LUXEMBOURG — Standing before a simple white cross in the cold autumn rain of 1946, Dwight D. Eisenhower removed his cap and said nothing. The Army camera that captured the moment recorded no sound.
Nine months earlier, George S. Patton Jr. had died in a Heidelberg hospital bed, paralyzed from the neck down after a freak vehicle collision, and Eisenhower had not come to the hospital.
He had not come to the funeral.
Now the newly installed Army Chief of Staff stood at Patton’s grave in Hamm, Luxembourg, surrounded by the men of the Third Army who had followed Patton across France. The photograph became one of the most reproduced images of the postwar era, and for nearly eight decades it has posed the same question: what was Eisenhower thinking?
Newly examined accounts of their 26-year friendship reveal that the answer lies buried in a muddy tank park in Maryland in 1919, where two junior officers — one rich, one poor, one decorated, one untested — tore a tank apart bolt by bolt and dreamed aloud about a kind of war that did not yet exist.
George Smith Patton Jr. , born November 11, 1885, in San Gabriel, California, was the grandson of a Confederate colonel killed at the Third Battle of Winchester. He graduated from West Point in 1909, competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, rode into Mexico with General John Pershing in 1916, and in 1918 built and led the first American tank brigade in France.
A German machine-gun bullet tore through his leg near the village of Cheppy on September 26, 1918, while he directed tanks on foot.
Dwight David Eisenhower, born October 14, 1890, in Denison, Texas, and raised in Abilene, Kansas, attended West Point because it was free. He graduated in 1915, the class the stars fell on, but spent the First World War commanding Camp Colt on the old Gettysburg battlefield, training tank crews for a war he never saw. When his orders for France finally arrived, the armistice came first.
He had never heard a shot fired in anger.
At Camp Meade, Patton was five years older, a wounded war hero, and in every measure that mattered to the peacetime Army, the superior. They became friends almost immediately. Their wives, Beatrice Patton and Mamie Eisenhower, became friends as well.
In the evenings the two officers talked about tanks until the coffee went cold.
In 1920 they made a mistake. They wrote it down. Patton published an article in the Infantry Journal arguing that tanks would be of enormous importance in future wars.
That November, Eisenhower published his own article in the same journal, arguing that tanks must not crawl forward at the pace of foot soldiers but must be used boldly as a striking force. The response was swift. Eisenhower was summoned by Major General Charles Farnsworth, the Chief of Infantry, and told his ideas were not merely wrong but dangerous.
If he published anything like it again, he could expect a court-martial.
Patton heard similar grumbling from his own superiors. But for Patton, a reprimand was only an irritation. He had money, connections, and a family name.
Eisenhower had none of it. Then, in the first days of 1921, Eisenhower’s world collapsed. His three-year-old son, Doud Dwight, known as Icky, contracted scarlet fever and died on January 2.
Decades later Eisenhower would write that this was the greatest disappointment and disaster of his life, the one he could never entirely forget.
A grieving young officer without money and with a warning hanging over his head learned a lesson that would shape everything that followed. In this Army, being right was not enough. You had to be careful.
You had to be patient. You had to know when to keep silent. Patton never learned that lesson.
He did not want to.
And yet it was Patton who opened the door that changed Eisenhower’s life. One evening the Pattons invited a guest to dinner: Brigadier General Fox Conner, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man from Mississippi who had served as Pershing’s chief of operations in France. After the meal, Conner turned to the two younger officers and began asking questions about tanks.
The conversation moved to the tank workshop and continued for hours. Eisenhower did not realize it, but he had just been interviewed.
Conner soon took command of an infantry brigade in the Panama Canal Zone and requested Eisenhower as his executive officer. For three years, in the humid jungle heat, Conner had him read Clausewitz, military history, and the campaigns of great commanders. Conner told him something he would carry for decades: a new world war was coming, and when it came it would be fought alongside allies.
Conner then helped Eisenhower secure a place at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, a school the infantry had not wanted to send him to. Patton, who had already completed the course with honors, sent Ike his old notes. In 1926 Eisenhower finished first in a class of 245 officers.
That same year Patton wrote him a letter setting out his entire philosophy of war in a single sentence. “Victory in the next war,” he wrote, “will depend on execution, not on plans.” Remember that sentence.
It will return.
The years passed and the friendship survived through letters. Then, in September 1939, German armored units thundered into Poland. In the spring of 1940 they carved through France in six weeks.
