that would render what I say as being more than anecdotal. I do however have my mom’s photograph of Bedell Smith which was inscribed to her by him. I could send you a photocopy. . . to . . . verify my mom’s knowing Smith.”
A post-war nationalized Canadian woman who grew up in Mannheim and was there when Patton was injured wrote:
So the rumours flying around in my hometown... might be true after all. To the people of Mannheim, Germany, there was no mystery, but rather a well-timed assassination plot. It was said that General Patton’s car had traveled on an isolated country road that morning without any other vehicle on the horizon. When it approached an intersection, an army truck came barreling down the other road aiming for Patton’s car and crashing into it. This is what I remember people saying
back in 1945. They also said Patton wanted to take on the Russians and that did not sit well with his top brass.
While the official story is that the hospital in which Patton died was not equipped to do an autopsy—and that was why no autopsy was performed—a former orderly there at the time of Patton’s death wrote, along with sending me pictures of the place, that the 130 th Station Hospital in Heidelburg “was very capable of performing autopsies.”
So why didn’t it?
These are witnesses who were there at the time or who have personal knowledge bearing on the issue. Reading more of Bazata’s seemingly endless diaries about his clandestine life, I came upon this stream of consciousness which seems appropriate with which to end. To get to the point quickly and succinctly, which Bazata seldom did in his secretive, long-winded, often-coded writings, I’ll paraphrase:
What really matters? Not so much the individual scandal of the Patton saga—that is only a closeted skeleton surrounding a great and total soldier. Rather, it is man’s evil. Patton’s murder is but an episode in a continuing saga—important mostly because it shows how this evil works: good intentions corrupted then betrayal. I’ve seen once brave and courageous men become the enemy because of petty greed, power grabbing and protectiveness. Patton had to be killed in Germany so it would look like a hostile people had done it. It was hoped the brutal Germans would be blamed....It was the easiest and safest place to do it because of the chaos there. It had to be done before he returned to the U.S. and launched
real trouble as president or policy maker and great exposer of Ike, Monty, Winny (Churchill), FDR, Truman and “Milly” (Donovan) of OSS. 9
Who knows the full truth? Where there is smoke there is fire. And there is a lot of smoke here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my wife, Bego, children, Robert and Amaya, and my cousins Tim Wilcox and Bobby Russell. The idea grew as a family affair. My agent Jim Trupin, JET Literary Associates, placed the proposal with Doug Grad, now an agent himself, and then Anneke Green, both of whom edited the manuscript. Harry Crocker brought it to Regnery.
Once the research commenced, Stephen Skubik’s children, especially Mark Skubik and Harriet Hanley, were helpful, as were former OSS agent Rene Defourneaux, Peter J. K. Hendrikx, Denver Fugate, Christine Sample, Elizabeth Rettig, and Betty McIntosh, also a former OSS agent.
At the National Archives, John Taylor, Lawrence H. McDonald, Will Mahoney, David VanTessel and David J. Mengel aided. Helping with the CIC and military intelligence research were former CIC agent Duval Edwards, Conrad “Mac” McCormick, and Col. John H. Roush, Jr. (Ret.). At the Library of Congress, Historical Specialist Daun van Ee provided documents and at Ft. Knox’s
Patton museum, Director Frank Jardim took photos I needed. Curator Charles Lemons and librarian Candace Fuller also contributed.
Others worthy of special mention were Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, the famous “fight doctor,” novelist Fredrick Nolan, Schluchtern (Germany) resident Christa Krucker, Gloria Pagliaro, Matt
A post-war nationalized Canadian woman who grew up in Mannheim and was there when Patton was injured wrote:
So the rumours flying around in my hometown... might be true after all. To the people of Mannheim, Germany, there was no mystery, but rather a well-timed assassination plot. It was said that General Patton’s car had traveled on an isolated country road that morning without any other vehicle on the horizon. When it approached an intersection, an army truck came barreling down the other road aiming for Patton’s car and crashing into it. This is what I remember people saying
back in 1945. They also said Patton wanted to take on the Russians and that did not sit well with his top brass.
While the official story is that the hospital in which Patton died was not equipped to do an autopsy—and that was why no autopsy was performed—a former orderly there at the time of Patton’s death wrote, along with sending me pictures of the place, that the 130 th Station Hospital in Heidelburg “was very capable of performing autopsies.”
So why didn’t it?
These are witnesses who were there at the time or who have personal knowledge bearing on the issue. Reading more of Bazata’s seemingly endless diaries about his clandestine life, I came upon this stream of consciousness which seems appropriate with which to end. To get to the point quickly and succinctly, which Bazata seldom did in his secretive, long-winded, often-coded writings, I’ll paraphrase:
What really matters? Not so much the individual scandal of the Patton saga—that is only a closeted skeleton surrounding a great and total soldier. Rather, it is man’s evil. Patton’s murder is but an episode in a continuing saga—important mostly because it shows how this evil works: good intentions corrupted then betrayal. I’ve seen once brave and courageous men become the enemy because of petty greed, power grabbing and protectiveness. Patton had to be killed in Germany so it would look like a hostile people had done it. It was hoped the brutal Germans would be blamed....It was the easiest and safest place to do it because of the chaos there. It had to be done before he returned to the U.S. and launched
real trouble as president or policy maker and great exposer of Ike, Monty, Winny (Churchill), FDR, Truman and “Milly” (Donovan) of OSS. 9
Who knows the full truth? Where there is smoke there is fire. And there is a lot of smoke here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank my wife, Bego, children, Robert and Amaya, and my cousins Tim Wilcox and Bobby Russell. The idea grew as a family affair. My agent Jim Trupin, JET Literary Associates, placed the proposal with Doug Grad, now an agent himself, and then Anneke Green, both of whom edited the manuscript. Harry Crocker brought it to Regnery.
Once the research commenced, Stephen Skubik’s children, especially Mark Skubik and Harriet Hanley, were helpful, as were former OSS agent Rene Defourneaux, Peter J. K. Hendrikx, Denver Fugate, Christine Sample, Elizabeth Rettig, and Betty McIntosh, also a former OSS agent.
At the National Archives, John Taylor, Lawrence H. McDonald, Will Mahoney, David VanTessel and David J. Mengel aided. Helping with the CIC and military intelligence research were former CIC agent Duval Edwards, Conrad “Mac” McCormick, and Col. John H. Roush, Jr. (Ret.). At the Library of Congress, Historical Specialist Daun van Ee provided documents and at Ft. Knox’s
Patton museum, Director Frank Jardim took photos I needed. Curator Charles Lemons and librarian Candace Fuller also contributed.
Others worthy of special mention were Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, the famous “fight doctor,” novelist Fredrick Nolan, Schluchtern (Germany) resident Christa Krucker, Gloria Pagliaro, Matt
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