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

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IG FARBEN BUILDING

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY

SEPTEMBER 28, 1945

4:30 P.M.

The man with eighty-five days to live is about to be fired.

George S. Patton has been summoned, with prejudice, to meet with his boss Dwight Eisenhower. The same foul autumn rains that stymied Patton one year ago in Metz now make flying impossible, so Patton has driven seven and a half hours to the massive industrial office complex that now serves as Ike’s headquarters. Patton spent the journey through the bombed-out ruins of Germany preparing a plan of attack, thinking of the words he must speak to save his career once again. “The ride reminded me of a similar one,” he will write in his diary tonight, that “I took from Knutsford to London … when I was strongly under the impression I was going to be relieved and sent home—if not tried.”

The IG Farben Building rises palatial and scrubbed in the midst of a decimated Frankfurt am Main. Olive-drab American army bulldozers prowl the streets all day long, pushing rubble to the side of roads. The local Germans eke out a living as best they can, collecting debris to make fires for cooking and warmth, sleeping each night in whatever shelter they can find. “Frankfurt resembles a city,” one visitor will write of the destruction, “not so much as a pile of bones and smashed skulls resembles a prized steer.”

But Ike’s headquarters is an island of luxury in this decimation, a beige fortress where the curving stairwells are made of marble, elaborate fountains burble soothingly, and senior American officers can enjoy a meal of venison, ice cream, and red wine—all served by German servants. Visitors need a special pass just to get in the door. When they do, they find the hallways filled with clerks and junior officers who spend their days pushing paper and counting down the hours until they can rotate stateside. The more quick-witted Germans label Eisenhower’s headquarters “G.I. Farben Haus.”

This same grand complex was also the site where the cyanide-based Zyklon B gas, which was used to exterminate millions in the Nazi death camps, was developed. For that reason, the more cynical residents of this city call the structure Das Pharis?er Ghetto, the “Ghetto of the Pharisees.”1

Fresh-cut roses are delivered each day to Capt. Kay Summersby and other women serving in U.S. military offices. Summersby’s secretarial desk sits just outside Eisenhower’s vast office. She wears red lipstick, and her auburn hair is pinned back to reveal her high forehead. Summersby’s brown Women’s Army Corps uniform is tailored to accentuate her figure. Despite the relaxed working environment, she keeps her jacket on at all times, and her tie firmly knotted. Eisenhower’s headquarters is a “luxurious” space, she will write, adding that “several tennis courts could have fitted into Ike’s office.”

Summersby hears the footfalls of George Patton’s trademark riding boots coming down the hallway, and snaps to attention as General Patton enters the office for the long-delayed meeting. Soon she hears Eisenhower raising his voice loud enough to be heard through the thick wooden door. This is not typical behavior for Ike, and Summersby is shocked. The meeting between Patton and Eisenhower borders on the volcanic.

The relationship between Summersby and Eisenhower is far more congenial. They have been together for three years now and are closer than ever. Summersby could have returned to her home in England, but she does not want to leave Eisenhower. However, in just a month, Ike is slated to return to America, where he will replace George C. Marshall as army chief of staff.

Summersby wants to go with him.

She isn’t demanding that Eisenhower leave Mamie, his wife of almost thirty years. She would be content to serve as a member of his staff at the Pentagon. After all this time as part of what Eisenhower calls his “immediate wartime family,” she finds the thought of returning home alone to England devastating.

Their relationship is an open secret. It was quietly condoned during time of war, and even now, Summersby stays in a special house reserved for female officers, which Eisenhower visits most nights for supper and a few rubbers of bridge. Such an esteemed presence at the dinner table can hardly be kept under wraps. But now, unbeknownst to Summersby, great effort is being taken to make sure that the relationship comes to an end.

Army censors have already doctored the official photograph taken at the German surrender ceremony on May 7. The signing took place in a redbrick schoolhouse in Reims, France. In the original photograph, Summersby stands just behind a grinning Eisenhower, who holds up the two pens used to sign the surrender documents. Ike is making a V, for “Victory,” with the pens.



