George S. Patton: Assassinated?

The death of General George S. Patton in December, 1945 remains one of the enduring and intriguing mysteries of World War II, but the newly-discovered diary of one of the war’s most colorful assassins reveals that prominent Allied commanders wanted him dead because he threatened to expose Angl0-American collusion with the Soviet Union that cost thousands of American lives.

Patton believed that General Eisenhower wrongly prevented him from closing a gap in the German line as the Wehrmacht retreated from France in 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to regroup for the bloody Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.  Patton was also angry that Eisenhower diverted gasoline meant for his tanks to the timid British General George Montgomery, in order to placate Stalin’s need to storm Berlin and Prague and enabling Soviet domination of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Military historian Robert Wilcox presents evidence that the head of the Office of Strategic Services, General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered colorful OSS assassin Douglas Bazata to stage a car wreck and break Patton’s neck with a low-velocity bullet.  Then, when Patton showed signs of recovering from his injuries, the OSS turned a blind eye to Soviet NKVD agents who poisoned Patton in his hotel bed.

Wilcox points to several pieces of evidence: no autopsy was ever performed on Patton’s body, Patton’s driver was whisked away to London after the accident before he could be questioned, and, with the help of a Detroit Cadillac expert, Wilcox proves that the car on display in the Patton museum in Fort Knox was not the car Patton was injured in.

It’s unclear if the evidence necessarily proves Patton was assassinated, but as Charles Province, president of the Patton Historical Society, notes, “There were a lot of people who were pretty damn glad that Patton died. He was going to really open the door on a lot of things that they screwed up over there.”