Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON, DC

JANUARY 20, 19451

11:55 A.M.

War is never far from the minds of Americans, even on a unique day in the nation’s history.

Hope that the Second World War would end by New Year’s Day has long been abandoned. Wounded soldiers, many on crutches, are among the seven thousand invited guests tromping through harsh weather to witness Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s swearing-in as president of the United States. This will be the first inaugural address during wartime since Abraham Lincoln spoke eighty years ago, in 1865. Also, this is the first inaugural to be held at the White House, in “the president’s backyard,” as the South Lawn is known. Finally, this is the first and only time an American president will be sworn in for a fourth term.

A light snow dusts the White House on this Saturday morning as spectators show their invitations to the security guards, then pass onto the wintry lawn. It stopped snowing three hours ago, but the skies are threatening yet another storm. No seats await, so the seven thousand guests remain standing—even those soldiers balancing on crutches. Thirteen of Roosevelt’s grandchildren pose for a newsreel cameraman atop the stairs of the South Portico, just a few steps from the podium. FDR’s chief of staff, Harry Hopkins, stands ground level at the bottom of the stairs, fastidiously overseeing the proceedings.



President Roosevelt speaking at his fourth inauguration ceremony

In addition to the veterans and dignitaries,2 a smattering of black faces can be seen in the crowd, reflecting Roosevelt’s hope for a more racially integrated nation. The diverse attendees stand side by side in the elements, awaiting the noon start. Wartime shortages of gasoline and lumber mean that the traditional post-inaugural parade will not happen, and the swearing-in ceremony promises to be brisk.

As the seconds tick down, the crowd presses closer and closer to the White House walls. Only a thin barrier of Secret Service agents and Washington, DC, police protect the curved outcropping known as the South Portico.

At the stroke of twelve, Rev. Angus Dun steps to the lectern to begin the proceedings. The Right Reverend is bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Washington. Dun is a pacifist, which makes him an odd selection to deliver the invocation in a time of all-out war. Even more intriguing, Dun is visibly handicapped. He balances on crutches, having lost one leg to polio. His hands and remaining foot are deformed. Perhaps it can be said that the clergy is the only profession that would embrace a handicapped individual in this day and age, yet the fact remains that Dun has prospered. And unlike President Roosevelt, who would never dare reveal his handicap, Angus Dun3 does not hide who he is. Thus it is fitting that just eighty-three days hence, at a time when such fears will be completely meaningless to FDR, Angus Dun will also lead prayers at the president’s funeral service.

* * *

Harry S. Truman, the sixty-year-old senator from Missouri, steps to the lectern to be sworn in as vice president. This is a time of austerity in America and around the world, so Truman and Roosevelt have chosen to forgo formal dress, preferring instead to wear dark business suits.

The new vice president places his left hand on a family Bible and raises his right to take the oath of office. He is a small, wiry man with an infectious grin, a man unafraid to cry in public but able to conceal his emotions when a situation turns competitive. Those unlucky enough to sit across the poker table from Harry S. Truman know this all too well. The S does not stand for anything; that single letter is his actual middle name. It was once Truman’s dream to attend West Point, but poor eyesight ended that ambition, making necessary the glasses he now wears. Truman, however, fought as an officer in the First World War. He aced the vision exam before his induction into the military by memorizing the eye chart.



President Harry S. Truman in 1945

Truman made the leap from a small-time county commissioner to Missouri senator just ten years ago. And at times the power in Washington still overwhelms him. Now is such a moment. He and FDR barely know each other, and the president clearly has no interest in asking Truman’s advice about how to run the country. It is also widely known that Truman did not campaign for this new job. In fact, he was initially reluctant to accept the vice president’s spot on the ticket when it was offered at the Democratic Convention last July. Foreseeing his own death, FDR had sought to replace his current vice president, Iowa native Henry Wallace, with someone less liberal and less inclined to align himself too closely with the labor movement. Roosevelt studied the dossiers of several candidates before settling on the pragmatic Truman.

But it was left to a friend and longtime political aide to convince Harry Truman to take the job. “I think, Senator, that you’re going to do it,” Edward D. McKim told him one night during the Chicago convention.

Truman got angry. “What makes you think I’m going to do it?”

McKim knows Truman well, and has a deep knowledge of how to push his good friend’s emotional buttons. “Because there’s a little ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, that would like to see her son become president of the United States.”

Truman teared up at the image of his mother. He stormed out of the room and refused to speak with McKim.

McKim was unfazed. He was well aware that fear played a part in Truman’s reluctance, for there was enormous pressure in accepting the Chicago nomination. “The consensus of opinion at the whole convention was that whoever was nominated for the vice presidency would eventually be president of the United States.”

