In December 1943, a British colonel walked into General Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters at Bushy Park in southwest London carrying a leather briefcase. Inside were plans for a deception operation that would shape the final year of the war in Europe. The proposal required a commander for a fictional American army group that did not exist. Only one American general met the criteria.
That general was George Smith Patton Jr., the disgraced hero of Sicily, who four months earlier had struck two wounded soldiers in field hospitals and nearly ended his own career. Eisenhower’s reluctant reaction to the proposal was documented in Carlo D’Este’s 1995 biography of Patton. “You want me to do what with Patton?” he asked.
The story of how a disgraced general became the ghost commander of a fake army is drawn from Patton’s personal diary, published posthumously in 1974 as The Patton Papers, from D’Este’s biography, from the official 1949 British report on Operation Fortitude by Roger Hesketh, from Michael Howard’s Strategic Deception in the Second World War, and from Eisenhower’s personal papers at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas.
George Smith Patton Jr. was born on November 11, 1885, on the family ranch at San Gabriel, California. His father was a California lawyer and Democratic politician who had inherited a tradition of southern military service stretching back through Confederate General Hugh Mercer of Virginia to the American Revolution. His mother was Ruth Wilson Patton of an old Los Angeles family.
Young George grew up on horseback. He rode before he could read. He rode through the coastal foothills of San Gabriel with his younger sister Anne and with his cousin Beatrice, the young girl from Boston who would eventually become his wife. He was raised in a household where the books of classical military historians were read aloud at evening meals.
He could not read. In the technical vocabulary that did not yet exist in the 1890s but would later be applied to his condition, he was dyslexic. His mother read to him aloud day after day from Homer, Xenophon, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. By the time he was 10, he could recite long passages of the Iliad from memory.
He learned to read at the age of 11. He believed from an early age that he had lived previous lives. He believed he had been a Roman legionary who fought under Julius Caesar in Gaul, a cavalry commander under Hannibal of Carthage, and a Napoleonic marshal in the Grande Armée that marched on Moscow in 1812. These were religious convictions for him.
He was a southern gentleman who cursed like a sailor. He was a practicing Episcopalian who believed in reincarnation. He was a millionaire through his wife’s inheritance who never needed his army salary. He was a brilliant tactician who spent his entire career preparing for the one battle he believed his reincarnations had been preparing him for.
He was also known throughout the interwar peacetime army as a man of uncontrolled temper who did not believe in the medical condition then known as combat exhaustion and today known as post-traumatic stress disorder. He had married Beatrice Banning Ayer on May 26, 1910, in Massachusetts. She was the daughter of a Boston textile magnate.
They had three children: Beatrice Jr., born 1911; Ruth Ellen, born 1915; and George Patton IV, born 1923, who would follow his father into the army and rise to major general during the Vietnam War. Patton graduated from West Point in 1909 after being held back one year for failing mathematics.
He competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and placed fifth. He rode with the U.S. Army in the 1916 Punitive Expedition into Mexico and personally killed three Mexican bandits with his ivory-handled revolver in a car ambush that became one of the founding stories of his personal legend.
He served with the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I as an officer of the Tank Corps he helped create. He was wounded in the Meuse-Argonne offensive on September 26, 1918. He spent the 23 interwar years in peacetime cavalry and armor commands standard for an American regular army officer of his generation.
He went to war with the American 2nd Armored Division in November 1942 as part of Operation Torch. He took command of the American II Corps in North Africa on March 6, 1943, after the disaster at Kasserine Pass cost the corps 6,000 casualties in eight days. He reformed the corps in 12 days.
Within two weeks, he led it back on the offensive against the German forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He landed the American 7th Army at the southern Sicilian beaches on July 10, 1943. He captured Palermo on July 22. He would capture Messina on August 17, ahead of Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army.
Between those two victories, in the interval of 26 days between July 22 and August 17, 1943, he made two decisions that nearly ended his army career. The first came on the afternoon of August 3, 1943, at the 15th Evacuation Hospital at Nicosia, Sicily, when he encountered Private Charles Herman Kuhl.
Kuhl was 27 years old, from Mishawaka, Indiana. He had been a carpet fitter in civilian life before his 1943 enlistment. His hospital admission card read malaria, fever of 102, psychoneurosis anxiety moderately severe. Patton asked him what was wrong. Kuhl answered, “I guess I can’t take it, sir.”
Patton removed his leather riding gloves from his belt. He struck Kuhl across the face. He kicked the supply crate Kuhl was sitting on. Kuhl fell to the floor. Patton walked out of the ward.
The second incident came on the afternoon of August 10, 1943, at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital at San Stefano. Patton encountered Private Paul G. Bennett, 21 years old, a soldier of an American field artillery battery. Bennett had been admitted the evening before with dehydration, malaria, and the psychological effects of a friendly artillery bombardment.
Patton saw Bennett sitting on a hospital cot with his hands shaking. He asked Bennett what was wrong. Bennett could not answer. His speech was affected by shell shock. Patton drew his ivory-handled revolver from its holster and waved it at Bennett. He shouted, “You yellow son of a bitch, I ought to shoot you myself right now, God damn you.”
He struck Bennett across the face with his hand. Bennett fell backward onto his cot. Patton kicked the cot and shouted for the medical staff to remove Bennett from the hospital and return him to the front lines immediately. He walked out of the ward.
