Killing Patton

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Текст книги "Killing Patton"

Автор книги: Bill O'Reilly

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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

Illustration Credits

Maps by Gene Thorp

Archive Photos/Getty Images

Popperfoto/Getty Images

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

AP Images

National Archives

Mondadori via Getty Images

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Archive Photos/Getty Images

AP Images

Gene Thorp

Archive Photos/Getty Images

AP Images

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Archive Photos/Getty Images

Premium Archive/Getty Images

Archive Photos/Getty Images

Courtesy of the Weekly Standard

Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library Hyde Park, New York

AP Images

UIG via Getty images

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Courtesy of the Department of Defense

Walter Bibikow/JAI/Corbis

Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Aachen

Abrams, Creighton “Abe”

Adlerhorst (Eagle’s eyrie)

Alliluyeva, Natasha

American Cemetery, Hamm, Luxembourg

Amsterdam

Anderson, Harry

Antwerp

Appman, Charles

Ardennes Forest. See also Battle of the Bulge

Argentan

Arnold, Henry “Hap”

“Aryan certificate”

Assenois

atomic bomb

Auschwitz-Birkenau

crematoria

escapes

liberation and survivors

Mengele experiments

Austria

Babalas, Peter K.

Bad Nauheim

Bad Tölz

Baker Company

Bandera, Stepan

baseball

Bastogne

Battle of the Bulge

Assenois

Bastogne

element of surprise

Elsenborn Ridge

end of

La Gleize

Malmedy Massacre

Noville

Operation Greif

Baum, Abraham

Bazata, Douglas

BBC

Belgium. See also Battle of the Bulge

Belzec

Bennett, Paul

Bergen-Belsen

Beria, Lavrentiy

Berlin

Allied bombing of

Battle of

Hitler’s bunker in

postwar division of

Soviet army in

Blokhin, Mikhailovich

Blowtorch Brigade

Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt

Boggess, Charles

Bolshoi Theater

Bormann, Martin

Boxing Day

Bradley, Omar

Battle of the Bulge

Braun, Eva

Britain, Battle of

British army

Battle of the Bulge

Rhine offensive

Sicily campaign

Buchenwald

Budapest

Bulgaria

Bull, Harold

Büllingen

Burgdorf, Wilhelm

Byrnes, J. F.

Caesar, Julius

Canada

Carlyle, Thomas

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Chaumont

Chelmno

Chiang Kai-shek

China

Christmas

in Soviet Union

Churchill, Winston

drinking of

Potsdam Conference

Roosevelt and

Stalin and

at Yalta

Citrónóva, Helena and Rozinka

Civil War (U.S.)

Clochimont

Codman, Charles

Cold War

combat fatigue

communism

Chinese

Greek

Soviet

concentration camps

liberation of

Congress, U.S.

Cuneo, Ernest

Currie, J. C.

Czechoslovakia

Dachau

D-day

Denmark

Desobry, William

Dewey, Thomas

Dickerman, Milton

Dickson, Benjamin “Monk”

Dietrich, Marlene

Distinguished Service Cross

Donovan, William “Wild Bill”

Nuremberg Trials and

Doolittle, Jimmy

Dresden

Driant assault

Dun, Angus

Dwight, William

Eastern Europe

concentration camps

postwar division of

see also specific countries

East Prussia

Easy Company

Echternach

Eden, Anthony

VIII Corps

Eighty-Second Airborne Division

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Battle of the Bulge

leadership style

Patton and

as president

Kay Summersby and

Eisenhower, Mamie

Elsenborn Ridge

Étain

Falaise Pocket

Fifteenth Army

Fifth Infantry Division

Driant assault

Fighting Sixty-Ninth

First Army

Battle of the Bulge

Forgan, J. Russell

Fourth Armored Division

foxholes

France

Nazi occupation of

Resistance

World War I

Frank, Anne

Frank, Otto

Frankfurt

Frederick the Great

friendly fire

Gaffey, Hugh

Gay, Hobart “Hap”

Geising, Erwin

Geneva Convention

George Company

German navy

Germany

Allied advance into

invasion of Soviet Union

nuclear capabilities

Nuremberg Trials

persecution of Jews

postwar

racial purity

World War I

Gerow, Leonard T.

Gerrie, Jack

Gestapo

Gladstone, William

Goebbels, Joseph

Goebbels, Magda

Goering, Hermann

gold

Gordon, Jean

Grant, Ulysses S.

