Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Afterword





If you have read Killing Kennedy, you know that Martin Dugard and I are not conspiracy theorists. We write from a factual point of view with no agenda.

But the death of General George S. Patton presents a disturbing picture if one fully accepts history’s contention that his demise was simply the result of an accident.

We begin with Sgt. Robert Thompson and his two friends, who were responsible for plowing into Patton’s car. Shortly after the accident, Thompson claims to have been flown to England by army intelligence for his own safety, due to the number of American soldiers who worshipped Patton and would perhaps have wanted to cause Thompson physical harm. However, just four days after the collision, Thompson mysteriously makes his way back to Germany. There, he is interviewed by American journalist Howard K. Smith. In the wire service story Smith files on December 13, Thompson claims that Patton’s driver was speeding and at fault.

Thompson also asserts that he was alone in the truck when it struck Patton’s limo, but Gen. Hap Gay and PFC Horace Woodring swear there were two other people in the truck with Thompson. Indeed, a report dated December 18, 1945, by the Seventh Army provost marshal specifies that a German civilian employee of the 141st Signal Company of the First Armored Division (Thompson’s company) named Frank Krummer was in the truck at the time of the accident. The name of the other passenger was not mentioned.

But that report, like every other document relating to the accident, has disappeared. So the veracity of Thompson’s story was never officially challenged. His version of events was not vetted by the military police. He was not arrested or detained for anything having to do with the accident.

Robert Thompson soon vanishes from the historical record, surfacing only after he dies in Camden, New Jersey, on June 5, 1994. Frank Krummer also disappears. And if there was a third occupant of the vehicle, his name remains unknown to this day.

* * *

Despite Patton’s rank and fame, the military police documenting the accident treated it as nothing more than a fender bender. The crime scene investigation was conducted by Lt. Peter K. Babalas, the MP who arrived first on the scene. Military police from his 818th MP Battalion at Mannheim questioned both drivers, made notes about the damage to both vehicles, and wrote up a standard accident report. Though Patton’s driver testified that “the driver and his passengers were drunk and feeling no pain,” Sgt. Robert Thompson’s blood alcohol levels were never tested and he was never charged with driving under the influence. Thompson’s possession of the Signal Company’s truck also went unquestioned, despite the fact that he was almost sixty miles north of his duty station, with no apparent reason for being in Mannheim on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. His assertion that at the time of the accident he was turning into a quartermaster’s depot to return the truck does not hold up, as the depot was still several hundred yards down the road. George Patton, in fact, commented about the depot when Woodring drove past it.

Thompson’s drunkenness, negligence, and apparent larceny went unquestioned. In fact, the first MP on the scene attempted to arrest Private Woodring, Patton’s driver. It was only through the intercession of Gen. Hap Gay that the MP let Woodring go free.

The case was then declared closed. There was no formal inquest, no attempt to speak to Patton in the hospital about his version of events, and no inquiry after his death. Sgt. Robert Thompson’s military records, which might have detailed any further actions that were taken against him, were burned on July 12, 1973, when fire swept through the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, destroying nearly eighteen million official military personnel files.

Incredibly, Lieutenant Babalas’s report has also vanished. A 1953 request for a copy of the report by the Gary, Indiana, Post-Tribune received an official response from the army noting that, first, the “Report of investigation is not on file;” second, “Casualty Branch has no papers on file regarding accident”; and third, “There is no information re the accident in General Gay’s 201 [personnel] file.”

* * *

Seeking more information about the death of his friend, Gen. Geoffrey Keyes, commander of the Seventh Army, immediately launched a probe of his own into the accident. But Keyes’s report, too, went missing. In fact, the only report that remained in circulation was a curious document that was allegedly written in 1952 and signed by PFC Horace Woodring, Patton’s driver. When asked about it in 1979, Woodring swore that he had never made any statements or signed his name to any such report. He believed the paperwork was completely fabricated.

Attempts by the authors of this book to find the official accident report were unsuccessful. If it does exist, it is well hidden.

* * *

In 1979, OSS Jedburgh Douglas Bazata made the astounding assertion that he was part of a hit team that lay in wait for Patton’s limousine. He claimed that after the crash, he fired a low-velocity projectile into the back of Patton’s neck in order to snap it. When Patton did not die immediately, Bazata said, the general was murdered in the hospital by NKVD agents using an odorless poison. Bazata also swore that Wild Bill Donovan paid him ten thousand dollars plus another eight hundred dollars in expenses for his role in Patton’s death.

But many believe that Bazata’s story is far-fetched. No projectiles were ever found, and surely Woodring and Hap Gay would have seen any assassination team. However, Bazata held to his story. On September 25, 1979, he described Patton’s assassination to four hundred and fifty former OSS agents gathered for a reunion at the Washington Hilton.1

Bazata does have some credibility. He was heavily decorated for his service as a Jedburgh, winning the Distinguished Service Cross, four Purple Hearts, and France’s Croix de Guerre with two palms.2 After the war ended and he left the army in 1947 as a major, Bazata led a flamboyant life. He remained in France, where he studied wine making and had a successful career as a painter, with the Duchess of Windsor and Princess Grace of Monaco each sponsoring a showing of his work. Bazata himself was the subject of a painting by the eccentric artist Salvador Dalí, who put the former Jedburgh on canvas dressed up as Don Quixote. The British art critic Mark Webber, writing in 1969, noted that Bazata had “lived a life eventful enough for a dozen novels.”

Among the former OSS members gathered in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton when Bazata made his claims to have killed Patton, there was much conversation. Some believed him. And even after the astounding claim, Bazata was hired to work for the U.S. government, during the Reagan administration, as special assistant to Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. Upon his death in 1999 at the age of eighty-eight, Bazata was the subject of a lengthy obituary in the New York Times that made no mention of the claims that he’d killed Patton, which were widely known.

However, in 1974 a work of fiction entitled The Algonquin Project, by British writer Frederick Nolan, was published that tells the story of an assassin who creeps up on Patton’s vehicle immediately after the accident and shoots a low-velocity projectile into the general’s neck. It has been confirmed that Bazata read this book. However, two former Jedburghs who knew Bazata well, along with journalist Joy Billington of the Washington Star, claim that he confided to them about the Patton assassination as early as 1972, two years before the book was published.

* * *

The strange death of George S. Patton should be reexamined by American military investigators. Although the trail is ice cold, technological advances could solve some of the puzzles.

There is no doubt that General Patton died a hero, and history certainly honors that to this day. But the tough old general did not go out on his own terms, and there are many unanswered questions surrounding his death. Those questions deserve to be addressed.

BILL O’REILLY

MARTIN DUGARD

MAY 2014