Why Did Patton Confront German Officers Who Saluted Hitler Instead of the American Flag

Somewhere in Bavaria in the summer of 1000 945, an American guard walked past a barbedwire compound and saw something that stopped him cold. A row of captured German officers standing at attention in the morning cold, their right arms raised in the salute of a dead furer. The war had been over for weeks.

Their country had surrendered. Their leader had put a pistol to his own head in a bunker in Berlin. And still in front of the American flag, they secuted Hitler. The guard reported what he had seen. The report climbed the chain of command. It reached eventually a four-star general in a stone building in Batz, a man who had liberated a Nazi camp with his own eyes just weeks before and who did not forget what he saw there.

What that general did next is why we are here today. But to understand it, we have to go back 6 weeks to a morning in April in a town called Ordroof. April 12th, 1,945, 10 in the morning. A small town in Therinjia called Ordruff. The wind carries a smell that no soldier who lived through that day would ever forget. It is not the smell of battle.

Battle has its own smell, and men who have marched across Europe know it well. This is different. This is sweeter and heavier, and it clings to the uniform in a way that no washing can remove. Three American generals step out of their staff cars at the gate of what had been until 8 days earlier, a subcamp of the Bukinvald concentration camp system.

The first is Dwight David Eisenhower, 54 years old, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. His face is carefully composed. He has come here because he wants to see it with his own eyes and because he already understands that the world will one day try to forget and he does not intend to let it. The second is Omar Nelson Bradley, 52, commander of the 12th United States Army Group. He says almost nothing.

Bradley is a quiet man in a war of loud men and what he sees this morning will remain with him until the day he dies. The third is George Smith Patton Jr. 59 years old, four stars on his shoulder, ivory gripped revolvers on his hips, commander of the Third United States Army. He is the loudest of the three. He is the most theatrical.

He is the man who slapped two shell shocked soldiers in Sicily two years ago and nearly ended his own career doing it. He is the man who prayed for weather and got it. Who cursed like a long shoreman and quoted scripture in the same breath. who believed in the private chambers of his own strange mind that he had lived before as a Roman legionnaire and a soldier of Napoleon.

He is also the man who within the next 30 minutes will walk behind a shed at Ordroof and be violently sick. They enter the camp. There are bodies in the yard, not one, not 10. Bodies stacked in patterns arranged the way cordwood is arranged for a winter fire. Some of them had not yet been buried. The SS guards had shot the last of the prisoners eight days earlier before running east toward what they hoped would be safety.

The prisoners were shot because they were too weak to be marched away and because the guards did not want witnesses. There are witnesses now. Eisenhower walks the length of the yard with his jaw set. He orders every American soldier in the vicinity who is not on active duty to come and look. He orders photographers.

He orders film crews. He sends a cable to Washington and to London and asks for congressmen and members of parliament to be flown here to Ordroo so that they can see what he has seen. Bradley stands beside a pile of corpses and does not move for a long time. Patton walks toward the shed.

He is the general of an armored army. He has commanded the fastest and most aggressive campaign of maneuver warfare in the history of the United States. He has seen men blown apart by artillery and burned alive in tanks. He has walked battlefields where the dead lay so thick you could not step between them.

But this is different and he knows it is different and his body knows it before his mind does. He goes behind the shed, vomits, he wipes his mouth, he walks back out and he does not speak of it. And later that night in the journal he keeps in his own careful handwriting, he will describe what he saw as one of the most appalling sites he had ever witnessed.

That evening, the mayor of the nearby town of Ordroof and his wife are ordered to tour the camp along with the local civilian population. They see everything. They walk between the same piles the generals walk between. And that that night in their own home, the mayor and his wife hang themselves. This is the world into which General George Patton walks in the last spring of the last year of the war in Europe.

And the war for him is not over. The war for Patton is only about to change its shape. To understand what he will do in the next 8 months and why it will destroy him, we have to understand who he is. He was born on November 11th, 1,885 in San Gabriel, California into a family of southern gentry that had transplanted itself west.

His grandfather had been a Confederate colonel killed at the third battle of Winchester in 1,864. His family filled his childhood with stories of that war and of Napoleon and of the Caesars. He grew up believing that a man’s purpose was to lead other men in battle and that death in combat was not a tragedy but a fulfillment. He struggled with reading.

He may have had what modern doctors would call dyslexia. He compensated by memorizing enormous passages of military history by studying the campaigns of Alexander and Hannibal and Marlboro until he could recite them in the dark. He entered the Virginia Military Institute, then West Point, where it took him five years to graduate because of his difficulty with mathematics.

He competed in the 1,912 Stockholm Olympics in the modern pentathlon, an event designed to test the skills of a military courier, finished fifth. he would have finished higher, but the judges ruled that one of his pistol shots had missed the target and he insisted until the end of his life that the shot had passed through a hole made by an earlier bullet.

He chased Ponchovilla in Mexico under General John Persing in 1991. He commanded the first American tank unit in the First World War and was wounded leading it in the Muzar Gone. Between the wars, he wrote poetry, sailed his own boat, played polo, and read continuously. He kept a journal in the same steady hand he had used since boyhood. He believed in reincarnation.

