Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (41 page)

But the death of General George S. Patton presents a disturbing picture if one fully accepts history’s contention that his demise was simply the result of an accident.

We begin with Sgt. Robert Thompson and his two friends, who were responsible for plowing into Patton’s car. Shortly after the accident, Thompson claims to have been flown to England by army intelligence for his own safety, due to the number of American soldiers who worshipped Patton and would perhaps have wanted to cause Thompson physical harm. However, just four days after the collision, Thompson mysteriously makes his way back to Germany. There, he is interviewed by American journalist Howard K. Smith. In the wire service story Smith files on December 13, Thompson claims that Patton’s driver was speeding and at fault.

Thompson also asserts that he was alone in the truck when it struck Patton’s limo, but Gen. Hap Gay and PFC Horace Woodring swear there were two other people in the truck with Thompson. Indeed, a report dated December 18, 1945, by the Seventh Army provost marshal specifies that a German civilian employee of the 141st Signal Company of the First Armored Division (Thompson’s company) named Frank Krummer was in the truck at the time of the accident. The name of the other passenger was not mentioned.

But that report, like every other document relating to the accident, has disappeared. So the veracity of Thompson’s story was never officially challenged. His version of events was not vetted by the military police. He was not arrested or detained for anything having to do with the accident.

Robert Thompson soon vanishes from the historical record, surfacing only after he dies in Camden, New Jersey, on June 5, 1994. Frank Krummer also disappears. And if there was a third occupant of the vehicle, his name remains unknown to this day.

*   *   *

Despite Patton’s rank and fame, the military police documenting the accident treated it as nothing more than a fender bender. The crime scene investigation was conducted by Lt. Peter K. Babalas, the MP who arrived first on the scene. Military police from his 818th MP Battalion at Mannheim questioned both drivers, made notes about the damage to both vehicles, and wrote up a standard accident report. Though Patton’s driver testified that “the driver and his passengers were drunk and feeling no pain,” Sgt. Robert Thompson’s blood alcohol levels were never tested and he was never charged with driving under the influence. Thompson’s possession of the Signal Company’s truck also went unquestioned, despite the fact that he was almost sixty miles north of his duty station, with no apparent reason for being in Mannheim on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. His assertion that at the time of the accident he was turning into a quartermaster’s depot to return the truck does not hold up, as the depot was still several hundred yards down the road. George Patton, in fact, commented about the depot when Woodring drove past it.

Thompson’s drunkenness, negligence, and apparent larceny went unquestioned. In fact, the first MP on the scene attempted to arrest Private Woodring, Patton’s driver. It was only through the intercession of Gen. Hap Gay that the MP let Woodring go free.

The case was then declared closed. There was no formal inquest, no attempt to speak to Patton in the hospital about his version of events, and no inquiry after his death. Sgt. Robert Thompson’s military records, which might have detailed any further actions that were taken against him, were burned on July 12, 1973, when fire swept through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroying nearly eighteen million official military personnel files.

Incredibly, Lieutenant Babalas’s report has also vanished. A 1953 request for a copy of the report by the Gary, Indiana,
Post-Tribune
received an official response from the army noting that, first, the “Report of investigation is not on file;” second, “Casualty Branch has no papers on file regarding accident”; and third, “There is no information re the accident in General Gay’s 201 [personnel] file.”

*   *   *

Seeking more information about the death of his friend, Gen. Geoffrey Keyes, commander of the Seventh Army, immediately launched a probe of his own into the accident. But Keyes’s report, too, went missing. In fact, the only report that remained in circulation was a curious document that was allegedly written in 1952 and signed by PFC Horace Woodring, Patton’s driver. When asked about it in 1979, Woodring swore that he had never made any statements or signed his name to any such report. He believed the paperwork was completely fabricated.

Attempts by the authors of this book to find the official accident report were unsuccessful. If it does exist, it is well hidden.

*   *   *

In 1979, OSS Jedburgh Douglas Bazata made the astounding assertion that he was part of a hit team that lay in wait for Patton’s limousine. He claimed that after the crash, he fired a low-velocity projectile into the back of Patton’s neck in order to snap it. When Patton did not die immediately, Bazata said, the general was murdered in the hospital by NKVD agents using an odorless poison. Bazata also swore that Wild Bill Donovan paid him ten thousand dollars plus another eight hundred dollars in expenses for his role in Patton’s death.

But many believe that Bazata’s story is far-fetched. No projectiles were ever found, and surely Woodring and Hap Gay would have seen any assassination team. However, Bazata held to his story. On September 25, 1979, he described Patton’s assassination to four hundred and fifty former OSS agents gathered for a reunion at the Washington Hilton.
¹

Bazata does have some credibility. He was heavily decorated for his service as a Jedburgh, winning the Distinguished Service Cross, four Purple Hearts, and France’s Croix de Guerre with two palms.
²
After the war ended and he left the army in 1947 as a major, Bazata led a flamboyant life. He remained in France, where he studied wine making and had a successful career as a painter, with the Duchess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco each sponsoring a showing of his work. Bazata himself was the subject of a painting by the eccentric artist Salvador Dalí, who put the former Jedburgh on canvas dressed up as Don Quixote. The British art critic Mark Webber, writing in 1969, noted that Bazata had “lived a life eventful enough for a dozen novels.”

