean of former Nazis. In Patton’s region, Bavaria, however, de-Nazification proceeded at a markedly slower pace. In contrast to other military administrators throughout the country, Patton was unenthu-siastic about the process. The issue came up at a press conference held at his headquarters, in Bad Tolz, on September 22. Why were Nazis retaining key governmental positions in Bavaria? a reporter asked.
Patton’s aide Hap Gay vigorously shook his head, signaling to his chief to avoid answering the question. Patton pointedly ignored the signal, replying: “In supervising the functioning of the Bavarian government, which is my mission, the first thing that happened was that the outs accused the ins of being Nazis. Now, more than half the German people were Nazis and we would be in a hell of a fix if we removed all Nazi party members from office.” That may have sounded reasonable to some, but it was not the answer Eisenhower and the politicians wanted. Patton went on: “The way I see it, this Nazi question is very much like a Democratic and Republican election fight. . . . Now we are using [former Nazi party members] for lack of anyone better until we can get better people.”19 Patton had a population to feed; electricity, heat, and water to supply. He had to begin reconstruction of basic infrastructure. Practically the only ones who knew how to do these jobs had served during the Hitler regime as bureaucrats and administrators, and party membership was a job requirement at the time. The papers, however, looked no further than Patton’s comparison between the Nazis and the American political parties, announcing in their headlines the shocking news that Patton found no difference between Nazis and the Democratic and Republican parties.
Predictably, Eisenhower exploded. Patton defended himself by claiming that he had been misquoted. Strictly speaking, he had not been misquoted but quoted out of context. Eisenhower asked him to hold another press conference to set the record straight. In compliance, Patton carefully prepared a written statement, but instead of reading it verbatim, he embellished the speech, ad-libbed in a defiant tone, and ended up simply reiterating his rationale for retaining former Nazis in administrative positions.
Patton had been raised during a time and in a social milieu in which class prejudice, racism, and anti-Semitism were the rule rather than the exception. His exposure to the death camps, the horrific evidence of the Holocaust, had not softened these inbred and long-cultivated views. True, he was sickened by Nazi inhumanity, yet he also tended to blame the Jews for allowing themselves to be victimized. Now, under fire from the press and politicians, he became ugly and downright delusional in his prejudice. He saw no fault in himself, but declared in a letter to Beatrice on September 25 that the “Devil and Moses” had joined forces against him. In another letter to her, he wrote that the “noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting with good success to implement a further dismemberment of Germany.” He noted, in his diary, “a very apparent Semitic influence in the press. They are trying to do two things: First, implement Communism, and second, see that all business men of German ancestry and non-Jewish antecedents are thrown out of their jobs.” He went on to draw a sharp line between the Jewish-dominated press and what he saw as his own heritage of values: “They have utterly lost the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice and feel that a man can be kicked out because somebody else says he is a Nazi.”20 On September 28, 1945, Eisenhower summoned Patton to his headquarter
s in the IG Farben Building in Frankfurt. After a heated exchange among Patton, Eisenhower, and Bedell Smith, Eisenhower quietly, even gently, made what he carefully termed a suggestion. The so-called Fifteenth Army—really nothing more than a small headquarters and staff— had been formed to compile the history of the war in Europe. It was an important job, Eisenhower insisted, and the Fifteenth required a good commanding general. He asked Patton to take charge. Patton’s first impulse was to resign his commission on the spot, but he held his tongue. Perhaps it was his love of history and the opportunity to exercise come control over how the history of the war would be written—whatever his reasons, he decided to relinquish the storied Third Army and accept command of this new “paper army.”
Lucian Truscott, old comrade and trusted subordinate, who had performed for Patton at first reluctantly but then brilliantly in the capture of Messina, Sicily, relieved him of Third Army command on October 7 at the army’s headquarters in Bad Tolz. During the somber change-of-command ceremony, Patton spoke to his officers: “All good things must come to an end,” he said. “The best thing that has ever happened to me thus far is the honor and privilege of having commanded the Third Army.”21
Assuming his new command, Patton wasted no time in putting the personnel of Fifteenth Army, housed in a hotel at Bad Nauheim, to work on gathering the documents necessary for writing the war’s history. But he quickly lost interest in his assignment. As his staff started their research, Patton left, traveling to Paris, Rennes, Chartres, Brussels, Metz, Reims, Luxembourg, and Verdun. Everywhere he was welcomed as a hero and given civic certificates and military decorations. He even traveled to Stockholm, scene of his Olympic glory in 1912, where he met with the surviving members of the Swedish Olympic team of that now-distant year.