He wrote poems about it. He wrote lines describing himself as a soldier who had fought in the legions of Rome, in the armies of Napoleon, on fields he had never seen with the eyes of this life, but somehow remembered anyway. He was not embarrassed by any of this. He believed it the way other men believed in their own names.

He carried two revolvers. The Colt was a singleaction army revolver, 45 caliber with ivory grips carved with his initials, the Smith and Wesson. 357 Magnum, also ivory grip. He wore on rarer occasions. He hated being told the grips were pearl. Pearl, he said, was for pimps. He wore riding breaches and polished boots long after the rest of the army had moved to trousers and leggings.

He wanted to be seen. He wanted to be remembered. And in 1,943 in Sicily, he almost threw all of it away. He walked into a field hospital and found a soldier who had no visible wound. The soldier told him his nerves could not take it anymore. Patton called him a coward and slapped him across the face with his glove.

A week later in another hospital, he did it again to another man. Eisenhower, informed of what had happened, made him apologize publicly to every unit in his army and nearly relieved him from command. Patton kept his command, but something in him understood from that moment on that the war would forgive a great deal in a winning general and almost nothing in a losing one. He had to keep winning.

And he did. He led the Third United States Army from the beaches of Normandy across France in the summer of 1,944 at a speed that startled his own supply officers. In December, when the Germans launched their last great offensive in the Ardans, Patton pivoted three divisions 90 degrees in winter weather and drove them north to relieve the encircled town of Baston, an operation that most of his fellow generals considered impossible until he did it.

In March of 1,945, he crossed the Rine at Oppenheim. And the next day he stopped his jeep on the bridge and urinated into the river because he had said months earlier that he would and he was a man who kept the promises he made to himself. By April he was deep inside Germany and the war was ending and something inside him was already beginning to turn.

Because here is the thing about George Patton that most of the histories miss or soften or leave for the footnotes. He admired the Germans. He admired them as soldiers. He admired their discipline, their tactical craft, their ability to conduct a defensive retreat that punished every mile of Allied advance.

In his private journals and in his letters home to his wife Beatatrice, he wrote things that would have shocked the American public if they had ever been printed. He wrote that the German soldier was in many respects the finest fighting man in Europe. He wrote that the Prussian military tradition was the tradition from which all modern armies had learned.

He wrote more than once that he found the professionalism of a captured vermached officer more congenial to his own temperament than the conduct of certain of his allies. This is not a rumor. This is not an invention of a hospital biographer. This is what he wrote in his own hand in journals that his family gave to the historian Martin Bloommanson and that were published in 1,974.

He was the loudest anti-German general in the American army. He was also in the privacy of his own mind the American general who understood the German soldier best and who found in that soldier something he recognized. That contradiction is not a flaw in the story. That contradiction is the story. By late April of,945, the third United States Army has taken more prisoners than any other formation in the war.

By the time of the German surrender on May 8th, the number will exceed 1 and a4 million men. They arrive in columns that stretch for miles. They arrive on foot, on carts, on farm wagons. They arrive in uniforms that still bear the insignia of the Vermacht, of the Luftvafa, of the Vafan SS, of every branch of the collapsing German war machine.

Where do you put them? The Geneva Convention has answers to this question. It requires food, shelter, medical care, and treatment consistent with the standards of one’s own troops. But the Geneva Convention was written for a war between states. And the war that is ending is not that kind of war. The state that made these soldiers is disintegrating.

There will soon be no German government to receive them home. There will soon be no German army from which they were sent. Eisenhower, faced with numbers no army had ever handled, creates a new legal category. He calls them disarmed enemy forces. as disarmed enemy forces rather than prisoners of war.

They are outside the protections of Geneva and their rations can be and are cut below what Geneva would require. This decision will be debated for decades. Some of the debate will be serious and some of it will be dishonest and we will come back to it. But for now, understand only this. In the last week of April 1000, 945 in the American zone of southern Germany, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers are in cages.

And the man responsible for a great many of those cages is George Patton. And inside the cages, something interesting is happening. The German soldiers are still soldiers. They still form up by rank. They still take orders from their captured officers. In some camps, in the barbed wire compounds set aside for the Vafan SS, the prisoners still keep their old discipline.

And in the private moments when the American guards are not looking, some of them still greet each other with the stiff right arm and the two syllables that had become for 12 years the required greeting of the German state, H. Hitler. The greeting had officially been abolished. Grand Admiral Carl Dunitz in the strange twilight government that existed for three weeks after Hitler’s suicide had ordered it discontinued in what was left of the German armed forces.

But orders from a government that no longer exists are not obeyed with much enthusiasm. And in the SS compounds, especially among men who had signed a personal oath to Adolf Hitler and who did not believe that his death released them from it, the arms still went up. American guards report it.

