PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (23 page)

Patton’s gloom deepened in February, when Eisenhower transferred the principal thrust of the collective Allied offensive from the American army to the British under Montgomery. “You may hear that I am on the defense,” he wrote to Beatrice on February 4, 1945, “but it was not the enemy who put me there. ... I feel pretty low to be ending the war on the defensive.” From Eisenhower, Patton sought recognition and praise, but received none. When he met with Ike in Bastogne on February 5, he came away “surprised when Eisenhower failed to make any remark about my Bastogne operation. ... So far in my dealings with him, he has never mentioned in a complimentary way any action that myself or any other officer has performed. . . . He had on his new five stars—a very pretty insignia.” Turning to Beatrice by way of letter, Patton sought a sympathetic ear. He bemoaned the fact that “too many ‘safety first’ people” were running things. “I don’t see much future for me in this war.”
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AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE, Patton wrote to his son, George, about leadership : “I have it—but I’ll be damned if I can define it.” This was not bragging or pride. It was a statement of fact about his own nature. “It” was not an achievement or a skill; “it” was simply an irreducible element that could not be accounted for. In any case, publicly, Patton gave all the credit for victory to his officers and troops, telling the press on January 1 that the relief of Bastogne “sounds like what a great man George Patton is, but I did not have anything to do with it. . . . The people who actually did it were the younger officers and soldiers. When you think of those men marching all night in the cold, over roads they had never seen, and nobody getting lost, and everybody getting to the place in time, it is a very marvelous feat; I know of no equal to it in military history ... I take my hat off to them. . . . To me it is a never ending marvel what our soldiers can do.”
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By the middle of February, as Third Army closed in on the Rhine, Patton’s post-Battle of the Bulge let-down began to lift. Whereas on February 4, he had whined to Beatrice about being forced to end the war on the defensive, on February 10, he responded with defiance when, through Bradley, Eisenhower asked how soon Third Army could go on the defensive and yield more troops to Montogomery’s 21st Army Group. Patton replied to Bradley that he would resign before he would relinquish the offensive at this point in the war. Bradley conveyed Patton’s ultimatum to Eisenhower, who backed down to the extent of permitting Bradley (and, therefore, Patton) to assume a posture of what he called “aggressive defense.” As Patton noted, “I chose to view it as an order to ‘keep moving’ toward the Rhine with a low profile.” Indeed, Patton pressed the attack, albeit very quietly. “Let the gentlemen up north learn what we’re doing when they see it on their maps.”
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On leaving Luxembourg, Third Army moved through the Eifel sector of Germany’s West Wall, the formidable defenses of the Siegfried Line. The terrain, stubbornly defended, was heavily forested, rugged, and cut up by the Moselle, Our, and Saur rivers. Of the fighting and progress through the Eifel, Patton wrote to Beatrice on February 14: “Some times I get so mad with the troops for not fighting better and then they do something superb. The forcing of the crossing of the Sauer and Our Rivers . . . was an Homeric feat.”
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On February 14, Patton and his aide, Charles Codman, left for a few days of relaxation in Paris, where Patton took time to spend an evening at the Folies Bergere, which (he recorded in his diary) “is perfectly naked, so much so that no one is interested.”
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Patton also went hunting with Ike’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, bagging three ducks, one pheasant, and three hares, and then talked Smith into backing his request for more troops to use in his low-profile offensive. Patton managed to persuade Bradley to return the 10th Armored Division to the Third Army; however, Bradley conspired with Patton to keep Eisenhower and the rest of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in the dark. He cautioned Patton to stay off the phone for the next few days until it was too late for

SHAEF to recall the division. If he was unavailable to receive an order, he could neither obey nor disobey it.

Patton advanced on the principal city of the Eifel, Trier (which, he observed with pleasure, had once been captured by the Roman legions). It fell to the 10th Armored and an infantry division on March 1. Shortly after this, Patton resumed answering the telephone and soon picked up an order to bypass Trier. He sent a message in reply: “Have taken Trier with two divisions. Do you want me to give it back?”
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Soldiers of the 6th Army Group had been fighting just west of the Rhine since November. At last, on March 7, 1945, elements of the 9th Armored Division under Brigadier General William M. Hoge, captured an intact railway bridge at Remagen and quickly crossed the Rhine, establishing a bridgehead on the east bank. The Third Army finally reached the Rhine on that same day, at Coblenz, but the Germans had left no bridges intact here. Although Patton was disappointed that his was not the first army to cross the Rhine, he was pleased that at least an American army had beaten Montgomery across. Patton’s engineers set to work bridging the Rhine and, during the night of March 22, Patton stealthily slipped a division across the river—a day in advance of Montgomery, whose much-trumpeted crossing had been delayed by the overly elaborate preparations he made. “God be praised,” Patton recorded in his diary on the twenty-third. He immediately composed Third Army General Orders 70, addressed to the “officers and men of the Third Army and to our comrades of the XIX TAC [Tactical Air Command],” tallying their achievements from January 29 to March 22, including the capture of Trier, Coblenz, Bingen, Worms, Mainz, Kaiserslautern, and Ludwigshafen; the capture of 140,112 enemy soldiers; and the killing or wounding of 99,000 more, “thereby eliminating practically all of the German Seventh and First Armies. History records no greater achievement in so limited a time. . . . The world rings with your praises. . . . Please accept my heartfelt admiration and thanks for what you have done, and remember that your assault crossing over the Rhine . . . assures you of even greater glory to come.”
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The day after writing this exultant general order, Patton recorded in his diary: “Drove to the river and went across on the pontoon bridge, stopping in the middle to take a piss in the Rhine, and then pick up some dirt on the far side.”
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Picking up the clod of dirt was in emulation of William the Conqueror, who, in 1066, stumbled as he disembarked at Pevesney, then rose up with a fistful of English earth and led his army to the Battle of Hastings. As to Patton’s other act, urinating in the Rhine was without doubt a crude gesture, but no less a figure than Winston Churchill would repeat it on his own arrival.

