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

Sources





Researching this book was an adventure.

The journey began in the German town of Heidelberg, with a visit to the hospital room at Nachrichten Kaserne where Patton died. Shane Sharp, the base’s public affairs officer, arranged for Major Aaron Northup to conduct a brief tour of the facility, allowing our first hands-on glimpse into the places visited by George S. Patton in the final years of his life.

After that simple and somewhat poignant beginning, the research careened all over Europe and through parts of America, as Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and many of the other influential figures that grace these pages demanded their own levels of in-depth investigation. Some of this was a straightforward dig into various archives, museums, and official U.S. Army battlefield histories. In particular, the Central Intelligence Agency, the presidential libraries of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and the National Archives were of great assistance. This history is still close enough to the present time that two key figures in this book, Abe Baum and Manfred Rommel, passed away during the research process. As with many other figures in this book, their newspaper obituaries provided important background information. These are all standard sources for historical research. However, there were also several unexpected sources that helped bring the past to life.

Among them was the George S. Patton Memorial Museum at Chiriaco Summit in California’s Mojave Desert, with its vast and diverse amount of Patton memorabilia, including several tanks displayed in the desert surrounding the museum. Also, the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin offered a chilling look into Nazi Germany. It is built atop the former site of Gestapo headquarters, next to a small remaining section of the Berlin Wall. And, of course, the site of Patton’s grave in Luxembourg was powerful in its elegant simplicity.

The city of Bastogne is not the commercial crossroads it was in 1944, but it pays homage to the Battle of the Bulge and its American defenders each year on the anniversary of the battle. The 101st Airborne’s former barracks and site of General McAuliffe’s headquarters is an operational military facility that sometimes opens its gates for tours. And while it is not to be found on any map, Fort Driant still exists in the hills above Metz, slowly being reclaimed by the forest. It is possible to walk the battlefield, following the path of Easy Company and Baker Company—though this is roundly discouraged by the locals due to the large amounts of unexploded ordnance. Open doorways and tunnels allow the adventurous to step inside Fort Driant’s Wehrmacht gun emplacements and see for themselves the thickness of the fort’s concrete walls.

Katerina Novikova, director of press relations at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, was very helpful in passing along the ballet’s program for the night in October 1944 when Olga Lepeshinskaya danced for Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. And Aleksandra Perisik-Green in the House of Commons Information Office was no less dogged in finding the meeting minutes for the day on which Churchill eulogized Franklin Roosevelt, allowing us to pinpoint the exact time that heartfelt speech began.

It is ironic that the people who make history are some of the most bold, courageous, and passionate people that have ever walked the earth, but that the actual writing of history is often so fact driven that all emotion is deflated from the telling of a person’s life story. So it is interesting that most literature about George Patton breaks from this tradition and displays a subcurrent of deep empathy for the general. It says a great deal about the power of Patton’s personality and the tragedy of his early demise.

There is a vast body of excellent literature about Patton, so there was no shortage of published resources. War As I Knew It, Patton’s published journals, was a constant source of information and insight, as was The Patton Papers, which expanded his personal writings in a way that gave them context. Beyond the words of Patton himself, the writings of Carlo D’Este (the excellent Patton: A Genius for War), Martin Blumenson (Patton and The Patton Papers), Ladislas Farago (The Last Days of Patton), and Brian Sobel (The Fighting Pattons) were particularly helpful. Each of them writes of Patton as if they knew him (which was actually the case with Blumenson, who served as staff historian for Patton’s Third Army). For specifics about the conspiracy theories surrounding Patton’s death, the writing of Robert K. Wilcox (Target: Patton) was very helpful.

What follows is a list of sources that helped with the research for this book. It is lengthy but hardly exhaustive, because hundreds of sources were called upon.

World War II has been written about extensively, but Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle and Rick Atkinson’s Guns at Last Light are loaded with detail and action. The Victors, by Stephen E. Ambrose, takes the reader onto the battlefield through the eyes of ordinary soldiers, and in vivid fashion. For a look at the war from a command point of view, Omar Bradley’s A Soldier Story is self-effacing and an easy read. While there are too many books detailing the war to list in this space, some that were very helpful in providing background nuance include Darkness Visible: Memoir of a World War II Combat Photographer, by Charles Eugene Sumners; World War II in Numbers, by Peter Doyle; Patton, Montgomery, Rommel: Masters of War, by Terry Brighton; The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity, by Paul Roland; and The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944: An Operational Assessment, by John A. Adams. Wild Bill Donovan, by Douglas Waller, proved to be the definitive source on the OSS chief; also useful on the topic were The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944, by Will Irwin; and OSS Against the Reich: The World War II Diaries of Colonel David K. E. Bruce, by David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce.

Metz was written about in spectacular fashion by Anthony Kemp in The Unknown Battle: Metz, 1944, and Steven J. Zaloga with Metz 1944 and Lorraine 1944. The Battle of the Bulge is another milestone of the war that has been covered at great length, but the books we relied on were Robert E. Merriam’s The Battle of the Bulge; Troy H. Middleton: A Biography, by Frank J. Price; Battle: The Story of the Bulge, by John Toland; 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, by Stanley Weintraub; Alamo in the Ardennes, by John C. McManus; Against the Panzers: United States Infantry versus German Tanks, 1944–1945, by Allyn R. Vannoy and Jay Karamales; The Ardennes on Fire: The First Day of the German Assault, by Timothy J. Thompson; Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmedy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge, by Danny S. Parker; The Ghost in General Patton’s Third Army: The Memoirs of Eugene G. Schulz During His Service in the United States Army in World War II, by Eugene G. Schulz; Battle of the Bulge 1944 (2): Bastogne, by Steven J. Zaloga; and the underrated Once Upon a Time in War: The 99th Division in World War II, by Robert E. Humphrey.

Adolf Hitler is modern history’s best-known madman, so to step inside his world is frightening, to say the least. It helped to follow the research of other writers who had gone there already, including firsthand accounts by Otto Skorzeny (Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando) and Traudl Junge (Hitler’s Last Secretary: A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler). In addition, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, by Joachim Fest; Hitler, by Joachim Fest; Hitler, by Robin Cross; and Hitler: A Biography, by Ian Kershaw were all spectacular.

The Big Three Allied leaders were vital to telling this story properly, and their prominence ensured that a great amount of archival detail was available to document their movements and thoughts. Books of note were The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security, 1939–1953, by Michael Parrish; Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, by Helen Rappaport; The FDR Years, by William D. Pederson; My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin, edited by Susan Butler; No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, by Doris Kearns Goodwin; Defending the West: The Truman-Churchill Correspondence, 1945–1960, edited by G. W. Sand; The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, by Peter Clarke; and The Road to Berlin, volume 2 of Stalin’s War with Germany, by John Erickson.

Thanks to these authors, and to those whose books are not mentioned but whose research aided in building this narrative.





Acknowledgments





My assistant Makeda Wubneh and literary agent Eric Simonoff were invaluable in helping me write Killing Patton with Marty Dugard, the best researcher I have ever known.

—BILL O’REILLY

* * *

Thanks to Eric Simonoff, the world’s greatest agent. To Bill O’Reilly, a master storyteller and all-around great guy from whom I have learned so much. And, as always, to Callie: You are my sunshine.

—MARTIN DUGARD