The chief medical officer of the 93rd Evacuation Hospital wrote his report that evening. He sent it, along with the corresponding report from the 15th Evacuation Hospital written a week earlier concerning the incident with Kuhl, to the chief medical officer of the 7th U.S. Army. The reports reached the 7th Army chief medical officer on August 14.
On August 14, 1943, he sent them to Eisenhower’s headquarters at Algiers. They reached Eisenhower on August 16. He read them on the morning of August 17. He was 52 years old, commanding general of the Allied forces in the North African theater, with headquarters in the city of Algiers on the Mediterranean coast of French Algeria.
Eisenhower had known George Patton for 30 years. He first met Patton at West Point in the autumn of 1913, when Eisenhower was a plebe cadet in the class of 1915 and Patton was a young lieutenant who had graduated seven years earlier. They served together at Camp Meade, Maryland, during the 1920s.
They had been the two American officers most personally responsible for the creation of the American Army’s Armored Force. They had corresponded throughout the 1930s. Patton was one of the closest personal friends Eisenhower had ever had.
Eisenhower read the hospital reports on the morning of August 17, 1943, at his Algiers headquarters. He set them down on his desk. He considered his response carefully. He walked to the window of his office and looked out at the Mediterranean beyond the American Army compound. He returned to his desk.
He drafted the personal letter to George Patton that would define the American Army’s disciplinary response to the slapping incidents for the next three months. The letter was six paragraphs long. It was dated August 17, 1943. It read in part:
“I clearly understand that firm and drastic measures are at times necessary in order to secure the desired objectives, but this does not excuse brutality, abuse of the sick, nor exhibition of uncontrollable temper in front of subordinates. I must so seriously question your good judgment and your self-discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness.”
The letter was transmitted by courier to Patton’s 7th Army headquarters in Sicily on the evening of August 17. Patton received it on the morning of August 18. He read it once. He read it a second time. He walked to his field desk. He wrote in his diary that he had made a great mistake and that he understood the seriousness of what Eisenhower had written.
He did not sleep that night. He returned in the morning to the routine business of his 7th Army command. He gave orders. He inspected units. He met with his staff. He wrote to Beatrice at Green Meadows in Massachusetts. He waited.
Patton apologized to Bennett on August 21, 1943, at his 7th Army command post at Palermo. He apologized to Kuhl on August 22. Both apologies were delivered in the presence of the medical officers who had witnessed the original incidents. Both apologies were accepted.
Kuhl, in an interview he gave to a United Press correspondent in December 1943, described Patton’s apology as sincere but unnecessary. Bennett said he thought General Patton had meant well and that he bore him no ill will. Both soldiers forgave him. The American press did not.
American war correspondents covering the Sicilian campaign had learned of the slapping incidents within days. Several had personally witnessed one or both. They reached a collective agreement at evening meetings in the American press briefing tent at 7th Army headquarters at Palermo to suppress the story. The reason for the suppression was Eisenhower.
Eisenhower had personally requested in a meeting with senior American war correspondents at Algiers on August 19 that they refrain from reporting the incidents. He explained that the American war effort in the Mediterranean could not afford to lose Patton in the critical period of transition from the Sicilian campaign to the Italian mainland campaign expected within the following month. They agreed for three months.
But on the morning of November 21, 1943, the American columnist and radio broadcaster Drew Pearson received a tip from an American Army medical officer who had served in the Sicilian campaign and had personally witnessed the slapping of Charles Kuhl on August 3. Pearson had not been present at Eisenhower’s Algiers meeting. He was not bound by the correspondent agreement.
Pearson was, in the practical assessment of the American radio industry of 1943, the most aggressive muckraking American journalist of the Second World War. His weekly Sunday evening program on the Blue Network reached approximately 15 million American listeners per week. He verified the tip through his own Army sources.
He broadcast the story on the evening of November 21, 1943, at 7:00 Eastern time on the opening segment of his 15-minute Blue Network program. He reported that Lieutenant General George S. Patton had struck an American soldier in a field hospital in Sicily and had been severely reprimanded for the act by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He added that he did not expect Patton to be used in important combat again.
The American press exploded. The Associated Press contacted the War Department for a reaction that evening. It received a no comment. The following day, Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers released a statement that did not directly address the incident: “General Patton has never been reprimanded at any time by General Eisenhower or by anybody else in this theater.”
The statement was technically accurate. Eisenhower’s reprimand of Patton had been a personal letter, not a formal military reprimand. But the American press understood the distinction as evasion. Coverage escalated through the final week of November and the first week of December.
The United States Congress became involved. Senator Guy Gillette of Iowa, a Democratic member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, called on November 25 for a formal Senate investigation into the slapping incidents and for Patton’s immediate removal from command. Multiple representatives introduced resolutions in the House calling for the same measures.
The American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars issued formal statements condemning Patton’s behavior. Letters from the mothers of dead American soldiers of the Sicilian campaign began to arrive at the War Department. Beatrice Ayer Patton, reading the newspapers at Green Meadows in Hamilton, Massachusetts, wrote of her deep concern for her husband’s emotional state.
Patton himself wrote in his diary during the same week. The entries recorded his belief that his army career was ending. He wrote of despair. He wrote of his sense that his life’s preparation for the great war he believed he had been born to fight was going to be denied him. He did not sleep well.
The American Chief of Staff, General George Catlett Marshall, met with Secretary of War Henry Stimson on November 25 to discuss the Army’s response. Marshall and Stimson had been fielding requests for Patton’s dismissal from Congress, the press, and the public for four days. They agreed that something had to be done. They also agreed that Patton was too valuable to lose.
