Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General (43 page)

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.

Notes

Chapter 2

1
Operation Panzerfaust, a.k.a. Operation Mickey Mouse, was launched on October 15, 1944, in response to Miklós Horthy’s public declaration of alliance with the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler’s security forces had advanced knowledge of Horthy’s plans, and Skorzeny was already in place in Budapest to remove Horthy from power. The name “Mickey Mouse” was based on the nickname of Horthy’s son, Miki. In addition to capturing the younger Horthy, the Germans also took the regent prisoner. Miklós Horthy was taken to Bavaria by Skorzeny, where he lived out the war under round-the-clock SS guard.

2
“Greif” refers to the griffin, a mythological beast with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. In Greek antiquity, it was considered the most powerful of all creatures.

Chapter 3

1
The first meeting of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill) in which it was agreed that the Americans and British would open a second front in Europe. This strategy was designed to take the pressure off the Russians, who had been battling the Nazis on Soviet soil for more than two years, at the cost of more than twenty million dead, wounded, or missing Soviet soldiers and citizens. The meeting was held at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran. Eisenhower and other top military commanders were also in attendance, along with their personal staff.

2
Montgomery was not promoted to field marshal until September 1, 1944.

Chapter 4

1
His left arm was seriously mangled when he was twelve, in an accident involving a horse-drawn carriage.

Chapter 5

1
Alice Roosevelt was extremely loyal, and her flair for the cutting remark was later put to good use in defense of her cousin Franklin. When it was said that Wendell Willkie, FDR’s opponent in the 1940 presidential election, was a grassroots candidate, she agreed, noting that it was “the grass of 10,000 country clubs.” And of FDR’s 1944 opponent, the nattily attired and immaculately coiffed Thomas Dewey, she remarked, “He looks just like the little man on the wedding cake.” Dewey, a man so sensitive about his height that he sometimes sat on a phone book to look taller in his office chair, would be haunted by that remark the rest of his career.

2
Donovan won his Medal of Honor during World War I, as leader of a mostly Irish American regiment from New York known as the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. He was shot and wounded while battling German positions in France on October 14 and 15, 1918. Donovan refused to be evacuated, so that he might continue to lead the charge. In addition to the Medal of Honor, in his lifetime he was also awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, and the National Security Medal. No other individual has won all four of America’s top decorations. Also of note is that upon his return from World War I, Donovan worked with Teddy Roosevelt to form a new institution for veterans known to this day as the American Legion.
The Fighting 69th
, a film about the exploits of the regiment, starring James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, was released in early 1940. The actor George Brent played Donovan.

Chapter 6

1
Patton served as G-2 in charge of Hawaiian Islands security from 1935 to 1937. During that time he wrote a paper entitled “Surprise” in which he predicted the growing power of the Japanese military and its potential to attack the Hawaiian Islands through the use of aircraft carriers, submarines, and fighter-bombers. This made Patton the first American officer to accurately predict the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor four years later.

Chapter 7

1
Many refer to the West Point class of 1915 as “the class the stars fell on.” Fifty-nine of its graduates achieved the rank of general. Among them were Eisenhower and Bradley, who both attained five-star rank, the highest rank in the U.S. Army. At this point in history, only nine men had been selected for this honor, which also carries the title of general of the army. Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip Sheridan all held this title, but in the Civil War era, when there was no rank higher than four stars. General John Pershing held the same title just after World War I. Those who wore five stars are army generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Henry “Hap” Arnold, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall. The navy equivalent of five stars has been awarded to admirals Chester Nimitz, William Leahy, Ernest King, and William F. Halsey.

2
There is still a great deal of conjecture about who leaked the story, but due to the severe restrictions on what the press could and could not publish, the story would never have made it into print without the blessing of British and American authorities at the highest level. Churchill’s ongoing efforts to insert Britain in the postwar argument at the expense of the Soviet Union would have allowed him to seize Patton’s comments as an opportunity to heighten U.S.-Soviet tensions.

