George S. Patton was one of the most famous American generals of World War II. His celebrity has endured for more than 70 years, placing him alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur as household names.
Patton led armies to victory in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. In the final campaign, his forces raced east and ended the war just inside Czechoslovakia.
Yet many people do not know that his last months were marked by depression, anger and controversy. His death in December 1945, at the age of 60, has since become the subject of intense speculation.
Was it an accident, or was he murdered by a shadowy conspiracy of Allied leaders fed up with his anti-Soviet rhetoric and embarrassing mistakes? Had Patton become a liability instead of the asset he had once been?
Patton was a brilliant but difficult man. He was never slow to state his opinions, and his behavior often caused problems with Allied authorities.
He first commanded U.S. troops in action during Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942. He then led forces in the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily in July 1943.
His flamboyant dress, peppery language and command style won him many fans among the divisions he led and among the Allied press and public. But some of his decisions and orders brought censure from higher command.
An early example came on June 27, 1943, just before the invasion of Sicily. In a public speech, Patton illegally told his army that they should take no prisoners.
After the capture of Biscari, some U.S. soldiers cold-bloodedly executed 73 Italian prisoners of war. Two soldiers were tried for this war crime, but Patton's order created an uncomfortable situation for the Allies.
Eager to prevent the reputation of America's most famous general and the U.S. Army from being tarnished, the investigation of Patton was dropped by order of his superior, General Omar Bradley.
Patton's behavior was often only one step from a serious scandal. Just weeks after the Biscari murders, he physically slapped a U.S. soldier across the face inside an evacuation hospital.
The man was suffering from combat fatigue, something Patton did not tolerate. That incident occurred on August 3, 1943.
A few days later, at another evacuation hospital, Patton again lost his cool with a soldier suffering from combat fatigue. When the private explained why he was there, Patton called him a coward and a disgrace.
"You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot," Patton shouted.
There were further incidents. Most famously, toward the end of the war, Patton ordered a task force of tanks and infantry to go 50 miles behind German lines to liberate an officer's POW camp at Hammelburg in Germany.
Task Force Baum was a complete fiasco. Of the 314 men, 16 Sherman tanks and many other vehicles that set out, only 35 men and no tanks or vehicles returned. All the rest were killed or captured in March 1945.
It subsequently emerged that Patton's son-in-law, Colonel John Waters, was a prisoner at the camp. The press attention was most unwelcome to General Eisenhower and the Allied cause.
It looked as though Patton had used his power to send a half-thought-out rescue mission to save his daughter's husband, heedless of the cost in American lives and equipment. It was an abuse of power, but so successful was Patton's handling of his Third Army in pushing through Germany that the episode was hushed up.
Another problematic subject was Patton's increasingly antagonistic attitude toward America's ally, the Soviet Union. He did not want to stop his army at the Bavarian-Czech frontier and allowed some units to push into what would become Soviet territory in April 1945.
He famously said of the Russians, "I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them."
His fellow generals and Allied leaders did not much like Patton for a variety of reasons. Some thought him overrated as a general, an accusation also leveled at another flamboyant World War II leader, British Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery.
Interestingly, Montgomery got on very well with Patton and admired him. General Eisenhower knew Patton's value, saying after his death that it was no exaggeration to say Patton's name struck terror into the hearts of the enemy.
General Bradley, however, disliked Patton in every way possible. General Sir Alan Brooke, the British chief of the imperial general staff, called Patton "a dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment."
President Harry S. Truman did not rate Patton as highly as his predecessor, President Roosevelt, had. Truman compared Patton to two other egotists: General MacArthur in the Pacific and General George Armstrong Custer, who died at the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Patton had plenty of admirers and detractors in the Allied camp. Whether enough of the latter wished him harm is hard to say.
What is certain is that forces managed to keep Patton out of the Pacific War. As soon as Germany was defeated in early May 1945, Patton demanded a transfer to the Pacific and an army to lead.
