Target (44 page)

Eyewitness accounts are worse. Russo-British Historian Nikolai Tolstoy described what happened when four hundred former
Soviets kept at Dachau, Germany, formerly scene of an infamous Nazi concentration camp, were told they were being repatriated:

Through his intelligence people and his own experience, Patton was acutely aware of this. He rebelled, letting some 4,500 Russian POWs escape, according to Dr. Mark Elliott, director of the Global Center at Alabama’s Samford University and a Soviet affairs expert.
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Such defiance must have angered Eisenhower, if not Marshall and Truman. One of SHAEF’s major jobs was the enforcement of repatriation. But even worse to Patton’s superiors and enemies, according to Farago, were Soviet charges, relentlessly pressed, that Patton was secretly hiding and husbanding former Waffen-SS units with which to later attack them.
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The Soviets presented proof gathered by their numerous spies. With Eisenhower in Moscow at the invitation of his friend General Zhukov, “Hero of Berlin,” where he unprecedentedly (for a non-Russian) joined Stalin for celebrations at Lenin’s tomb, SHAEF generals sent investigators to check the charges. They returned shocked. Among
other things, nearly 5,000 former German soldiers who should have already been discharged and sent home and made to plow fields under punitive occupation policies were being kept in readiness at a camp located at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the alpine resort which hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics.
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And there were other such enclaves being kept by Third Army officers under Patton. Some of the prisoners were hardened Nazis who should have been caged in war-criminal camps. “No explicit orders,” writes Farago, “could be traced to document the scheme . . . . But the design was unmistakable,” according to at least one of the investigators, Walter Dorn, an Ohio State University professor who had helped devise the administration’s plans for denazification and saw the pattern as a major occupation violation.
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Presented with the evidence, Major General Walter Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff whom Patton detested, exclaimed, “There is no rational explanation for what General Patton is doing. I don’t doubt any longer that old George has lost his marbles.”
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In fairness to Patton, writes Farago, Third Army had the best record in the occupation of discharging POWs and sending them home, a formidable task because of the large numbers. But to Dorn, who, according to Farago, was to “bring to bear” his “ingrained liberalism” in Bavaria, “this was a case of chronic insubordination. Patton was defying Ike, his commander, and in the process he was sabotaging the will of the government of the United States.”
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In other words, in Dorn’s opinion, he was committing treason.

Returning to SHAEF from Moscow, Eisenhower, incensed, ordered Patton to Frankfurt and reportedly screamed at him behind closed doors. “I demand that you get off your bloody ass and carry out the deNazification program as you are told instead of mollycoddling the Nazis,” he’s quoted as saying by Mark Perry,
author of one of the latest books mentioning the incident. Eisenhower aides, writes Perry, “could hear their commander out in the hallway.”
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Patton’s response, while contrite, was basically to go hunting and continue publicly to state that Russia, not Germany, was the problem. At an August 27 meeting at SHAEF, he showed he was unrepentant. Exactly what he said may not be recorded. But afterward, he wrote,

On the same day, he wrote his wife, “If what we are doing is ‘Liberty, then give me death.’”
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Two days later he received the order from SHAEF to evict civilian Germans from their homes in order to give displaced Jews, many from concentration camps, better housing. Patton called General Harold R. Bull, Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff under Beetle Smith, to protest. “If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc.?” he wrote, “and called [Bull’s] attention to possible repercussions but got nowhere . . . . Naturally I intend to carry out the instructions to the limit of my capacity in spite of my personal feelings against them, and in spite of my fear that in doing such things we will lay ourselves open to just criticism. We are also turning over to the French several hundred thousand prisoners of war to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”
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As a result of his protest, charges that Patton was anti-Semitic began appearing in the press. There is no doubt that he saw Jewish New Dealers like Secretary Morganthau and some Jewish newspaper reporters as destructive and, at least in the case of the reporters, his enemies. His diaries, especially after he was fired, are peppered with criticism of Jews and belief that Jews, especially Jewish liberals, were plotting against him. But he was a complicated man, and such bias from him was as much directed at individuals as at a race or religion. As historian Victor David Hanson writes,

Many Jews served with him and won his loyalty—as he did theirs.

