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

Postscript





George Patton once stated that he wished to be buried with his men, and so he is. Many of the five thousand interred at the American Military Cemetery just outside Luxembourg City are Third Army soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton’s burial site became such a popular postwar attraction that the hordes of visitors made it impossible for grass to grow around his grave or those nearby. So on March 19, 1947, his body was exhumed and moved to the location where it now rests, in a solitary spot apart from the long rows of white crosses, at the very front of the cemetery. The location suggests that Patton is still leading his men.

* * *

A devastated Beatrice Patton flew home to America the day after her husband’s funeral. It was Christmas, but she had given herself over to grief and mourning. There would be no holiday for her.

In their thirty-five years together, she and George Patton endured countless separations as he waged war in Mexico, Africa, France, and Germany. In the letters he wrote during these long times away from her, she came to know his innermost thoughts and his deep love. George Patton had dyslexia, which makes spelling, reading, and writing a chore, so the very act of writing was as much a symbol of his love as the words themselves.

But there would be no more letters from George Patton. As his body was lowered into the cold, wet ground of Luxembourg, Beatrice Patton’s grief was almost overwhelming.



Patton’s grave

Her beloved Georgie was no more.

Beatrice Patton never remarried. Her grandson James Patton Totten, speaking in 2008, admitted that she hired several private detectives to look into her husband’s death. Each of these investigations was unsuccessful in finding any hard evidence of an assassination.

A lifelong equestrienne, Beatrice suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm while galloping across a field outside Hamilton, Massachusetts, eight years after her husband’s death. Though Mrs. Patton immediately fell from the horse, she was dead before hitting the ground. As noted earlier, she had long made it clear that she wished to be buried with her husband. When the U.S. Army refused to allow her to be interred at the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, her children smuggled her ashes to Europe and sprinkled them atop the grave of George Patton.

* * *

The hospital where Patton died remained a U.S. Army installation until July 1, 2013. At that time, the 130th Station Hospital, or Nachrichten Kaserne as it later became known, was closed and handed over to the German government. With the exception of a small ceremonial plaque that was hung outside the door, Room 110 was not treated with any fanfare after Patton’s death, and was long used as a radiology lab. In the course of researching this book, a visit was paid to the facility to see this very special room. The place where Patton died was quite ordinary. Coincidentally, this visit occurred just hours before the decommissioning, making Martin Dugard the last American visitor to enter Patton’s hospital room before it was handed over to the Germans.

* * *

PFC Horace Woodring, driver of Patton’s Cadillac at the time of the accident, returned home to Kentucky after the war. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower took the time to assure him personally that he had not been at fault in the auto accident that paralyzed the general. Nevertheless, Woodring was devastated by Patton’s death. “I felt like a kid who had lost his father,” he later remembered, “because that’s how I felt about him. I had every admiration in the world for the man. I just thought he was the greatest.” When Woodring’s wife gave birth to a son, they gave him the middle name of Patton. Woodring and his family moved to Michigan in 1963, where he sold cars and rode snowmobiles to indulge his penchant for speed. Woodring died of heart disease in a Detroit hospital in November 2003. He was seventy-seven years old. Until the day he died, Woodring asserted that the accident that killed Patton was inexplicable.

* * *

The hero of the Battle of Fort Driant, Pvt. Robert W. Holmlund, who won the Distinguished Service Cross, was promoted posthumously to staff sergeant. Strangely, he has become a historical mystery. Staff Sergeant Holmlund is not listed as being buried in any of the American military cemeteries in Europe; nor is he buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

* * *

Capt. Jack Gerrie was sent home to Wisconsin for a thirty-day leave after the battle for Fort Driant. On his way back into Europe, he passed through a depot, to await transportation to his unit. While there, on December 29, 1944, Gerrie was killed when a captured German gun he was examining fired into his head.

* * *

German generals Ernst Maisel and Wilhelm Emanuel Burgdorf, who came to Erwin Rommel’s home bearing the field marshal’s fatal suicide pill, lived two very different lives after that day. Maisel was promoted to lieutenant general (Generalleutnant) in the waning days of the war and placed in command of the Sixty-Eighth Infantry Division. He was captured by American forces on May 7, 1945, released two years later, and lived out his days in the mountains of German Bavaria, where he died on December 16, 1978, at the age of eighty-two.

Burgdorf was long dead by then. In fact, he had committed suicide five days before Maisel was taken prisoner. Called to Adolf Hitler’s Berlin bunker during the final days of the war, Burgdorf witnessed the Führer’s signing of his last will and testament. Three days later, Burgdorf shot himself in the head rather than be captured by Soviet troops.

