Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

by Bill O'Reilly

  Somehow Helena and Rozinka escape being raped. However, they must silently listen to the screams of those women being violated, and then the heart-wrenching silence when the act is completed.

  The Russian soldiers are not satisfied with mere sexual conquest. They are animals, biting away chunks of women’s breasts and cheeks and savagely mauling their genitals. Many strangle their victims after the act, silencing them forever. Perhaps they prefer murder to the personal shame of their victims glaring at them in hatred.

  “I didn’t want to see because I couldn’t help them,” Helena remembers. “I was afraid they would rape my sister and me. No matter where we hid, they found our hiding places and raped some of my girlfriends.”

  Russian soldiers raped millions of women during the course of the war.1 A large proportion of these women will contract venereal disease from their attackers. Some of them will commit suicide afterward. Others will become pregnant but refuse to carry a rapist’s baby to term and will find a way to abort the fetus. Many of those who give birth to these children of rape—Russenbabies, as they will be known—will abandon them. For some women, such as those in the barn, the liberation of Auschwitz was not the end of their suffering, but the beginning of a new kind of suffering.

  “They did horrible things to them,” Helena will recount decades later, from her new home in the Jewish nation of Israel, the image of kicking, biting, and clawing at a young Soviet officer to prevent herself from becoming a victim of rape still clear in her head.

  “Right up to the last minute we couldn’t believe that we were still meant to survive.”

  * * *

  Many Auschwitz survivors find there is no shelter, even when they make it back to their hometowns. All throughout Eastern Europe, Joseph Stalin and the Russian military machine have taken advantage of the mass Nazi deportations of Jews to steal homes and farms and give them to the Russian people. This is just the start of a massive forced migration that will see millions of non-Soviets in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland forced out of their homes. They will be left to resettle in the ruins of the Nazi occupation, in lands that will be without industry, farming, or infrastructure.

  Like Helena and Rozinka Citrónóva, Linda Libusha is a Slovak who has survived Auschwitz. As she walks the streets of her beloved hometown of Stropkov, from where she was arrested and led away in March 1942, she believes the nightmare of the camps may be finally behind her.

  But Linda doesn’t recognize anyone during her stroll down the main street. It’s as if everyone she ever knew has vanished. When she knocks at the door of the house in which she grew up, it is answered by someone she has never seen before, a heavyset man with a red Russian face. Over his shoulder she can see the same familiar rooms and hallways where she once played as a child—and where this foreigner now makes his home.

  The Russian takes no pity on the death camp survivor.

  “Go back where you came from,” he says, slamming the door in her face.

  16

  TRIER, GERMANY

  MARCH 13, 1945

  MORNING

  George S. Patton is on the move.

  Finally.

  Sgt. John Mims drives Patton in his signature open-air jeep with its three-star flags over the wheel wells. The snows of the cruel subzero winter are melting at last. Patton and Mims pass the carcasses of cattle frozen legs-up as the road winds through Luxembourg and into Germany. Hulks of destroyed Sherman M-4s litter the countryside—so many tanks, in fact, that Patton makes a mental note to investigate which type of enemy round defeated each of them. This is Patton’s way of helping the U.S. Army build better armor for fighting the next inevitable war.

  It is a conflict that Patton believes will be fought soon. The Russians are moving to forcibly spread communism throughout the world, and Patton knows it. “They are a scurvy race and simply savages,” he writes of the Russians in his journal. “We could beat the hell out of them.”

  But that’s in the future, after Germany is defeated and the cruel task of dividing Europe among the victors takes center stage. For now, it is enough that the Third Army is advancing into Germany. Patton has sensed a weakness in the Wehrmacht lines and is eager to press his advantage.