However, even before the issue of Patton’s anti-Semitism became prominent, it appears officials at SHAEF decided he was an enemy. The supposedly secret army of Nazis he was keeping—never proved, but at least apparently wished for by Patton—seems to have been the deciding factor. Patton, above all others, had the moxie, ability, and will to use such a force. More importantly, Soviet leaders—as well as U.S. leaders—
believed
he might use them, which could mean World War III. Nobody but Patton wanted that. Patton was now viewed as a bonafide menace, and a threat to world peace in addition to being insubordinate, uncontrollable, and, in the eyes of some, treasonous. Appropriately, in view of what their investigations revealed, General Clarence Adcock, another of Eisenhower’s staff, decided that Patton, as Eisenhower and Marshall had earlier come to believe, was indeed “mad, for he could offer no rational explanation for what the general was
doing and saying.”
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He therefore, as Marshall had tried earlier, had a Medical Corp psychiatrist sent to Patton’s headquarters “in the disguise of a supply officer to observe Patton as closely as possible.” In addition, he ordered Patton’s phones, including those in his residence, tapped. Not only did U.S. officials need this stealthy monitoring for their own purposes, writes Farago, but also, “it was assumed, from certain passages in the Russian communications to General Eisenhower that the Russians were also tapping and bugging Patton,” so they wanted to know what threats the Russians were hearing in order to placate any Soviet reaction.
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Patton, obviously, was now a marked man. Everything he did and said privately would be known to American and Russian leadership. And to think the Russians were not also surreptitiously monitoring him is to think naively. They had spies in the White House, had bugged Allied leaders at Teheran and Yalta, and generally had made the U.S. and its soldiers among the most spied on in the world. Spying on Patton would certainly, in view of that, be expected and, in comparison with Teheran and Yalta, much easier. Skubik, in fact, told his son, Mark, that he had seen the Russians tapping U.S. phones in the area:

As Skubik’s son relates, the Russians had the run of the American occupation zones with little fear they would be thwarted. They knew the American policy of appeasement in hopes of peace. The repatriation enclaves they established in Western zones were actually spy hubs used primarily for clandestine activities. They were off limits to U.S. authorities. General Davidov, whom Skubik accused of plotting against Patton, was officially head of repatriations from August 1945 until he disappeared shortly after Patton’s death. Additional indication that Soviet intelligence was specifically targeting Patton is found in
The Haunted Wood,
Weinstein and Vassiliev’s ground-breaking work on Soviet espionage in this period. It discloses that, interestingly, OSS’s Donald Wheeler, an Oxford graduate and friend of Donovan aide, Duncan Lee, a Soviet spy, was passing to the NKVD “the monthly confidential report of the military governor in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany,” as well as other secrets, at least through “October /November 1945.”
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The military governor up to October was General Patton, and although OSS was officially disbanded October 1, 1945, the organization, in fact, continued in operation for months afterward, and then simply changed names. Were they just interested in the military governor, or was it specifically Patton they were after?

Similarly, the American bug on Patton’s phones was in operation at least through December 5, 1945. I found a three-page transcript of a conversation on that date between Patton and Beetle Smith at the Library of Congress. It shows, word for word, a discussion about Patton’s plans to leave Germany on December 10—the day before his fateful accident. He asks for
permission to take an unnamed aide and his orderly, Sergeant Meeks, with him, as well as for some other travel arrangements. Undoubtedly, the bug was in operation until at least after Patton was injured so his movements were easily monitored. And the Americans expected the line to be tapped, as one conversation with Patton proved.

General Joseph T. McNarney, an official who came after the war to be Eisenhower’s replacement,
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had called Patton to press him on “the Soviet complaint that he was too slow in disbanding” the SS troops he was believed to be harboring. “Hell,” Patton exploded, “why do you care what those goddamn Russians think? We are going to have to fight them sooner or later....Why not do it now while our army is intact and the damn Russians can have their hind end kicked back into Russia in three months? We can do it easily with the help of the German troops we have if we just arm them and take them with us. They hate the bastards.” McNarney could not believe what he was hearing. “Shut up, Georgie, you fool,” he blurted. It was not only that he was shocked. He was fearful that the Soviets might be listening. “This line may be tapped and you will be starting a war with your talking.” But Patton persisted. “I would like to get it started in some way. That is the best thing we can do now. You don’t have to get mixed up in it at all if you are so damn soft about it and scared of your rank—just let me handle it down here. In ten days I can have enough incidents happened to have us at war with those sons of bitches and make it look like their fault.”
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McNarney hung up.

What was the Soviet reaction?

McNarney reported the incident to Robert Murphy, Eisenhower’s special political advisor, who called Patton to his office. Murphy, who found the statements just as shocking as McNarney, writes Patton did not tone it down a bit. “He inquired, with a gleam in his eye, whether there was any chance of going on to Moscow, which he said he could reach in thirty days, instead of waiting for the Russians to attack the United States when we were weak [following the troop drawdown which was in progress] and reduced to two divisions [in Germany].”
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