Marshall sent a coded War Department cable to Eisenhower’s Algiers headquarters on November 26. The cable acknowledged the political pressure. It emphasized that the decision on Patton’s future rested with Eisenhower as theater commander. It conveyed Marshall’s own strong preference that Patton be retained for the coming European campaign.
Eisenhower received the cable on the morning of November 27. He replied within the hour. His response confirmed his intention to retain Patton in the Army for combat command. It requested Marshall’s continued support in withstanding the political pressure. But Eisenhower did not know what he was going to do with him.
Omar Bradley was already committed to command of the First Army for the projected Overlord invasion of France in the spring of 1944. The Fifth Army in Italy under Mark Clark was fully staffed. The American forces in the United Kingdom being built up for Overlord were commanded by Jacob Devers, who was being reassigned to the Mediterranean. Patton had no place to go.
He remained on ice through the first week of December 1943 while Eisenhower attempted to determine what to do with him. Then, on the evening of November 28, 1943, at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, the first meeting of the three principal Allied leaders of the Second World War convened. They met for four days.
On the second day of the meetings, November 30, 1943, Winston Churchill’s 69th birthday, they had a state dinner at the Soviet embassy. During the dinner, Stalin toasted Churchill. Churchill responded with a toast of his own. He said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Stalin approved. Roosevelt approved. The concept Churchill articulated in that single sentence became the formal code name of the Allied strategic deception operation that would accompany and protect the Overlord invasion of France in the summer of 1944. The code name was Bodyguard.
The operation, in its detailed suboperations of Fortitude South and Ironside and Vendetta and Zeppelin, would run from January 1944 through August. It would involve the coordinated use of the double agent network that had been penetrated into the German intelligence services through the Twenty Committee since the autumn of 1940.
It would involve the fictional creation of armies that did not exist, of divisions that had not been raised, of troop concentrations that had not been assembled, and of invasion plans that were not going to be executed. At the center of its most important suboperation would be an American general who could not be permitted to fight.
Colonel John Bevan arrived at Bushy Park in the second half of December 1943 at the American headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Eisenhower had been formally appointed to the position on December 7, 1943, by joint agreement of the American and British governments reached at the Tehran Conference.
Bushy Park was a royal park of approximately 1,100 acres in the southwest London borough of Richmond, adjacent to Hampton Court Palace. The American Army had been given use of the park for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, known throughout the spring of 1944 by the code name Widewing. The headquarters consisted of about 200 Nissen huts and prefabricated wooden buildings.
Bevan arrived at the office in the afternoon. He was accompanied by Sir Ronald Wingate and by a junior LCS officer. He carried a leather briefcase containing the operational planning documents for the deception operation code-named Bodyguard. He was met at the door by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith.
Bedell Smith, known throughout the Army by the nickname Beetle, admitted the three British officers to Eisenhower’s office. Eisenhower stood behind his desk. He was in the American service uniform of a four-star general. He was smoking a Camel cigarette. He shook hands with Bevan. Bevan opened his briefcase and presented the proposal.
The proposal was that the Allied deception campaign preceding the Overlord invasion would center on the creation of a fictional American army group based in the southeast counties of England. It would be represented to German intelligence as the principal Allied invasion force preparing to cross the English Channel at the Pas de Calais in the weeks following the real Allied landings at Normandy.
The fictional army group would consist of 11 divisions that did not exist. It would occupy camps being constructed at that moment out of inflatable rubber and painted canvas. It would be represented in German intelligence assessments by the coordinated efforts of the double agents the Twenty Committee had already established.
The fictional army group would be designated, in the formal planning designation approved by the Chiefs of Staff Committee on December 12, 1943, the First United States Army Group, abbreviated FUSAG. It required a commander. Bevan paused. Eisenhower looked at him. Bevan explained the criteria.
The commander would need to be an American general officer of sufficient reputation to convince German intelligence that the fictional army group was the main Allied invasion force. He would need to be an American general officer whom the Germans respected and feared. He would need to be an American general officer presently unassigned to a real operational command.
Eisenhower waited. Bevan continued. He said there was only one American general officer who met all three criteria. He requested Eisenhower’s permission to appoint him to the FUSAG command. Eisenhower looked at Bedell Smith. Bedell Smith did not move. Eisenhower looked back at Bevan.
He said, in the reluctant reaction documented by Carlo D’Este in the 1995 Patton biography, “You want me to do what with Patton?” He agreed within the hour of Bevan’s briefing. He agreed because the practical operational logic of Bevan’s proposal was the only remaining logic that could reconcile the American public demand for Patton’s removal from combat command with the Army’s requirement to keep Patton available for the role the Third U.S. Army would eventually play in the summer of 1944.
Patton could not be given a real combat command in the first months of 1944. Congress and the press would not permit it. But he could not be permitted to remain unassigned. His talents were too valuable. His reputation among his soldiers was too important. And Eisenhower’s personal loyalty to him, built over 30 years of friendship, was too strong.
Bevan’s proposal solved the problem. Patton would be appointed the FUSAG commander. He would be publicly announced in that role so the American public and Congress could see he was still being used. German intelligence would receive the same information through the double agent network. The German high command would conclude that Patton was leading the main Allied invasion at the Pas de Calais.
The American Third Army, which Patton would also be given command of on a secret basis, would remain his real operational assignment for the post-Overlord campaign in France. Two commands, one public, one secret. The ghost and the real.