  It was four weeks ago, on February 10, when Dwight Eisenhower once again ordered Patton and his Third Army to stop their drive east and go on the defensive and selected British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery to lead the massive Allied invasion force that will cross the strategically vital Rhine River. It is a politically astute maneuver, because while Montgomery officially reports to Eisenhower, the British field marshal believes himself to be—and is often portrayed in the British press as—Eisenhower’s equal. Winston Churchill publicly fueled this portrayal by promoting Montgomery to field marshal months before Eisenhower received his fifth star, meaning that for a time Montgomery outranked the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Now Eisenhower’s decision to throw his support to Montgomery’s offensive neatly defuses any controversy that might have arisen over Eisenhower giving Patton the main thrust.

  Stretching eight hundred miles down the length of Germany from the North Sea to Switzerland, the Rhine is the last great obstacle between the Allies and the German heartland. Whoever crosses it first might also soon know the glory of being the first Allied general to reach Berlin.

  It is as if Patton’s monumental achievement at Bastogne never happened.

  “It was rather amusing, though perhaps not flattering, to note that General Eisenhower never mentioned the Bastogne offensive,” he writes of his most recent discussions with Eisenhower. Then, referring to the emergency meeting in Verdun that turned the tide of the Battle of the Bulge, he adds, “Although this was the first time I had seen him since the nineteenth of December—when he seemed much pleased to have me at the critical point.”

  Even more galling, not just to Patton but also to American soldiers, is that Montgomery has publicly taken credit for the Allied victory at the Battle of the Bulge. Monty insists that it is his British forces of the Twenty-First Army Group, not American GIs, who stopped the German advance.

  “As soon as I saw what was happening,” Montgomery stated at a press conference, at which he wore an outlandish purple beret, “I took steps to ensure that the Germans would never get over the Meuse. I carried out certain movements to meet the threatened danger. I employed the whole power of the British group of armies.”

  What Montgomery neglected to mention was that just three British divisions were made available for the battle. Of the 650,000 Allied soldiers who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, more than 600,000 were American. Once again, Bernard Law Montgomery used dishonest spin in an attempt to ensure his place in history.

  Montgomery’s stunning January 7 press conference did considerable damage to Anglo-American relations.1 To Patton, it seems outrageous that Montgomery should be rewarded for such deceptive behavior.

  Yet despite the fact that four American soldiers now serve along the German border for every British Tommy, Eisenhower has caved in to pressure from Churchill and selected Monty to lead the charge across the Rhine. Still, the reasons for this decision are practical as well as political: the crucial Ruhr industrial region is in northern Germany, as are Montgomery’s troops. Theoretically, Monty is capable of quickly laying waste to the lifeblood of Germany’s war machine.

  Nevertheless, the decision makes George S. Patton furious.

  On this chilly Tuesday morning, the cautious and finicky Montgomery is still ten days away from launching Operation Plunder, as the Rhine offensive is known. So Patton, sensing an immediate weakness in the German lines, has convinced Eisenhower to let him attack, two hundred miles to the south. The plan to invade southern Germany’s Palatinate region came to Patton in a dream. It was fully formed, right down to the last logistical detail. “Whether ideas like this are inspiration or insomnia, I don’t know,” he writes in his journal. “I do things by sixth sense.”

  Patton’s
military ambitions for the assault are many, among them the devastation of all Wehrmacht forces guarding the heavily fortified Siegfried Line.2

  Privately, however, he admits that not all his goals are tactical. The war is now personal. Patton has endured countless slights and setbacks. Many are of his own doing, but just as many are clearly not. Patton, at heart, is a simple man who wears his emotions on his sleeve. This makes him extremely poor at the sort of political posturing at which rivals such as Montgomery excel.

  The man who lives for battle wants to be judged by his actions, not his words. The war will end soon. Patton would love nothing more than for the spotlight to shine on his accomplishments at least one more time.

  Doing so at Bernard Law Montgomery’s expense, of course, would make the experience all the richer.

  “He advertises so damn much that they know where he is,” Patton sneers of Montgomery, contrasting their leadership styles by alluding to the German high command’s constant awareness of his rival’s location. “I fool them.”

