Patton and other senior officers of the First and Third Armies had been having lunch in Bradley’s mess when the call came, so they got an earful of Bradley on the phone. When he was finished, practically every officer in the room stood up and applauded. “We were all very pleased with Bradley’s attitude,” Patton said, “and we told him so.”
The next day, Patton was informed he would lose his 95th Division and as many as six artillery battalions to Ninth Army. He was infuriated, of course, but Bradley had told him the orders came not from Ike but from the Combined Joint Chiefs of Staff headed by George Marshall. Orders were for the First and Third Armies to go on the defensive; the main effort to get to the Rhine and the heart of Germany would be made by the British. Patton thought that was foolish. “In my opinion, every division should be attacking,” he told his diary. “If such an attack were made, the Germans do not have the resources to stop it.”
To cheer himself up Patton went to Spa in Belgium and ordered two expensive shotguns, one for himself and one for his brother-in-law Frederick Ayer. On the way, he passed the wrecked town of Houffalize, which was, in his words, “completely removed.” He had seen such destruction in the First World War but not yet in this one, and it inspired him to compose a bit of rhymed doggerel.
Oh little town of Houffalize
How still we see thee lie
Above thy steep and battered streets
The aeroplanes sail by.
Yet in the dark streets shineth
Not any Goddamn light
The hopes and fears of all thy years
Were blown to hell last night.
Incensed, as Bradley had been when the supreme commander began taking away units, Patton decided to attack first and ask questions later. As far as Bradley was concerned, “I shall not tell him,” Patton decided. The first attack had been planned as a corps show, but then it expanded in Patton’s fertile mind, “like Minerva,” and soon developed into what became known as the Palatinate Campaign. He wrote to Freddy Ayer: “I am taking one of the longest chances of my chancy career; in fact, almost disobeying orders in order to attack.”
Unfortunately, by February 11 a warm spell had begun thawing the mountains of snow and ice, which “almost obliterated” the roads that were, according to Patton, “literally disintegrating” with the mix of thaw and the tremendous traffic of a mechanized army. By February 13, however, elements of the Third Army had forced their way across the Sauer River, which marked the Siegfried Line, and into Germany. Patton could not wait. He crossed the river, riding in his jeep along its bank, which was studded with hundreds of enemy pillboxes and miles of German barbed wire. “The men were quite surprised to see me,” he told his diary, “and the chance of getting hit was small and worth the risk due to the effect it had on the troops.”
Because of the weather, the attack had stalled temporarily, and Patton decided to visit Paris, where he ensconced himself in the palatial King George V hotel and visited SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—at the magnificent palace of Versailles.
Eisenhower was away but his chief of staff Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith told Patton that the “high strategy” was to have him resume the attack, and he asked him how many additional divisions he would require. Nearly dumbstruck, Patton responded he would need five divisions and was utterly dumbfounded when Smith said, “I think you should have twelve.” For someone who had, in the past, nearly always written insulting things about Smith, Patton now entered into his diary, “I have never known how great he really is.”
The two had a roaring time in Gay Paree; Smith took Patton hunting on an elegant preserve once belonging to the king of France where the Third Army commander shot three ducks, a pheasant, and three hares. That night they attended the Folies Bergère, which was “perfectly naked,” said Patton, “so much so that no one is interested.” They sat in a stylish box and drank champagne, and the manager said for Patton to always make the Folies “his home” when he visited Paris “to rest.”
“I can think of no place less conducive to rest,” he confided to his diary.
WHAT THE RIGHT HAND GIVETH, however, SHAEF would soon seek to take away in the form of what Patton derided as SHAEF’s “new toy”—a strategic reserve. Organized in case the Germans tried another Battle of the Bulge–type operation, this was to be made of divisions from all the armies, which were to be pulled out of combat and sent back to rest areas where they could be called upon should trouble break out. Patton’s view remained that all the divisions of all the armies should be attacking all at once, so his reaction to the SHAEF directive was predictable. “I wonder if ever before in the history of war a winning general had to plead to keep on winning.”
The strategy at this stage was to simply push eastward, shoving the Germans back on themselves, conquering territory, and shutting down the German war manufacturing industry. It seemed clear the enemy did not intend to surrender, which would certainly have been the sensible thing. Instead, he hung on, taking horrendous losses, hoping for a miracle.
The Palatinate in southwest Germany is a region of vineyards and nut groves interspersed with forests and low mountains considered (wrongly, as it turned out) unnavigable for armor. It is bounded by the Rhine River, and Patton’s 250,000-man killing machine rumbled across it in nine days, chewing up Germans at an unprecedented rate, crossing the Rhine (which Patton spit in on the way over), gobbling up ancient cities such as Coblenz, Heidelberg, Mainz, and Worms, destroying in the process two German armies and taking 60,000 enemy prisoners.