It seems odd that so famous and capable a general as Patton was denied such a high-profile role in the last fighting of World War II. While waiting to hear whether he would get such a command, he flew home to Bedford, Massachusetts, via Paris and London, arriving on June 7, 1945.
He spent time with his family and gave a speech before an audience of thousands at the Hatch Memorial Shell, an outdoor concert venue in Boston. He again exhibited a gross lack of judgment, saying that a man who dies in battle is "frequently a fool."
Considering the number of bereaved mothers and wives in his audience, it was an appalling thing to say. Patton then gave more speeches before huge audiences in Denver, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
In the meantime, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had decided that Patton would not be sent to the Pacific theater. Instead, he was ordered to return to Germany as military governor of Bavaria.
Bored and restless, Patton was ill-suited to the appointment. He viewed the denazification process the Germans were being subjected to as not very important.
He remained concerned with the Soviet menace to Europe as the early stages of the Cold War began to unfold in occupied Germany. In his opinion, forcibly expressed to U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson, the U.S. Army in Germany had to be kept at full strength.
He bitterly regretted having had to hand back territory his Third Army had liberated in Europe to the Soviets. "We have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe," he said. "We have lost the war."
Patton's attitude toward the defeated Germans was another source of embarrassment to Eisenhower and Truman. He famously stated that "SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat in America."
This private remark was published, creating another storm in the press. It did his reputation absolutely no good and required sorting out.
Patton was also very vocal in his resistance to U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s plan for post-war Germany. He believed the Americans would be seen as too harsh if it were fully enacted.
It did not help that Patton had made many remarks that bordered on anti-Semitism, aggravating certain sections of the U.S. press against him. Writing of the destruction of Berlin, which he visited in late July 1945, Patton said, "Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what could have been a good race and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages and all Europe will be communist."
Patton became more and more obsessed with the Soviet threat. He was angry that America was, in his view, unnecessarily punishing the Germans instead of protecting Europe from the Soviets.
Small wonder that some people might have preferred it if so famous a leader as Patton was silenced. Elements of the press in America had become rather anti-Patton.
Eisenhower relieved him of his position as military governor of Bavaria and gave him command of a paper army, the 15th, in Germany. Patton took the job happily, relieved to be out of the denazification business.
But his continued vocal criticisms of U.S. policy in Germany, and of the Soviets, continued. Patton, a four-star general and the most famous American of the war, was a massive liability to the U.S. occupation of Germany and the government back in Washington.
It has subsequently emerged that the Americans and the Soviets tapped Patton's phone. They were so concerned by his behavior and pronouncements that some have wondered whether they were concerned enough to kill him.
On December 9, 1945, Patton was invited by his chief of staff, Major General Gay, on a pheasant hunting trip near the town of Mannheim in Germany. The party consisted of two vehicles.
Patton's 1938 Cadillac 75 staff car was driven by Private First Class Horace Woodring, a 19-year-old combat veteran. With Patton was General Gay.
Traveling ahead of the Cadillac was a jeep driven by Sergeant Joseph Scruce, carrying the guns for the hunt, food and a hunting dog. On the way, Patton ordered a stop at the Roman ruins at Saalburg, then resumed the journey sitting in the front passenger seat to warm his feet next to the heater, as it was cold and snowy outside.
At a military police checkpoint, the Cadillac stopped so that the frozen hunting dog could be transferred to Patton's car. Patton resumed his usual right-hand back seat, with Gay sitting to his left.
With the jeep leading, the Cadillac followed the N38 road to the northern outskirts of Mannheim. At a railway level crossing, the jeep passed over, but the Cadillac was held up by a passing train.
After the train had passed, Woodring pulled away and noticed two U.S. Army trucks pulled onto the side of the road half a mile ahead. One started moving toward the Cadillac.
The truck was a two-and-a-half-ton six-by-six GMC. As it was about to pass the Cadillac, it suddenly veered left directly into the car's path.
Woodring had no time to take evasive action. The Cadillac collided with the truck at 20 miles per hour.