Everything the two officers had been warned never to say aloud was suddenly on the front page of every newspaper in America.
In September 1940 Eisenhower sat down and wrote to his old friend. He wanted in. He wrote that it was probably too much to hope that he could get a regiment in Patton’s division, since it would be nearly three years before he could become a colonel.
But there was nothing he would rather do than serve with him. Patton wrote back warmly. He would try to bring him in.
Think about that letter. In 1940, Dwight Eisenhower asked George Patton for a job.
It never happened. Instead, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall began to notice Eisenhower.
During the massive Louisiana maneuvers of 1941, Ike served as chief of staff of the Third Army and earned wide praise. He was promoted to brigadier general. Days after Pearl Harbor, Marshall summoned him to Washington to work on war plans.
By the spring of 1942 he was a major general. In June he was sent to London to command American troops in Europe. In July he wore three stars.
Patton, meanwhile, had risen to command the 2nd Armored Division, then an armored corps, then the Desert Training Center in California. He was a major general and proud of it. But now his commander was the younger officer who had once asked him for a regiment.
On November 8, 1942, Operation Torch began. Patton led the Western Task Force, roughly 35,000 men who had crossed the Atlantic directly from the United States. He waded ashore at Fedala, near Casablanca.
On November 11, his 57th birthday, French troops in Morocco laid down their arms. Eisenhower, directing the entire operation from a damp tunnel beneath the Rock of Gibraltar, had given his old friend his first great command of the war.
The friendship endured, but the balance between them had changed forever. Three months later it was tested. In February 1943, German troops under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel attacked the inexperienced American II Corps in Tunisia.
At Kasserine Pass the Americans were driven back in disorder. Thousands were killed, wounded, or captured. It was a national humiliation.
Eisenhower relieved the corps commander, Major General Lloyd Fredendall, and sent for George Patton.
Patton arrived in early March like a thunderstorm. He enforced rules on helmets, ties, and leggings. Men cursed his name, but they began to act like soldiers again.
Within weeks, American infantry held at El Guettar and beat back a German armored attack. Beside Patton in those weeks stood a steady, soft-spoken officer named Omar Bradley. Remember that name too.
That summer Patton commanded the new Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. On July 10, 1943, his men landed on the southern coast. While the British under General Bernard Montgomery pushed up the eastern side of the island, Patton swung west and north.
He took Palermo on July 22. Then he turned east and drove for Messina, desperate to get there before Montgomery.
The heat was merciless. Dust hung over every road. Malaria and dysentery raged through the ranks, and in the field hospitals behind the lines, alongside the wounded, lay men with no visible injuries at all — men whose nerves had simply given out.
On August 3, Patton visited the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia. He walked the rows, spoke with the wounded, and displayed the confidence he believed a commander must project. Then he stopped at a soldier of the 1st Infantry Division.
His name was Charles Kuhl. He was 27 years old. He wore no bandage.
Patton asked what was wrong with him. Kuhl answered that he guessed he just couldn’t take it anymore.
Patton exploded. He struck Kuhl in the face with his gloves. He grabbed him by the collar, dragged him to the entrance of the tent, and kicked him outside.
He shouted that the man was not to be admitted. Only later did the doctors learn the full truth. Kuhl had a high fever.
He had malaria.
A week later, on August 10, it happened again at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. This time the soldier was Paul Bennett, 21 years old, an artilleryman with a spotless record. He sat trembling on his cot.
“It’s my nerves,” he told the general. “I can’t stand the shelling anymore.” Patton struck him in the face.
He struck him again, so hard that the young man’s helmet liner flew off. He pulled his pistol and waved it in his face. He shouted that Bennett was going back to the front line, that he might be shot and killed, but that he would fight.
Doctors and nurses watched in stunned silence. Patton stormed out.
Within days the reports reached the medical chain of command. On August 16 they landed on Eisenhower’s desk in Algiers. He read them and understood immediately what they meant.
If this became public, the American people would demand Patton’s head, and Eisenhower would lose the only general who could drive an army at full speed.
On August 17 he wrote Patton a letter unlike any he had written him before. He told him he understood that strict and drastic measures were sometimes necessary to win. But, he wrote, this did not excuse brutality, 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 of the sick, nor the display of uncontrollable temper.
He warned him that his judgment and self-control were now seriously in question and ordered him to apologize to both soldiers, to the doctors and nurses who had witnessed it, and to his troops.