And this does not mean waiting four more years until Roosevelt finishes his term. The president’s ill health is now a very poorly kept secret. Even as he swears the oath of office, Truman is quite certain that FDR will soon die—and that he will become the thirty-third president.

That is a notion, in the words of another Truman confidant, “that scares the very devil out of him.”

When the ballots were finally cast at the 1944 Democratic Convention, 1,176 delegates were asked to select the party’s new vice presidential candidate. Senator Harry Truman garnered 90 percent of the vote. Incumbent vice president Henry Wallace received just 9 percent.

Now, eleven weeks after the Roosevelt-Truman ticket’s landslide victory over Thomas Dewey’s Republican ticket, the crowd in Washington bears witness as Truman recites the oath. It is an awkward moment, for the man swearing him in is none other than Henry Wallace, the ultraliberal vice president he is now replacing.

Soon it is done. Harry Truman is the vice president of the United States.

Now Franklin Delano Roosevelt is helped to his feet and begins the shuffle of hips and swinging of leg braces that approximates his version of a walk. Supported by the steel bands around his legs and hips that are concealed beneath his dark blue business suit, Roosevelt stands before the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Stone. His left hand rests on the same Dutch-language Bible as was used in his first three inaugurals. Per FDR’s tradition, the Bible is open to 1 Corinthians 13, which teaches that of the three virtues, faith, hope, and love, the greatest trait mankind can display is love.

FDR has six children and is devoted to his thirteen grandchildren, who now watch him from just a few feet away. He also has a wife to whom he has remained married for forty years. In his own way, FDR loves them all.

But Franklin Roosevelt’s biggest love is reserved for the American people, whom he has led through twelve daunting years of deprivation and warfare. Roosevelt was first elected president just five weeks before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, but while Hitler has pursued a course of evil that is destroying his nation, Roosevelt has lifted America up from the lowest point in U.S. history to make it the most powerful nation on earth. He has done the people of America one final great favor by ensuring that his successor will not be an ideological extremist, but a man of the people who will do his best to heal the nation when the war inevitably ends. In this way, FDR does not repeat the mistake of Abraham Lincoln, who selected Andrew Johnson as his second vice president. Johnson’s bumbling presidency deepened the rifts and divisions after the Civil War ended and Lincoln was assassinated. As FDR well knows, some of the problems Johnson created exist to this day.4

The crowd pressing in on the South Lawn does not know upon which Bible verse Roosevelt’s hand rests. But they can hear his love in the timbre of his voice—so confident and assured, the father figure who will work tirelessly to lead the nation out of danger.

When they draw him, political cartoonists like to accentuate FDR’s strong, uplifted chin. This is how FDR actually appears as he recites the oath of office, a symbol of authority and optimism. And despite the heart disease that is slowly killing him, and the bone-thin legs that can barely support him, the president hardly looks ill. His posture is ramrod straight, his complexion a healthy pink, and his voice strong and clear.

The oath of office complete, FDR now turns to the crowd of seven thousand, and to millions of Americans listening on the radio, and prepares to deliver his final inaugural address.

* * *

Four thousand miles away, Gen. George S. Patton is not paying attention to the inaugural. Patton, who thinks highly of Roosevelt, and whom the president fondly addresses in person as the “Old Cavalryman” and “Our greatest fighting general—a pure joy,” is too busy directing the mop-up to be done on the battlefields of Luxembourg and Belgium, and enduring military politics.

Once again, Dwight Eisenhower is ignoring Patton. Having done the impossible, Patton is once again benched. Rather than having his top general lead the drive into Germany, Eisenhower is putting his strategic weight behind British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, who has demanded that he lead the decisive Allied push to the Rhine River. Montgomery cleverly planned for this next wave of combat by withholding most British troops from the Battle of the Bulge. While Patton’s Third Army was taking casualties and losing scores of tanks and halftracks, Montgomery was husbanding his resources. Now, fresh and unscathed, the British army and those American units under Montgomery’s command are the new tip of the Allied spear. Meanwhile, as the inaugural takes place in Washington, Patton and the Third Army are relegated to rooting out the last pockets of German resistance in the Bulge.

Knowing that being bitter and angry will not help his cause in the slightest, Patton tries to put a positive spin on the situation.

“Saw a lot of dead Germans today, frozen in funny attitudes,” he writes to his wife, Beatrice. “I got some good pictures, but did not have my color camera, which was a pity.

“They are definitely on the run, and have suffered more than we hoped.”

* * *

“Wild Bill” Donovan is furious.

