Killing Patton

The book makes a compelling case that Patton made many political missteps and was a bad ideological fit for post-war public life. He openly advocated re-arming Nazis to fight the USSR, which showed the United States government that Patton had outlived his usefulness. They tolerated his occasional insubordination when he was winning battles, but what “Wild Bill” Donovan called Patton’s “very serious disregard of orders for the common cause” (382) was simply unacceptable in peacetime. Patton’s popularity might make his argument for a new “hot” war against the USSR a supported idea.

Although no historians believe there is sufficient reason to believe that he was assassinated, O’Reilly argues that it is possible that the military police who concluded “that the collision was simply an accident” (392) were wrong. He has two pieces of evidence: the April incident where an unidentified Spitfire attacked Patton’s plane, and a later one when Patton was almost killed by a collision with a German peasant’s ox cart. O’Reilly has not done a survey of how many incidents of this sort were happening to other people during the postwar chaos, so it’s not clear why O’Reilly believes that these incidents constitute an outlying smoking gun rather than typical accidents.

O’Reilly’s also questions the official version of the fatal accident. No one checked the blood alcohol level of Thompson, the driver of the truck. Thompson was not brought up on charges of manslaughter or drunk driving; instead, he was discharged to America. The initial report of the investigators into the accident has gone missing. Again, though, while interesting, these details do not constitute the conspiracy theory proof O’Reilly needs. Without an accounting of how many other records from the time have gone missing, it is not clear whether these missing documents are par for the course or somehow extraordinary. Similarly, without data on how many drunk drivers in that part of Germany at that time would have had blood alcohol testing, we do not know whether the fact that no one tested Thompson is unusual. Without research into what kinds of charges were being filed against US soldiers on German soil and under what jurisdiction, we cannot know whether moving Thompson to the US seems nefarious or is simplifying an embarrassing situation where a sergeant managed to go joyriding in a truck without being stopped.

Aside from this, for it to have been murder rather than accident, Thompson would have had to have known precisely where Patton was heading on December 9. Who would have tipped him off? Only Patton’s orderly, Sergeant Meeks, the driver Woodring, and General Gay knew the route. Gay and Woodring were close to Patton, so they are unlikely culprits, and there is no evidence that Meeks had any contact with anyone in the OSS. O’Reilly’s final piece of evidence is the confession of ex-OSS operative Douglas Bazata, who claimed he received $10,000 to fire a projectile into the back of Patton’s neck. However, this story is clearly fictive. Published in 1974—five years before Bazata’s “confession”—the The Algonquin Project by Frederick Nolan tells a nearly identical story about an assassin who fires a projectile into Patton’s neck after his crash. O’Reilly himself admits that “Bazata read this book” (406). Most likely, Bazata, a colorful character who once posed for Salvador Dali, lied about all of this for attention.