Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General
Page 26
Patton desperately misses the war. He longs to arm the Germans and lead them against the Russians. It is a war that should have begun even before Berlin fell, Patton believes. He’s not afraid to stand up to the Russians, as he proved at a September 7 parade in Berlin, to celebrate the end of the war against Japan. More than five thousand American, Russian, French, and British soldiers stood in formation on the bright afternoon, on the broad Unter den Linden Boulevard, near the partially demolished columns of the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Patton stood on the review stand alongside the Russian general Georgy Zhukov, both men squinting in the strong sunlight as the troops marched past in review.
It is Zhukov who put the greatest pressure on Dwight Eisenhower to ensure that Patton hand over all German POWs to the Russians—particularly those elite SS units whom the Russians believe Patton is hiding from them. Eisenhower has already aligned himself with Zhukov, slighting Patton, Montgomery, and every other American and British general by stating in June that “The war in Europe has been won and to no man do the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov.”
The Russian general is used to such supplicant behavior. During the war, he ordered his troops to shoot any of their comrades who ran from the Germans, and any Russian village that was thought to have collaborated with the Nazis was burned to the ground. Zhukov is so feared that other Russian generals have been known to tremble in his presence.
Patton does not tremble.
“He was in full dress uniform much like comic opera and covered in medals,” Patton later wrote to Beatrice of Zhukov. “He is short, rather fat and has a prehensile chin like an ape but good blue eyes.”
As Russian tanks rolled past the reviewing stand, Patton noticed Zhukov gloating over the new Soviet IS-3 model tank.4 Looking up at his American counterpart, the Russian general delivered a taunt: “My dear General Patton,” he crowed. “You see that tank? It carries a cannon which can throw a shell seven miles.”
Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov with General Eisenhower
Patton’s face remained impassive, his tone calm and sure. “Indeed? Well, my dear Marshal Zhukov, let me tell you this: if any of my gunners started firing at your people before they had closed to less than seven hundred yards, I’d have them court-martialed for cowardice.”
Patton’s aide Maj. Van S. Merle-Smith will later state that he had never before seen “a Russian commander stunned into silence.”
Yet in his publicly stated belief that the Russians are America’s new enemy, and should be treated as such, Patton stands alone. Indeed, American troops are either going home or being sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, leaving fewer and fewer GIs to fight “the Mongols,” as Patton calls the Russians—not that the Truman administration has any intention of doing such a thing.
Among those departing is Sgt. John Mims, Patton’s driver for the last four years. The two have traveled thousands of miles together, and Mims’s caution at the wheel has kept Patton from being injured, despite navigating battlefields and avoiding artillery shells. “You have been the driver of my official car since 1940,” Patton writes in a farewell commendation to Mims. “During that time, you have safely driven me in many parts of the world, under all conditions of dust and snow and ice and mud, of enemy fire and attack by enemy aircraft. At no time during these years of danger and difficulty have you so much as bumped a fender.”
Another driver will soon be assigned to the general, but Mims can never truly be replaced, and Patton is so upset about his leaving that he originally fought to keep him in Europe. Only when he was reminded that Mims has a young wife at home did Patton relent and sign the travel orders.
But even more disturbing to Patton is that all his peers are going home to bigger and better jobs. While Patton spends his days reluctantly getting rid of the Nazi presence in Bavaria, Ike will soon be army chief of staff, Gen. Omar Bradley is already in Washington heading up the new Veterans Administration, and, of course, Gen. Courtney Hodges is off to fight in the Pacific.
It seems there is no place for George Patton in a peacetime army. The one job he really wanted, that of commandant of the War College at the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, has been given away to Gen. Leonard T. Gerow, a close friend of Eisenhower’s who helped plan and lead the D-day invasion.
As their turbulent meeting stretches on, Dwight Eisenhower finally calms down a bit and gets to the main point: shockingly, his plan is to take away the Third Army from George S. Patton.