Counter intelligence corps officers file memos about it. The reports move up the chain. They land eventually on the desk of George Patton. He is now the military governor of Bavaria. He is now responsible for a captured population of 9 million German civilians, 1.9 million displaced persons, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, and an entire regional administration that has to be either rebuilt from nothing or rebuilt using the same men who ran it under Hitler.

He is going to make choices in the next four months that will end his career. He is going to make choices that historians will still be arguing about 80 years later. And the first of those choices begins with a very simple question. What do you do with a defeated enemy who refuses in his heart to accept that he has been defeated? There is one more thing to know before we go further.

It has to be said now because it will matter later and because a story about General Patton that does not include it is not an honest story. He had a temper that he could not always control. in August of 1,00 943 in Sicily in the hospital tents at Nicicoia and San Stefano. He lost that temper twice and he struck two American soldiers who were suffering from what would later be understood as combat trauma. He called them cowards.

He waved a pistol. He accused them of shaming the uniform. He was in those moments a man who did not see suffering that did not look like his own. Eisenhower forgave him because he needed him. The American public forgave him because he won battles. The soldiers he had struck lived out their lives in ordinary obscurity.

And one of them decades later said he did not blame the general, that the general had been under strain. But the incident tells us something we will need in the months to come. When George Patton looked at a broken man, he did not always see a man. Sometimes he saw a failure of discipline. Sometimes he saw an offense against the standard he held for himself.

And when he saw those things, his hand did not always wait for his judgment. Now imagine that man, that temperament, that history, standing in front of a captured SS officer who has just raised his right arm and said the two words that Patton has spent the last three years of his life trying to erase from the earth.

Imagine what he might do. We do not have to imagine. He wrote it down. May 14th, 1,945. 6 days after the German surrender, 6 days into a piece that does not yet feel like peace, George Patton takes up his new post as the military governor of Bavaria. His headquarters is in the town of Bad Tolt in the foothills of the Alps in a complex of stone buildings that had been until a few weeks earlier an SS officer training school.

The irony is not lost on him. He walks the corridors where young men had been taught to serve Adolf Hitler. And he sets up his desk in a room where their instructors had lectured them on racial theory and the strategic vision of the furer. The building smells of pine and old cigarette smoke. Outside the windows, the mountains are still capped with snow. Bavaria is his now.

9 million German civilians. 1.9 million displaced persons scattered across the countryside in schools, in barns, in former labor camps, in whatever roof could be found for them. Roads shattered by bombing, rail lines cut, bridges dropped into rivers, electricity intermittent, water uncertain, winter, though far away in the calendar, already visible on the mountaintops.

and two orders from Washington that will define everything he does in the next four months. The first order is called Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive, 167. It has been signed in April of 1,00 945 and it lays out in the flat pros of American bureaucracy what the occupation of Germany is supposed to accomplish. Germany is to be treated not as a liberated country, but as a defeated enemy.

Its economy is to be held to a subsistence level. Its people are to understand that they have brought this fate upon themselves. And every person who held any position of significance in the Nazi party, in the SS, in the security services, or in any of the affiliated organizations is to be removed from any position of authority. The word for this process is denazification.

It sounds on paper like a simple thing. It is not a simple thing. Because the Nazi party had 8 and a half million members by the end of the war. Because for 12 years, if you were a school teacher in a German town, you were expected to join the party or find another line of work. If you were a doctor, a lawyer, a railway inspector, a postal supervisor, a factory foreman, a village clerk, the same expectation applied.

Some men had joined because they believed. Some had joined because they were afraid. Some had joined because their careers required it and they had children to feed. To an American captain arriving in a Bavarian village in May of 1,945, the paperwork looked the same in every case. Nazi party member since 1,937. Nazi party member since 1,933.

Nazi party member since the beginning. If you sacked every one of them, no train would move. No hospital would open, no school would teach, no court would sit. And Bavaria needed all of those things by the end of the summer or people would starve in the winter. Patton understood this immediately. He was not a subtle political thinker, but he was a practical man and he had been raised on farms and in horse country and he knew what it took to keep a functioning place functioning.

On May 28th, 1,945, he appointed Fritz Schoffer as the minister president of Bavaria. Sheffer was 57, a Catholic conservative, a lawyer, a former leader of the Bavarian People’s Party, which the Nazis had abolished in 1,933. He had been arrested by the Gestapo. He had spent time in Daau. He was, by any reasonable measure, a man the Nazis had persecuted.

But Sheffer, once installed, needed staff. He needed clerks and prosecutors and administrators. And Bavaria had been run for 12 years by the Nazi state, and every man with experience in running Bavaria had at some point filled out a party membership form. Schaffer kept those men, many of them. He argued that he had no choice. Patton, when the reports came in, agreed with him.

This decision made quietly in an office in Munich in the last days of May will end Patton’s career by the end of September. He does not know it yet. Sep Dietrich surrenders to American soldiers on May 8th, 1,945. He is 52 years old. He is one of the highest ranking officers of the Vafan SS, an Oberish group infurer, which is the SS equivalent of a full general.