Quietly, Eisenhower also sent trusted men to Sicily to find out exactly what had happened and how far the story had spread. Patton obeyed. He apologized to Bennett on August 21 and to Kuhl two days later.
Then he traveled from division to division, standing before thousands of men as he struggled to speak words of regret that did not come naturally to him.
But the story had already escaped the hospital tents. A group of war correspondents in Sicily had heard about it. They had interviewed witnesses and, instead of publishing, several of them flew to Algiers and brought it directly to the Allied commander.
Eisenhower asked them to hold the news. Within his headquarters he made his reasoning clear. If this ever came out, he said, they would demand Patton’s head and that would be the end of Georgie in this war.
He could not let that happen. Patton, he said, was indispensable to the war effort. The reporters, impressed by his honesty and his evident need for the man, agreed to stay silent.
The secret held for three months. On the evening of Sunday, November 21, 1943, millions of Americans tuned their radios to the popular broadcast of the Washington columnist Drew Pearson. And Pearson told them everything.
A famous American general had slapped a sick soldier in a hospital in Sicily.
The story was not entirely accurate in its details, but the core was true and the country exploded. Newspapers ran furious editorials. In the House of Representatives, Congressman Jed Johnson of Oklahoma and Congressman Charles Hoeven of Iowa demanded that Patton be relieved.
Letters poured into Washington, more than a thousand by mid-December. Mothers asked how a man like him could be trusted with their sons. Others wrote just as passionately in his defense, reminding Washington that Patton won battles.
And then came a letter no one expected. It was from the father of Private Charles Kuhl. He asked that General Patton not be punished.
Think about that. A father in America whose son had been struck by the most famous general in the Army sat down at his kitchen table and wrote to ask for mercy for the general. Not for his son — for Patton.
In Algiers, Eisenhower absorbed the blows. He did not relieve Patton of command. He did not throw him to the wolves.
But everyone around him understood that something had changed. The secret he had tried so desperately to protect was now a national 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁, and it came at the worst possible moment.
Because the most important command of the war was about to be assigned. The Allies were preparing the invasion of Northern France. For that invasion the Americans needed a general to lead their assault army.
Patton wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. He had already led American troops to victory in Africa and Sicily. He did not get it.
As early as September, before the slapping story broke, the job had gone to Omar Bradley — the quiet officer who had served as Patton’s deputy in Tunisia, the man who had commanded a corps under Patton in Sicily. Now Bradley would lead the First Army onto the beaches of France. In December, President Roosevelt named Eisenhower Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
Ike’s personal assessment of his old friend was painfully clear. Patton was a superb fighter, a man he needed, but he did not trust Patton’s self-discipline enough to give him an army.
For months Patton waited in Sicily with almost nothing to do. His Seventh Army was dismantled piece by piece. Divisions that had followed him across the island were loaded onto ships and sent to Italy or England to fight under others.
Visitors found him restless, bitter, and afraid his war was over.
Then, in January 1944, the orders came. He was to fly to England. There he would take command of the Third Army, still arriving from the United States.
His headquarters would be established at Peover Hall, an old manor house in Cheshire near the small town of Knutsford. The Third Army would not land on D-Day. It would follow later, once a beachhead was secured.
But Patton was also given a second role, one that existed only in the imagination of the enemy. The Allies had created a phantom army group called the First United States Army Group. On paper it was enormous.
In reality it consisted of rubber tanks, dummy landing craft, false radio traffic, and carefully planted stories fed to the Germans through double agents. It was all part of a vast deception called Operation Fortitude, designed to convince Hitler’s generals that the main invasion would come at Pas-de-Calais, the narrowest crossing of the Channel, rather than Normandy. And to make the lie credible, the Allies needed a commander the Germans would take seriously — someone they feared.
They chose George Patton.
Patton knew exactly what he was being used for. He was seen in southeast England. He gave speeches.
He appeared in public. German intelligence, which had studied his campaigns in Africa and Sicily, watched closely. Wherever Patton is, they reasoned, that is where the real blow will fall.
Then, on April 25, 1944, he nearly destroyed himself again. In Knutsford, a group of local women had organized a welcome club where American soldiers could relax, drink tea, and meet British families. Patton attended the opening.
He arrived late and had been told, or believed, that no press were present. He was asked to say a few informal words. He stood and spoke warmly.