He is in Chungking, China, in the last week of a monthlong around-the-world tour that began in Washington, DC, at the same time Bastogne was being liberated. As always, he is driven by personal, not ideological, motivations. It is his deep desire that his Office of Strategic Services (OSS) remain the world’s most elite clandestine organization. And as with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin, Donovan has no moral or ethical qualms about dealing with the Communists. He is positioning himself and the OSS for a prominent place in the postwar world. Nothing must stand in his way. And since it is clear to Donovan that Communists will be a powerful global presence once Germany and Japan surrender, he is more than happy to deal with them.

The Chinese Communist rebels want twenty million dollars to purchase arms for themselves to battle China’s Japanese occupiers. Donovan is not concerned that this angers China’s existing national government and its leader Chiang Kai-shek, which rightly fears that the Communists will someday attempt to take over the country. Nor is Donovan concerned that twenty million dollars is far more money than the Communists require for such a task.



“Wild Bill” Donovan during the Nuremberg Trials

What concerns Donovan is that his secret slush fund, provided for him by Congress and its War Agencies Appropriations Act of 1944, is just twenty-one million dollars. The terms of the money are that Donovan can spend it any way he likes, without regard to oversight or legality. That money is meant to cover all his far-flung spy operations, from France to Germany to Greece and even into the Vatican. Giving almost all his funds to the Chinese Communists would be ridiculous.

Donovan sends a counteroffer to the Communist Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung,5 hoping he will lower their price.

But today the Chinese are not the source of Donovan’s fury. His focus is on Europe. Donovan seethes about the capture of OSS operatives near Patton’s headquarters. The event happened in September, and began with a flirtation at the bar of Paris’s Ritz Hotel between American socialite Gertrude Sanford Legendre and a U.S. naval commander who doubled as one of Donovan’s spies. The pair quickly struck up a romantic friendship, then borrowed a rented Peugeot and left for a joyride to the front. Gertrude, an undercover OSS agent, wanted to pay a visit to the headquarters of her friend George S. Patton.

Soon they made the mistake of unwittingly crossing into Germany, where the Nazis promptly captured them. Legendre quickly became the subject of a massive propaganda blast by the Germans, portrayed as the first woman POW on the Western Front.

The story was picked up by the global media. Legendre had the good sense to tell her captors that she was nothing more than a Red Cross employee, but Donovan knows that it is just a matter of time before Gestapo6 interrogators break her. Legendre is privy to an enormous amount of top-secret information that could damage OSS clandestine operations. So while Donovan is concerned about their fates, he is equally outraged that his two spies allowed themselves to be captured in such ridiculous fashion. There will be no forgiveness if they return alive. Wild Bill Donovan is a man who believes in retribution and punishment. Those who run afoul of his agenda will pay a heavy price.

Patton, of course, had nothing to do with their capture. But Donovan is wary of the general, due to Patton’s notorious mistrust of the Russians. There is growing sentiment in Washington that Patton’s soaring popularity must be brought back down to earth. It was no secret in American G-2 (intelligence) circles or the military press that certain politicians and generals did not want George Patton to garner more laurels, a war correspondent who traveled with the Third Army will write after the war.

So Donovan keeps an eye on Patton as he waits for news about his missing spies, and secretly monitors the many situations around the globe that might somehow affect his postwar power.

Meanwhile, as Donovan is set to fly from Chungking to visit his British counterparts7 in Ceylon, the Chinese Communists come back with their counteroffer.

They want more money, not less.

Donovan says he will get back to them.

* * *

The president’s voice is strong and clear.

“We Americans of today, together with our allies, are passing through a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage, of our resolve, of our wisdom, of our essential democracy,” Roosevelt tells the nation.

As he looks out on the crowd standing below him on the South Lawn, he does not make eye contact with anyone in that sea of overcoats, scarves, and fedoras. Indeed, he does not make any attempt to recognize them at all. The president’s gaze remains fixed on a line of trees in the far distance. His thoughts are focused on the microphone before him, knowing that his pitch-perfect vocal delivery will have far more impact on the millions listening on the radio.

“Our constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy.

“And so today, in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons—at a fearful cost—and we shall profit by them.

“We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger.

“We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear. We can gain it only if we proceed with the understanding, the confidence, and the courage which flow from conviction.”

After a few final sentences invoking the blessing of the Almighty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt concludes his fourth inaugural address. It is just 558 words long—only George Washington’s second inaugural was shorter. Fifteen minutes after the ceremony began, it is over.

The crowd files back out of the White House grounds without commotion or celebration. They have achieved their goal: they have seen history made.

Harry Truman returns to his office in the Senate Building and begins cleaning out his desk.

And Franklin Delano Roosevelt turns his attention to an event even more pivotal than his inauguration: next week’s meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to determine the fate of Nazi Germany.

It will take place in a seaside Soviet resort town known as Yalta.