Among the former OSS members gathered in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton when Bazata made his claims to have killed Patton, there was much conversation. Some believed him. And even after the astounding claim, Bazata was hired to work for the U.S. government, during the Reagan administration, as special assistant to Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. Upon his death in 1999 at the age of eighty-eight, Bazata was the subject of a lengthy obituary in the
New York Times
that made no mention of the claims that he’d killed Patton, which were widely known.

However, in 1974 a work of fiction entitled
The Algonquin Project
, by British writer Frederick Nolan, was published that tells the story of an assassin who creeps up on Patton’s vehicle immediately after the accident and shoots a low-velocity projectile into the general’s neck. It has been confirmed that Bazata read this book. However, two former Jedburghs who knew Bazata well, along with journalist Joy Billington of the
Washington Star
, claim that he confided to them about the Patton assassination as early as 1972, two years before the book was published.

*   *   *

The strange death of George S. Patton should be reexamined by American military investigators. Although the trail is ice cold, technological advances could solve some of the puzzles.

There is no doubt that General Patton died a hero, and history certainly honors that to this day. But the tough old general did not go out on his own terms, and there are many unanswered questions surrounding his death. Those questions deserve to be addressed.

B
ILL 
O’R
EILLY

M
ARTIN 
D
UGARD

M
AY
 2014

Postscript

George Patton
once stated that he wished to be buried with his men, and so he is. Many of the five thousand interred at the American Military Cemetery just outside Luxembourg City are Third Army soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton’s burial site became such a popular postwar attraction that the hordes of visitors made it impossible for grass to grow around his grave or those nearby. So on March 19, 1947, his body was exhumed and moved to the location where it now rests, in a solitary spot apart from the long rows of white crosses, at the very front of the cemetery. The location suggests that Patton is still leading his men.

*   *   *

A devastated
Beatrice Patton
flew home to America the day after her husband’s funeral. It was Christmas, but she had given herself over to grief and mourning. There would be no holiday for her.

In their thirty-five years together, she and George Patton endured countless separations as he waged war in Mexico, Africa, France, and Germany. In the letters he wrote during these long times away from her, she came to know his innermost thoughts and his deep love. George Patton had dyslexia, which makes spelling, reading, and writing a chore, so the very act of writing was as much a symbol of his love as the words themselves.

But there would be no more letters from George Patton. As his body was lowered into the cold, wet ground of Luxembourg, Beatrice Patton’s grief was almost overwhelming.

Patton’s grave

Her beloved Georgie was no more.

Beatrice Patton never remarried. Her grandson James Patton Totten, speaking in 2008, admitted that she hired several private detectives to look into her husband’s death. Each of these investigations was unsuccessful in finding any hard evidence of an assassination.

A lifelong equestrienne, Beatrice suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm while galloping across a field outside Hamilton, Massachusetts, eight years after her husband’s death. Though Mrs. Patton immediately fell from the horse, she was dead before hitting the ground. As noted earlier, she had long made it clear that she wished to be buried with her husband. When the U.S. Army refused to allow her to be interred at the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, her children smuggled her ashes to Europe and sprinkled them atop the grave of George Patton.

*   *   *

The hospital where Patton died remained a U.S. Army installation until July 1, 2013. At that time, the
130th Station Hospital
, or Nachrichten Kaserne as it later became known, was closed and handed over to the German government. With the exception of a small ceremonial plaque that was hung outside the door, Room 110 was not treated with any fanfare after Patton’s death, and was long used as a radiology lab. In the course of researching this book, a visit was paid to the facility to see this very special room. The place where Patton died was quite ordinary. Coincidentally, this visit occurred just hours before the decommissioning, making Martin Dugard the last American visitor to enter Patton’s hospital room before it was handed over to the Germans.

*   *   *

PFC Horace Woodring
, driver of Patton’s Cadillac at the time of the accident, returned home to Kentucky after the war. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower took the time to assure him personally that he had not been at fault in the auto accident that paralyzed the general. Nevertheless, Woodring was devastated by Patton’s death. “I felt like a kid who had lost his father,” he later remembered, “because that’s how I felt about him. I had every admiration in the world for the man. I just thought he was the greatest.” When Woodring’s wife gave birth to a son, they gave him the middle name of Patton. Woodring and his family moved to Michigan in 1963, where he sold cars and rode snowmobiles to indulge his penchant for speed. Woodring died of heart disease in a Detroit hospital in November 2003. He was seventy-seven years old. Until the day he died, Woodring asserted that the accident that killed Patton was inexplicable.

*   *   *

The hero of the Battle of Fort Driant,
Pvt. Robert W. Holmlund
, who won the Distinguished Service Cross, was promoted posthumously to staff sergeant. Strangely, he has become a historical mystery. Staff Sergeant Holmlund is not listed as being buried in any of the American military cemeteries in Europe; nor is he buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

*   *   *

Capt. Jack Gerrie
was sent home to Wisconsin for a thirty-day leave after the battle for Fort Driant. On his way back into Europe, he passed through a depot, to await transportation to his unit. While there, on December 29, 1944, Gerrie was killed when a captured German gun he was examining fired into his head.

*   *   *

German generals
Ernst Maisel
and
Wilhelm Emanuel Burgdorf
, who came to Erwin Rommel’s home bearing the field marshal’s fatal suicide pill, lived two very different lives after that day. Maisel was promoted to lieutenant general (
Generalleutnant
) in the waning days of the war and placed in command of the Sixty-Eighth Infantry Division. He was captured by American forces on May 7, 1945, released two years later, and lived out his days in the mountains of German Bavaria, where he died on December 16, 1978, at the age of eighty-two.