He said the idea of such clubs was excellent, since it was the clear destiny of the British and Americans — and of course the Russians — to rule the world, and the better they knew each other, the better they would do their job.
A few friendly sentences in a small hall in an English town. But reporters were present, and when the story circulated, several versions left the Russians out entirely. In America it sounded as though Patton had declared that Britain and the United States alone would rule the postwar world, insulting the Soviet ally whose soldiers were dying by the hundreds of thousands on the Eastern Front.
The uproar was immediate and the timing was terrible. Patton’s name was on a list of generals awaiting permanent promotion in the U. S.
Senate, and now the entire list was in danger. In London, Eisenhower’s patience finally ran out. He had defended this man since Sicily.
He had absorbed the storm over Drew Pearson. He had gambled on him again and again, and now, weeks before the most important operation in the history of the Western Allies, Patton had put him in the headlines once more.
Eisenhower sent a telegram to General Marshall in Washington. He told him plainly that he was considering relieving Patton of his assignment and sending him home. Marshall’s reply was cautious.
The decision, he told Eisenhower, was his. But he urged him to weigh one thing above all: whether Patton could win the victory in battle.
For days Eisenhower struggled with it. Imagine the weight on his shoulders in that spring of 1944. More than a million and a half American servicemen were packed into Britain.
Thousands of ships and aircraft were being readied. The fate of occupied Europe depended on an operation that could fail on a stormy morning. And in the midst of it all, the Supreme Commander lay awake over a few careless sentences spoken over tea in an English town.
Then, in the first days of May, he summoned Patton. Patton came expecting the worst. He believed he was finished.
Instead, Eisenhower told him he was keeping him. And then he put the conditions in writing, in words that left no room for doubt. If Patton were again guilty of any indiscretion in word or deed that brought shame to the War Department, to any other part of the government, or to Eisenhower’s headquarters, he would be relieved of his command immediately.
Immediately.
It was the second time Eisenhower had saved him. It would not be the last, but from this moment both men knew there was a line, and Patton stood at its outermost edge.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy. Patton was not there. He spent D-Day in England, still playing the role of phantom commander, and the lie worked better than anyone had hoped.
Weeks after the landings, the German Fifteenth Army remained at Pas-de-Calais waiting for Patton’s invasion. Divisions that could have been committed against the Normandy beachhead sat idle, staring at an empty sea.
In early July, Patton finally crossed to France and watched in frustration as the Allied armies slogged through the hedgerow country, fighting field by bloody field. Then, on July 25, Bradley’s First Army launched Operation Cobra. After a massive aerial bombardment, American divisions punched a hole in the German line west of Saint-Lô.
The front broke open.
At noon on August 1, 1944, the Third Army became operational. And this was the twist no one could have foreseen at Camp Meade or even in Tunisia. On that same day, Omar Bradley took command of the 12th Army Group.
Patton’s former deputy was now Patton’s boss. Patton swallowed it. He had been senior in Tunisia.
He had been senior in Sicily. Now he saluted the officer who had once served under him, and he kept his thoughts for his diary.
And then he unleashed the Third Army on France. He pushed division after division through a single narrow road at Avranches, a bottleneck that should have taken days to clear. Some of his armored columns drove west into Brittany.
Others raced south and east. Le Mans fell. Orléans fell.
Chartres fell. His tanks covered in days distances that the armies of the First World War could not have crossed in years.
By mid-August, a massive opportunity presented itself. The German armies in Normandy had counterattacked and advanced too far. Now American troops were driving up from the south while British, Canadian, and Polish troops pushed down from the north.
Between them lay a shrinking pocket around the town of Falaise, containing tens of thousands of German soldiers.
On August 13, Patton’s troops reached the town of Argentan on the southern edge of the pocket. The Canadians were still fighting their way down from the north. Patton wanted to drive on and slam the door shut.
Bradley ordered him to stop. The concerns were real: the boundary between the American and British zones, the danger of friendly troops colliding and opening fire, the fear that Patton’s thin line would be overrun by desperate German divisions trying to escape. Bradley would later write that he preferred a firm shoulder at Argentan to a possible broken neck at Falaise.
Patton was furious. And though the pocket was finally closed days later at Chambois, a large number of German soldiers slipped through the gap before it shut. Historians still argue over how many.
Patton believed for the rest of his life that a chance to cripple the German army in the West had been thrown away.
