It was within this frame of reference that he met with the unfamiliar correspondents from the New York and Chicago newspapers. The press conference was long and boring. Patton didn’t speak but let members of his staff do the talking while he sat brooding. Afterward, a number of staff papers were to be read and Patton rose as if to leave but the reporters intercepted him and he agreed to answer a few questions.
Major Ernest Deane, Patton’s press officer, recalled that “things went wrong from the start.” These reporters, the Daniells, Levin, and Morgan, were utterly unintimidated by Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. In fact, they were openly hostile to him, one moving in close so that he deliberately blew smoke in Patton’s face. General Hobart “Hap” Gay, Patton’s chief of staff, said the reporters “tried to put words in Patton’s mouth.” Patton’s official biographer Martin Blumenson found another witness who stated that the reporters “made use of only partial truths, construed the answers to their questions to their own purposes and … tried to bring discredit upon General Patton.” Deane added that another correspondent, friendly to the Patton camp, said at breakfast before the press conference that he “overheard three of them … plotting to needle the General and make him lose his temper.”10
Apparently they succeeded, because at one point Patton became so frustrated with the interrogation-like questions of Levin that he responded, “Well, you’re so smart you know everything, why ask me?”
The reporters bore in on Patton for retaining Dr. Fritz Schaffer as president-minister of Bavaria because he kept Nazis in his administration. Patton denied knowing anything about that. He told the newsmen that his de-Nazification program was proceeding apace, that in fact he had removed or blocked some forty-seven thousand former Nazis from government work.
The reporters countered that Dr. Schaffer was a “reactionary,” who was too right wing to govern the state. (Schaffer, a lawyer by trade, had in fact been imprisoned by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp until the end of the war. He went on to hold several high posts in the German national government, including finance minister and minister of justice.)
Patton, who had not appointed Schaffer, denied knowing much about him, then one of the correspondents began ticking off “facts” about Schaffer’s fitness to serve. That night Patton told his diary: “The temerity of the newspaper man in suggesting that he knew more about who we should have than I do—although I know nothing—made me mad which I think is what they wanted … The more I see of people I regret that I survived the war.”
The next day’s New York Times quoted Patton as saying, “The Nazi thing is just like a Democrat-Republican election fight.” Of course the story was wired to every newspaper in the country, causing a great uproar of vituperation against General Patton and General Eisenhower as well. Editorial writers produced stories headlined: “General Patton Should Be Fired.” Letters to the editor were published expressing outrage.
Light was shed on this matter a few days later by a highly respected journalist who had been president of the International News Service and a broadcast official at NBC. Frank E. Mason was in Germany on a special mission for former U.S. president Herbert Hoover and, several days after the press conference incident, wrote to Hoover and a few other prominent military and government officials that a number of American newspapers—including those where the Patton press conference correspondents worked—were apparently “trying to run interference for a Red government in Germany.” These “radical journalists,” Mason wrote, had attacked Patton in “a conspiracy to make sure that only those Germans who were acceptable to the Russians and the German Communists were appointed to local government posts in the American zone.”
The clamor in the American newspapers naturally reached Eisenhower’s headquarters. Ike phoned Patton and told him to hold another press conference to straighten out the misunderstanding about Democrats and Republicans being like Nazis.
Frank Mason attended this conference in which Patton apologized for any comparison of “so vile a thing as Nazism” with the American Democratic and Republican parties. Calling it an unfortunate analogy, Patton explained that in Germany practically all tradesmen, small businessmen, doctors and lawyers, government workers, and other professionals had been in some way beholden to the Nazi party, “which permitted them to carry on their businesses and professions.” He said that if we kick them all out, it would so retard the reorganization of Bavaria “that we will certainly be guilty of death by starvation or freezing of women, children, and old men this winter.”
Someone asked him, “General, aren’t there some who consider Fritz Schaffer a Nazi?”
Patton again pointed out that Schaffer was picked before he got there, and said there was so far no evidence that he was a Nazi.
The next day the four correspondents—the Daniells, Levin, and Morgan—were in Eisenhower’s headquarters a day’s drive away, grilling his chief of staff Bedell Smith. “Do you think,” Levin demanded, referring to Patton, “that the [de-Nazification] program can be carried out by people who are temperamentally and emotionally in disagreement with it?”
It was a scummy thing to do, but the reporters smelled blood and were determined to keep their stories on the front page. An unsigned memorandum attached to the transcript of the meeting stated: “It was a definite scheme [by the four reporters] to undermine and discredit General Patton. Their method was to sow seeds of doubt as to whether or not General Patton was loyal to General Eisenhower.”
Headlines now read: “Patton Belittles de-Nazification Program.” Accompanying editorials drew Eisenhower into the controversy, suggesting that he did not have his subordinates under control. Former Nazis, it was implied, were still running the German government in Bavaria.
In response, Eisenhower issued orders reiterating his original instructions—that former Nazis were to hold no positions other than as common laborers. And he sent a telegram to Patton saying, “I simply can’t believe that these reports [about opposition to the de-Nazification program] are accurate.” He asked Patton to take the first opportunity to fly up and see him for an hour.