  At Patton’s command, the Third Army romps through the Palatinate on what Col. Abe Abrams of the Fourth Armored Division calls the “Rhine Rat Race.” They travel with ample supplies of metal decking and pontoons, allowing them to build temporary bridges across the Rhine—it is hoped, well ahead of Montgomery and his Twenty-First Army Group.

  American armored divisions have already succeeded in crossing the Rhine, in the city of Remagen, eighty-six miles north of Trier. The incredulous Americans could not believe that the bridge remained intact, and crossed immediately. And while they were not able to advance beyond a small toehold on the Rhine’s eastern shore, the symbolism of the Allied achievement struck such fear into the minds of the Nazi high command that Adolf Hitler ordered the firing squad executions of the four officers he considered responsible for not having destroyed the bridge.3 The men were forced to kneel, and then were shot in the back of the neck. The final letters they had written to family and lovers were then burned.

  Hitler then ordered the great commando Otto Skorzeny to assemble a team of swimmers who would float down the Rhine and attach explosives to the Remagen Bridge. The mission failed when all of Skorzeny’s amphibious commandos were discovered by sharp-eyed American sentries along the shore, and were either killed or captured.

  The Allies still hold the bridge, but are unable to advance farther without the assistance of a greater fighting force.

  George S. Patton understands the significance of Remagen. “Ninth Armored Division of the Third Corps,” he writes in his journal on March 7, “got a bridge intact over the Rhine at Remagen. This may have a fine influence on our future movements. I hope we get one also.”

  But even if he can’t find an intact bridge, Patton is determined to beat Montgomery across the Rhine.

  He has just ten days.

  * * *

  Two weeks ago, the Third Army captured the ancient German fortress of Trier, attacking quickly and suffering few casualties. His victory complete, Patton now takes the opportunity to visit the conquered city.

  Many are convinced that the Second World War will be the war to end all wars, but Patton knows better. As a reminder to himself that war is inevitable, he has been reading Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars each night before bed. The memoir recounts Caesar’s battles in Gaul4 and Germany from 58 to 51 BC. The words rise up off the page for Patton, and he feels a personal connection to the action.

  As he drives to the decimated Trier, he studies the ancient highway carefully, absorbing its every nuance. It is not the sight of the swollen Moselle River that mesmerizes him, or even that of Allied engineers scurrying to corduroy5 the muddy country thoroughfare before Allied vehicles accidentally tumble down the steep hillside and into the raging torrent.

  No, it is the belief that he traveled this road two thousand years ago.

  Patton is convinced that he was a soldier and a great general in his many past lives. He once stood shoulder to shoulder with Alexander the Great and Napoléon. He crossed the Alps on an elephant while residing in the body of the Carthaginian conqueror Hannibal. Patton also is quite certain that he once fought for the great Caesar as a Roman legionary, marching into battle on this very same road from Wasserbillig to Trier. Even as a biting wind chaps his exposed face, Patton can “smell the coppery sweat and see the low dust clouds” of legionaries advancing on the Germanic hordes along the Moselle.

  Patton has no problems meshing his Protestant faith with his belief in reincarnation. He simply believes that he has a powerful connection with the supernatural. This belief was reinforced by two very prominent occurrences during World War I. On one occasion, he found himself pressed to the ground during a battle, terrified to stand and fight. He believed that he saw the faces of his dead grandfather and several uncles demanding that he stop being a coward. The other instance took place in Langres, France, once occupied by the ancient Romans. Though he had never visited the city, Patton was able to navigate his way without the help of his French liaison officer. He gave the Frenchman a tour of the Roman ruins, including the amphitheater, parade ground, and various temples dedicated to a deity. He also drove straight to the spot where Caesar had once camped, and pointed to where the Roman leader had once pitched his tent.

  Now, like Caesar in 57 BC, Patton has conquered Trier.