The race continued. Patton’s men crossed the Seine. They raced past Reims and reached Verdun, the old battlefield of the First World War.
The border of Germany itself was within reach.
And then, at the end of August, the tanks began to stop. Not because the Germans stopped them, but because they ran out of gasoline. The Allied supply system was stretched to its limit.
Almost everything still had to come over the Normandy beaches or through a handful of ports hundreds of miles behind the front. Every gallon had to be trucked forward. There was simply not enough to keep every army running at full speed.
Eisenhower had to choose. In the north, Field Marshal Montgomery demanded priority. He argued that one powerful thrust in the north could end the war.
Patton argued the same, but for a thrust through his own sector. Eisenhower, the man who had learned in Panama that wars are won by holding allies together, refused to stake everything on one card. He favored a broad-front advance, but in early September he gave Montgomery the lion’s share of support for a daring plan.
Its name was Market Garden.
On September 17, 1944, thousands of British and American paratroopers, later joined by a Polish brigade, landed in the Netherlands to seize a series of bridges leading to the Rhine at Arnhem. It failed. The British 1st Airborne Division was crushed at Arnhem.
The Rhine was not crossed, and in eastern France Patton’s army, starved of fuel, bogged down in the autumn rains of Lorraine around the fortress city of Metz.
The war of rapid movement turned into a slow, freezing war of attrition. The rain in Lorraine seemed never to stop that autumn. Rivers overflowed.
Fields turned into marshes that swallowed tanks to their tracks. The old forts around Metz, built and rebuilt over generations, were full of German defenders who had had time to dig in. American infantry attacked across open ground under artillery fire, withdrew, and attacked again.
Trench foot spread through the foxholes. The casualty lists that had seemed so light in August grew heavy by November.
Patton hated every day of it. He believed that if he had been given fuel in late August, he would never have had to fight for Metz. Patton reportedly muttered a sentence that summed up everything he felt that autumn about his old friend.
Ike is the best damn general the British have.
It was cruel. It was unfair to a commander trying to hold together an alliance of proud nations. But it tells you exactly where the friendship stood.
Patton believed Eisenhower thought like a politician. Eisenhower believed Patton thought only of Patton.
Then, in the icy fog before dawn on December 16, 1944, Adolf Hitler made his last great gamble in the West. More than 200,000 German troops attacked through the Ardennes in Belgium and Luxembourg, a quiet sector the Allies had thought was safe. Thinly spread American divisions were overwhelmed.
Entire units were cut off. Prisoners were shot. Roads streamed with retreating trucks and frightened civilians.
The Germans drove a huge bulge into the American line, aiming for the Meuse and the port of Antwerp beyond.
At the crossroads town of Bastogne, the 101st Airborne Division rushed to occupy a crucial junction. Soon they would be surrounded. Patton’s Third Army was far to the south, preparing its own offensive toward Germany.
But Patton was not entirely surprised. His intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, had warned for days of German troops massing across the line. Patton had ordered his staff to think about what the Third Army would do if the enemy struck in the north.
On the morning of December 19, Eisenhower called his senior commanders together for an emergency conference in Verdun. They gathered in a cold stone room in an old French army barracks. There was barely any heat.
The faces around the table were gray with fatigue and worry. Bradley was there, as were General Jacob Devers, Eisenhower’s deputy Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, and George Patton.
Eisenhower opened the meeting with words meant to shake them out of their gloom. “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster,” he told them. “There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.”
Patton, in character, proposed letting the Germans drive on to Paris, then cutting them off and crushing them. No one laughed very hard. Then Eisenhower came to the point.
He wanted Patton to go to Luxembourg, take charge of the fight on the southern shoulder of the front, and counterattack north toward Bastogne. He asked the question that gripped everyone in the room. When could he attack?
To move the Third Army north, Patton would have to break off an eastward offensive, turn enormous formations of men, tanks, and artillery ninety degrees, and send them over icy roads in the middle of winter. It was the kind of maneuver staff officers plan for a week or more. Patton told him he could attack in 48 hours.
There was a stir at the table. Some officers thought he was showing off. Eisenhower was not amused.
“Don’t be fatuous, George,” he said. Eisenhower feared Patton would rush too soon and attack with too few divisions, sacrificing them piecemeal. Patton explained that his staff already had plans prepared for exactly this situation.
After some discussion, they agreed. A strong attack with three divisions on December 22.