With this decision, Eisenhower can effectively terminate the press furor over Patton’s remarks and place someone in charge of the Third Army who will be less sympathetic to the Nazis.
“Your greatest fault,” Eisenhower tells Patton, “is your audacity.”
The words are meant to sting, but both men know that Patton considers audacity his greatest asset.
Then the meeting takes another turn. Instead of simply relieving Patton of active command, Eisenhower suggests instead that Patton assume control of the Fifteenth Army.
It is a face-saving solution, meant to ensure that Patton does not return to America in disgrace. Yet to a fighting man such as Patton, the notion is absurd. The Fifteenth is a paper army, tasked with the job of writing the war’s history.
But Patton has no choice. As he walks out of Eisenhower’s office, he finds the same reporters who published the stories leading to his downfall now waiting in the corridor for news of his fate.
Eisenhower tells them nothing. Patton also says nothing. He would normally have stayed and had dinner and drinks with Ike; instead, Patton rushes to the train station across from the IG Farben Building to catch a 7:00 p.m. train back to Bavaria.
The humiliation slowly sinks in: Patton’s beloved Third Army has been wrenched from his grasp. One of the greatest fighting forces in the history of war will now be commanded by another man. Under Patton’s leadership, that spectacular assemblage of men, tanks, and big guns led the liberation of France, rescued Bastogne, crossed the Rhine, and would have freed all of Eastern Europe if Eisenhower had not halted Patton’s advance.
“I’ve obeyed orders,” Patton tells an aide over dinner on the long nighttime train ride. “I think that I’d like to resign from the Army so that I could go home and say what I have to say.”
But powerful people do not want this to happen. George Patton knows too much—and saying what he knows would be a disaster.
He must be silenced.
25
JOSEPH STALIN’S PRIVATE VILLA
SOCHI, RUSSIA
OCTOBER 17, 1945
AFTERNOON
Joseph Stalin is down but not out.
The sixty-six-year-old Russian dictator is taking a rare vacation at his favorite hideaway. At his direction, the lavish mountain home has been painted forest green, so that it is completely camouflaged within a grove of cypress trees.1 Despite this cloak of invisibility, Stalin is on guard as he strolls alone in the palm-tree-lined courtyard. Trademark pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, he is obsessively contemplating his future—and that of the Soviet Union.
“The Boss,” as Stalin is known, desperately needs time away from Moscow. The fresh air and quiet of this retreat one thousand miles due south of the Russian capital are more than a mere tonic to the overworked despot. Unbeknownst to the Americans and British, Stalin suffered two minor heart attacks at the Potsdam Conference, which he concealed from the public. Despite the ailments, Stalin was able to continue negotiating the future of Europe.
The stress of the war, combined with years of working sixteen hours a day while puffing on a pipe filled with strong tobacco, is taking a savage toll on Stalin’s body. He is afraid that any sign of weakness might lead to an attempt to oust him from power. Only his personal physician, Vladimir Vinogradov, knows the full extent of his health problems. But even at leisure, Stalin is a workaholic and finds vacationing to be a nuisance. Now, as he takes two months away from the Kremlin, spending his days in gardening and long walks, he still receiv
es dozens of reports from Moscow each day.
And these reports trouble him deeply.
Stalin’s absence is causing a furor. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, has simply explained that “Comrade Stalin has departed for vacation to rest,” but few in Moscow or around the world believe there is not more to the story. Foreign diplomats and the international press scurry to learn the truth about what’s happening in Sochi, as rumors fly.2
There are rumors that Stalin will soon quit his job, to be replaced either by Marshal Georgy Zhukov or perhaps by foreign affairs commissar Vyacheslav Molotov. “Stalin may leave his post,” the Chicago Tribune is reporting. “The ambitious aspirations of Marshal Zhukov to become a dictator have full backing of the army, while Molotov is backed by the Communist Party.”