He commanded the sixth SS Panzer Army in the Arden’s offensive the previous winter. He was one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest and most loyal followers, a man who had been with the party since the 1920s, who had commanded Hitler’s personal bodyguard regiment, whose men had committed some of the worst atrocities of the war on the Eastern Front and in Belgium.

American soldiers take him at Kstein in Austria near the German border. He is dressed in a Vermach uniform, not an SS one because by May of 1000 945, the SS uniform is a death sentence in many places. And even Septrich understands this. He is polite. He is professional. He asks about his wife.

He does not raise his arm and he does not say the two words, at least not where the Americans can see him. He is one of thousands. By the middle of May, the prisoner of war population in Patton zone is enormous. The Mooseberg camp, Stallag 7A, which the Third Army had liberated on April 29th, now holds captured Germans instead of Allied airmen.

New enclosures are being built at Bad Eling. The columns of gray uniformed men keep coming. And inside those enclosures, the reports keep arriving on the desks of Counter Intelligence Corps officers. In compound after compound, the German officers are still organizing their men by rank. They are still holding formations. They are still in the SS enclosures, particularly running what amounts to a shadow discipline of their own.

Prisoners who are considered to have shown weakness or to have cooperated too readily with the Americans are punished by their fellow prisoners in unofficial tribunals. And in the mornings before roll call in the corners of the camps, the reports continued to arrive. The arms continued to go up.

The two syllables forbidden now still moved on lips that would not let them go. The Americans see it. The Americans hear about it and the Americans are furious. Patton issues orders. All prisoners in Third Army custody are to render the standard military salute when a flag of the United States is present. Any prisoner observed rendering the Hitler salute is to be assigned to labor details.

SS prisoners are to be segregated from Vermach prisoners and held under closer guard. Officers who continue to organize their men along old chain of command lines are to be moved to separate enclosures and stripped of the informal authority they had retained. He is not gentle about it. In his journal, he writes about the SS prisoners with a contempt that is almost surprising in its intensity.

He calls them the men who ran the camps he had seen at Ordruff. He does not forget whatever admiration he had for the German soldier as a category, he does not extend it to the men in the black uniforms and the death’s head insignia. Those men in his private mind are outside the fraternity of soldiers altogether. He wants the arm down. He wants the flag saluted.

He wants the discipline of the American army imposed on every cage in his zone. And in this, he is entirely within the mainstream of American military opinion in the summer of 1,945. It is what he does next that is not. There is another problem, and it is worse than the one with the SS men in the cages, the displaced persons.

By June of 1,945, there are somewhere between six and 7 million displaced persons in occupied Germany. They are the survivors of the Nazi camps, the forced laborers brought from the east, the refugees from every corner of the collapsed Reich. They are Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Yugoslav, Italian, French, Dutch, Belgian.

and a portion of them, a portion that carries a moral weight far beyond its numbers, are Jewish. The Jewish survivors are a fraction of what they once were. Whole families are gone. Whole towns are gone. Whole languages are in a real sense gone. What is left is a population of people who have survived the unservivable and who are now living in the summer of 1,945 in camps run by the American army in southern Germany.

Some of these camps had been Nazi concentration camps. Some had been forced labor barracks. Some for former SS training facilities. Feling on Lake Starberg had been a Hitler youth school. Lansburg west of Munich held survivors in the barracks of a former Vermach Garrison town. Fur involved near Wulfr’s housen had housed workers for a munitions plant.

They are in Patton’s zone. They are there for his responsibility. And in the summer of 1,945, they are not being taken care of well. The conditions are grim. The food is insufficient. The medical care is thin. The clothing is often still the striped uniforms of the camps because no one is issued new clothes. Some survivors are guarded in effect by American soldiers who treat them with the suspicion of a garrison force keeping a lid on a restless population.

In some camps, former Nazis in the surrounding countryside eat better than the Jews who survived their genocide. President Harry Truman hears about this in Washington. And in June of 10,00 945, he does something quiet and important and consequential. He asks a man named Earl Grant Harrison to go to Europe and look. Earl Harrison is 46 years old.

He is a lawyer, a former commissioner of immigration and naturalization, the American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He is a serious man, unshowy, methodical. He is not a soldier and he is not looking for a war with the army. He arrives in Europe in July. He visits camp after camp in the American zone.

He talks to survivors. He inspects the barracks. He looks at the food. He watches the medical lines. He takes notes. And in August of 1,945, he submits his report to President Truman. The report is short. It is not decorated. It is not written for the newspapers. It is written for the man in the White House.

And it says in one sentence that will echo for the rest of the century that the American army is treating the Jewish survivors in effect as the Nazis had treated them. Not with the same murderous intent, not with the same industrial cruelty, but with the same indifference to their humanity, the same willingness to leave them in barbed wire compounds in their old uniforms, the same failure to recognize that these were not simply displaced persons, but a specific population that had come out of a specific hell and required specific

care. Truman reads the report. He sends it to Eisenhower. Eisenhower reads it and he understands immediately what has happened and he goes to Bavaria himself. On September 29th 1,945 he arrives at Felding. He walks through the camp with George Patton at his side. Patton is not happy. His journal from those days shows a man who resents the report, who does not accept its premises, who writes about the displaced persons in language that is difficult to read now and was difficult to read then.