The Palatinate Campaign was regarded by many, including the Germans, according to Patton’s historian and deputy chief of staff Paul Harkins, to be “one of the greatest campaigns of the entire war.”19
Patton published a congratulatory order filled with phrases such as “The world rings with your praises … You have wrested 6484 square miles of territory from the enemy … The highest honor I have ever attained is that of having my name coupled with yours in these great events … your assault crossing over the Rhine assures you of even greater glory to come … This great campaign was only made possible by your disciplined valor, unswerving devotion to duty, etc., etc.”20
Marshall telegraphed Eisenhower: PLEASE PASS ON MY PERSONAL AND ENTHUSIASTIC CONGRATULATIONS TO PATTON. Eisenhower sent along the telegram in a message satchel, appending it in longhand: “Dear George: To this I add that I continue to have reason to cheer that you came with me to this war. Ike.”
BY MARCH 26 THIRD ARMY was fairly flying through Germany and had taken Frankfurt. The day before, Patton had ordered one of his corps commanders to send an expedition to the town of Hammelburg to liberate nearly a thousand American officers who had fallen prisoner to the Germans, including Patton’s son-in-law Colonel John Waters, who had been captured in Tunisia two years earlier. Patton wrote Beatrice: “Last night I sent an armored column to a place 40 miles east of Frankfurt where John and some 900 prisoners are said to be. I have been nervous as a cat all day because everyone but me thought it was too great a risk. I hope it works.”21
For five days, there was no word of the relief column, then on March 30 German radio announced that the several hundred American troops going to Hammelburg had been “captured or destroyed.” Patton was dismayed. There had been much discussion of the size of the rescue task force. A combat command–size unit, about four thousand men with tanks and heavy weapons, was a potent force that only a large-scale enemy opposition could overcome. That was what Patton had in mind for the operation but Bradley, he told Beatrice, had “talked him out of it.” In the end it was agreed to send an armored task force of only two tank companies, which might get in and out fast. Soon, however, remnants of the column returned through the American lines and told what happened.
After bulling its way past several small German units and destroying considerable German matériel, the task force reached the prison camp, where the German commandant decided to surrender. He sent out a delegation consisting of a
German captain carrying a white flag and three American officers carrying an American flag—Colonel Waters among them.
As they cleared the gate, however, a German guard suddenly and inexplicably lifted his rifle and shot Waters in the leg, the bullet traveling up to his spine. The two American officers rushed him to the camp hospital, which was run by a Serbian doctor. The relief force then piled as many prisoners as they could on their vehicles and headed back toward Third Army lines.
Unfortunately a German assault gun battalion was also in the area, and this powerful force ambushed the relief column, knocking out the commander’s tank and halting its progress. The Americans fought doggedly until they were surrounded and their ammunition and gasoline ran out. Then they lit fire to their vehicles and took to the woods and fields.
One week later, a strong American force recaptured the prison camp and Waters was among the prisoners, recovering from his wound. He was brought back to the Third Army hospital where it was determined that Waters would have to be operated on, and Patton visited him when possible.
There were complaints, however, that Patton had risked and lost an army task force in personal pursuit of rescuing his own son-in-law. Inevitably this grumbling reached the newspapers and another Patton “incident” was created. Patton maintained that he was never sure Waters was in the camp in the first place and that the expedition to rescue the prisoners was part of a “diversion” to mislead the Germans about the direction the army would take next. Eisenhower explained it to Marshall as a “wild goose chase” of Patton’s that he hoped would not be inflated by the press. “Patton is a problem child,” Ike said, “but he is a great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.”22
Third Army kept grinding across the face of Germany at a terrific pace, but then Eisenhower slowed them down. The reason stated was that Ike wanted all his armies (there were five of them) to proceed across Germany roughly parallel to one another. Patton considered Montgomery to be at the bottom of the new instructions, because he was perpetually falling behind. Patton wrote Beatrice: “We [Third Army] never meet any opposition because the bigger and better Germans fight Monty—he says so. Also, he advertises so much they know where he is coming. I fool them.”
“I could join the Russians in a week if they’d let me,” he said. “Damn equality.”
Patton and several of the other army generals around this time appealed to the visiting Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy about the “wanton and unnecessary bombing of German civilian cities.” By this point in the war, the Allied strategic bombing campaign was fully fledged. Across Germany, old and historic Teutonic architecture was being blown to rocks and dust by flights of more than a thousand heavy bombers a day. Patton told McCloy, who was also a friend, “We all feel that indiscriminate bombing has no military value and is cruel and wasteful,” and recommended the air force concentrate on purely military targets, particularly “on oil.”b,23
On April 7, one of Patton’s corps commanders called to say his men had captured the German gold reserve in the city of Merkers. They blew the steel vault door and found in addition to billions in paper marks 4,500 gold bricks weighing 37 pounds apiece and worth approximately $57 million.c On April 12 Patton, accompanied by Bradley and Eisenhower, entered the elevator to an enormous salt mine in Merkers and descended a half mile to the great chamber below, which was heaped with goods looted by the Germans from Jews and other Europeans whose countries they had overrun.
