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

by Bill O'Reilly

  To make matters worse, the new president dislikes Patton. Back in 1918 the two men fought in the great Battle of Meuse-Argonne, and Patton surely appreciated the precision artillery support provided by Truman’s Battery D, even though he didn’t know Truman personally. A colonel in those waning days of World War I, he outranked Captain Truman, but now the tables are turned.

  “Don’t see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley,” Truman will write in his journal, “and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons and MacArthurs.”

  Truman’s scathing opinion of the general is based solely on a first impression. He has not taken the time to get to know Patton, and the two will never engage in a meaningful discussion of any kind.

  Truman just doesn’t like him.

  The two men are polar opposites.

  Patton has swagger; Truman is humble.

  Patton is tall and athletic, a larger-than-life military hero. The diminutive, bespectacled Truman, on the other hand, looks like the bank clerk he once was.

  Patton was born into wealth, and then married into even more money. Truman has been handed nothing in his life—nothing, that is, except the presidency.

  In Patton, Truman sees a braggart who struts around like a peacock in his showy uniform, with the polished helmet and bloused riding pants.

  Truman dresses simply, and avoids putting on airs. He detests Patton’s flashy style. Despite the many pressing international obligations on his mind as the flag is being raised over Berlin, Truman takes time to covertly count the number of stars adorning Patton’s uniform—and is appalled to find them adding up to twenty-eight.

  With the Second World War now at an end, the president has little need for a general who believes it his birthright to speak his mind, especially when it creates international discord.

  The official American policy toward the Germans is that anyone previously connected with Nazi Germany is ineligible to help the nation rebuild. The Russians agree; in fact, this is a cornerstone of the Potsdam discussions. But Patton dissents. He speaks fearlessly about the lunacy of “denazification,” telling the press that it is “no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not have paid lip service to Nazism than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not have paid at least lip service to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party when it is in power.”

  Patton disagrees with official American policy. One disturbing element of which is that former German soldiers be used as forced labor in Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. These men, Patton feels, should be used to rebuild their own country. Germany’s hospitals are no longer functional, its sewer systems don’t work, the roads and bridges have been bombed, and there are millions of former POWs and displaced persons who will need shelter and food once winter comes.

  So with words that put him directly at odds with the policies of his president, Patton tells a reporter that German labor is the solution to rebuilding Germany—whether or not someone was once a Nazi. He says, “My soldiers are fighting men and if I dismiss the sewer cleaners and the clerks[,] my soldiers will have to take over those jobs. They’d have to run the telephone exchanges, the power facilities, the street cars, and that’s not what soldiers are for.”

  In his own way, Patton is still fighting battles. Even as he quietly begins making plans to leave the military, he wages an ironic war in favor of the German people. “The Germans are the only decent people left in Europe. It’s a choice between them and the Russians. I prefer the Germans.”4

  The Russians interpret this stance as an attempt to shield former SS members, perhaps to use them against the Russians in a future war. They have lodged a formal complaint with Omar Bradley suggesting just that, noting that Waffen SS fighters who surrendered to the Third Army in Czechoslovakia during the month of May have not shown up on the lists of individuals turned over to the Russians for repatriation. Soviet spies now fill Bavaria, hunting these men down.

  The Russians win again. On June 13, while Patton is on tour in America selling war bonds,5 his headquarters is informed by cable that the Third Army must immediately account for any German forces in its region. At the same time, army chief of staff George Marshall orders that Patton’s phones be tapped, and even takes the extraordinary measure of requesting that a psychoanalyst from the navy’s Medical Corps observe one of the general’s press conferences to see if Patton is suffering from a nervous breakdown.

  Marshall, himself, likes Patton, but his top commander, Eisenhower, has written to him that Patton is a “mentally unbalanced officer.” Ever since the Knutsford incident in 1944, when Patton inadvertently slighted the Russians while speaking to a group of British women, Ike has come to believe that Patton suffers from seizures and bouts of dementia. This serious charge, and Patton’s habit of speaking out in favor of the Germans, has convinced Marshall to investigate Patton’s mental health.