* * *

Just prior to Burgdorf’s suicide, fellow bunker residents Joseph and Magda Goebbels chose a most grisly death. On May 1, 1945, Magda Goebbels medicated her six children with a drink containing morphine. She then cracked a vial of cyanide into their mouths as they slept, killing them one by one. She and her husband later went up out of the bunker, where she bit into a cyanide pill and Joseph Goebbels fired a bullet into the back of her head. Goebbels then killed himself with a pill and a simultaneous gunshot.

The other elite members of the Nazi Party died in similar fashion. SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who was captured by the British three weeks after fleeing Berlin, killed himself in prison with a hidden cyanide pill. Hermann Goering, the corpulent head of the Luftwaffe, was arrested by American troops on May 6, 1945. On September 30, 1946, he was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. But Goering, who openly laughed and joked during the Nuremberg Trials, and declared that gruesome films showing Nazi concentration camp atrocities were faked, did not want to die a public death. With the unwitting help of Herbert Lee Stivers, a nineteen-year-old American army guard, a cyanide ampoule was smuggled into Goering’s cell and he committed suicide. A local German girl who had caught Stivers’s eye while he was off duty convinced him to carry “medicine” to Goering hidden inside a pen. Afterward, Stivers never saw the girl again. “I guess she used me,” he lamented when Stivers finally admitted what had happened. He did so in 2005, sixty years after the fact, explaining that he was still bothered by a guilty conscience.

Goering’s body was put on public display in Nuremberg before being cremated.

* * *

Manfred Rommel, son of Erwin Rommel, returned to his post as a Luftwaffe antiaircraft gunner shortly after his father’s forced suicide. He soon deserted and surrendered to French forces. After his release from captivity, he went to college and then entered politics, where he became mayor of Stuttgart and a leading liberal voice in postwar Germany. Magnanimous and much admired, he refused to run for national office, despite the widespread belief that he could have risen to chancellor. Rommel formed friendships with the sons of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and George S. Patton. He died on November 7, 2013, at the age of eighty-four.

* * *

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower returned home a hero. He did not believe that a military officer should interest himself in politics. So despite widespread popular support for an Eisenhower presidential candidacy in 1948, he accepted a position as head of Columbia University, in New York City, rather than running for office. However, he soon changed his mind. He was elected president of the United States in 1952 and 1956, serving two terms. When doctors told him that his chain-smoking was a hazard to his health, Eisenhower quit the four-pack-a-day habit cold turkey. He died of heart failure on March 28, 1969. He was seventy-eight years old.

* * *

Kay Summersby, Ike’s Irish wartime consort, did not share in Eisenhower’s success. She married and soon divorced, then became engaged for a short time to a man who mistakenly thought she was wealthy. After that, she wrote two tell-all books about her relationship with Eisenhower. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the two continued to meet secretly. Kay Summersby died of liver cancer in 1975, at her home in Southampton, New York.

* * *

The life of Jean Gordon, Patton’s wartime consort, ended on an even more tragic note. Shortly after the general’s death, she and Beatrice Patton had a heated meeting in New York. The precise words that passed between them are unknown. Jean Gordon committed suicide on January 8, 1946, by gassing herself in a friend’s apartment. No suicide note was entered into evidence by police. However, Patton family legend states that a message found at the scene read, “I will be with Uncle Georgie in heaven, and will have him all to myself before Beatrice arrives.”

* * *

Omar Bradley, the general with whom Patton sparred so often during the war, went on to serve for almost forty years in the army, rising to the rank of five-star general and serving as army chief of staff. He oversaw American forces in the Korean War, and later consulted with President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. He also served as a consultant on the movie Patton, which won the actor George C. Scott an Academy Award for his portrayal of the general. Bradley lived to be eighty-eight.

* * *

Ironically, Winston Churchill enjoyed an even longer life. Though overweight, a heavy drinker, and rarely seen without a cigar, Britain’s wartime prime minister lived to be ninety. He died on January 24, 1965, seventy years to the day after his father passed. Potsdam was the last great moment of World War II for Churchill. He flew home from Potsdam on July 25. The next day, he learned that he’d lost the general election in a landslide to Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who was voted in by an electorate weary of all individuals associated with the grueling war effort. The election results were a shock to Churchill’s Conservative Party, who thought his wartime exploits made him a shoo-in, but polls later show that the British people believed Labour was better poised to rebuild the nation. The tables were turned in 1951, when Churchill was once again elected prime minister. He served from 1951 to 1955, whereupon he resigned, citing a series of strokes and his advanced age of eighty. In his later life, Churchill spoke candidly about the state of the world. His funeral was the largest such state ceremony in world history until that time, with delegates from 112 nations coming to pay their respects. As his casket was borne down the Thames aboard a barge, the dock cranes lining the waterway lowered their jibs in salute. He is buried in the Churchill family plot at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon, next to his wife, Clementine. They were married for fifty-six years.