3
The group consisted of right fielder and player-manager Mel Ott of the New York Giants; pitcher Bucky Walters of the Cincinnati Reds; Dutch Leonard, a retired former pitcher who’d once played for the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox; and Frankie Frisch, the retired second baseman who enjoyed an eighteen-year career as a player with the New York Giants and then St. Louis Cardinals, and later managed the Cardinals. The greatest of these was Ott. Just five foot nine, he hit 511 career home runs, was the first player in history to have eight consecutive 100-RBI seasons, had a lifetime batting average of .304, and retired only 124 hits shy of 3,000. The lifetime Giant would tragically die in a car crash at the age of forty-nine.

4
Top-level members of the SS had to prove their racial purity by providing records of their family lineage dating back to 1750. This practice of achieving racial superiority was based on something known as “scientific racism,” which stated that some races were more advanced than others. Beginning on April 7, 1933, German law required that obtaining a certificate known as the
Ariernachweis
was mandatory for any individual wishing to hold public office in Germany or to gain membership in the Nazi Party. This “Aryan Certificate” was attained by showing a complete record of family lineage (through birth and marriage certificates) that proved racial purity. It was believed that the Caucasian race was divided into three sectors: Semitic (descendants of Noah’s son Shem, most often associated with Jewish ethnicity); Hamitic (descendants of Noah’s son Ham, often associated with North African and Middle Eastern ethnicity); and Aryan, construed by the Nazis to be of Nordic and Germanic ethnicity. The defining characteristics were blue eyes, blond hair, a statuesque physique, and Caucasian skin pigment. The Aryan bloodline was thought to be purer because it had not intermingled with that of other ethnicities. The extermination of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally and physically handicapped individuals was a way of cleansing Europe of people with non-German impurities. Scientific racism was discredited after World War II. It’s worth noting that members of the SS were all German at the beginning of the war. By its end, combat deaths had seen its ranks so depleted that soldiers of foreign birth, such as Czechs, Poles, and Norwegians, were conscripted into the Aryan brigades.

5
Commander, gunner, loader, driver, machine gunner/radio operator.

6
The differences between the Wehrmacht and the SS can be summed up in the translations of their names.
Wehrmacht
means “defense force” in German, while
SS
roughly translates as “protection squadron”—as in the protection of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party ideology. The Wehrmacht comprised all the German armed forces, including the SS (army, navy, air force, and SS; or, in the original German,
Heer
,
Kriegsmarine
,
Luftwaffe
, and
Schutzstaffel
). The two groups wore separate uniforms, with the Wehrmacht clad in gray wool, while the SS wore camouflage or earth-gray uniforms. In addition to being a branch of the military, SS troopers swore to be loyal to Adolf Hitler unto death, and could be ordered to do anything in the name of the Führer. This led them to commit scores of unconscionable acts of terror and brutality, acts that included murdering prisoners of war, Jews, and other innocent civilians. The
totenkopf
(“skull”) emblem worn on the SS uniform signified that “you shall always be willing to put yourself at stake for the life of the whole community,” in the words of SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Beginning in 1934, the SS was put in charge of the concentration camps that would systematically murder millions of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, handicapped individuals, and political prisoners. The barbaric behavior of the SS stands in sharp contrast to that of Wehrmacht soldiers such as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whose troops were forbidden from mistreating civilians. Rommel and other German commanders ignored SS admonitions to murder Jews and enemy prisoners. Nevertheless, many German fighting men participated in civilian atrocities, especially against the people of Poland, France, and the U.S.S.R. “I have come to know there is a real difference between the regular soldier and officer, and Hitler and his criminal group,” Dwight Eisenhower said. “The German soldier as such has not lost his honor. The fact that certain individuals committed in war dishonorable and despicable acts reflects on the individuals concerned, and not on the great majority of German soldiers and officers.” Ironically, Eisenhower would later censure George S. Patton for publicly making very similar remarks.