  The powerful Wild Bill Donovan also loathes Patton. Donovan and the OSS have been working with the Russians ever since he visited Moscow in December 1943. The American and Russian spy agencies are now exchanging information and helping one another on espionage projects within Germany, including spying on George Patton.

  In fact, OSS agent Duncan Lee, an Oxford graduate and descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, is assigned to deliver to Donovan “the monthly confidential report of the military governor in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany.” This includes an OSS accounting of Patton’s personal movements and wiretap recordings.

  Wild Bill Donovan’s future is uncertain now that Franklin Roosevelt has died. Harry Truman keeps his distance. With the war over, the OSS may be dissolved. Donovan will do whatever it takes to keep his spy agency intact, including undermining the Truman administration’s increasingly hard-line stance against the Russians by sharing secrets about Patton.

  But Donovan himself is being deceived.

  The spy war in Germany between Russia and the United States is ratcheting up. It is, as American intelligence officer James H. Critchfield will later write, “the largest, most concentrated and intense intelligence warfare in history.” However, Donovan does little to stop the Russian influence within the OSS. Since the summer of 1944, his security office has made it known to Donovan that forty-seven OSS agents are either Communists or Russian sympathizers. Wild Bill also knows that Joseph Stalin has been planting Russian spies within the OSS since 1942.

  What Donovan does not know is that Duncan Lee, his executive secretary and the man who knows all his secrets, is a traitor. Lee is working for the Russian spy agency NKVD, as a double agent. Among invaluable nuggets of information Lee has provided the Soviets over the course of the war was advance warning of the D-day landing date and the exact location of the atomic bomb research in Tennessee. That the Russians would use such a prized asset, Lee, to gather information about George Patton speaks volumes about their eagerness to see him silenced.

  In May 1945, Donovan gains shocking information about Patton, of which the general himself is totally unaware. Stephen Skubik, a special agent in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, speaks fluent Ukrainian, and is tasked with developing undercover sources of Slavic ethnicity to report to American intelligence. On May 16 he met with Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who will one day assist the Americans and British in spying on the Russians.6 Bandera specifically told Skubik that “Soviet High Command has been ordered by Marshal Stalin to kill U.S. Army General George Patton.”

  Stalin’s reasons are simple: Patton defied Russian authority when he invaded Czechoslovakia back in May, during the waning days of the war.7

  But rather than being shocked by Skubik’s news, Donovan orders him to arrest Bandera so that he can be returned to the Russians, thereby silencing the man who is warning about an attempt on Patton’s life.

  “I was disappointed with my first visit to OSS,” Skubik will later write with a great deal of understatement.

  But the inve
stigation is not over for Stephen Skubik. A few weeks later he meets with Professor Roman Smal-Stocki, an academic and former Ukrainian diplomat, who is on the verge of being expelled from Germany and sent back into Russian hands. Smal-Stocki informs Skubik that “the NKVD will soon attempt to kill General George Patton. Stalin wants him dead.”

  Finally, in the middle of the summer, Special Agent Skubik interviews yet another Ukrainian, Gen. Pavlo Shandruk, who fought with the Nazis in the waning days of the war and is now desperately trying to avoid being sent back to Russia. He offers the United States some vital intelligence that he hopes will allow him to remain in the American Zone. “Please tell General Patton to be on guard,” Shandruk tells Agent Skubik. “He is at the top of the NKVD list to be killed.”

  Wild Bill Donovan and Special Agent Skubik soon meet again. And once more, Skubik tells him of the threats. But Donovan dismisses them, saying they are “just a provocation.”