Eisenhower signed the formal appointment order on December 22, 1943. The order was transmitted to Patton at his 7th Army headquarters in Sicily the same day. Patton read it on the afternoon of December 23. He did not immediately understand what he was being asked to do.
He would understand only after his arrival in England on January 26, 1944, and after the first briefings that Colonel David Ingram Strangeways of the 21st Army Group R Force would deliver to him at the Hotel Cecil in London during the first week of his English tour.
Patton flew from Sicily to England on January 25 and 26, 1944. He arrived at the American airfield at Prestwick, Scotland, on the morning of January 26. He was met by an American Army staff car and driven to London. He was installed at the Hotel Cecil, a Victorian-era hotel on the Strand near Trafalgar Square that had been requisitioned by the American Army for senior American officers arriving in England for the Overlord buildup.
He was briefed on his role by Strangeways in the hotel dining room on the afternoon of January 27. Strangeways was 31 years old. He had served under Bernard Montgomery in the Eighth Army at El Alamein. He had planned the deception operations that preceded the Sicilian invasion in the summer of 1943. He had been personally selected by Bevan in the autumn of 1943 to be the operational implement of the Fortitude South deception centered on FUSAG.
He explained the operation to Patton in detail across the two-hour lunch meeting. Patton listened. When Strangeways had finished, Patton said, in words his personal aide Colonel Charles Codman would paraphrase in the 1957 Codman memoir, that he understood he was to be a decoy, a goddamned decoy, a fake general commanding a fake army for the purpose of fooling a German general who happened to be smarter than most of the American generals he knew.
Strangeways nodded. Patton said he would do it. He said he would not enjoy it. He did not enjoy it. Between January 27, 1944, and the first week of August 1944, George Patton played the role of the FUSAG commander in one of the most elaborate exercises in institutional theater the American Army had ever conducted.
He made public appearances at the fictional FUSAG camps in Kent and Essex. He inspected troops that did not exist. He gave speeches to units that had not been raised. He was photographed with officers commanding fictional divisions.
The fictional divisions were represented in the physical facilities that American and British engineers constructed in the fields of Kent and Essex during the spring of 1944 by inflatable rubber Sherman tanks manufactured at an American factory in Akron, Ohio, and shipped to England in crates. They were represented by dummy landing craft constructed of painted canvas over wooden frames and moored in the Thames estuary and along the Kent coast. They were represented by fuel storage tanks constructed of painted plywood over steel scaffolding.
They were also represented by radio traffic. The American Army Signal Corps established radio units in Kent and Essex that transmitted fictional operational communications simulating the communications of 11 American divisions. The radio traffic was patterned on the real communication signatures of real American divisions in the United States and Ireland, transmitted with the real call signs and procedural characteristics of the real formations. German radio interception services in northern France recorded and analyzed the fictional traffic and reported it to the German high command as evidence of the American troop buildup in southeast England.
They were also represented by double agents. The network of German agents in England that the British security service had penetrated and turned since the autumn of 1940 included approximately two dozen active agents. The most important was a Spanish citizen named Juan Pujol García, 32 years old, of Barcelona, whose prewar profession had been managing a poultry farm in the Catalan countryside.
García had volunteered his services to the British in the autumn of 1941. He had been operating as a double agent from London since the spring of 1942 under his British handler, Tomás Harris. German intelligence had assigned him the code name Arabel. The British had assigned him the code name Garbo, in reference to the quality of his dramatic performance.
Between January and August 1944, García transmitted approximately 500 false reports to his German handlers in Madrid concerning the FUSAG buildup in southeast England. He described the fictional divisions in detail. He described the fictional supply depots. He described the fictional invasion planning conferences at which General Patton had briefed his fictional staff on the plans for the Pas de Calais invasion.
German intelligence believed him. They awarded him the Iron Cross Second Class in July 1944 for his services to the German war effort. The British would later award him the Member of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the Allied war effort. He is the only person in the 20th century to have received both decorations. He died in Caracas, Venezuela, on October 10, 1988, at the age of 76.
But the single most important individual operational contribution to the success of Fortitude South, in the documented assessment of the British military intelligence community delivered in postwar analyses, was made not by García, not by the inflatable tanks, not by the radio traffic, and not by Patton himself. It was made by a captured German general officer whose unwitting participation provided the final confirmation the German high command required.
His name was Lieutenant General Hans Cramer. He was born on July 13, 1896, in a German family of Prussian military tradition. He entered the Imperial German Army as a cadet in 1914 and served in World War I as an artillery officer. He remained in the Reichswehr through the interwar period and commanded a German panzer regiment in the invasion of France in 1940.
He commanded the Deutsches Afrika Korps briefly in the final months of the North African campaign of 1943, taking over the armored formation from Field Marshal Rommel during Rommel’s illness. He was captured by British forces at the end of the North African campaign on May 12, 1943. He was held as a senior German prisoner of war in a British camp in the English countryside for the 12 months between May 1943 and May 1944.
During his captivity he developed a serious medical condition that British Army physicians diagnosed as consistent with chronic angina pectoris, common among senior German officers who had served in the North African desert climate for extended periods. The British agreed to release him in a prisoner exchange being negotiated with the German authorities through the International Committee of the Red Cross in April 1944. They arranged the exchange for late May.
