In the 2018 documentary Silence Patton: The First Victim of the Cold War, filmmaker Robert Orlando explores the suspicious death of General George Patton in 1945. Patton died of injuries sustained when his car collided with an Army truck. Although it was strange that the Army never conducted an investigation, as is procedure, Patton himself declared on the scene that it was an accident, and that the soldiers in the truck were not be punished. The fact that his death was very convenient to many of the leaders shaping the future of post-war Europe is what has historians alleging there was a conspiracy to murder him. The evidence examined in the documentary can also be found in the book The Patton Papers, which is a published compilation of his diary and letters to family and friends (all quotes are from these two works).
General Patton was arguably the best field commander of the war. “Old Blood and Guts,” as he was called, understood that fortune favored the bold, and believed the best way to win a war was to viciously attack the enemy until he surrendered or was annihilated. Many thought him mad, especially when he slapped shell-shocked soldiers in field hospitals, and accused them of cowardice. The press characterized him as such, and Patton would fight them even after the war ended. In hindsight, it seems he was right to do so, not just because he had a deep love and respect for his soldiers, but also because the press could credibly be accused of aiding the enemy. Patton would eventually accuse the New York Times, specifically, of attempting to implement communism.
The political environment certainly would have allowed for it. The communist infiltration of the US government was already well under way during the Roosevelt administration, as detailed by the book Blacklisted by History. It’s also likely that Soviet spies even managed to penetrate the president’s cabinet. Giving Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt, he was, at best, extremely naïve about communism and the USSR’s intentions. Before the famous Yalta Conference in February 1945, he told Ambassador William Bullitt, “I think that if I give him (Stalin) everything I possibly can, and ask nothing from him in return, he won’t try to annex anything, and he will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
Patton, on the other hand, saw communism for what it was from the start. He knew that Stalin was bent on conquest and would oppress any new populations that would become trapped behind the future Iron Curtain. The only notable Western leader to agree with Patton was Winston Churchill, who remarked, “Germany is finished. The real problem is Russia. I can’t get the Americans to see it.” Churchill later told General Eisenhower, “I deem it highly important that we should shake hands with the Russians as far east as possible.”
As Patton’s forces crossed the Rhine River, his goal was to do just that. He soon found himself in a position to easily capture Berlin before the Red Army, but was ordered to halt his advance on the city. Politics deemed that Stalin deserved to take it, and when he did, “at least two million German women were raped,” in what was one of the worst atrocities of the war. Patton then headed southeast, but when he came within striking distance of Prague, he was again ordered to stand down and abandon that city to its sad fate as well.
The surrender of Germany did not mark an end to the war in Patton’s eyes, just the end of a phase of the war. To truly free the people of Europe, the communist menace had to be crushed. Patton pleaded with Secretary of War Robert Patterson to allow him to do what needed to be done, arguing, “their (the Soviet) supply system is inadequate… they could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could give them for five days. After that it would make no difference how many million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. Let’s not give them the time to build up their supplies. If we do, then… we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!”
In his diary he wrote, “In my opinion, the American Army as it exists now could beat the Russians with the greatest of ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms, whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the Russians, the sooner we do it the better.” He reiterated the point about time, which was key, in a letter to his wife: “If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on we will get weaker and they stronger.” When it was clear that he wasn’t going to get his way, Patton complained that, "Tin politicians in Washington have allowed us to kick the hell out of one bastard (Hitler) and at the same time forced us to help establish a second one (Stalin) as evil or more evil than the first."
At that point, it wasn’t just the profanities coming out of Patton’s mouth that worried his military and civilian superiors. He was going to become a political liability to some very powerful people when he returned home:
According to the NY Post, "The cause of death was ruled accidental, but two witnesses have emerged to dispute the official story. The first is Douglas Bazata, an Office of Strategic Services agent in World War II, the forerunners of the CIA. He claimed that he, an OSS assassin, was asked to kill Patton by OSS chief Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. The order was the culmination of a long-running plot that had started as a non-lethal “stop Patton” plan. Later, in interviews with me before his death in 1999, Bazata enlarged that scenario, claming that he, along with a Russian accomplice, set up the Dec. 9 “accident,” and that others — he believed Soviets — had finished the job in the hospital.Though it is not well known, the OSS had an alliance with the NKVD, the Soviet spy network, during and after the war."
Whether or not there was foul play surrounding his death, it’s important to consider how history would have unfolded differently if Patton had been allowed to attack the Soviets. If the USSR was defeated in 1945, the Allies would most likely have installed a democratic government. Without Soviet communism, and without a power-hungry dictator, there would have been no Cold War. There would have been no nuclear arms race. China may not have fallen to communism, in which case 40 million lives would have been saved outright. The people of Eastern Europe wouldn’t have had their rights stripped away for the next 44 years. There would have been no reason to fight proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Afghanistan, and significant portions of Africa and Latin America. What a world it could have been.
