Y1806

FRONT LINES, EUROPEAN THEATER — A captured German general’s demand for a private room and fine wine ended in a freezing mud ditch late Saturday after Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. personally ordered the aristocratic officer thrown into a flooded drainage trench alongside a muddy supply road. The confrontation, which unfolded at approximately 1400 … Read more

Thirty-two American soldiers died on a road in southern Germany on March 27, 1945, and for 36 years the United States Army buried the reason why. They died because a four-star general sent 314 men 60 miles behind enemy lines on a mission that every officer in the room told him would fail, and because … Read more

WASHINGTON — The American general who commanded the largest U. S. field army in Europe during World War II, led his troops across the Rhine at Remagen, closed the Ruhr Pocket and met the Red Army on the Elbe River, remains almost entirely unknown to the public he served — and historians say the silence … Read more

ARLON, Belgium — A frozen road outside this southern Belgian town became the site of an unrecorded turning point in the Battle of the Bulge on the afternoon of Dec. 22, 1944, when Gen. George S. Patton Jr. discovered that soldiers of his Third Army had gone three days without a hot meal. The encounter, … Read more

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. personally confronted an imprisoned SS colonel who threatened an American interrogator’s family, delivering a cold warning that the officer’s crimes were already documented and headed for prosecution, according to accounts of the May 1945 encounter in occupied Germany. The confrontation, described in a newly circulating historical account, places the four-star … Read more