He does not believe the survivors are being mistreated. He does not believe they deserve the special treatment the report recommends. His private views about the Jewish survivors in his own are in the historical record that his own family preserved and made public. Ugly. This has to be said and it has to be said plainly because a story about George Patton that leaves this out is not a story. It is a monument.

He was a brilliant soldier. He was a physically brave man. He liberated a subcamp of Bukinvald and he wept in his own way at what he saw there. And he also six months later wrote about the survivors of that same system in language that would not have been out of place in the mouths of the men who had built it. Both things are true.

Both things are in the record. Both things are him. Eisenhower gives him a direct order. Conditions in the displaced persons camps will improve. The uniforms will be replaced. The rations will increase. The camps will be reorganized so that survivors are not guarded but assisted. Patton complies. He is a soldier and he takes an order and he sees to it that the order is carried out.

But something has broken between him and the Supreme Commander that will not be repaired. While all of this is happening, Patton is thinking about a different war. He has been thinking about it since May. The war in his mind is not really over. It is only paused because to the east of the American zone stands the Red Army. And the Red Army is not going home.

It is settling in. It is stripping the industrial equipment out of Eastern Germany and shipping it to the Soviet Union. It is installing governments in Poland, in Hungary, in Romania, in Bulgaria, in Czechoslovakia, in Yugoslavia. It is doing all of this while the American army demobilizes and goes home.

Hatton in bad tilts watches this happen and he does not accept it. He begins to write in his journal and in his letters to Beatatrice a set of arguments that are astonishing to read. Now he argues that the Americans should not have stopped at the elbe. They should have pushed on. They should have driven the Red Army back to its own borders.

He argues that Poland must not be abandoned to Stalin. That the political settlement being negotiated at Potdam is a betrayal of the men who died to reach Berlin. And most extraordinarily he argues that the German army, the Vermacht, should not be disbanded. It should be reconstituted. Its officers should be released from the prisoner of war cages and placed at the head of their old divisions.

And those divisions should be re-equipped with American weapons, and they should stand shoulderto-shoulder with the American army in a common front against the Soviet Union. He writes this in his journal on September 8th, 1,945. He suggests it in a more careful form in a conversation with General Joseph McNarney.

He mentions it in letters to trusted correspondents. The commander of the American army in Bavaria is proposing less than four months after the end of the Second World War that the United States rearm the losing side of that war and use it to fight a new one. He is not entirely wrong about the future. He is not entirely wrong about the intentions of Ysef Stalin.

And he is not entirely wrong about the fate of Eastern Europe. And he is not entirely wrong about the eventual necessity of a Western military alliance that would include a rearmed Germany. He is only wrong about the year. He is proposing in 1,945 what the United States government will officially adopt in 1,955. But there is no room in 9,945 for a general who is proposing this.

The war has just ended. Americans are burying their sons. The alliance with the Soviet Union, however cynical it may have been, is still the alliance that won the war. and to attack it publicly is to attack the entire moral architecture of victory. Patton does not care. He has never been a man who trimmed his opinions to fit the political weather.

He is not going to start now. September 22nd, 1,945. A room in the headquarters at Bod Toltz. Journalists have gathered. There are correspondents from the New York Herald Tribune, from the Chicago Daily News, from the New York Times, from wire services and small papers and everything in between. The war is over. The stories are winding down.

But there are still headlines to be found in the American zone of Germany. And one of them they suspect is going to walk into this room in the next few minutes. Patton walks in. He is in a bad mood. He has been in a bad mood for weeks. The Harrison report has been public knowledge. The pressure from Frankfurt has been constant.

The reporters have been sniffing around Bavaria for weeks, filing stories about former Nazis retained in office, about dasification more honored in the breach than the observance, about a military governor who does not seem to be governing along the lines that Washington has laid down. The questions start. Why are so many former Nazi party members still in positions of authority in Bavaria? Patton has an answer to this.

He has thought about it. He has in fact thought about it more carefully than his critics will later give him credit for. And what he says in front of the journalists is that most of the people who joined the Nazi party joined it the way an American might join the Republican or Democratic party.

It was, he says, the party that was in power. It was the party you joined if you wanted to keep your job. It did not mean for most of them that they had believed anything in particular. It only meant that they had wanted to remain school teachers or postal clerks or railway inspectors. He is in a limited way correct. The historian Robert Gelatley working in German archives half a century later will document exactly how party membership functioned as a career necessity for millions of Germans who did not share the ideology.

Many joined because it was expected. Many joined because refusing to join would have marked them as suspect. Many joined without believing anything at all in the way that men in many societies join organizations they are indifferent to because the alternative is a closed door. Patton is describing something real, but he is describing it in a room full of American journalists in September of 1,945.