They also arranged, in a decision Bevan and Strangeways reached in mid-May 1944, to use Cramer as an unwitting messenger for the final confirmation of the FUSAG deception. Cramer was collected from his prisoner of war camp on May 20. He was informed he was being repatriated to Germany. He was told the journey to the neutral Swedish port of Gothenburg would take the following two weeks. He was told he would be permitted to see something of wartime England during the journey.
He was driven over the three days of May 21 through 23, 1944, in an unmarked British staff car from his prisoner of war camp in the Yorkshire countryside to a series of locations carefully selected for their relevance to the FUSAG deception. The route ran west and south through the counties of the English southwest.
Cramer, in the visual observations he made from the staff car window, saw American troops in vast numbers, American vehicles in traffic-choked columns on the narrow English roads, American supply depots in grain warehouses along the rail lines, and American invasion craft in harbors along the southern coast. He was seeing the real Overlord buildup in Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset.
But every town sign along the route had been altered by British Army engineers who had preceded the staff car by 24 hours. The signs read Dover and Folkestone and Ramsgate and Margate and Canterbury and Ashford. Those were the town names of the southeast counties of Kent that were, in Cramer’s German geographical understanding, the FUSAG assembly area opposite the Pas de Calais.
The British guards, in the loose talk Bevan had personally scripted for them, made overheard comments about the American FUSAG buildup, about the American invasion at the Pas de Calais expected in mid-July, and about the relative unimportance of the ongoing Normandy operations that had been launched on June 6.
Cramer arrived at a country house in the southwest of England on the evening of May 23. The country house had been selected by Bevan and Strangeways as the venue for a formal dinner reception at which General Patton would host him as the ostensible FUSAG commander. He was invited to dinner. Patton hosted him. They dined in the formal reception room.
Patton, in the role Strangeways had prepared him for over the preceding four months, played the character of the loose-lipped American general too drunk on his own success to maintain the security discipline his position required. He mentioned the Pas de Calais repeatedly. He mentioned the mid-July invasion date. He complained about the sideshow at Normandy drawing away resources FUSAG needed for the main effort.
Cramer listened. The British interpreter at the dinner would later record in his after-action report that Cramer had come away from the evening believing Patton was a formidable soldier who nevertheless spoke too freely about matters that should have been held in confidence. Cramer was returned to his transit accommodation that evening.
He was placed on a neutral Swedish transport ship at the Cornish port of Falmouth in the final days of May. He was landed at Gothenburg on June 3. He was transported by German staff car to Berlin, where he arrived on June 5. He was debriefed at the German Army High Command on June 6 and 7.
He reported, in the briefing preserved in the Wehrmacht records captured by American forces in 1944, that the American FUSAG army under General Patton was preparing a major invasion at the Pas de Calais in the mid-July time frame, that the ongoing Normandy landings were a diversion designed to draw German reserves away from the real invasion area, and that the German response should be to hold the 15th Army at the Pas de Calais and await the main American attack.
His report reached Hitler on the evening of June 7. The Normandy landings had begun on the morning of June 6. Hitler had, in the first 36 hours of the Normandy operations, been debating with Field Marshal Rundstedt and Field Marshal Rommel whether to release the German 15th Army at the Pas de Calais to reinforce the German forces opposing the Allied landings.
Rundstedt and Rommel had been arguing for the immediate release of the 15th Army. The 15th Army consisted of approximately 250,000 German troops. Its transfer south to Normandy in the first days of the invasion would have effectively doubled the German force opposing the Allied landings. It might have decided the outcome of the Overlord operation.
Hitler read Cramer’s report on the evening of June 7. He personally signed the order on June 9, 1944, three days after the Normandy landings, directing the 15th Army to remain at the Pas de Calais and await the main American attack under General Patton. The order was preserved in the captured Wehrmacht records. It bears Hitler’s personal signature.
The 15th Army remained at the Pas de Calais. It remained there through June 10, June 15, July 1, July 15, and July 24. It remained there for the seven weeks during which the Allied forces at Normandy had the opportunity to reinforce, secure their beachhead, organize the breakout operations that would culminate in Operation Cobra on July 25, and begin the liberation of France.
Consider what those seven weeks meant. Two hundred fifty thousand German soldiers of the 15th Army sat in their prepared defensive positions along the Channel coast of France from Dunkirk to Le Havre, in the fortified concrete emplacements of the Atlantic Wall Hitler had ordered constructed between 1942 and the spring of 1944.
They watched the empty English Channel through their binoculars. They waited for an invasion fleet that had already landed 100 miles to the west. They waited for the American General Patton to appear at the head of 11 American divisions that did not exist. They waited for orders that never came, because the orders had already been given by Hitler on June 9 and reaffirmed on June 15, July 1, and July 15.
Forty miles to the south at Normandy, the actual Allied invasion force was landing men and supplies at a rate that would, between June 6 and July 24, deliver approximately 850,000 Allied soldiers, 150,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies onto the French beaches where the German coastal defense divisions had been overwhelmed on the morning of D-Day.
The Allied buildup could not have been done without the seven weeks. If the 15th Army had been released south to Normandy in the first three days after D-Day, if Rundstedt and Rommel had won their arguments with Hitler on June 7, 8, and 9, if the 250,000 German troops of the 15th Army had reinforced Rommel’s Army Group B in the first week of the Normandy campaign, the Allied beachhead might have been contained. It might have been driven back into the sea.