There were, as Patton described it, “suitcases filled with jewelry, silver and gold, watches, utensils, vases, gold-filled teeth, false teeth, etc., in no way labeled, simply valuable metal obtained by bandit methods.” Eisenhower joked that he was unable to find a box of diamonds, but they did uncover art treasures, which Patton uncharitably described as being “worth, in my opinion, about $2.50 and of the type usually seen in bars in America.”24
RUMORS OF SO-CALLED SLAVE LABOR CAMPS were rife in all the Allied armies but it wasn’t until after they visited the mine that they encountered what Patton described as “one of the most appalling sights I have ever seen.”
Near the town of Ohrdorf the Germans had constructed one of many “concentration camps” in which the Nazis confined “undesirables”—political enemies, Gypsies, homosexuals, and, principally, Jews. A man wearing the garb of an inmate escorted the Allied generals through the camp. He took them to a gallows where men were hanged for attempting to escape. This was no ordinary gallows but one made to kill in the most painful manner. The drop board was about two feet from the ground and the noose was made not of rope but of piano wire. It was designed so that the toes of the man to be executed would just touch the ground and it would take about fifteen minutes for the wire to strangle him to death.
There was also a whipping table upon which a man was stretched facedown and beaten with a bloody stick the size of a pick handle. Patton noted that their guide was not emaciated as were the rest of the inmates, which Eisenhower also noticed because he asked the man “very pointedly” how he could be so fat. Patton’s chief of staff reported that two days later this man was “torn limb from limb” by other prisoners.
Beyond the whipping table was a pile of about forty naked human bodies, shot in the head at close range and lying in a large pool of dried blood. A shed nearby contained another forty bodies in the final stages of emaciation, sprinkled with lime to contain the stench. After the shed had filled to capacity, Patton said, the bodies were removed to a pit about a mile from the camp and buried. This was what the Germans did to prisoners who had grown too weak to work. Patton’s party also visited the pit, the bottom of which was filled with arms, legs, and bodies sticking out of scummy green water.
It quickly became clear that, as the American army approached the camp, the Germans had attempted to destroy the evidence. They had some of the prisoners dig up the bodies in the pit and place them on “a mammoth griddle,” composed of crisscrossed rail tracks set on brick foundations. They then poured pitch on the bodies and roasted them on a fire of coal and pine.
This method did not cover the crime, however, because the charred bones and skulls of “many hundreds” of inmates were left “on or under the griddle,” Patton said. The American commanders ordered their soldiers to visit the scene to “teach our men to look out for the Germans,” Patton wrote in his diary. The mayor of the town was also ordered to “confront the spectacle,” after which he and his wife went home “and hanged themselves,” Patton wrote.25
When he returned to his headquarters, Patton called a press conference in which he spoke of “the most horrible sight I have ever seen,” and strongly suggested that the reporters visit the camp and tell the world. Two days later leading elements of his army discovered something even worse—Buchenwald.
There, the inmates still living were lying in tiers of bunks like “feebly animated mummies,” Patton said. “When we went through they tried to cheer but were too feeble.” In a large building with rows of tall smokestacks, luckless inmates were dumped down a chute that delivered them to the basement where the walls were lined with iron meat hooks with piano wire nooses. Two executioners—drawn from the inmate population—lifted the victim up on the hook, where he slowly strangled to death. After a set period of time, anyone showing signs of life was dispatched with a bloody club that looked like “a potato masher.”
On the level above were six furnaces resembling “baker’s ovens,” connected to the basement by an elevator, Patton said. The elevators could accommodate about six bodies at a time to go to the furnace room for disposal.
Patton’s chief of staff Brigadier General Hobart R. “Hap” Gay had this observation: “No race and no people other than those who are strictly sadists could commit crimes such as these. To take prisoners … and deliberately starve them to death is an atrocity.”26
Patton ordered inhabitants of towns near these charnel houses taken there to see for themselves what their government was doing. Whatever they had known, whatever rumors they had
heard, the German civilians seemed utterly shocked and horrified at seeing the camps in person.
ON APRIL 12, PATTON WAS LATE getting to bed and found he’d forgotten to wind his watch. When he turned on the radio to get the time he heard that President Roosevelt had died. “It seems very unfortunate,” he told his diary in reference to the new president, Harry S. Truman, “that people are made vice presidents who were never intended, neither by Party, nor by the Lord, to be Presidents.”
Three days later, Patton was informed that the Third Army would have a special mission. Bradley had received orders from Eisenhower to turn his army group southeast toward the Bavarian Alps and Austria in search of a Nazi “great National Redoubt,” about which army intelligence had been picking up rumors. These rumors stated that Hitler and other high-placed Nazis either had left or would leave Berlin for the hugely fortified and armed redoubt in the mountains where thousands of fanatical Nazis had gathered for a spectacular “last stand.”
Patton thought it was nonsense and a wild goose chase but made no objection since attacking in any direction was better than sitting still. “Sometimes I feel I might be nearing the end of this life,” he wrote Beatrice. “I have liberated J. [John Waters] and licked the Germans so what else is there to do?” That night he learned from the radio he’d been promoted to full four-star general.
Patton also was informed that his niece and former paramour Jean Gordon, the doughnut girl, was having an affair with a young officer in his headquarters who was resolved to return to his wife and children. Patton had the man transferred to a distant command.27