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

“Things going very badly at Fort Driant,” George Patton writes in his journal. It is nighttime in his headquarters. The Third Army lost 110 men in the first day of fighting, and the toll continues to rise. He has spent the evening pacing, fretting, and resisting the urge to smoke a cigar, a habit he is forever trying to quit. “We may have to abandon the attack, because it is not worth the cost. I was over optimistic.”

Days have passed since PFC Robert Holmlund dropped that Bangalore down into the German barracks. The battle for Driant has become a bloody stalemate. It is quiet far behind the lines at Patton’s chateau in the small town of étain, but he can envision the chaos at Driant. Reports from the battlefield have been grim, with casualties mounting and no forward progress being made.

Easy can go nowhere. The men are dazed and drained by more than three days without sleep, food, or water. The Germans are so well hidden, and have zeroed in on the American positions so accurately, that any attempt to reinforce or rescue Easy is tantamount to a suicide mission. The number of dead in the unit is more than thirty—and rising by the hour. But enemy fire is so intense that no bodies can be removed.

In the words of one fellow general, Patton paces like a “caged tiger.” He is in no mood to lose a battle, particularly when Montgomery and the British have been given the green light (and the gasoline) to attack deep into Germany.

Patton knows his reputation could be damaged by any defeat. He is also aware that the nature of warfare is that many men will lose their lives for the sake of a common objective. Capturing Fort Driant, the lone obstacle standing between Patton’s army and the invasion of the German homeland, is such an objective. So it is that Patton orders his old friend Gen. Walton Walker, who serves as commander of the Third Army’s Twentieth Corps, to press the attack on Driant. Patton tells the burly Texan that the battle must be won “even if it takes every man.”

* * *

Capt. Jack Gerrie hasn’t slept in two days. He has just spent another endless night atop Fort Driant, and now presses his body flat against the curve of a shell crater as the constant rip of the German Bone Saw cuts through the morning air.

It seems impossible to escape that lightning-fast death spray. And Captain Gerrie has had enough of it. With many of his men dead, Gerrie finds a piece of paper and prepares to scratch out a letter to none other than Gen. George S. Patton.

There isn’t a man on the battlefield who would consider Gerrie a coward. Just last month, he single-handedly changed the course of a battle by paddling a canoe across the Seine River under heavy fire to better observe enemy positions. Once ashore, he shot the first German he encountered, did his reconnaissance while under further enemy fire, and then, staying underwater as much as possible, swam the two hundred yards back across the river to direct the U.S. attack.

And one week ago, Gerrie and his men of Company G were with Easy Company on that first ill-fated probe into Driant. He was pinned down for four hours with MG-42 bullets whizzing over his head, waiting for night to fall before he and his men could retreat.

So Capt. Jack Gerrie knows something about hopelessness. But this is different. He and his men are now completely stuck. His faith in Patton’s attack has vanished. Meanwhile, the majority of the German soldiers concealed within Fort Driant are completely safe. They have taken almost no casualties. As a company commander, Gerrie feels it is his duty to get the word about this dire situation back to General Patton.

He thinks carefully about what he is about to write. There is so much to tell. Only those with him on the battlefield can truly appreciate the futility of the U.S. position.

Gerrie has fought in the tunnels and on the roof over the past two days. He knows firsthand that the passages below Driant are a warren of steel doors, rubble, and other obstacles that will take weeks to get through. The tunnels are three feet wide and seven feet tall, and the Germans can block the American advance simply by throwing up new barriers of debris along their lengths. The fighting is accomplished through machine-gun fire and lobbed grenades. The acoustics amplify even the slightest explosion, rendering each man deaf for the length of any firefight. And of course there’s the odor. Soldiers fighting inside the fort on both sides have no choice but to relieve themselves in the tunnels. The foul aroma mixes with the smell of gunpowder, the thick haze of TNT, and the many pools of blood to form a horrific bouquet that Captain Gerrie will never forget.

The rooftop is equally terrifying. The German snipers are selective, focusing their bullets on Americans carrying flamethrowers or Bangalore torpedoes. When Gerrie and Company G moved in to reinforce Baker Company two days ago, a column of tanks followed them. Those Shermans are now just rusting hulks. The Germans knocked them out, one after the other, with precision firing from a Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyer.

Now the American forces atop Fort Driant are in a state of chaos. The soldiers hide from snipers anywhere they can—in abandoned pillboxes, shell craters, empty bunkers. Any movement outside these shelters during daylight is pure folly. Many of these men are brand-new soldiers, rushed from a replacement depot and into the front lines. Most are no more than boys, eighteen to twenty years old, with no combat experience. They don’t understand military tactics, and until now they have never heard a shot fired in battle. These bewildered young men do the only things they can to stay alive: take cover, hug the earth, and pray.

But that only gets them through the day. The nights atop Fort Driant are far deadlier. The Germans sneak out of their holes in the ground and silently prowl the battlefield. The Wehrmacht soldiers have the advantage of surprise and know this terrain far better than their enemies do. They slaughter the men of the Third Army where they lie hiding, killing them one by one. The last words many of the Americans will ever hear are spoken in German, in the quiet whisper of an assassin.

Last night, Gerrie tried to turn the tables by venturing into the killing zone to locate the men of Company G and organize them into a cohesive fighting unit. But he could find only half his soldiers. The rest are either missing or dead; the rooftop is not a place for taking prisoners. The time has come for Jack Gerrie to dispel once and for all any delusions that this battle is winnable.