None of it happened because Hans Cramer had dined with George Patton at the country house in the southwest of England on the evening of May 23, 1944, and had believed he was in the southeast of England, and had reported back to Adolf Hitler on June 7 that Patton’s FUSAG army was still coming.
Patton was released from his FUSAG assignment on August 1, 1944, when the Third U.S. Army was formally activated in France under his command. He raced across the French countryside in the final six weeks of the summer, liberating the Loire Valley and the approaches to Paris.
He commanded the Third Army through the final 10 months of the European war, through the relief of Bastogne in December 1944, through the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945, and through the final advance into Czechoslovakia that ended at the American Ordnance Depot at Pilsen in May 1945.
He was appointed military governor of the American occupation zone in Bavaria on May 6, 1945, one day before the German surrender at Reims. He served in the position for approximately five months. On September 22, 1945, at a press conference in Bavaria, Patton made the documented remarks about the American denazification program that would define his final months of Army service and produce the political controversy that ended his Third Army command.
He was removed from command of the Third Army by Eisenhower on October 7, 1945. He was reassigned to command of the ceremonial Fifteenth U.S. Army, a paper headquarters established to prepare the Army’s official history of the European campaign. He served in the position for approximately two months.
On the morning of December 9, 1945, Patton left his Fifteenth Army headquarters at Bad Nauheim, Germany, to travel by Army staff car to a hunting trip in the German countryside near Speyer. He was accompanied by his chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, and by his driver, Private First Class Horace Woodring, 19 years old, of Louisville, Kentucky.
At approximately 11:45 in the morning on the road between Bad Nauheim and Speyer near the city of Mannheim, Patton’s Cadillac staff car collided with a 2½-ton American Army truck driven by Technician Fifth Grade Robert L. Thompson, 20 years old, of Camden, New Jersey. Neither Gay nor Woodring was seriously injured.
Patton was flung forward against the partition between the rear passenger compartment and the driver’s compartment. His head struck the partition at an angle that severed his spinal cord at the level of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He was taken to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg.
Beatrice Ayer Patton flew from Massachusetts to Germany on December 11. She sat with him for the following 10 days. He was, in the medical assessment of the Army physicians who attended him, mentally alert but physically incapable of any movement other than his eyes and his mouth. He whispered to her. She wrote his words down.
He asked on December 15 whether he had any chance of recovery. The senior Army physician at the 130th Station Hospital told him honestly that he did not. He accepted the medical assessment. He died on the evening of December 21, 1945, at the age of 60 years and 40 days.
He died three years and four months after Winston Churchill’s London Controlling Section had suggested to Dwight Eisenhower in December 1943 that a disgraced American general could be transformed into a weapon of strategic misdirection that would save the Normandy invasion.
He had requested burial with his men. He was buried on December 24, 1945, at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial at Hamm, near Luxembourg City, among the 5,076 American soldiers of his Third Army killed in the Ardennes and Rhineland campaigns of the winter and spring of 1944 and 1945. His grave was placed at Row 1, Grave 228.
Beatrice Ayer Patton attended the funeral. She stood at the graveside in the rain on December 24. She was surrounded by her daughters Beatrice Jr. and Ruth Ellen and by her son George Patton IV, then a 22-year-old lieutenant in the United States Army. The funeral was attended by the senior American commanders of the European theater still in Europe.
Beatrice returned to the United States in the first weeks of January 1946. She lived at Green Meadows in Hamilton, Massachusetts, for the following seven years and nine months. She spent the years reorganizing her husband’s papers, diaries, and correspondence, which she donated to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and which would form the documentary basis for the two-volume Patton Papers edited by Martin Blumenson and published in 1972 and 1974.
She continued to ride. She rode her horses in the hunt country of the North Shore of Massachusetts through the autumns and springs following her husband’s death. She hunted with the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, of which she had been a member for the majority of her adult life.
On the morning of September 30, 1953, at the Myopia Hunt in Hamilton, Massachusetts, she was thrown from her horse. She landed on her head. She was taken to Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she was diagnosed with a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. She died approximately six hours after the fall at the age of 67 without regaining consciousness.
She was buried beside her husband at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, according to her request included in her will. The two of them lie together in the first row of the cemetery at the head of the American Third Army that they had, in their different ways, both served for the final year of the European war. They are the only two American civilians buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery.
Dwight David Eisenhower served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces through the final month of the European war. He accepted the formal German surrender at Reims on May 7, 1945. He returned to the United States. He served as Army Chief of Staff. He served as president of Columbia University. He was elected president of the United States on November 4, 1952, and served two terms in the White House between January 20, 1953, and January 20, 1961. He died on March 28, 1969, at the age of 78 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He is buried at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, next to his wife and his firstborn son Doud, who had died at the age of three of scarlet fever in 1921.
Winston Spencer Churchill lost the British general election of July 1945 to the Labour Party under Clement Attlee. He served as leader of the opposition between 1945 and 1951. He returned to Downing Street for a second time in October 1951, at the age of 76, and served as prime minister for a final three and a half years. He retired in April 1955. He died on January 24, 1965, at the age of 90. He is buried at the Bladon Parish Churchyard adjacent to Blenheim Palace, where he had been born. His grave is a simple stone marker.
General George Catlett Marshall served as Secretary of State under President Truman between January 1947 and January 1949. He designed the European recovery program that would be known throughout the 20th century as the Marshall Plan. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his work on the European Recovery Program. He died on October 16, 1959, at the age of 78 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 7.