  Over the week that it took to reduce the strategically vital city to rubble, the Germans fought tenaciously. Twenty Allied bombing raids pounded the Wehrmacht defenders, until it became only a matter of time before the Germans fled, and tanks from the American Tenth Armored Division rolled past the ancient Roman amphitheater on the eastern edge of town. The fact that this structure remains standing while all else has crumbled is not lost on Patton. “One of the few things undestroyed in Trier is the entrance to the old Roman amphitheater which still stands in sturdy magnificence.”

  Shortly after the conquest on March 1, Patton received a message from Allied headquarters. “Bypass Trier. It will take four divisions to capture it,” read the order.

  “Have taken Trier with two divisions,” an acerbic Patton responded. “What do you want me to do? Give it back?”

  One week later, Patton’s plan to invade the Palatinate was approved by Eisenhower.

  Following the old adage that it is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission, Patton does not plan on asking for permission to ford the Rhine, should the opportunity present itself.

  * * *

  Patton’s barbed sense of humor is not accidental. He is weary of the ineffectual leadership of General Eisenhower, who he believes consistently sabotages his success. He feels the same way about Omar Bradley, his immediate superior.

  So Bradley’s February 10 order to go on the defensive was soul crushing for Patton. He will be sixty this year, making him “the oldest leader in age and battle experience in the United States Army in Europe,” by his own estimation. The war is winding down, but it has taken its toll on George Patton.

  He has become so obsessed that he is now incapable of existing in a world without war. Even the total nudity of dancers at the famous Folies Bergère dance revue, seen on a mid-February leave in Paris, could not distract Patton from thoughts of the fighting. Nor did being recognized everywhere he went in the city, which is normally a salve for his ego.

  After a case of food poisoning made him violently ill—and led to a growing belief that his life was being threatened by unknown forces—Patton hurried back to his headquarters near the front, unable to stay away from the war even one day longer.

  He knows that his last battle is soon to come—at least in this lifetime. Thus Patton seeks to prolong his role in the fighting. “I should like to be considered for any type of combat command, from a division up against the Japanese. I am sure that my method of fighting might be successful. I am also of such an age that this is my last war, and I would therefore like to see it through to the end,” Patton writes in a letter to the chief of the army, Gen. George Marshall, on March 13.


  The mere thought that the fighting will soon end fills Patton with dread. “Peace is going to be hell on me,” he writes to his wife, Beatrice. “I will probably be a great nuisance.”

  Patton wants to finish out the war on his own terms. That means go on the attack. “A great deal was owed to me,” he wrote of one conversation with Omar Bradley, after it was suggested that the Third Army once again go on the defensive. “Unless I could continue attacking I would have to be relieved.”

  * * *

  Dwight Eisenhower is quite confident that George Patton will never ask to be relieved. Yet he immediately follows up his February 10 order with a second command, allowing Patton to place his army on “aggressive defense.” Ike knows that Patton will interpret this order as permission to launch a series of low-profile attacks.

  Such dithering is an example of Eisenhower’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness: compromise. He wants to make everyone happy, and believes that “public opinion wins wars.” Very often it seems Eisenhower would rather make the popular decision than the right one. This is the manner in which he has behaved throughout his entire army career, and it has served him well. At the start of the war he was a colonel, leading training exercises at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Now his penchant for compromise and diplomacy has allowed him to rise to prominence and power despite the glaring fact that he has never fought in battle, or even commanded troops in combat.

  Eisenhower personally favors a “broad front” assault into Germany, much like the campaigns of Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the final days of the Civil War. By attacking Germany from both the north and south, Eisenhower can affect a pincer movement, trapping the Wehrmacht between the claws of his forces. Montgomery, however, prefers a single “full-blooded” thrust through the industrial Ruhr region of northern Germany. Naturally, Monty plans to be in charge, bringing the full weight of forty Allied divisions to bear on the Germans. Generals such as Patton will sit on the sidelines and watch.