5 months after Ordroof, 5 months after Dau, 6 weeks after Hiroshima, in the middle of a summer during which the American public has learned the full scale of what the Nazi party had done. And in that room, in that month, to compare Nazi party membership to Republican or Democratic Party membership is not analysis.

It is a match dropped in a gasoline can. His exact phrasing recorded by the stenographer that afternoon was that the Nazi thing was just like a Democratic Republican election fight. The words went out on the wires that night. The reporters take their notes. They file their stories that night. By the next morning, the headlines are in every major American newspaper.

Patton compares Nazis to Democrats and Republicans. Patton defends retention of Nazis in government. Patton says most Nazis joined for career reasons. The White House sees the papers. The War Department sees the papers. Eisenhower and Frankfurt sees the papers. And Eisenhower, who has covered for patent after Sicily, who has kept him on through every scrape and every scandal, who has stood between him and the American press for nearly three years, understands that this time there is no cover to be given. The summons comes on

September 28th. Patton drives to Frankfurt. He is met by Eisenhower and by General Walter Bedell Smith, the chief of staff of the Supreme Headquarters, a hard man who has been the one carrying the messages Eisenhower did not want to deliver in person. The meeting is described later by Bradley and by Patton’s aid, Hobart Gay, and by Patton himself in his journal.

Eisenhower is calm. He is not shouting. He does not need to shout. He tells Patton that he will be relieved of command of the Third United States Army and of the military governorship of Bavaria. He will be reassigned to command of the 15th United States Army. The 15th Army is not really an army. It is a small headquarters staff whose function is to write the official history of the American campaign in Europe. It has no troops in the field.

It has no operational role. It is a paper command and both men in the room know it. Patton takes the news the way he takes most news. He argues, he defends himself. He points to his record. He points to the practical impossibility of running Bavaria while sacking every man with a party card. He points to the Soviet threat that he believes is being ignored.

Eisenhower listens. Eisenhower does not change his mind. They part civily. Two American generals who have been through Africa and Sicily and Normandy and the Rine together. Two men who have quarreled and forgiven and quarreled again for nearly four years. Uh two men who understand each other well enough to know that this is the end of something.

Patton drives back to Bad Tilts. On October 7th 1,945, he stands in front of the staff of the Third Army and reads a short farewell. He tells them that all good things come to an end. He turns over command to Lieutenant General Lucian Truscuit, a competent and dependable officer who will do the job with less drama and less brilliance and for that reason more success.

He gets into his car and he drives north to a small resort town called Badnauheim where the 15th Army has its paper headquarters. The war is over. The occupation is beginning. And the man who had led the fastest and most aggressive advance in American military history is now the commander of a filing cabinet. He writes letters to Beatatrice.

He tells her he is coming home for Christmas. He tells her he intends once he is home to speak plainly to the American public about what he has seen and what he believes. He does not say whether he will seek public office. He does not need to. Everyone around him understands what a patent return to the United States would mean.

Before he goes, he has planned one last outing, a hunting trip. Feeasant in the fields near Mannheim on a Sunday morning in early December. His chief of staff, Hobart Gay, will go with him. His driver will be a young private named Horus Woodring, 19 years old, from Kentucky. The date is set, December 9th, 1,945. A Sunday morning in the Rhineland.

The sky is gray the way German skies are gray in December. Low and even and without character. The temperature is just above freezing. The roads are wet from an overnight rain. At the 15th Army headquarters in Bad Nowheim, General George Patton is dressed for a day in the field. He wears a heavy overcoat over his uniform.

He carries a shotgun in a leather case. Beside him is Major General Hobart Gay. 51 years old, his chief of staff, a man who has been at his side through Africa and Sicily and France and Germany. One of the small handful of men in the world whom Patton considers a true friend. Carr is a 1,938 Cadillac Series 75, a big pre-war limousine requisitioned from a German civilian for the use of senior American officers.

The driver is Private First Class Horus Woodring, 19 years old from Kentucky. Quiet and careful behind the wheel. Behind them, a jeep follows with the hunting dogs and a soldier assigned to handle them. Plan is simple. Drive south toward Mannheim. Hunt pheasant in the fields along the rine. Return to Bad Nheim by evening.

Fly to Paris in a few days. Board a ship. Sail for home. Patton has been telling Beatatrice in letters that grow longer and more personal as the weeks pass that he is looking forward to seeing her. He has been telling his aids that once he is back in the United States, he will speak his mind. He will say what he thinks about the Soviet Union, about the future of Germany, about the direction of American policy in Europe.

He will, in his own words, tell the truth. Whether that would have meant retirement or a lecture tour or a run for Congress or something stranger and larger that his mind was already circling but had not yet named. No one will ever know because the day does not go as planned. The car moves south on the road that runs from Bad Nheim through Frankfurt and on toward Mannheim. It is not a fast trip.

The roads are broken in places from the war. Rubble has been pushed to the shoulders but not cleared. American military vehicles pass in both directions. Gray and olive shapes moving through the gray morning. Just before noon near the town of Kaertal on the northern outskirts of Mannheim, the Cadillac approaches a rail crossing.