General Walter Bedell Smith served as Eisenhower’s chief of staff through the final month of the European war. He was appointed United States ambassador to the Soviet Union in March 1946 and served in Moscow until March 1949. He was appointed director of central intelligence in October 1950 and served as head of the CIA until February 1953, when Eisenhower’s new administration appointed him under secretary of state. He died on August 9, 1961, at the age of 65 of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
General Omar Nelson Bradley commanded the 12th Army Group through the final year of the European war. He was appointed the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in August 1949 and served in the position for the next four years. He was promoted to General of the Army in September 1950. He died on April 8, 1981, at the age of 88 at a hospital in New York City. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30.
Colonel John Henry Bevan continued to direct the London Controlling Section through the final year of the European war. He returned to civilian life in 1945 as a stockbroker in the City of London. He died on December 3, 1978, at the age of 84 at his home in Berkshire, England.
Sir Ronald Wingate served as Bevan’s deputy through the final year of the European war. He continued in various British Foreign Office positions through the postwar decades. He died in 1978.
Colonel David Ingram Strangeways served through the final year of the European war as the operational implement of the Fortitude South deception and the later deception operations that supported the Allied advance across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. He continued in the British Army through the postwar decades. He died on June 30, 1998, at the age of 85 at his home in Yorkshire.
Lieutenant General Hans Cramer returned to Germany on June 3, 1944. He was released from further active service due to the medical condition that had caused his repatriation. He survived the final year of the war in German civilian life. He died in Hamburg on October 28, 1968, at the age of 72. He never learned that he had been used.
The existence of the FUSAG deception was not disclosed to the German general officers who had been its victims until the publication of the first British postwar accounts in the 1970s. The detailed operational documents of Fortitude South were classified by the British government until the 1974 release under the 30-year rule. The official 1949 report on Fortitude written by Roger Hesketh was published in book form only in 1999, 31 years after Cramer’s death and 54 years after Patton’s.
Cramer died believing that the American invasion at the Pas de Calais that he had reported to Hitler on June 7, 1944, had failed to materialize because of some unknown American strategic recalculation.
General Hans von Salmuth, the commander of the German 15th Army at the Pas de Calais throughout the seven weeks after D-Day, was captured by American forces in the five months of the European war. He was tried at the American war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and sentenced to a term of imprisonment for war crimes committed by units under his command on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1943. He was released from imprisonment in 1953 and died in Wiesbaden on January 1, 1962, at the age of 73.
He learned of the FUSAG deception during his American interrogations in the summer of 1945. He is reported in the American interrogation report preserved in the captured German records at the end of the war to have said, in words quoted in American military historiography of the Second World War ever since, that “we fought a war against a ghost.” The ghost was General George Smith Patton Jr.
Private Charles Herman Kuhl, the 27-year-old American soldier from Mishawaka, Indiana, whom Patton had struck across the face at the 15th Evacuation Hospital in Nicosia, Sicily, on the afternoon of August 3, 1943, returned to civilian life after the war. He resumed his prewar profession as a carpet fitter. He lived in Mishawaka for the 26 years between his 1945 discharge and his death on January 31, 1971, at the age of 55 of complications from a cardiovascular condition.
He never publicly criticized Patton after the 1943 apology. He is buried at Fairview Cemetery in Mishawaka, Indiana. His grave is unmarked by any reference to the event that had in the autumn of 1943 briefly made his name known throughout the American press. He forgave Patton. He was an American soldier who had done his duty in an American war, who had contracted malaria in Sicily and had been running a fever of 102 on the afternoon of August 3, 1943, when his army commander struck him across the face for the medical condition his army did not yet recognize as a medical condition.
Private Paul G. Bennett, the 21-year-old American soldier whom Patton had struck at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital in San Stefano on the afternoon of August 10, 1943, also returned to civilian life. He also died in the 1970s. He also forgave Patton. Both of them are remembered by the American military historians who have written about the slapping incidents of the Sicilian campaign of 1943.
Neither of them lived to see the declassification of the FUSAG documents in 1974. Neither of them ever knew that the general who had slapped them in August 1943, and whose slapping had produced the American political crisis that nearly ended his Army career, had been transformed by Churchill’s staff and Eisenhower’s personal decision into the ghost commander of the fictional army that held the German 15th Army at the Pas de Calais for the seven weeks after D-Day that decided the fate of the European war. They did not know. But we know.
Juan Pujol García, the Spanish poultry farmer from Barcelona who had operated as the double agent Garbo in London between the spring of 1942 and August 1944, and who had transmitted the 500 false reports to German intelligence in Madrid that convinced them of the reality of the FUSAG buildup in southeast England, retired from British intelligence service after the war.
He faked his own death in Angola in 1949 to escape possible Nazi retaliation. He moved to Venezuela the same year. He operated a bookshop in Caracas for the majority of the following 39 years. He was discovered alive by the British historian Nigel West in 1984. He was presented to Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace in 1984 to receive his Order of the British Empire, awarded during the war but never claimed. He died in Caracas on October 10, 1988, at the age of 76. He is buried in a Caracas cemetery. He is the only person in the 20th century known to have received both the Iron Cross of Nazi Germany and the Order of the British Empire of the United Kingdom.