  * * *

  Back in Berlin, Patton stands at attention on this crisp morning, watching the Stars and Stripes hoisted over the city he once longed to conquer. Today, Patton is harboring a dangerous secret. Although American undersecretary of war Robert Patterson proclaimed on May 31, 1945, that all Allied POWs had been returned, Patton knows that a top-secret policy instituted by Gen. George Marshall, then tacitly approved by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, effectively abandons all American and British POWs who fell into Russian hands at the end of the war. The Russians are using them as leverage in negotiations with the Allies to ensure that all Soviets who have fled to the West will be returned.

  Patton believes that the man to his left, President Truman, has allowed more than twenty thousand American POWs to remain in Russian hands. As a military man, Patton will do whatever it takes to see these men released—even wage war. But he is conflicted, because he understands that Truman’s motivations for allowing these Americans to be held hostage is to ensure that the Russians join in the fight against the Japanese and then, once the war is over, join a new organization to be known as the United Nations, in order to ensure future world peace.8

  Patton is becoming more and more certain that the only way he can speak freely about these issues is to leave the military.

  Armed with top-secret knowledge and his usual defiant attitude, George Patton has made himself a target—and he knows it.

  A few weeks ago, before leaving his daughters in Washington, Patton said something that disturbed them greatly: “Well, I guess this is goodbye. I won’t be seeing you again.”

  Patton’s daughters were shocked. “It’s crazy,” they protested. “The war is over.” To which Patton mysteriously responded, “My luck has run out.”

  24

  IG FARBEN BUILDING

  FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY

  SEPTEMBER 28, 1945

  4:30 P.M.

  The man with eighty-five days to live is about to be fired.

  George S. Patton has been summoned, with prejudice, to meet with his boss Dwight Eisenhower. The same foul autumn rains that stymied Patton one year ago in Metz now make flying impossible, so Patton has driven seven and a half hours to the massive industrial office complex that now serves as Ike’s headquarters. Patton spent the journey through the bombed-out ruins of Germany preparing a plan of attack, thinking of the words he must speak to save his career once again. “The ride reminded me of a similar one,” he will write in his diary tonight, that “I took from Knutsford to London … when I was strongly under the impression I was going to be relieved and sent home—if not tried.”

  The IG Farben Building rises palatial and scrubbed in the midst of a decimated Frankfurt am Main. Olive-drab American army bulldozers prowl the streets all day long, pushing rubble to the side of roads. The local Germans eke out a living as best they can, collecting debris to make fires for cooking and warmth, sleeping each night in whatever shelter they can find. “Frankfurt resembles a city,” one visitor will write of the destruction, “not so much as a pile of bones and smashed skulls resembles a prized steer.”

  But Ike’s headquarters is an island of luxury in this decimation, a beige fortress where the curving stairwells are made of marble, elaborate fountains burble soothingly, and senior American officers can enjoy a meal of venison, ice cream, and red wine—all served by German servants. Visitors need a special pass just to get in the door. When they do, they find the hallways filled with clerks and junior officers who spend their days pushing paper and counting down the hours until they can rotate stateside. The more quick-witted Germans label Eisenhower’s headquarters “G.I. Farben Haus.”

  This same grand complex was also the site where the cyanide-based Zyklon B gas, which was used to exterminate millions in the Nazi death camps, was developed. For that reason, the more cynical residents of this city call the structure Das Pharisäer Ghetto, the “Ghetto of the Pharisees.”1

  Fresh-cut roses are delivered each day to Capt. Kay Summersby and other women serving in U.S. military offices. Summersby’s secretarial desk sits just outside Eisenhower’s vast office. She wears red lipstick, and her auburn hair is pinned back to reveal her high forehead. Summersby’s brown Women’s Army Corps uniform is tailored to accentuate her figure. Despite the relaxed working environment, she keeps her jacket on at all times, and her tie firmly knotted. Eisenhower’s headquarters is a “luxurious” space, she will write, adding that “several tennis courts could have fitted into Ike’s office.”