Patton walked to a telephone, called his headquarters, and gave a simple code word. Across eastern France, the Third Army began to turn. Before the conference broke up, there was a brief human moment between the two old friends.
The Senate had just confirmed Eisenhower’s promotion to the new five-star rank of General of the Army. “George,” Eisenhower said, “every time I get a new star I get attacked.” “And every time you get attacked, Ike,” Patton answered, “I pull you out.”
For a moment it was Camp Meade again.
On the morning of December 22, 1944, the Third Army’s III Corps attacked north into the German flank, exactly as promised. The snow was deep, the cold merciless, engines froze, men slept in holes they hacked from the frozen ground. The Germans fought hard for every village and every treeline.
In Bastogne, the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne were short of nearly everything. Ammunition, medical supplies, winter clothing. Wounded men lay on straw in cellars waiting for help that might not come.
Snow blew into the foxholes at the edge of town. Men wrapped their feet in blankets and burlap and peered into the white mist, listening for the sound of German engines. South of the town, Patton’s men heard the guns and kept advancing.
On December 23 the skies above the Ardennes cleared and Allied fighter-bombers roared over to attack German columns and drop supplies to the defenders of Bastogne. And at midday on December 26, the lead tanks of the 37th Tank Battalion, part of the 4th Armored Division under Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, broke through the German ring and made contact with the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne. Bastogne was relieved.
The fighting in the Ardennes would continue for weeks, but the German gamble had failed and Patton’s rapid turn to the north became one of the most remarkable achievements of the entire war. Every risk Eisenhower had taken for this man, every 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 he had survived, every time he had refused to send him home, had paid off in the snow of Belgium.
You would expect Eisenhower to finally put Patton at the top of the list. He did not. On February 1, 1945, Eisenhower sent General Marshall a private memo ranking the senior American officers under his command by the value of their services.
At the top, in a shared first place, he named Omar Bradley and air commander Carl Spaatz. After them came his own chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith. Only then did he name George Patton.
Barely five weeks after the relief of Bastogne, the general who had just executed one of the greatest maneuvers in American military history ranked below a staff officer who had never led troops in combat in this war. To Eisenhower, it made perfect sense. Bradley planned.
Spaatz commanded a gigantic air force. Smith kept the whole headquarters running. Patton executed brilliantly, but he also created problems no one else created.
The war went on. On the night of March 22, 1945, Patton’s troops quietly crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, ahead of Montgomery’s massive, carefully staged crossing in the north. Patton was delighted.
He wanted the whole world to know the Americans got there first.
His columns drove deep into Germany, and in early April they discovered something no combat could have prepared them for. On April 12, 1945, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton traveled together to a place near the town of Gotha called Ohrdruf. It was a Nazi forced-labor camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald, recently taken by American troops.
The three generals walked through it together. They saw the bodies stacked in a shed. They saw the remains of prisoners burned on pyres.
They saw the gallows and the whipping blocks. The stench was overwhelming.
Patton, the hardest man in the Army, the general who had seen more death than almost any other living American officer, turned away, walked behind a building, and was violently sick. Eisenhower walked through every part of the camp. He wanted to see everything so that no one could ever tell him it had not happened.
He ordered nearby units to be brought through the camp so they would understand what they had been fighting against. Days later he wrote to Marshall that the things he saw defied description.
That night the three generals stayed at Patton’s headquarters. Around midnight Patton turned on the radio and the news came in. President Franklin Roosevelt was dead.
The three men sat up late, talking about the future, about the country, about a war that was not yet over.
Less than a month later, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered. For Dwight Eisenhower, the end of the war was the beginning of an enormous new responsibility. He had to govern a shattered country, feed millions of hungry people, and send a millions-strong army home.
For George Patton, the end of the war was something else.
Patton had once written his friend that victory would depend on execution, not on plans. Now there was nothing left to execute. No armies to chase, no rivers to cross.
And the qualities that had made him invaluable in war threatened to become his most dangerous traits in peace.
In the summer of 1945, George Patton was in the Bavarian Alps. He was now military governor of Bavaria, and his Third Army headquarters was based in the spa town of Bad Tölz, south of Munich, in a massive stone complex that had once been a training school for SS officers. From his windows he saw green hills and mountain peaks.
It was beautiful, but for a man like Patton it was a prison.