Stalin considers such rumors as a poruganiie—a desecration not only of his reputation but of the power to which he clings so dearly. Two men who learned the hard way how ruthlessly Stalin deals with those who attempt to usurp his power were Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his son Lev Sedov. Trotsky was once a trusted commissar of foreign affairs, just as Molotov is now. But the bond between Stalin and Trotsky was broken when their ideologies about the true nature of communism began to differ. Eventually, Trotsky was forced to flee Russia, taking up residence in Mexico. There he openly criticized Stalin, believing that he was safe from the long arm of the NKVD.
Trotsky was wrong.
In August 1940, NKVD agent Ramon Mercader attacked Trotsky in his home, plunging the sharp tip of an ice axe deep into the former revolutionary’s skull. Miraculously, Trotsky initially survived the blow, only to die one day later in the hospital.
Trotsky’s assassination mimicked that of his thirty-two-year-old son, Lev Sedov, two years earlier. At the time of his death, Sedov was on the NKVD execution list because he was arranging an international Communist conference in Paris that would celebrate his father’s, rather than Stalin’s, vision of communism.
Sedov suffered an acute attack of what appeared to be appendicitis in late January 1938. His symptoms mysteriously disappeared, then reappeared a few weeks later. Immediately, his best friend, an anthropologist named Mark Zborowski, informed Russian intelligence that Sedov had checked into a small Paris hospital known as the Clinique Mirabeau.
Unbeknownst to Sedov, Zborowski was an NKVD agent.
A few days after emerging from surgery, Sedov was in good spirits. He joked with his wife, Jeanne, and for several days was thought to be enjoying a normal recovery. But when his wife came to visit him on February 14, 1938, Sedov appeared listless.
“You know what they did to me last night?” he asked his wife. Suddenly, Sedov stopped talking, apparently unable to finish his thought. Two days later, to the horror of his wife, he died. An examination found strange purple bruising on his abdomen. Sedov was autopsied twice, but Parisian medical authorities ruled that he’d died from natural causes.3
The NKVD chiefs were relentless in their zeal to develop untraceable poisons. Beginning with Genrikh Yagoda; his successor, the reprehensible Nikolai Yezhov; and then the even more heinous Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless spymasters pushed Soviet scientists to experiment with deadly toxins.4
The research was done at a top-secret laboratory known as the Kamera (“the Chamber”), where poisons of all kinds were tested on Russian political prisoners. The goal of the scientists working at the Kamera was to concoct an odorless, tasteless poison that would go undiscovered in case of an autopsy.
“We set ourselves the task of developing in the laboratory poisons so that they could be consumed using wine, drinks and food without modifying the taste or color of the food and drink,” one Russian official would testify at Yezhov’s secret trial in 1940.5 “It was also proposed that we invent fast-acting and slow-acting poisons but they had to have no visible impact on the body so that the autopsy on someone who had been poisoned would be unable to detect that the person had been poisoned.”
The Kamera came into being during Stalin’s reign of terror. Various poisons were used to silence enemies of the state. Now, as he endures his necessary time away from Moscow, Stalin has plenty of enemies in need of silencing. He lives like a monk as he plots the future. After spending each day in the gardens, the Boss spends his nights reading hand-carried reports from Moscow. He receives no visitors, and communicates with the outside world only through the occasional telephone call. Among the dossiers he receives each day are reports from Beria apprising him of the findings of the many NKVD surveillance teams hidden throughout occupied Europe. Stalin is already making plans to replace Zhukov as deputy minister of defense, and to humiliate Molotov before firing him as commissar of foreign affairs. As to relationships with the Western Allies, the time away from Moscow is giving Stalin an even greater resolve. “It is obvious that in dealing with such partners as the U.S. and Britain we cannot achieve anything serious if we begin to give in to intimidation or betray uncertainty,” he messages his top advisers in Moscow. “To get anything from this kind of partner, we must arm ourselves with the policy of stoikosti i vyderzhki”—“tenacity and steadfastness.”