* * *

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for thirty years, dying at the age of seventy-four from a stroke and complications of heart disease brought on by years of heavy smoking. Ironically, his life might have been lengthened if doctors had reached him more quickly after his stroke, but Stalin’s standing orders that his guards never enter his room worked against him. Though they thought it odd that he did not come down for breakfast or lunch on March 1, 1953, his guards refused to disobey his orders, thus delaying medical assistance. He died four days later. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, but a subsequent examination of the body suggests that Stalin may have been murdered after someone slipped an odorless and tasteless rat poison named warfarin into his wine the evening before he collapsed. His body was embalmed, then placed in a mausoleum next to that of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, where it was on public display in Moscow’s Red Square until October 31, 1961. Stalin’s remains were then removed and interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. Lenin’s body is still on display.

* * *

Soviet marshal Georgy Zhukov, the Russian general who won the Battle of Berlin and later shared a review stand with George Patton, lived a tempestuous life after the war. Long viewed as a political threat by Joseph Stalin, he was stripped of his job as commander of Soviet ground forces in early 1946 and reassigned to a post far from Moscow, in Odessa. He was recalled to Moscow in 1953, and Stalin’s death one month later allowed Zhukov once again to become a political force. Zhukov oversaw the arrest and execution of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, after which he became a close adviser to the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev. On his sixtieth birthday, in 1964, Zhukov was named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He died of a stroke in 1974; his ashes are interred in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

* * *

Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, moved to New York after her husband’s death, where she lived for a time in suites at the Park Sheraton hotel while pursuing several prominent causes. She was one of the first delegates to the United Nations, where she oversaw the passing of a document known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which promises basic freedoms to men and women throughout the world. Russia, quite notably, abstained from voting in its favor, due to a clause known as Article Thirteen, which asserts people’s right to travel freely from one country to another. Eleanor traveled widely, and gave more than one hundred lectures each year. She died on November 7, 1962, from a combination of aplastic anemia and bone marrow tuberculosis. She was seventy-eight. Eleanor Roosevelt was laid to rest next to FDR at their family home in Hyde Park, New York.

* * *

His time at the helm of the OSS marked the peak of Wild Bill Donovan’s lifetime of adventure. He played a significant role in the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created by the National Security Act of 1947. However, President Truman was reluctant to allow him to lead the organization. Donovan returned to his law practice in New York, but once again left the law, in 1953, to assume the role of U.S. ambassador to Thailand, at the behest of President Dwight Eisenhower. Donovan’s mental faculties soon began to slip, and he spent the last years of his life in a state of dementia. He died on February 8, 1959, at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington at the age of seventy-six. Wild Bill Donovan is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

* * *

Gen. George Marshall, the man who served as army chief of staff during the war, died in Washington, DC, in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight. In his lifetime, he served as general of the army (the most senior soldier in the U.S. Army), secretary of state, and secretary of defense; was Time magazine’s Man of the Year; and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. His most enduring legacy was the creation of the Marshall Plan, which allowed Europe to rebuild itself after World War II with financial assistance from the United States. President Harry Truman once said that Marshall was the greatest man of his generation.

* * *

Bernard Law Montgomery was named First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein after the war, a title referring to his epic defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the Egyptian desert. Montgomery served as Britain’s chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 to 1948, and then held a number of other military positions until his retirement from the army in 1958, at the age of seventy-one. Outspoken as ever, he soon involved himself in a number of political issues, including supporting apartheid in South Africa, criticizing the 1967 legalization of homosexuality in Britain as “a charter for buggery,” and publicly ridiculing American military policy in Vietnam. Montgomery continued his habit of second-guessing his superior officers from the Second World War, particularly Eisenhower, whom he derided in his eponymous 1958 memoir. Montgomery died in 1976, at age eighty-eight. He is buried in the Holy Cross churchyard in the southern English city of Binsted.

* * *

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini preceded Adolf Hitler in death by just two days. Pro-Communist partisans captured him and his mistress near Lake Como, in the mountains of northern Italy, on April 27, 1945, as the two were attempting to flee to Switzerland. They were held overnight, then driven to a remote location and killed by a firing squad. Mussolini, at his request, was shot in the chest instead of the face. The first bullet did not kill him, so a second shot was fired at point-blank range. Their bodies were then driven into the city of Milan, where they were publicly displayed hanging upside down on meat hooks. The angry citizens of Milan then spat on, kicked, and threw rocks at the corpses. Adolf Hitler learned of Mussolini’s fate while in his Berlin bunker; the news gave him further incentive to have his corpse burned.