The task before him was not war. It was paperwork, politics, and reconstruction. Millions of people needed food, water, electricity, and shelter before winter.
And official American policy was denazification. Former members of the Nazi party were to be removed from positions of power and responsibility. Patton did not see it that way.
He argued that if every former party member were dismissed, no one would be left who knew how to run the power plants, the railroads, and the local offices. So in parts of his zone, men who had belonged to the party stayed at their posts. To Patton it was simply efficiency.
To people who had just seen the camps, it looked like something far worse.
And Patton’s own personal writings revealed a darker side. In his diary he vented his contempt for the Soviet Union and spoke of fighting the Russians. Worse, he wrote with open prejudice about Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in displaced persons camps.
In August a report landed on President Harry Truman’s desk. It had been written by Earl Harrison, an American lawyer sent to inspect those camps. His findings were devastating.
Survivors of the death camps were still living behind barbed wire, many still in their striped prison clothing, crowded together and poorly fed. Harrison wrote that as matters stood, the United States appeared to be treating the Jews as the Nazis had done, except that they were not exterminating them.
Truman sent the report to Eisenhower with a sharp demand for action. Eisenhower acted quickly. He ordered changes.
And he went to see the camps himself. On September 17, 1945, which happened to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Eisenhower visited the displaced persons camp at Feldafing. Patton went with him.
Eisenhower insisted they attend the service in the camp synagogue. He spoke to the survivors, promised help, and asked for patience.
That evening Patton wrote in his diary. He described the crowded worshippers in terms so cruel that historians still quote them as evidence of his bigotry. He called them the most stinking group of people he had ever seen.
The two old friends stood in the same room and looked at the same people. And they saw two entirely different things.
Five days later, on the morning of September 22, Patton held a press conference in Bad Tölz. Reporters asked him why former Nazis still held their jobs. Patton, irritated, tried to explain, and in the process compared joining the Nazi party to the way Americans join the Democrats or the Republicans.
The words raced across the Atlantic. American newspapers were outraged. Only months after the world had seen the bodies at Buchenwald and Dachau, one of America’s most famous generals seemed to be telling the world that the Nazis were just another political party.
Eisenhower summoned him to Frankfurt. At midday on September 28, Patton walked into Eisenhower’s office in the vast IG Farben building, a headquarters taken from the German chemical giant. The two men who had once taken a tank apart together at Camp Meade sat down across from each other.
They talked for a long time. What each of them truly felt in that room we know only from their own later accounts. But the outcome was clear.
On October 7, 1945, General Lucian Truscott took command of the Third Army at Bad Tölz. Patton said a brief farewell to the staff that had followed him from Normandy to Czechoslovakia. Then he went to Bad Nauheim to command the Fifteenth Army.
It had no combat divisions. Its task was to study and record the history of the war. The greatest battlefield commander in the American army now stood at the head of a library.
In November, Eisenhower left Europe. On November 19 he became Army Chief of Staff, taking the reins from General Marshall in Washington. His task now was to bring millions of soldiers home.
Patton, meanwhile, prepared to go home as well. He was to leave for America on Christmas leave, and he spoke of retiring.
On the morning of Sunday, December 9, 1945, he decided to go pheasant hunting one more time. He got into the back seat of his Cadillac staff car beside his chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay. Behind the wheel was a 19-year-old private first class named Horace Woodring.
Shortly before noon on the edge of Mannheim, at Käfertal, an Army truck crossed in front of their car. The two vehicles collided at low speed. Woodring was not seriously hurt.
Gay was shaken but unharmed. But Patton, in the back seat, was thrown forward. His head struck the partition between the front and rear seats.
His neck was broken.
He was rushed to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg. Doctors found that the third and fourth cervical vertebrae were fractured and dislocated. His spinal cord was severely damaged.
He was paralyzed from the neck down. He was fully conscious.
Beatrice Patton was in America when the news reached her. The Army flew her across the ocean, along with one of their leading neurosurgeons, Colonel R. Glenn Spurling.
Within days she was at her husband’s bedside and scarcely left his side. For twelve days a man who had never stood still in his life lay motionless in traction. Beatrice read to him.
Visitors came and stood quietly at the foot of the bed. Nurses turned him and cared for him. He was courteous to the medical staff, sometimes even joked, but he understood exactly what the doctors were not saying.