Although Patton and the Third Army had not been the first across the Rhine, he expressed himself quite accurately when he told his soldiers that the world rang with their praises—and it rang with his as well. Once again, Patton was in the limelight and hailed as a great general. And once again, it was at this moment that he chose to gamble on yet another controversial action that risked his reputation.

During the Tunisian campaign, Patton’s son-in-law John Waters had been captured. Until early 1945, he was held in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Poland, but (according to intelligence Patton received), as the Soviets approached, he was transferred west to a camp at Hammelburg, Germany. Hammelburg was believed to hold 5,000 POWs, including 1,500 Americans, many desperately ill, all near starvation. Patton decided to launch a rescue mission.

Patton discussed the matter with Manton Eddy. Hammelburg lay well within enemy-held territory, and Patton wanted to detach a 4,000-man armored combat command to do the job. Eddy persuaded him that a much smaller highly mobile detachment, just 306 men and 10 medium tanks, 6 light tanks, 27 half-tracks, 7 Jeeps, and 3 motorized assault guns, would be better suited to a hit-and-run raid. Reluctantly, Patton agreed. Captain Abraham Baum was assigned to command the detachment, and Patton asked (but did not order) his aide Alexander C. Stiller, who knew Waters and would be able to recognize him, to go along. Stiller hopped into Baum’s Jeep. His presence would raise serious questions about Patton’s motive. Was he risking 306 men (307, including Stiller) to liberate 5,000 Allied POWs, including his son-in-law? Or was he risking them to liberate his son-in-law, who incidentally happened to be in company with 5,000 other prisoners?

The raiding party rushed headlong to Hammelburg, on the way engaging and defeating an enemy tank unit, destroying some locomotives and military equipment on flatcars, liberating 700 Soviet POWs, then fighting through to the camp. The commandant surrendered, sending out a surrender party of four, including Waters. A nervous German guard fired at the party, however, seriously wounding Waters. Baum liberated the camp and loaded as many of the freed prisoners into his vehicles as he could. On the return trip, however, the raiders were ambushed by a superior force. In a fierce firefight, Baum was wounded three times, and the rescue party, vastly outnumbered, surrendered. Most of the prisoners walked back to the camp. The raiders were taken back to Hammelburg, except for Stiller, who was sent to a prison in Nuremberg. A week after the raid, a number of officers who had managed to escape during the firefight found their way back to U.S. lines and confirmed that Waters was a prisoner. Just two days after this, on April 5, the 14th Armored Division reached Hammelburg and liberated the prisoners still there, including Waters. He recovered and continued his military career. Stiller was not liberated until later in April.

In some ways, the hardest-hit casualty of the operation was Patton. The same newspapers that, weeks earlier, had hailed him as Grant, Lee, and Napoleon rolled into one now carried stories of how Patton had sacrificed a heroic force of soldiers for the sake of his son-in-law. Both Eisenhower and Bradley were furious, but, this time, there would be no official repercussions. “I did not rebuke [Patton] for it,” Bradley wrote in his postwar memoir,
A Soldier’s Story.
“Failure itself was George’s own worst reprimand.”
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In Patton’s corner of the war, southern Germany, resistance was rapidly folding, and Third Army units were scooping up prisoners of war. By early April, their bag of more than 400,000 exceeded the number of prisoners captured by any other Allied army. By the end of April, the Third Army had processed more than a million POWs. That same month, Manton Eddy’s XII Corps liberated the Merkers industrial salt mine and there found the entire gold bullion reserve of the Third Reich. Eddy reported to Patton that the mine, some 2,100 feet underground, also contained vaults belonging to the Reichsbank. When Eddy hesitated to investigate, Patton in no uncertain terms ordered him to “blow open that fuckin’ fault and see what’s in it.”
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What was in it warranted a special tour by Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton. The three generals were lowered into the mine aboard a superannuated elevator suspended by single cable. As they slowly descended through the darkness, Patton could not resist the bravado of gallows humor: “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.”

Ike was not amused. “O.K., George, that’s enough. No more cracks until we are above ground again.”
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The generals beheld 4,500 25-pound gold bars (worth at the time about $57.6 million); millions more in currency, including marks, British pounds, and American dollars; and many hundreds of paintings that the Nazis had looted from the museums and great homes of the nations they had conquered. “We examined a few of the alleged art treasures,” Patton remarked. “The ones I saw were worth, in my opinion, about $2.50, and were of the type normally seen in bars in America.”
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The generals also saw something far more sinister: many thousands of gold and silver dental fillings, eyeglasses, and other gold and silver items taken from victims of what Hitler and his henchmen called the Final Solution and what the world would soon call the Holocaust.

Patton came face to face with it that very afternoon. Accompanied by Eisenhower and Bradley, he visited the just-liberated Ohrduf concentration camp. It was, Patton said, “the first horror camp any of us had ever seen. It was the most appalling sight imaginable.” The generals were shown the gallows, the whipping table (“which was about the height of the average man’s crotch. The feet were place in stocks on the ground and the man was pulled over the table . . . while he was beaten across the back and loins”), and pile upon pile of naked bodies, some out in the open, some jammed into a shed, all “in the last stages of emaciation.” The generals also saw “a sort of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation.” As the Americans had approached the camp, the German guards had ordered the inmates to exhume the many dead and pile the corpses on this “griddle.” The idea was to cremate the abundant evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. “The attempt,” Patton remarked, “was a bad failure. . . . one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue.”
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