General Eisenhower at the German military surrender

In the censored version of the photograph, Eisenhower is still all smiles, but Kay Summersby’s image has vanished. No other person was edited out of the picture.

The doctored photograph is just the first sign that the affair is doomed. Ike already knows it. Gen. George Marshall has threatened to expose Eisenhower if he requests a divorce.2 Unbeknownst to Summersby, her name will not be on the list of those approved to travel home with Ike. No other member of his staff will be left behind.

* * *

George Patton thinks Eisenhower is “very nasty and showoffish” when Kay Summersby is around. But the shouts that Summersby hears coming from Eisenhower’s office are hardly for her benefit. Patton tries to appear calm, but he squirms in his seat as the evidence against him is presented. He has made a mess of things with the media yet again, going on the record as stating that being a member of the Nazi Party is no different from being a member of the Republican or Democratic Party. “To get things done in Bavaria, after the complete disorganization and disruption of four years of war, we had to compromise with the devil a little. We had no alternative but to turn to the people who knew what to do and how to do it,” he told a small gathering of the press one recent morning in his office, defending his use of former Nazi officials in the rebuilding of Germany.

With war at an end, the journalists who remain in Europe are hungry for any story they can find. Reporters from the New York Times, Chicago Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune were overheard plotting to “get” Patton by tripping him up with loaded questions that would lead him to make the same sort of ill-advised comments to the press that he made at Knutsford.3 The Philadelphia Bulletin saw nothing newsworthy in Patton’s quote, and did not run the story. And the piece was originally buried on the back pages of the Chicago paper. Yet the New York Times, Stars and Stripes, and the New York Herald Tribune made much of Patton’s remarks. Eisenhower was irate when he received word, erupting in what Kay Summersby will later describe as “the granddaddy of all tempers. General Patton had made his last and final mistake.”

Now Patton must explain to Eisenhower how he could have been so careless with his words.

After past missteps, Patton appeared contrite in Eisenhower’s presence. He humbled himself to save his career. But Patton does not do that now. He is dressed in a simple uniform without his pistols. He believes that supplication will be unnecessary. Some well-chosen flattery and reminders of their longtime friendship should be enough to get Patton out of this jam with Ike.

But the truth is Patton no longer has a career worth saving. He is restless and bored. His behavior borders on depressive some days, with the best remedy being a hunting expedition or time on horseback.

Patton desperately misses the war. He longs to arm the Germans and lead them against the Russians. It is a war that should have begun even before Berlin fell, Patton believes. He’s not afraid to stand up to the Russians, as he proved at a September 7 parade in Berlin, to celebrate the end of the war against Japan. More than five thousand American, Russian, French, and British soldiers stood in formation on the bright afternoon, on the broad Unter den Linden Boulevard, near the partially demolished columns of the landmark Brandenburg Gate. Patton stood on the review stand alongside the Russian general Georgy Zhukov, both men squinting in the strong sunlight as the troops marched past in review.

It is Zhukov who put the greatest pressure on Dwight Eisenhower to ensure that Patton hand over all German POWs to the Russians—particularly those elite SS units whom the Russians believe Patton is hiding from them. Eisenhower has already aligned himself with Zhukov, slighting Patton, Montgomery, and every other American and British general by stating in June that “The war in Europe has been won and to no man do the United Nations owe a greater debt than to Marshal Zhukov.”

The Russian general is used to such supplicant behavior. During the war, he ordered his troops to shoot any of their comrades who ran from the Germans, and any Russian village that was thought to have collaborated with the Nazis was burned to the ground. Zhukov is so feared that other Russian generals have been known to tremble in his presence.

Patton does not tremble.

“He was in full dress uniform much like comic opera and covered in medals,” Patton later wrote to Beatrice of Zhukov. “He is short, rather fat and has a prehensile chin like an ape but good blue eyes.”

As Russian tanks rolled past the reviewing stand, Patton noticed Zhukov gloating over the new Soviet IS-3 model tank.4 Looking up at his American counterpart, the Russian general delivered a taunt: “My dear General Patton,” he crowed. “You see that tank? It carries a cannon which can throw a shell seven miles.”



Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov with General Eisenhower

Patton’s face remained impassive, his tone calm and sure. “Indeed? Well, my dear Marshal Zhukov, let me tell you this: if any of my gunners started firing at your people before they had closed to less than seven hundred yards, I’d have them court-martialed for cowardice.”

Patton’s aide Maj. Van S. Merle-Smith will later state that he had never before seen “a Russian commander stunned into silence.”

Yet in his publicly stated belief that the Russians are America’s new enemy, and should be treated as such, Patton stands alone. Indeed, American troops are either going home or being sent to the Pacific to fight the Japanese, leaving fewer and fewer GIs to fight “the Mongols,” as Patton calls the Russians—not that the Truman administration has any intention of doing such a thing.

Among those departing is Sgt. John Mims, Patton’s driver for the last four years. The two have traveled thousands of miles together, and Mims’s caution at the wheel has kept Patton from being injured, despite navigating battlefields and avoiding artillery shells. “You have been the driver of my official car since 1940,” Patton writes in a farewell commendation to Mims. “During that time, you have safely driven me in many parts of the world, under all conditions of dust and snow and ice and mud, of enemy fire and attack by enemy aircraft. At no time during these years of danger and difficulty have you so much as bumped a fender.”

Another driver will soon be assigned to the general, but Mims can never truly be replaced, and Patton is so upset about his leaving that he originally fought to keep him in Europe. Only when he was reminded that Mims has a young wife at home did Patton relent and sign the travel orders.

But even more disturbing to Patton is that all his peers are going home to bigger and better jobs. While Patton spends his days reluctantly getting rid of the Nazi presence in Bavaria, Ike will soon be army chief of staff, Gen. Omar Bradley is already in Washington heading up the new Veterans Administration, and, of course, Gen. Courtney Hodges is off to fight in the Pacific.

It seems there is no place for George Patton in a peacetime army. The one job he really wanted, that of commandant of the War College at the Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, has been given away to Gen. Leonard T. Gerow, a close friend of Eisenhower’s who helped plan and lead the D-day invasion.

As their turbulent meeting stretches on, Dwight Eisenhower finally calms down a bit and gets to the main point: shockingly, his plan is to take away the Third Army from George S. Patton.

With this decision, Eisenhower can effectively terminate the press furor over Patton’s remarks and place someone in charge of the Third Army who will be less sympathetic to the Nazis.

“Your greatest fault,” Eisenhower tells Patton, “is your audacity.”

The words are meant to sting, but both men know that Patton considers audacity his greatest asset.

Then the meeting takes another turn. Instead of simply relieving Patton of active command, Eisenhower suggests instead that Patton assume control of the Fifteenth Army.

It is a face-saving solution, meant to ensure that Patton does not return to America in disgrace. Yet to a fighting man such as Patton, the notion is absurd. The Fifteenth is a paper army, tasked with the job of writing the war’s history.

But Patton has no choice. As he walks out of Eisenhower’s office, he finds the same reporters who published the stories leading to his downfall now waiting in the corridor for news of his fate.

Eisenhower tells them nothing. Patton also says nothing. He would normally have stayed and had dinner and drinks with Ike; instead, Patton rushes to the train station across from the IG Farben Building to catch a 7:00 p.m. train back to Bavaria.

The humiliation slowly sinks in: Patton’s beloved Third Army has been wrenched from his grasp. One of the greatest fighting forces in the history of war will now be commanded by another man. Under Patton’s leadership, that spectacular assemblage of men, tanks, and big guns led the liberation of France, rescued Bastogne, crossed the Rhine, and would have freed all of Eastern Europe if Eisenhower had not halted Patton’s advance.

“I’ve obeyed orders,” Patton tells an aide over dinner on the long nighttime train ride. “I think that I’d like to resign from the Army so that I could go home and say what I have to say.”

But powerful people do not want this to happen. George Patton knows too much—and saying what he knows would be a disaster.

He must be silenced.