Target (61 page)

An ancient town near the fabled Black Forest and headquarters of the U.S. Fifteenth Army.

As historian Carlo D’Este observed with the title of his 1995 biography.

Although there are good arguments against that characterization of him. See, for instance, “Patton & Preferences II: Competence is colorless” by Peter Kirsanow,
National Review Online
, February 11, 2004, in which Kirsanow argues that Patton’s record shows that he did not care about race, creed or religion, only results. Victor David Hanson gives more evidence that Patton was not anti-Semitic in his review of Stanley P. Hirshson,
General Patton: A Soldier’s Life
(Harper Perennial, 2003).

The Patton Papers,
790.

Most of the details in this account are taken from the investigation done by Ladislas Farago, the first historian investigating the accident who both traveled to the site and conducted interviews with eyewitnesses. It is the next best source to an official accident report which appears to no longer exist.

Farago’s accounts of Patton’s accident differ in the two Patton books he wrote. In the early
Ordeal and Triumph
, he apparently didn’t research the accident well, and writes that Thompson signaled his turn and was legitimately aiming for a driveway leading to “his Quartermaster unit.” But after an investigation himself for
Last Days
, he changed his account, writing the truck driver did not signal, was not aiming for any driveway, and was foolishly allowed to vanish. The first version, more widely read than
Last Days
, might account for why some think nothing awry happened.

Records of the mission are not more specific.

Millar was decorated for action in North Africa, was a POW until his escape, and penned the acclaimed memoir
Maquis
in 1946.

Probably a reference to the fact that he was leery of spies.

One of the first so-called “miracle” drugs, Sulfanilamide had been discovered in the 1930s and was commonly called “sulfa.”

Nazi secret police.

The Medal of Honor is the first.

Bazata, in his after-action account, says they had pistols and presumably fired at the Germans. Millar indicates they did not shoot back.

One of the first guns with a silencer, designed by the British just before the start of World War II.

Millar does not remember the soldiers shooting at them or the bridge being blown. He writes that he was told the bridge had been blown later. But Bazata’s recommendation for the DSC repeats that it was blown just as they crossed.

The newspaper was published from 1975 to 2001. It had a controversial reputation while in publication, considered variously far right-wing and anti-Semitic by some opposed to its political views or populist and edgy by others.

Being an artist, he would say, gives one entry everywhere.

Sources I’ve encountered say even refusing less extreme missions meant banishment for the one refusing. Donovan did not look kindly on the reticent.

A description I was to hear from many who knew him.

Bazata would jump pages to continue thoughts, write upside down and in large letters suddenly amidst a thought. He left out conjunctions, phrases, even verbs—all, I think, intentionally because he was leery of writing anything down.

In both his books about Patton.

Denny Lebeau, his individual Cedric codename which he would keep for other operations and use in coming years.

Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley toured the camp on April 12, 1945.

Used often in his diary entries and his personal correspondence.

As they were dubbed by an adoring press.

America was beginning to break Soviet codes and was getting hints at just how extensive Soviet spying was. The super-secret code-breaking operation was named “Venona,” with which I will be dealing later.

As Cave-Brown writes in
The Last Hero
, (pages 728 and 735), “nobody could be more elusive than Donovan.” However a search of Donovan’s own files at Carlisle Barracks shows that he left for Germany around May 14, 1945 and returned around May 20.

Sydney Weinberg was to have been an OSS representative in Moscow but was killed when a convoy on which he sailed was attacked off Norway and sunk.

Like Chief of Staff, Admiral William D. Leahy.

The episode is still mysterious with not all aspects revealed or agreed upon by scholars.

I have had no success confirming a Bert Goldstein in connection with Patton.

An extremely rare, pre-war luxury car, Goering’s Horch is hard to track. The Horch Museum, Zwickau, confirmed that Goering owned a Horch 853 “with special roadster coachwork” but could not provide any other particulars or its whereabouts today.

And perhaps explains why Goering’s Horch may be in Russia.

This makes no sense because Mannheim was between Bad Nauhiem and Heidelberg, not the other way around.

This also seems bogus since Heidelberg was in Seventh Army jurisdiction, not Fifteenth.

Presumably the U.S. policies in Germany to which he objected and which got him fired.

Gingold, whose pictures show a “goofy” and “scared” Thompson, as he described it, made the charge to me in an interview. He said he saw the bottles.

He also writes in the book, contrary to all available evidence, that Patton arrived at the 130th hospital not in Snyder’s ambulance, but in the wrecked Cadillac limousine. He says he looked outside and observed it.