  Summersby hears the footfalls of George Patton’s trademark riding boots coming down the hallway, and snaps to attention as General Patton enters the office for the long-delayed meeting. Soon she hears Eisenhower raising his voice loud enough to be heard through the thick wooden door. This is not typical behavior for Ike, and Summersby is shocked. The meeting between Patton and Eisenhower borders on the volcanic.

  The relationship between Summersby and Eisenhower is far more congenial. They have been together for three years now and are closer than ever. Summersby could have returned to her home in England, but she does not want to leave Eisenhower. However, in just a month, Ike is slated to return to America, where he will replace George C. Marshall as army chief of staff.

  Summersby wants to go with him.

  She isn’t demanding that Eisenhower leave Mamie, his wife of almost thirty years. She would be content to serve as a member of his staff at the Pentagon. After all this time as part of what Eisenhower calls his “immediate wartime family,” she finds the thought of returning home alone to England devastating.

  Their relationship is an open secret. It was quietly condoned during time of war, and even now, Summersby stays in a special house reserved for female officers, which Eisenhower visits most nights for supper and a few rubbers of bridge. Such an esteemed presence at the dinner table can hardly be kept under wraps. But now, unbeknownst to Summersby, great effort is being taken to make sure that the relationship comes to an end.

  Army censors have already doctored the official photograph taken at the German surrender ceremony on May 7. The signing took place in a redbrick schoolhouse in Reims, France. In the original photograph, Summersby stands just behind a grinning Eisenhower, who holds up the two pens used to sign the surrender documents. Ike is making a V, for “Victory,” with the pens.

  General Eisenhower at the German military surrender

  In the censored version of the photograph, Eisenhower is still all smiles, but Kay Summersby’s image has vanished. No other person was edited out of the picture.

  The doctored photograph is just the first sign that the affair is doomed. Ike already knows it. Gen. George Marshall has threatened to expose Eisenhower if he requests a divorce.2 Unbeknownst to Summersby, her name will not be on the list of those approved to travel home with Ike. No other member of his staff will be left behind.

  * * *

  George Patton thinks Eisenhower is “very nasty and showoffish” when Kay Summersby is around. But the shouts that Summersby hears coming from Eisenhower’s office are hardly for
her benefit. Patton tries to appear calm, but he squirms in his seat as the evidence against him is presented. He has made a mess of things with the media yet again, going on the record as stating that being a member of the Nazi Party is no different from being a member of the Republican or Democratic Party. “To get things done in Bavaria, after the complete disorganization and disruption of four years of war, we had to compromise with the devil a little. We had no alternative but to turn to the people who knew what to do and how to do it,” he told a small gathering of the press one recent morning in his office, defending his use of former Nazi officials in the rebuilding of Germany.

  With war at an end, the journalists who remain in Europe are hungry for any story they can find. Reporters from the New York Times, Chicago Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune were overheard plotting to “get” Patton by tripping him up with loaded questions that would lead him to make the same sort of ill-advised comments to the press that he made at Knutsford.3 The Philadelphia Bulletin saw nothing newsworthy in Patton’s quote, and did not run the story. And the piece was originally buried on the back pages of the Chicago paper. Yet the New York Times, Stars and Stripes, and the New York Herald Tribune made much of Patton’s remarks. Eisenhower was irate when he received word, erupting in what Kay Summersby will later describe as “the granddaddy of all tempers. General Patton had made his last and final mistake.”

  Now Patton must explain to Eisenhower how he could have been so careless with his words.

  After past missteps, Patton appeared contrite in Eisenhower’s presence. He humbled himself to save his career. But Patton does not do that now. He is dressed in a simple uniform without his pistols. He believes that supplication will be unnecessary. Some well-chosen flattery and reminders of their longtime friendship should be enough to get Patton out of this jam with Ike.

  But the truth is Patton no longer has a career worth saving. He is restless and bored. His behavior borders on depressive some days, with the best remedy being a hunting expedition or time on horseback.