On December 10, the day after the accident, Eisenhower sat at his desk in Washington, 4,000 miles away, and wrote to his friend. After everything — after Sicily, after Knutsford, after Frankfurt — the words were simple and personal. He wanted Patton to know that he was never out of his thoughts and that his hopes and prayers were with him for a speedy recovery.
It was a warm letter. After three years of reprimands, warnings, and hard decisions, it sounded like a voice from Camp Meade.
The recovery never came. On the evening of December 21, 1945, George Smith Patton Jr. died in his sleep.
A blood clot had reached his lungs. He was 60 years old. He had survived a bullet in France, two world wars, and every enemy commander he ever faced.
He died in a traffic accident on a quiet German road, seven months after the war in Europe ended.
Three days later, on Christmas Eve, in a cold gray rain, he was buried at the American military cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg, among the soldiers of the Third Army who had fallen in the winter fighting. His grave was marked with the same simple white cross as theirs. Beatrice stood beside it in the wet cold.
Soldiers who had followed him across France stood at attention in the rain. The bugle sounded and the notes drifted away over the hill. So many people came to visit the grave that his remains were moved in 1947 to a new plot at the head of the rows.
Today he still lies there, looking out over the graves of his men.
Dwight Eisenhower did not come to Heidelberg. He did not come to the funeral. But in September 1946, almost exactly a year after the meeting in Frankfurt where his friend had been stripped of his last command, Eisenhower came to Luxembourg.
An Army cameraman filmed the moment. The Chief of Staff walked slowly across the cemetery to Patton’s grave. He laid flowers before the white cross.
He took off his cap and stood there. The film has no sound. We cannot hear what he said, or whether he said anything at all.
What we do see is a man of 55, now the most powerful soldier in the American army, standing utterly still before the grave of an old friend he had punished, protected, and ultimately relieved. But in the years that followed, Eisenhower began to speak carefully. In 1946, in a commentary on a book about Patton and his Third Army, Eisenhower wrote a sentence he had never written so clearly while Patton was alive.
“George Patton,” he said, “was the most brilliant commander of an army in the open field that our or any other service produced.”
Even then he added a caveat. “Patton’s army,” he explained, “was only part of a much larger organization, and others deserved credit for planning the campaigns Patton executed so brilliantly.” Even in his praise, Eisenhower could not quite let go of the distinction that had separated them since Camp Meade.
In 1948 Eisenhower published his war memoirs, Crusade in Europe. And for the first time he told the American people, in his own words, the story of the slapping incidents. How he sent trusted men to Sicily to investigate.
How he weighed the damage against Patton’s value. And how he ultimately decided to keep him. He wrote with admiration of Patton’s understanding of speed in wartime and his relentless drive in pursuit.
It was not a confession. Eisenhower never wrote confessions. But it was the closest he ever came to an explanation.
Everything he had done to Patton and for Patton had been the same decision, made over and over. In 1953 Eisenhower became President of the United States, and in 1967, in the quiet of retirement, he published a gentler memoir called At Ease. In it he went back to the beginning — to Camp Meade, to two young officers taking a tank apart, to the Chief of Infantry threatening him with a court-martial, and to a dinner at George and Beatrice Patton’s home where he met the man who changed his life, Fox Conner.
At the end of his own life, the old general still returned to that small camp in Maryland, still remembering the friend who had once been his superior. Dwight Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington. He was 78 years old.
He was buried in a small chapel in Abilene, Kansas, beside the little boy he had lost in 1921.
And three years after his death, something happened that he never lived to see. In 1972, and again in 1974, the historian Martin Blumenson published The Patton Papers, based on Patton’s letters and diaries. For the first time the public could read what Patton had written privately during the war — the frustration, the bitterness, the harsh and often cutting judgments about Eisenhower.
Eisenhower had spent the war protecting Patton’s reputation. He did not live long enough to read in print what Patton had written about him.
Two old soldiers. One lies at the head of his men on a hill in Luxembourg. The other lies on the flat prairie of Kansas beside his son.
One believed wars are won by execution. The other believed they are won by holding everything together long enough for the executors to do their work. Both were right.
And that difference, so small on an evening in Maryland in 1919, grew until it stood between them for the rest of Patton’s life.
So when Eisenhower stood at that white cross in the autumn of 1946, his cap in his hand, what was he really saying goodbye to? A troublesome subordinate? Or the only man who had ever been the senior officer in their friendship — the man who had opened the door to everything Eisenhower would become?