* * *

Miklós Horthy Jr., the target of SS commando Otto Skorzeny’s Operation Mickey Mouse, spent the remainder of World War II as a German prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp. He was freed by Allied forces on May 5, 1945. Due to the Russian invasion of his Hungarian homeland, he spent the rest of his life in exile in Portugal with his father, Miklós Horthy, the longtime Hungarian regent.

* * *

Otto Skorzeny was acquitted of war crimes at the 1947 Dachau Trials. While he was being held to determine if further charges could be filed, three former SS officers dressed as American MPs successfully helped him escape. For a time, he devoted himself to helping other former SS members escape from Germany. Skorzeny later worked with espionage agencies around the world in a number of clandestine activities. Ironically, among them was Mossad, the intelligence agency for the Jewish state of Israel. Skorzeny died of cancer in July 1975, at the age of sixty-seven.

* * *

Maj. Hal McCown, who was the prisoner of Joachim Peiper at La Gleize, remained in the army until 1972. He went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam, and retired as a major general. McCown died in 1999. He is among a number of American junior officers during the Second World War who went on to lead the military during the Vietnam War years. Another was Lt. Col. Creighton “Abe” Abrams, who had a long and successful military career. He became a four-star general and chief of staff of the army during the Vietnam War. All three of his sons became general officers, and his three daughters all married military men. Abrams’s lifelong fondness for cigars finally caught up with him in the 1970s, and he died of complications of lung cancer in 1974. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to his wife of thirty-eight years, Julia.

Other key Bastogne figures went on to long and successful army careers, and formed the backbone of the officer corps during the Vietnam War. Lt. Col. Harry Kinnard, who suggested that Gen. Tony McAuliffe formally reply “Nuts” to the German surrender order, commanded the First Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, which fought in the legendary Battle of Ia Drang. This was immortalized in the book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young and the movie by the same name. Kinnard lived until 2009, when he passed away at the age of ninety-three. Maj. William Desobry, who so famously held the line in Noville, remained a German prisoner of war until the spring of 1945. He later rose to lieutenant general, and stayed in the army until 1975. He passed away in 1996. A street in Noville now bears his name. The Rue du Général Desobry is a pivotal crossroads on the way into Bastogne.

* * *

Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the hero of Bastogne, would never shake his connection with the “Nuts” response, which has gone down in history as one of warfare’s great quotations. His military career continued until 1956, when he left the service and went on to a number of high-ranking civilian occupations. He died in 1975 at the age of seventy-seven. Before dying, he recounted his weariness about his claim to fame: “One evening a dear old Southern lady invited me to dinner. I had a delightful time talking to her and her charming guests. I was pleased because no mention was made the entire evening of the ‘nuts’ incident. As I prepared to depart and thanked my hostess for an enjoyable evening, she replied, ‘Thank you and good night, General McNut.’”

* * *

George Patton’s oldest daughter, Beatrice, remained married to John Waters until her death on October 24, 1952. She gave birth to two sons, John and George Patton. Her sister, Ruth Ellen, married a career army officer, James Totten, who rose through the ranks to become a major general. They had two sons, Michael and James, both of whom continued the family lineage of service in the army. In her memoir, The Button Box: A Daughter’s Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton, Ruth Ellen wrote that at the moment of her father’s death, she woke up and saw him standing at the foot of her bed in full uniform. “I sat up in bed—I could see him plainly. When he saw I was looking at him he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.” In the morning, she called her sister, Beatrice, who reported a similar occurrence. “She said she had been fast asleep when the phone by her bed rang. She picked it up and there was a lot of static, as if it were an overseas call, and she heard Georgie’s voice ask, ‘Little Bee, are you alright?’” But when young Beatrice Patton called the overseas operator, she was told that there had been no call.

Gen. George Patton’s only son, George Patton IV, got the news at West Point, where he was midway through his senior year. His father was buried on his twenty-second birthday. George Junior was unable to leave West Point for the funeral. After his commissioning, he followed in his father’s footsteps, and rose to the rank of major general. He served in the Korean War and also did several tours in the Vietnam War. Like his father, he spoke fluent French and was passionate about history. During his lifetime, Patton legally changed his name to avoid any confusion between him and his father, who had gone by George S. Patton Jr. even though his actual name was George S. Patton III. The younger Patton dropped the Roman numeral four so that he was simply George Patton. He died in 2004, at the age of eighty. General Patton and his wife, Joanne, had five children, among them their oldest son, George Patton V.