Bad weather prevented Patton from going to Eisenhower’s headquarters until September 29, when he finally decided to drive. It took seven and a half hours and when he arrived Ike “was quite friendly.” But he gave Patton a long lecture on “keeping my mouth shut.” Then Ike got around to the reason he had asked his old friend to come.
Eisenhower confided that if there had been some other appropriate command at the time, he would never have given Patton the military governorship of Bavaria. Then he suggested transferring Patton from command of his beloved Third Army to command of the Fifteenth Army, which was essentially a paper organization charged with writing a military history of the war. Patton was stunned; he suggested that Ike might simply relieve (or fire) him, but Eisenhower refused. He didn’t want that for his old friend. When Patton argued that he should at least keep command of the Third Army, Ike told him that while he retained complete confidence in him he did not think Patton believed in his (de-Nazification) policies and that it would be best for him to transfer to the Fifteenth. The news correspondents had done their work.
In the moment Patton considered resigning, but he decided “[I] would become a martyr too soon.” He took the job.
AT THE FIFTEENTH ARMY, Patton’s duties were mainly administrative, which gave him much leisure time for his favorite sports and pastimes. He also had been sitting for a majestic-looking oil portrait that was finished October 2. His feelings were hurt over his reassignment, but he got over it—yet he remained bitter about the journalists and continued to hate the Communists. For their part, many American newspapers carried front-page stories of Patton’s “punishment” with the headline PATTON FIRED!
Regardless, he wrote his favorite brother-in-law Frederick Ayer to look for a quail-shooting plantation in northern Florida, Georgia, or the Carolinas, and he told Beatrice he was looking forward to sailing when he came home. Upon returning,
he hoped to be made president of the Army War College. On October 11, on the occasion of Patton’s pending sixtieth birthday, the staff of the Fifteenth Army threw a big party for him.
He wrote Beatrice that he had managed to secure passage across the Atlantic on the battleship USS New York and would be home on December 14, in time for Christmas. “I hate to leave the Army,” he told her, “but what [else] is there?” He’d planned to shoot pigs that day, but it was too snowy. “I may see you before you see this,” he added presciently. It was his final letter to Beatrice.11
On the morning of December 9, a Sunday, the day before he was to leave for the United States, Patton and his chief of staff Hap Gay were on the outskirts of Mannheim on their way to some pheasant hunting. They were riding in the rear of a 1938 army Cadillac limousine driven by Private First Class Harold L. Woodring. Woodring had stopped for a train before proceeding when he noticed “two 6 × 6 [two-and-a-half-ton ‘deuce-and-a-half’] trucks approaching from the opposite direction.” When they came near, Woodring testified, the first truck “just turned into my car.”
It struck the Cadillac a sharp blow on its left front fender, knocking it back about ten feet. Gay and Woodring were unhurt, but Patton, sitting in the right rear, was thrown forward and up, striking his head hard on the railing that held the partition glass, which was rolled down at the time.
The blow gashed his forehead to the bone above the eyebrows, partially scalping him and stripping the skin off for three inches. He slumped back across Gay, who was still in his seat. Patton remained conscious “and swore a little,” according to Woodring. He bled moderately, but that was not the extent of the damage. He couldn’t move anything below his shoulders. He was paralyzed.
MPs arrived within a few minutes and sent for an ambulance that carried Patton to a military hospital near Heidelberg. As they cut off his clothing and began injecting him with plasma, for shock, and antibiotics he raised his head and chuckled, “Relax gentlemen, I’m in no shape to be a terror now.” When a chaplain arrived Patton said, “Well, let him get started. I guess I need it.”
Several neurosurgeons came in. When they saw Patton’s X-rays they understood the gravity of his injury. Two vertebrae had been severely dislocated; there was too much swelling to tell the extent of damage to the spinal cord but it looked bad.
Beatrice left for Germany the day after the accident on a special plane that Eisenhower provided. Also aboard was Colonel Roy Glenwood Spurling, the army’s leading specialist in neurosurgery. He had been on leave in the United States, but was summoned back on orders of the adjutant general.
When Spurling looked at the X-rays and consulted with the other doctors he concluded that Patton’s condition was “precarious.” Patients with that kind of injury seldom lived long. Nevertheless, this was George Patton. When Spurling visited him, Patton asked, “Man to man, what chance do I have to recover?” Spurling replied that he was doing far better than most patients with his type of injury and that it was impossible to tell at that time.
“What chance do I have to ride a horse again?” Patton offered.
“None.”
Patton hesitated a moment, then said, “Thank you Colonel, for being honest.”
Get-well messages flooded in from around the world, including those from President Truman, Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill. After a day Patton seemed to be getting better, giving the doctors hope that the spinal cord was not as badly damaged as they had feared.
From the beginning, Patton had been held in traction by something called Crutchfield hooks attached to his skull. They tended to slip, so the doctors inserted “large caliber fishhooks” beneath his cheekbones to relieve pressure. By the third day, Spurling said, improvement ceased. The doctors allotted him an ounce and a half a day of scotch whisky, Johnnie Walker Red, brought by a colonel, a friend. Beatrice was concerned about an embolism. He had almost died from one when he broke his leg in the 1930s. On December 20, it happened. X-rays showed an embolism in his right lung, which began to fill with fluid, and he had to use an oxygen mask to breathe.
