“Harry,” she informs him, “the president is dead.”

Truman is shocked. “I had been afraid for some weeks that something would happen to this great leader, but now that this had happened I was unprepared for it,” he will later recall.

Emotional as always, Truman fights back tears. The death of FDR is stunning, but not as much as the terrifying realization that he is now president of the United States.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Truman asks, remembering his manners.

Eleanor Roosevelt looks hard at Harry Truman. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she says. “For you are the one in trouble now.”3

*   *   *

Three thousand miles to the east, George Patton is just finishing his daily journal entries. The hour is late, but today has been extraordinary, and he needs to put every last detail on paper before going to bed. Finally, he closes his journal and puts down the pen.

Patton notices that his wristwatch needs winding. So he turns on the radio in the small truck trailer that serves as his field bedroom. He hopes to get the exact time from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s evening broadcast.4 Instead, he hears the shocking news that FDR is no more.

This is the wretched conclusion to what has been the most nerve-wracking day Patton has endured thus far in the war. Just after breakfast, he met with generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley at his headquarters in an old Wehrmacht fort in Hersfeld, one hundred and sixty miles east of the Rhine. Together, they traveled to the town of Merkers, where Patton’s army has just made an incredible find.

The three men entered the mouth of a massive cave, where they boarded a flimsy wooden elevator that lowered them two thousand feet into a salt mine. The shaft was pitch black, so once the daylight above them narrowed to a pinprick during the descent, Patton could not see the other occupants of the car. Noting that the elevator was suspended from a single thin cable, he couldn’t help but quip about their plight: “If that clothesline should break,” he joked grimly, “promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.”

“George, that’s enough,” shot back a nervous Eisenhower; “no more cracks until we are above ground again.”

The purpose of their descent is of worldwide significance. Elements of Patton’s Third Army accidentally discovered the Merkers mine while interrogating local citizens. The bombing of Berlin had forced the Nazis to smuggle their financial reserves out of the Reichsbank and to a place of safety. They chose this inaccessible salt mine. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of gold bars, currency, and priceless works of art were delivered the two hundred miles from Berlin to Merkers by train, then stored underground. As Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley stepped off the darkness of the elevator and into the brightly lit cave, they found a surreal scene. Bags of gold and cash stretched as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of paintings and sculptures, including an Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti, lined the walls, along with paintings by Titian and Manet. In its way, the gathered wealth signifies the dissolution of the Nazi government. Without money in the capital city of Berlin, it can no longer wage war.

“In addition to the German Reichsmarks and gold bricks, there was a great deal of French, American and British gold currency. Also, a number of suitcases filled with jewelry, such as silver and gold cigarette cases, wristwatch cases, spoons, forks, vases, gold-filled teeth, false teeth, etc.” Patton wrote in his journal.5

Patton suggests to Eisenhower that the gold be melted down into medals, “one for every son of a bitch in Third Army.”

*   *   *

Later in the day, George Patton’s mood abruptly shifts. The three generals lunch together and then go to tour the newly liberated concentration camp at Ohrdruf, eighty miles east of the Merkers mine. It was Patton’s Fourth Armored Division—the first tanks into Bastogne and the first to reach the Rhine—that found the horrifying site. Unlike Auschwitz, where SS guards were so rattled by the approaching Russians that they fled before executing the inmates, many residents of Ohrdruf were either shot or marched off to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Many were so emaciated and malnourished that the bullet wounds in their skulls had not even bled.

Patton has seen death in many forms during his time in the military. He has seen men blown to pieces and seen others lose their entire faces to exploding shells. But nothing he has ever witnessed prepared him for Ohrdruf. “It was the most appalling sight imaginable,” he will write in his journal.6 A former inmate leads the tour, showing the generals the gallows where men were hanged for trying to escape, and the whipping table where beatings were administered at random. “Just beyond the whipping table,” Patton later wrote, “there was a pile of forty bodies, more or less naked. All of these had been shot in the back of the head at short range, and the blood was still cooling on the ground.”

At one point, Patton excuses himself from the tour and walks off to vomit against the side of a building.

“When our troops began to draw near, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crimes. They therefore used the inmates to exhume the recently buried bodies and to build a mammoth griddle of railway tracks laid on a brick foundation. The bodies were piled on this and they attempted to burn them. The attempt was a giant failure. Actually, one could not help but think of some giant cannibalistic barbecue,” Patton wrote.

“In the pit itself were arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water which partially filled it.”

Writing those words should have been the end of the day for Patton, but the sudden news about FDR’s death rates another journal entry. He thought highly of Roosevelt, and doubts that Truman will make much of a president.

Patton and Harry Truman actually fought together during World War I. Truman commanded artillery that protected his armored units in the Argonne Forest. But Patton does not know this. “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made vice presidents who were intended neither for the party nor by the Lord to be presidents,” he writes in his journal before turning out the lights well past midnight.

*   *   *

Eight hours later, in the bathroom of his lavish suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Wild Bill Donovan stands bare-chested, shaving. He arrived from London late last night and went to bed before FDR DEAD, the shortest wire service message in history, shocked the world. Right now, he does not yet know the bad news.

The spy in charge of the Office of Strategic Services last met with President Roosevelt less than a month ago, when FDR consented to give the full weight of his office to the formation of a new national spy organization. Donovan’s future, and that of the fledgling CIA, seemed to be secure. Wild Bill has ordered many politically motivated assassinations—to him, murder is just one of many options in fulfilling a mission. But of late it has been just as important to pursue a policy of political gamesmanship. Donovan is good at that, and his hold on power seems to expand every day.

Donovan’s suite will serve as his headquarters during his time in Paris. As with his London headquarters, at the equally luxurious Claridge’s hotel, here aides and secretaries will stream in and out of the suite throughout the day, bringing Donovan cables and communiqués updating the actions of his ever-growing worldwide network of spies. So it is no surprise when J. Russell Forgan, the New York banker who now serves as the OSS London counterintelligence chief, races into the bathroom while Donovan is shaving.

For Donovan, the news that the president has died is nothing short of a calamity. He grabs a towel, wipes away his shaving cream, and immediately sends a condolence telegram to Eleanor.