Suddenly Patton wakes up. His dark blue eyes flick back and forth, searching for signs of Beatrice.
There she is.
“Are you all right, Georgie?” Beatrice asks. She is every bit as fiery as her husband, a fearless equestrienne and accomplished sailor.
Patton gazes intently at his wife. She is the only woman he ever truly loved, and the mother of his three children. Beatrice leans forward to pat her husband’s hand.
“It’s so dark,” Patton says. “So late.” He closes his eyes and falls back to sleep.
Beatrice soon leaves for the hospital mess, where she hopes to grab a quick dinner before returning to the bedside, not knowing that her husband has just spoken his last words.
At 6:00 p.m. the urgent news is delivered for Beatrice to return immediately to Room 110.
But she is too late.
The general whom Nazi Germany feared more than any other, the former Olympic pentathlete, the cavalry officer who once hunted the infamous Pancho Villa across the desert plains of Mexico, and the warrior who publicly stated that he wanted one day to be killed “by the last bullet, in the last battle, of the last war,” is already dead.
* * *
The official military report states that Gen. George S. Patton Jr. “died at 1745, 21 December 1945.” A pulmonary embolism, brought on by his twelve days lying immobile, had weakened his heart. The official causes of death, as listed in the army adjutant general’s report, are “traumatic myelitis, transverse fourth cervical segment, pulmonary infarction, and myocardial failure, acute.”
There is no autopsy. His body is immediately taken to the hospital basement and placed inside what was once a horse stall, where his personal four-star flag is laid over the corpse. At Beatrice’s request, Patton is laid to rest at the American Cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg, near the scene of his greatest battlefield triumph. Years later, when Beatrice falls from a horse and dies, she will be denied burial next to her husband, so her children will secretly smuggle her ashes into Europe and sprinkle them atop the grave.
It is a grave that may hold even deeper secrets.
* * *
The truth is, some do not believe Patton’s death was accidental. He had already survived several “accidents,” including the time his personal airplane was almost shot down by a British Spitfire fighter plane in April 1945—almost miraculously, Patton escaped injury.
But the auto crash that paralyzed Patton on December 9, 1945, was a far different story. The two-and-a-half-ton GMC army truck that collided with the general’s touring car suddenly and inexplicably veered from the opposite lane and into Patton—as if intentionally trying to injure the general. Both the man driving the truck and his two passengers quickly vanished after the incident. No criminal charges were ever filed. No accountability was ever recorded.
Also, both the official accident report and several key witnesses soon went missing. And most ominous of all, a former American intelligence operative confessed in October 1979 that he had planned and participated in the assassination of Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
It was a shocking assertion that was mostly ignored.
And so it was that a man who saw so much death on the battlefields of Europe and Africa officially died in a most pedestrian way.
Officially.
United States Third Army (October 1944)
LT. GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON JR.
XII CORPS
XX CORPS
MAJ. GEN. MANTON EDDY
MAJ. GEN. WALTON WALKER
26th Division
5th Infantry Division
MAJ. GEN. WILLARD PAUL
MAJ. GEN. LEROY IRVIN
101 Infantry Regiment
2 Infantry Regiment
104 IR
10 IR
328 IR
11 IR
35th Division
90th Division
MAJ. GEN. PAUL BAADE
MAJ. GEN. RAYMOND MCCLAIN
134 IR
357 IR
137 IR
358 IR
320 IR
359 IR
80th Division
95th Division
MAJ. GEN. HORACE MCBRIDE
MAJ. GEN. HARRY TWADDLE
317 IR
377 IR
318 IR
378 IR
319 IR
379 IR
4th Armored Division
10th Armored Division
MAJ. GEN. JOHN WOOD
MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM MORRIS
8 Tank Battalion
3 Tank Battalion
35 TB
11 TB
37 TB
21 TB
10 Armored Infantry Battalion
21 Armored Infantry Battalion
51 AIB
54 AIB
53 AIB
61 AIB
6th Armored Division
MAJ. GEN. ROBERT GROW
15 TB
68 TB
69 TB
9 AIB
44 AIB
50 AIB
1
THE HILLS ABOVE METZ, FRANCE
OCTOBER 3, 1944
12:02 P.M.
Private First Class Robert W. Holmlund is scared. He believes his life may be over at age twenty-one. The American assault is just two minutes old—two minutes that feel like twenty. The private serves as an explosives expert in the Third Army, Company B, Eleventh Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division. Holmlund is a student from the American heartland who left trade school to join the war. His senior commander is the most ferocious general on the Allied side, George S. Patton Jr. But unlike Patton, who now oversees his vast army from the safety of his headquarters twenty-five miles behind the front, Holmlund and the men of Baker Company are in grave danger as they sprint toward the heavily defended German fort known as Driant.
German machine-gun bullets whiz past Holmlund’s helmet at twice the speed of sound. Heads and torsos shatter all around him. U.S. artillery thunders in the distance behind them, laying down cover fire. The forest air smells of gunpowder, rain, and the sharp tang of cordite. The ground is nothing but mud and a thick carpet of wet leaves. Here and there a bramble vine reaches out to snag his uniform and trip his feet. Over his broad shoulders, Holmlund wears a block of TNT known as a satchel charge. Grenades dangle from his cartridge belt like grapes on a vine. And in his arms, rather than carrying it by the wooden handle atop the stock, Holmlund cradles his fifteen-pound, four-foot-long Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, as he would an infant. Only, this baby is a killing machine, capable of firing 650 three-inch bullets per minute.