Great Britain

German bombing of

global empire of

Parliament

Soviet relations with

U.S. relations with

Great Depression

Greece

Guadalcanal

Gypsies

Haase, Werner

Hahn, Otto

Halsey, William F.

Hammelburg mission. See Task Force Baum

Harkins, Paul

Harper, Paul

Harriman, W. Averell

Hautval, Adelaide

Heidelberg

Hendrix, James R.

Henke, Hellmuth

Hess, Rudolf

Himmler, Heinrich

Hiroshima

Hitler, Adolf

at Adlerhorst

anti-Semitic policies

assassination plot against

Battle of the Bulge

Berlin bunker

death of

family of

physical decline

Hitler Youth

Hodges, Courtney

Holmlund, Robert W.

Holocaust

homosexuals

Honsfeld

Hopkins, Harry

Horthy, Miklós

Höss, Rudolf

Hughes, Everett

Hungary

Huy

Istomina, Valentina

Italy

fall of Messina

Jackson, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall”

Japan

attack on Pearl Harbor

Jedburghs

Jews

Auschwitz survivors

Nazi persecution of

Roosevelt and

Jodl, Alfred

Johnson, Andrew

Jones, Alvin

Junge, Traudl

Kamera

Kampfgruppe Petersen

Kapler, Alexei

Katyn massacre

Keitel, Wilhelm

Kennedy, John F.

Kesselring, Albert

Keyes, Geoffrey

King, Ernest

Kinnard, Harry

Koblenz

Koch, Oscar

K-rations

Krummer, Frank

Kuhl, Charles H.

La Gleize

LaPrade, James

Leahy, William

Lee, Duncan

Lee, Robert E.

Legendre, Gertrude Sanford

Lehrterstrasse Prison

Leningrad

Leopoldville, SS

Lepeshinskaya, Olga

Libusha, Linda

Lincoln, Abraham

London

bombing of

London Protocol

Losheim Gap

Luftwaffe

Lüttwitz, Heinrich

Luxembourg

MacArthur, Douglas

Maisel, Ernst

Majdanek

Malmedy Massacre

Manhattan Project

Mao Tse-tung

Marshall, George

McAuliffe, Anthony

McCloy, John J.

McCown, Hal

McKim, Edward D.

Medal of Honor

medics

Meeks, William George

Mengele, Josef

Merkers

Messina

Metz

Meuse-Argonne, Battle of

Meuse River

Mexico

Middleton, Troy

Mims, John

Molotov, Vyacheslav

Montgomery, Bernard Law

Patton and

Rhine offensive

Moore, Ned

Morell, Theodor

Morgenthau Plan

Moscow

Moselle River

Mozes, Eva and Miriam

Murphy, James G.

Mussolini, Benito

Nancy, France

Napoléon Bonaparte

Nazism

Neufchâteau

New Deal

newsreels

Nierstein

Nimitz, Chester

Ninety-Ninth Division

Malmedy Massacre

Niven, David

Nixon, Richard

NKVD

Noland, Frederick, The Algonquin Project

North Africa

Noville

Nuremberg Trials

October Pause

Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

Ohrdruf

Oldham

101st Airborne Division

Operation Baseplate

Operation Greif

Operation Market Garden

Operation Mickey Mouse

Operation Plunder. See also Rhine offensive

Operation Tink

Operation Watch on the Rhine. See Battle of the Bulge

Oppenheim

Oppenheimer, Robert

O’Regan, Richard H.

Ott, Mel

Pacific Theater

Palatinate campaign

Paluch, Ted

Paris

parlementaires

Patterson, Robert

Patton, Beatrice

Patton, George S.

auto crash and controversy

Battle of the Bulge

children of

death of

Driant assault

ego of

Eisenhower and

end of combat career

enemies and near-death “coincidences”

four-star rank

Jean Gordon and

as military governor of Bavaria

Montgomery and

at Ohrdruf

Operation Tink

Palatinate campaign

Pearl Harbor predicted by

physical appearance of

relieved of Third Army command

religion of

Rhine offensive

Sicily campaign

slapping incidents

Soviet Union and

speech to Third Army

Spitfire incident

tactical brilliance

Task Force Baum

Truman and

vulgarity of

in World War I

Pearl Harbor

Pearson, Drew

Peiper, Joachim

penicillin

Pershing, John

P-47 Thunderbolts

Phillips, ZeBarney Thorne

Poland

concentration camps

pontoon bridges

Postyshev, Pavel

Potsdam Conference

Prague

press

British

military

Patton and

Soviet

Prettyman, Arthur

prisoners of war

Allied

German

Malmedy Massacre

Soviet

Task Force Baum

women as

Purple Heart

radio

intercepted messages

silence

rape

Rayburn, Sam

Red Army. See Soviet army

Red Cross

refugees

Reims

Remagen Bridge

Rhine offensive

Rhine River

Roberts, William

Romania

Romans

Rommel, Erwin

Rommel, Manfred

Roosevelt, Alice

Roosevelt, Anna

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Churchill and

death of

fourth inaugural

Jews and

New Deal

physical ailments

Stalin and

at Yalta

Roosevelt, Theodore “Teddy”