There is a 2 and a half ton GMC truck stopped on the opposite side of the road. A big cargo truck of the American Quartermaster Corps. The driver is Private First Class Robert L. Thompson. Thompson decides to turn left. He turns across the path of the Cadillac. There is no time for anything. Wooding breaks.

The Cadillac strikes the truck at the corner of its right rear quarter at a speed later estimated at around 30 km per hour, 20 mph. The kind of speed at which a modern automobile would deploy an airbag. And its passengers would walk away rubbing their necks. But this is 1,945. There are no airbags.

There are no seat belts. The dashboard of the Cadillac is heavy pre-war steel and glass. And the space between the rear seat and that dashboard is small. Woodring is thrown forward. He is not badly hurt. Gay sitting on the rear seat beside Patton braces himself instinctively at the moment of impact. He is not badly hurt either.

He will walk away from the wreck with bruises. Patton sitting on the same rear seat does not brace. He is looking at the truck. He is thrown forward hard. The top of his head strikes the metal frame of the partition that divides the rear compartment from the front seat or the corner of the roof above the windshield.

The precise geometry has been debated in the accounts. What is not debated is what happens to his neck. He suffers a fracture and dislocation of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He is paralyzed from the neck down. He is conscious. He can speak. The first words he says when Gay recovers his own bearings and asks how he is are quiet and characteristic.

He says he cannot move. He says he thinks he is paralyzed. He says after a moment that this is a hell of a way to die. The ambulance takes 45 minutes to arrive. It carries him to the 130th Station Hospital in H Highleberg, an American military medical facility housed in what had been until recently a German army medical complex.

He is taken up to a private room on the second floor. The commanding officer of the hospital is notified. Chief of neurosurgery for the European theater, Colonel Roy Glennwood Sperling is sent for from Frankfurt. Word travels up the chain of command. By evening, Eisenhower knows. By evening, Washington knows.

By evening, Beatatrice knows in a bedroom in a house in Massachusetts, and she begins to pack a bag for a flight she has been dreading for 35 years of marriage. Sperling arrives. He examines the general. He confirms what the first doctors have already concluded. The spinal cord is not severed, but it is severely damaged.

Traction is applied to the skull with a device called crutchfield tongs. Small metal hooks inserted into the bone to hold the neck in alignment. Patton is placed in a specialized bed. He cannot move his arms or his legs. He can breathe, but not deeply. He can speak though softly. He is entirely dependent on the men and women in white uniforms who move quietly around him.

Beatatrice arrives on December 11th, 48 hours after the accident. She has flown from the United States on a military aircraft arranged personally by the War Department. She walks into the room and she sees her husband and she does not weep, at least not where he could see her. She sits by the bed, she reads to him and when her voice tires, others read in her place.

Passages from a translation of Zenapons Anabasis. A book he had loved since he was a boy about 10,000 Greek soldiers marching home from a lost war in Persia. He is lucid. He knows what has happened to him. He knows what is likely to happen next. There are conversations in that room that no historian will ever fully recover because they belong to a husband and a wife of 35 years and because the door was closed and because Beatatric Patton until the end of her own life did not repeat them.

But there is one line she recorded afterward. He said it to her in one of those days. Looking up from the bed, he could not leave. He said, “This way of dying was too slow. For 12 days, he lies there. He is visited by Bradley. He is visited by Trusket. He is visited by younger officers who had served under him and who wanted one last time to stand in a room where he could see them.

” Eisenhower sends messages. So does General George Marshall from Washington. So do men and women he has never met from towns across the United States. letters that arrive at the hospital in a small mountain of envelopes because Americans have been reading the newspapers and they know that the general who took the third army across France is lying paralyzed in a bed in H Highleberg.

His body begins to fail in the ways that a paralyzed body of a 59year-old man in 945 fails. There are pulmonary problems. There is congestion. There is the slow accumulation in a system without movement of the fluids that a moving body clears without thinking. On the afternoon of December 21st, 1,945, 12 days after the accident, he seems to rally. He speaks with Beatatrice.

He is coherent. He is in the phrase used by his doctors comfortable. At approximately 5:50 in the evening, he falls asleep. He does not wake up. The cause is a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot has formed in the deep veins of his motionless legs, has broken loose, has traveled to his lungs, and has stopped his heart.

It is the death of an immobilized man. It is the death of thousands of soldiers who lie too long in hospital beds. It is a common death, an unremarkable death, a death without honor or drama or meaning. George Smith Patton Jr., four-star general of the United States Army, commander of the Third Army from Normandy to the Elby is dead at 59 years of age.

There will be in the decades that follow a small industry devoted to the proposition that this was not an accident. A former officer of the Office of Strategic Services named Douglas Bazada will claim in the 1970s that he was hired to kill Patton. A book will be written in 2008 drawing on his account arguing that the crash was staged and that a poison was administered in the hospital.

The book will find its readers. The serious historians will not agree. Carlo Desty, whose biography of patent runs to over a thousand pages, examines every document and every witness statement and every medical record and he concludes that the accident was an accident. Stanley Hersen reaches the same conclusion.