“The situation is critical,” Gerrie tells Patton in writing. He uses a pencil, trying to be legible even as the fatigue and the need to remain battle-ready muddy his thoughts. This letter will become, quite possibly, one of the most brutally honest communiqués ever posted from the field of battle. “A couple more barrages and a counterattack and we are sunk. We have no men, our equipment is shot, and we just can’t go on. The troops in Company G are done. They are just there, what’s left of them. Enemy has infiltrated and pinned what is here down. We cannot advance … We cannot delay any longer in replacement. We may be able to hold till dark but if anything happens this afternoon I can make no predictions.”

All around Gerrie’s shell hole, American corpses sprawl where they died, the bodies already fleeced for additional ammunition and explosives by the surviving GIs.

Gerrie continues his letter: “There is only one answer, the way things stand. First, either to withdraw and saturate [the fort] with heavy bombers or reinforce with a hell of a strong force. This strong force might hold here, but eventually they’ll get it by artillery fire. They have all these places zeroed in by artillery. The forts have 5–6 feet walls inside and 15-foot roofs of reinforced concrete. All our charges have been useless against this stuff. The few leaders are trying to keep left what is intact and that’s all they can do. The troops are just not sufficiently trained and what is more they have no training in even basic infantry. Everything is committed and we cannot follow attack plan. This is just a suggestion, but if we want this damned fort let’s get the stuff required to take it and then go.”

“Right now,” Gerrie concludes, aiming his words directly at Third Army commander George S. Patton, “you haven’t got it.”

* * *

Patton ignores Captain Gerrie’s letter—but only for a time. A week after the attack began, Patton admits that this battle cannot be won. He makes the decision to call off the assault on Fort Driant. On the night of October 12, American combat engineers booby-trap an escape route that will successfully take American troops back out of Fort Driant. They lay three tons of explosives, with fuses timed to go off at irregular intervals, in order to discourage the Germans from following for up to six hours.

Capt. Jack Gerrie survives the battle, and receives the Distinguished Service Cross a week later for his exploits crossing the Seine in August.

Thanks to his quick action with the Bangalore torpedo, PFC Robert W. Holmlund is also awarded the army’s second-highest award for valor—albeit posthumously.

After four days under fire, the men of Easy Company crawl out of their foxholes and make it back to the safety of the American lines. Of the 140 men who began the offensive, just 85 are physically unscathed.

The emotional toll of Easy’s harrowing time under fire, however, will not be counted for many years to come.

* * *

George S. Patton walks the battlefields of his youth, even as the time has come to admit defeat at Fort Driant. Just hours before the retreat is to begin, he visits the World War I battlefields at Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne, where he fought as a young tank commander. Now these rolling fields are peaceful and still. Death seems so far away. But it was here, on the muddy pastures of eastern France, that the final Allied offensive began in the summer of 1918. Almost thirty thousand Americans died in a hail of German machine-gun bullets and deadly mustard gas, but the battle (and the war) was ultimately won.

That the Battle of Meuse-Argonne was launched on September 26, almost twenty-six years to the day that Patton ordered elements of the Third Army to take Fort Driant, is an irony not lost on a man who is deeply steeped in history, and the history of war in particular. Now, instead of launching the final drive into Germany that would end the Second World War, he commands an army that is going nowhere.

That irony is not lost on Patton, either.

In all, he has just suffered nearly 800 casualties. Almost half the men who took part in the Battle of Fort Driant are dead or wounded. Some 187 men are classified as “missing,” a vague euphemism that defines a prisoner of war, a deserter, or a man whose body has been completely obliterated by an artillery shell.

Patton studies the topography of Meuse-Argonne alongside a visiting political dignitary, J. F. Byrnes of South Carolina. Byrnes is a close confidant of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, so Patton must rein in his tongue at a time when he would most like to lash out. The two men, however, have become quick friends, and walking the battlefield with him is a form of solace for Patton.

But beneath his external calm, Patton is furious. He seethes about the politics that saw his army halted in its tracks, and that then deprived him of the manpower and firepower he needed to win at Driant. Field Marshal Montgomery, his British rival who was the recipient of the scarce fuel and ammunition, chose to call off his assault on Germany at the height of the Driant assault. If Patton and his men had the supplies Montgomery is now hoarding, there would have been no defeat. By the end of the Driant attack, Patton’s big guns possess so little ammunition that they can fire only seven rounds per day. Patton believes his army is unbeatable if given enough gas, guns, and ammo.

Since arriving in France in early August, his army has killed more enemy, gained more ground, and lost fewer men than any command in Europe. The Third Army has been unstoppable, pressing the attack from one side of France to the other without losing a battle. But Patton has now failed miserably. The U.S. newsreel cameras that filmed Patton meeting with Eisenhower on the eve of the Metz offensive, sensing yet another great victory for America’s best general, must now report back to the American public that the great George Patton is not invincible after all.

On October 13, Patton moves his headquarters south to the French city of Nancy, where he finally follows Eisenhower’s order to stop his army and regroup. And so begins the “October Pause.” The lull in the action is a foolish move on the part of Eisenhower. The American army might be using the lull to reinforce, but so are the Germans. Unbeknownst to the Americans, Adolf Hitler is planning a major attack of his own.

And while the Führer has a deep hatred for the Americans, he also fears and respects George S. Patton, who has laid waste to so many German soldiers. These plans are designed to make sure that Old Blood and Guts is kept off the battlefield at all costs.