Beatrice sat beside him that day and the next, as she had since she’d arrived, reading to him from the military histories that he loved—the glories of Rome and Greece. He slept more but was listless and privately told his nurse he was going to die. To Beatrice he said, somewhat incongruously, “I should have done better.” Ever since he was a boy he’d always been striving.
On December 21, 1945, the army issued General Orders 685, signed by Patton’s close friend General Geoffrey Keyes: “With deep regret, announcement is made of the death of General George S. Patton, Jr.” The notion subsequently advanced by some—that Patton was assassinated—is too absurd to contemplate.
“Patton died as he lived,” Dr. Spurling said, “bravely.” A letter from a friend of Patton’s daughter Ruth Ellen summed it up succinctly: “For him I think it is seemly that he rode out on the storm, and escaped the dullness of old age, while he was at the height of his fame.”12
It was just so. There was a tremendous national outpouring of sympathy in the press and on the air. The old animosities were mostly forgotten, or at least brushed aside, and Patton returned to hero status with glowing praise and recitations of his prowess and feats of martial glory.
The night he died, daughters Bee and Ruth Ellen went to bed knowing only that their father was in grave condition. A little past midnight, which in Washington was the time Patton passed away, Bee’s phone rang and a voice from what sounded like an overseas call said, “Little Bee, are you all right?”
“Daddy?” she asked. “Daddy …” But the line had gone dead. She called the overseas operator to reconnect but was told no such call had been made to her number.
Right about that same time, Ruth Ellen awoke to see her father lying across a bench in the bay window of her bedroom, in his uniform, with his head propped up on his arm. He gave “his very own smile,” she said, and then he was gone. The next morning the two sisters spoke by phone and told each other what had happened. “I guess he’s dead then,” said Ruth Ellen. “Poor Ma,” Bee said.13
Beatrice was calmly trying to make arrangements for the body to be shipped to the United States when Spurling, at the behest of General Keyes, took her aside and told her that, upon the orders of General Eisenhower, no deceased American soldier had been sent home since the war began.
“Of course he must be buried here,” Beatrice cried. “Why didn’t I think of it? I know George would like to lie beside the men of his Army.”14
An Episcopal service of the Burial of the Dead was held in Heidelberg, after which the casket was put aboard a train for Hamm, Luxembourg, and its great American military cemetery. There, in a pouring rain, George S. Patton Jr. was buried on Christmas Eve among the graves of so many of his Third Army soldiers, beneath a simple white cross bearing only his name, rank, and serial number.a
In the years afterward Beatrice wrote to her “Georgie” on a regular basis, putting the letters in a desk drawer. Outwardly she was upbeat as usual but once wrote, “I cry from the back of my eyes.” She kept up with the things she and Patton used to love—sailing, shooting, even foxhunting, which had always frightened her. “What I live from now on is extra,” she said, “and if I get hurt it won’t hurt anyone else.”15
In 1953, on a crisp autumn day while riding in a foxhunt near her Massachusetts estate Green Meadows, Beatrice suddenly tumbled from her horse as the result of an aneurysm and died. She was cremated, at her wish, in order to be buried in the Luxembourg cemetery with her husband.
The army, however, did not allow civilians to be buried in its overseas military cemeteries, and so Beatrice’s ashes were placed beneath a tree at Green Meadows until, several years later, son George,c Ruth Ellen, and her sixteen-year-old son around sundown visited the Luxembourg gravesite. Just as it became dark, Ruth Ellen removed a large brown envelope from her purse “and poured a stream of crumbly ashes into her palm.” These she sifted through her fingers onto the gras
s on Patton’s grave, recalling the verse from 2 Samuel that says: “In their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.”16
FOLLOWING THE JAPANESE SURRENDER ceremony aboard the battleship Missouri, Douglas MacArthur set up headquarters on the top floor of the six-story Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance building, which was one of the few structures in Tokyo still standing—likely because of its close proximity to the Royal Palace that MacArthur had forbidden the air force to bomb. From its windows he could look into the palace gardens, where Tokyo Rose had promised MacArthur would one day be hanged.
The task that lay before him was both Herculean and Solomonic. MacArthur would have absolute authority over a nation of 80 million souls whose cities, like Germany’s, had been bombed to oblivion, and whose people were desperate and starving. But unlike Germany, Japan’s people had “more nearly a feudal society,” MacArthur said, “of the type discarded by Western nations four centuries ago”—a kind of theocracy in which the emperor was a divine being whose word was law. “There was no such thing as civil rights,” he said. “There were not even human rights.”17 Anything could be taken away at any time—including your life.
After the war, the Japanese were jaded, apathetic, and tired. Not only was there no will to fight, there was no will to work. From one end of the island chain to the other, the country stagnated. The people were suffering from “national shell-shock,” as General Kenney put it. “No one smiled. The people were not hostile to the occupying forces, they were just sullen. You got the idea that the people were waiting for something, but that they did not know what they were waiting for.”18