The dacha in which Joseph Stalin now rests was built in 1934. Since then, he has personally signed the death warrants of forty thousand people—among them, political rivals, military officials, troublesome intellectuals, and personal enemies. Anyone who dares cross Joseph Stalin soon finds himself dead. All it takes is the stroke of a pen—and perhaps a lethal dose of untraceable poison.
* * *
Two thousand miles northwest of Stalin’s dacha, George S. Patton is restless. Many thoughts run through his mind now that it is no longer occupied by war. Patton understands that he is a famous person throughout the world, and that his future might lie in political activism—he’d rather be “outside the tent pissing in, than inside the tent pissing out,” in his own words. In a way, speaking out about controversial issues would give the general an opportunity to wage rhetorical war. Above all, Patton remains a warrior, but his battlefield may be changing.
And that prospect is not lost on his enemies, one of whom is currently resting in South Russia.
Another is dealing with captured Nazis at Nuremberg.
26
PALACE OF JUSTICE
NUREMBERG, GERMANY
NOVEMBER 20, 1945
10:00 A.M.
The crowd rises to its feet in Courtroom 600 as the Nuremberg war crimes trials get under way. Twenty of Nazi Germany’s most brutal leaders sit in the dock under a bank of hot floodlights so bright that each of the prisoners has been given sunglasses.1 Behind them, a row of white-helmeted American military police stand at crisp attention. The eight judges, two each from the United States, Britain, Russia, and France, take their seats at the front of the room. The proceedings begin with a reading of the twenty-four-thousand-word document listing the atrocities for which these men are being tried: the murder of one million Russians at Leningrad, the death of 780 Catholic priests at Mauthausen concentration camp, the machine-gunning of British POWs who were recaptured after their “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III, and much more.
The litany of grisly indictments will take two full days to recount, and the Nazi prisoners soon grow bored. Some, such as Hitler’s former deputy führer Rudolf Hess, actually fall asleep.
Former Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering wears headphones to listen to an interpreter repeat what is being said. Arrogantly, he smirks as an accounting of his war crimes and tales of the art treasures he looted are read into the official court records. The formerly obese Reichsmarschall wears a simple gray uniform that hangs off him; he has lost seventy pounds since being taken prisoner. Goering is eager to speak in his own defense. Across the courtroom, he can see the deputy prosecutor, an American who has interviewed him for weeks. They have come to know each other quite well—so much so that Goering has confided stories about the sex lives of Germany’s greatest generals, and other salacious gossip, to his new friend, who speaks fluent German.
That prosecutor is none other than Wild Bill Donovan, the sixty-two-year-old major general, Medal of Honor winner, and chief of the OSS. The war may be over, but Donovan still has scores to settle. That is why he is here today. Many of his spies died at the hands of the Nazis, who also murdered countless innocent civilians as revenge for successful OSS operations. Donovan is relentlessly anti-Nazi, and began laying the groundwork for these trials as far back as October 1943, when he coaxed President Roosevelt into setting up a postwar apparatus for trying war criminals. It was two months later, in the spirit of Allied cooperation, that Donovan flew to Moscow and began forging a relationship between the OSS and the NKVD.
Hermann Goering with Hitler in Berlin
But things have gone horribly wrong for Donovan in recent months. He has been undone by sordid and unfounded rumors that he is having an affair with his daughter-in-law—a rumor that most displeased the prudish Harry Truman when it reached the Oval Office.2
In a separate incident, a fifty-nine-page report leveling charges of gross mismanagement and incompetence within the OSS was manufactured by Donovan’s rivals and also found its way to President Truman.
Now, even as the heat from the courtroom spotlights makes his pale, broad face flush a light crimson, Wild Bill is desperately clinging to what little authority he has left. A power struggle with chief Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson has not ended in his favor, and the fiery Donovan has decided that he will soon leave the trials rather than be a subordinate.
Even worse, as of October 1, his agency is no more. President Truman has shut down the OSS.
But Donovan knows that the United States needs a global spy network. So even though he is not technically America’s top spy any longer, he still maintains a close relationship with the leaders of the Russian NKVD and with British spymaster William Stephenson.3