Drew Pearson, the American radio broadcaster who had broken the Patton slapping story on the Blue Network on the evening of November 21, 1943, continued his investigative journalism career through the postwar decades. He wrote his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column until September 1, 1969, when he died of a heart attack at his home in Washington, D.C., at the age of 71. He is buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
He never received an apology from the American government for the stories he had broken during his career. And he never issued one to the American generals whose careers his stories had damaged. He believed in the journalistic conviction that had defined his American career for the 40 years between his 1929 arrival in Washington and his 1969 death: that the American public had the right to know what the American government was doing in their name.
Lieutenant General Leslie James McNair, the American general who had replaced Patton as the public commander of FUSAG in July 1944 when Patton was released to take the Third Army command in France, traveled from FUSAG headquarters in England to Normandy in the third week of July to observe the Operation Cobra breakout.
He was killed by an American bomb dropped short by the American Eighth Air Force during the opening artillery preparation for Operation Cobra on the morning of July 25, 1944, at a position near Saint-Lô, France. He was the highest-ranking American officer killed in the European theater of operations of the Second World War. He was 61 years old.
His death, in the ironic operational consequences the American Army did not immediately grasp at the time, actually assisted the continuation of the FUSAG deception in the weeks after his death. German intelligence did not learn of McNair’s death for the following six weeks. They continued to report his presence in Kent as the FUSAG commander. Hitler continued to hold the 15th Army at the Pas de Calais on the belief that the FUSAG invasion was still coming.
The ghost army that Patton had commanded held even after Patton had left it. It held under the dead command of a dead general who had not been publicly buried in the United States until the autumn of 1954. McNair was buried initially in a temporary American military cemetery in Normandy in the final days of July 1944. His American Army rank was not permitted to be disclosed in the American press until the end of the European war, for reasons of maintaining the Fortitude deception. He was reinterred at the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in the summer of 1954.
His son, Douglas McNair, a lieutenant colonel in the American Army, had been killed by a Japanese sniper on Guam on August 6, 1944, 12 days after his father’s death in Normandy. Douglas McNair is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. Both McNair men died in the same American war. Both died in the same August of 1944. Both died in the service of the same American Army.
Colonel Charles Codman, Patton’s personal aide, who had been present at the Hotel Cecil dining room briefing on January 27, 1944, and who had recorded Patton’s reaction to Strangeways’s briefing on the FUSAG deception, returned to civilian life in 1945. He published his 1957 memoir Drive with Little, Brown and Company of Boston. He died in the autumn of 1956, shortly before the book was published. He is buried in Massachusetts. His memoir remains, in the practical historical judgment of the American military historians who have studied Patton’s career, the single most important firsthand account of Patton’s personal reaction to the FUSAG assignment.
Everything that happened in the European theater of operations between June 6, 1944, and May 7, 1945, depended on the ghost army that George Patton commanded in the fields of Kent and Essex between January and August 1944. If FUSAG had failed, if the German 15th Army had moved south to Normandy in the first three weeks after D-Day, if Hitler had reinforced Rommel at Normandy in the critical June and July of 1944, the American Army that fought the later battles of the European theater would not have been there to fight them.
The Third Army under Patton would not have crossed France in August 1944. The 101st Airborne would not have reached Bastogne in December 1944. The 4th Armored Division would not have relieved Bastogne on December 26. None of it would have happened.
Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe answered the German ultimatum at Bastogne with one word. Patton answered the same ultimatum with 100 miles of frozen road. Both of them were able to answer because Fortitude South had held the German 15th Army at the Pas de Calais during the seven weeks after D-Day.
Fortitude South held because Patton was the ghost commander. Patton was the ghost commander because Colonel John Bevan and Winston Churchill’s London Controlling Section had proposed to General Dwight Eisenhower in December 1943 that a disgraced American general who had been struck from active combat command could be transformed into a weapon of strategic misdirection. Eisenhower said, “You want me to do what with Patton?” And then he did it.
If you visit the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm today, you can walk to the first row of the cemetery trees. You can stand in front of Grave 228. You can read the inscription on the white marble cross that identifies the grave as the final resting place of George Smith Patton Jr., General, United States Army, born November 11, 1885, died December 21, 1945.
You can turn to your left. You can see in the same first row the second grave that contains the remains of his wife, Beatrice Ayer Patton, born January 12, 1886, died September 30, 1953. You can turn to your right. You can see extending in the white marble crosses of the cemetery the graves of the 5,074 other American soldiers of the Third Army who were buried at Hamm between the autumn of 1944 and 1946.
They are all facing east. They are facing the direction the American Army moved during the final year of the European war. They are facing the Ardennes. They are facing Bastogne. They are facing the direction from which the German Ardennes offensive came on the morning of December 16, 1944, and the direction the American Army moved to defeat it. They are all facing home.
Patton would have wanted it that way. He believed, in the personal conviction that defined his religious understanding throughout his life, that he would meet these men again. He believed he had been a Roman legionary who had fought with them at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. He believed he had been a Carthaginian cavalry commander who had fought against them at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He believed he had been a Napoleonic marshal who had marched with them into Russia in 1812.
He believed that in each of his previous lives he had been preparing for the one battle he would fight in the final year of his American life. He believed that his soldiers who had marched with him 100 miles through the Belgian snow to reach Anthony McAuliffe’s paratroopers at Bastogne on December 26, 1944, had been marching with him in different armies under different flags in different centuries since the dawn of the human military tradition. He believed they were coming with him wherever he was going next.
They came with him. They are with him now in the first row of the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm on the hill outside Luxembourg City, in the quiet of the Belgian and Luxembourgish and French countryside that they had helped to liberate in the final year of the European war. They are with him now. May we always remember them.