Patton was thrown forward into a railing behind the driver's seat, injuring his head and neck. He was bleeding profusely from a laceration that extended from the bridge of his nose to the top of his scalp.
Patton collapsed into Gay's lap, unable to move. Woodring flagged down the first vehicle he saw, which turned out to be an army ambulance.
The medic, Sergeant Leroy Ogden, managed to stop the bleeding. Patton was then driven to the 130th Station Hospital at Heidelberg, arriving one hour after the crash.
Military police arrived at the scene to investigate. The truck's driver, Technical Sergeant Fifth Class Robert Thompson, was acting rather strangely.
He seemed unconcerned by the accident, grinning constantly. Woodring felt that Thompson and two unnamed companions may have been under the influence of alcohol.
Thompson was 50 miles from where he was supposed to be and on some kind of unauthorized joyride at the time of the accident. Two officers of the 818th Military Police Company interviewed all those involved.
No charges were filed against anyone. The accident was considered a routine fender bender.
In the hospital, Patton was found to be paralyzed from the neck down. His vertebrae were severely dislocated.
Specialists were flown in, as well as his wife from America. About a week after the accident, Patton started to improve, with some respiratory muscle movement coming back, and preparations were made to fly him to the U.S. for more treatment.
But on December 20, 1945, Patton suddenly deteriorated again. The next day he died of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure.
On December 24, 1945, as per his wishes, he was buried among the Third Army's fallen at the U.S. cemetery at Hamm in Luxembourg.
So what about the conspiracy to kill Patton? In actual fact, nothing whatsoever was said about a conspiracy for 30 years following his death.
Such a notion only surfaced in 1974 with the publication of a novel called "The Algonquin Project" by British writer Frederick Nolan. The book was a fictional story loosely set against the real death of Patton, dealing with a murder plot to kill a famous general.
It became a rather bad film called "Brass Target" in 1978. From these two fictions grew the conspiracy theory of Patton's assassination.
In 1979, a cash-strapped former World War II OSS operative named Douglas Bazata came forward with a fabricated story, believed by many, that he had been asked by OSS director Major General William Donovan to kill Patton in December 1945 to shut him up, as he had become an embarrassment to U.S. authorities.
On the surface, Bazata, who had earned a hatful of high decorations for his wartime daring, looked impressive. But any cursory comparison of the events of Patton's last day, as recorded by General Gay, Patton's driver Woodring and numerous other witnesses, is at variance with Bazata's rather ridiculous story.
Basically, Bazata claimed to have jammed the window beside Patton open four inches when the general was touring the Roman ruins shortly before his accident, so that he could shoot him later just before the crash. He said he used a special rock-firing gun made by a country he could not remember, which would make it look like Patton had suffered a non-gunshot wound to the head caused by the crash, which was also staged.
When Patton survived the shooting and the crash, he was finished off in the hospital with poison that emulated natural death. The press lapped up Bazata's fictional story, merging it with the novel and film that stated the rumors of an assassination plot.
What also fueled the mystery was the fact that no autopsy was performed on Patton, so no poison could be discovered. Of course, as it was considered a routine accident and not a murder case, no autopsy was necessary.
Records pertaining to Patton's accident were also said to be missing from the National Archives. These points found their way into Patton's biographer Ladislas Farago's 1981 book "The Last Days of Patton."
Since then, three more books have been published elaborating on the alleged plot to murder Patton, as well as introducing a new theory that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD, forerunner to the KGB. However, no concrete evidence that disagrees with the original witness statements has been produced.
The notion that Patton was assassinated has nonetheless entered the American national consciousness, fueled in part by the internet. In the final analysis, it seems likely that George S. Patton died because of a chain of unfortunate circumstances rather than some complex conspiracy.
He was just unlucky. When great people die in such ordinary ways, people often reach for the fantastic because they cannot accept the mundane.
The conspiracy to kill Patton is merely a fictional book and movie plot that has taken on a life of its own. Until some real evidence of foul play is presented, Patton's death must remain what it was: an accident.