Leiselus Farago who wrote the earlier account finds no evidence of anything but a slow ordinary vehicular collision and its slow ordinary consequences. And this in a strange way is the real ending of the story. Because a man like Patton, a man who had ridden into the guns of Muzaron, who had walked upright through the shellfire of Casserine, who had crossed the Rine on a pontoon bridge under a sky full of fighters, was not killed by an assassin. He was not killed in battle.

He was not killed by any of the enemies whose photographs he had studied in the campaigns of his own imagination. He was killed by a truck driver making a left turn at 20 m an hour. The universe, if the universe was watching, did not grant him the death he had spent his whole life preparing for.

It gave him instead the death of an ordinary traveler on an ordinary road on an ordinary Sunday morning in Germany. That is not a conspiracy. That is something much older and much harder to name. He had said many times that he wished to be buried with his men. The army honored the wish. On December 24th, 1,945, a small funeral service was held at the Chris Kirchie and H Highleberg, the Church of Christ, a Protestant church whose stone walls had survived the bombing of the city.

Beatatrice was there, Gay was there, the chaplain of the Third Army were there. So were representatives of every unit that had served under him come from across the American zone. On December 25th, Christmas Day, he was buried at the American Military Cemetery at Ham in Luxembourg. The cemetery held and holds the graves of 5,070 American soldiers, most of them killed in the Arden’s offensive of the winter before, most of them men of the Third Army who had died to break the German assault and hold Baston. It was of all the American

cemeteries in Europe, the cemetery of Patton’s men. He was placed among them. In the years that followed, so many visitors came to see his grave walking off the paths, wearing down the grass around a single marker in a sea of markers, that the cemetery authorities decided to move him. His grave was relocated to a spot at the head of the field at the front of the ranks, alone in a small clearing at the top of the slope.

And when you visit Ham today, you see it the way it was arranged then. The general stands in the imagination and in the geometry of the ground in front of his soldiers facing them as if he is still their commander and they are still on parade. Beatatrice never remarried. She survived him by seven years. She lived quietly at their home in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and she rode her horses in thief fields she had loved since girlhood.

On September 30th, 1,953, while riding, she suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm and died. Her body was cremated. Her ashes were carried to Luxembourg. And in a small ceremony that no one much publicized, they were buried at Ham at the foot of her husband’s grave so that they would rest together in the ground of a war that had made him famous and had killed him.

And the questions of course remain because a life like this one does not resolve into a single verdict. And any storyteller who pretends otherwise is lying to you. He was a brilliant field commander. He led the fastest sustained advance in the history of the United States Army. He relieved Baston.

He crossed the line ahead of every other Allied army. He was in his private beliefs a man of prejudices that are difficult to read now. His journals contain passages about the Jewish survivors in the displaced person’s camps of Bavaria that no honest historian can pretend do not exist. He treated those survivors for a time in ways that led a lawyer named Earl Harrison to write a report that reached the desk of the president of the United States.

Eisenhower had to order him to change course. He complied, but he did not agree. He walked into Ordruff on the 12th of April. 1,945. And what he saw there broke something in him that he never spoke of directly again. He ordered the cameras, the film crews, the witnesses. He understood before most men did that the evidence had to be preserved.

That is on the record. That happened. And he also four months later gave a press conference in Bad Toltz at which he compared membership in the Nazi party to membership in the Democratic or Republican party of the United States. He was in a narrow sociological sense describing something that was true of millions of ordinary Germans.

He was in the political and moral sense of that summer saying something that could not be said and that ended his career. He believed from May of 1,945 forward that the Soviet Union would become the principal adversary of the United States. He believed the German army should not be dissolved but reformed and used against the Red Army in a war that would come.

He was written off as a wararmonger, a reactionary, a man who could not accept peace. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in April of 1,949. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in May of 1,949. The Bundes, the new army of West Germany, was created in November of 1,955, staffed at its senior levels by former officers of the Vermacht, integrated into the command structure of NATO, and pointed in every plan and every exercise at the same Soviet enemy Patton had named 10 years earlier.

He did not live to see any of it. He had been dead for four years when NATO was born, for nine years when the Bundesphere was raised, for a full decade when the western military architecture he had sketched in a private journal in a former SS building in Bavaria took the form he had predicted. Whether that makes him a prophet or a man who happened to guess right about one large thing while being wrong about many smaller ones, honest people will disagree.

What is not in question is that on a wet Sunday in December of 1000 945 on a road outside Mannheim, a truck driver turned left and a Cadillac struck it at 20 m an hour and the loudest general of the American army fell silent in the back seat and a life that had contained ordroo and batults and baston and the rine came to rest in a bed in H Highleberg and then in the ground at Ham in front of his soldiers where he had always said he wanted to be.

He wrote in one of the last entries of his journal a line that his biographers have quoted often and never quite explained. He wrote that all good things must come to an end. He was speaking of his command. He was speaking perhaps of more than