Royal Air Force

bombing of Berlin

Spitfire incident

Rutherfurd, Lucy Mercer

Saint-Mihiel

St. Vith

Sardinia

Schroeder, Christa

Schwalm Creek Valley

“Screaming Meemie” rockets

Scruce, Joe

Sedov, Lev

Serbia

Seventh Army

Sicily campaign

Sheridan, Philip

Sherman, William Tecumseh

Sherman tanks

Shoumatoff, Elizabeth

Siberia

Sibret

Sicily

Siegfried Line

Sinatra, Frank

Skorzeny, Otto

Skubik, Stephen

slit latrine

Slovakia

Smith, Walter Bedell

Sobibor

Sochi

Somerville, James

Soviet army

at Auschwitz

Battle of Britain

in Berlin

rape and

Soviet Union

British relations with

Christmas in

communism

expansionism

German invasion of

Katyn massacre

nuclear weapons

Patton and

postwar

U.S. relations with

Speer, Albert

spies

Soviet-U.S. spy war

Spitfire incident

SS (Shutzstaffel)

at Auschwitz

Battle of the Bulge

Malmedy Massacre

Panzer divisions

racial purity

Waffen

Stalin, Joseph

Churchill and

health problems

Katyn massacre

Potsdam Conference

reign of terror

Roosevelt and

Sochi villa

Truman and

at Yalta

Stalin, Svetlana

Stalingrad

Stephenson, William

Stimson, Harold

Stone, Harlan

Strassmann, Fritz

Strong, Kenneth

Summersby, Kay

Switzerland

tank corps, U.S.

at Bastogne

Task Force Baum

Team Desobry

Tehran Conference

Tenth Armored Division

Third Army

Battle of the Bulge

Driant assault

Palatinate campaign

Patton’s speech to

Rhine offensive

Task Force Baum

see also specific corps, divisions, and companies

Thompson, John

Thompson, Robert L.

327th Glider Infantry Regiment

Time magazine

Tommies (British soldiers)

Treblinka

Trier

Trotsky, Leon

Truman, Bess

Truman, Harry S.

becomes president

Patton and

Potsdam Conference

Stalin and

Tunisia

Twelfth Army

Twentieth Amendment

Twentieth Corps

Twenty-Second Amendment

U-boats

United Nations

U.S. Air Force

U.S. Army. See specific armies, corps, divisions, and companies

U.S. Navy

urinating on enemy soil

Verdun

Versailles

Vienna

Villa, Pancho

von Goeckel, Günther

von Paulus, Friedrich

von Rundstedt, Gerd

von Wangenheim, Freiherr

Walker, Walton

Wallace, Henry

Walpole, Horace

War Agencies Appropriations Act (1944)

Warm Springs, Georgia

Warsaw

Washington, DC

Washington, George

Waterloo, Battle of

Waters, Beatrice Patton

Waters, John

Wehrmacht

Battle of Berlin

Battle of the Bulge

deserters

Driant assault

Panzer divisions

Rhine offensive

Welles, Orson

Wenck, Walther

Werbomont

West Point

White House

William the Conqueror

Willkie, Wendell

Wolf’s Lair

Women’s Army Corps

Woodring, Horace

World War I

Wunsch, Franz

Yalta Conference

Yezhov, Nikolai

Yugoslavia

Zborowski, Mark

Zhukov, Georgy K.

Ziegenberg

Zyklon B

ALSO BY BILL O’REILLY AND MARTIN DUGARD

Killing Lincoln

Killing Kennedy

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About the Authors

Bill O’Reilly is the anchor of The O’Reilly Factor, the highest-rated cable news show in the country. He also writes a syndicated newspaper column and is the author of several number-one bestselling books. He is, perhaps, the most-talked-about political commentator in America.

Martin Dugard is the New York Times bestselling author of several books of history. He and his wife live in Southern California with their three sons.

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