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Italian dictator Benito Mussolini preceded Adolf Hitler in death by just two days. Pro-Communist partisans captured him and his mistress near Lake Como, in the mountains of northern Italy, on April 27, 1945, as the two were attempting to flee to Switzerland. They were held overnight, then driven to a remote location and killed by a firing squad. Mussolini, at his request, was shot in the chest instead of the face. The first bullet did not kill him, so a second shot was fired at point-blank range. Their bodies were then driven into the city of Milan, where they were publicly displayed hanging upside down on meat hooks. The angry citizens of Milan then spat on, kicked, and threw rocks at the corpses. Adolf Hitler learned of Mussolini’s fate while in his Berlin bunker; the news gave him further incentive to have his corpse burned.

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Miklós Horthy Jr., the target of SS commando Otto Skorzeny’s Operation Mickey Mouse, spent the remainder of World War II as a German prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp. He was freed by Allied forces on May 5, 1945. Due to the Russian invasion of his Hungarian homeland, he spent the rest of his life in exile in Portugal with his father, Miklós Horthy, the longtime Hungarian regent.

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Otto Skorzeny was acquitted of war crimes at the 1947 Dachau Trials. While he was being held to determine if further charges could be filed, three former SS officers dressed as American MPs successfully helped him escape. For a time, he devoted himself to helping other former SS members escape from Germany. Skorzeny later worked with espionage agencies around the world in a number of clandestine activities. Ironically, among them was Mossad, the intelligence agency for the Jewish state of Israel. Skorzeny died of cancer in July 1975, at the age of sixty-seven.

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Maj. Hal McCown, who was the prisoner of Joachim Peiper at La Gleize, remained in the army until 1972. He went on to serve in Korea and Vietnam, and retired as a major general. McCown died in 1999. He is among a number of American junior officers during the Second World War who went on to lead the military during the Vietnam War years. Another was Lt. Col. Creighton “Abe” Abrams, who had a long and successful military career. He became a four-star general and chief of staff of the army during the Vietnam War. All three of his sons became general officers, and his three daughters all married military men. Abrams’s lifelong fondness for cigars finally caught up with him in the 1970s, and he died of complications of lung cancer in 1974. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, next to his wife of thirty-eight years, Julia.

Other key Bastogne figures went on to long and successful army careers, and formed the backbone of the officer corps during the Vietnam War. Lt. Col. Harry Kinnard, who suggested that Gen. Tony McAuliffe formally reply “Nuts” to the German surrender order, commanded the First Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam, which fought in the legendary Battle of Ia Drang. This was immortalized in the book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young and the movie by the same name. Kinnard lived until 2009, when he passed away at the age of ninety-three. Maj. William Desobry, who so famously held the line in Noville, remained a German prisoner of war until the spring of 1945. He later rose to lieutenant general, and stayed in the army until 1975. He passed away in 1996. A street in Noville now bears his name. The Rue du Général Desobry is a pivotal crossroads on the way into Bastogne.

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Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the hero of Bastogne, would never shake his connection with the “Nuts” response, which has gone down in history as one of warfare’s great quotations. His military career continued until 1956, when he left the service and went on to a number of high-ranking civilian occupations. He died in 1975 at the age of seventy-seven. Before dying, he recounted his weariness about his claim to fame: “One evening a dear old Southern lady invited me to dinner. I had a delightful time talking to her and her charming guests. I was pleased because no mention was made the entire evening of the ‘nuts’ incident. As I prepared to depart and thanked my hostess for an enjoyable evening, she replied, ‘Thank you and good night, General McNut.’”

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George Patton’s oldest daughter, Beatrice, remained married to John Waters until her death on October 24, 1952. She gave birth to two sons, John and George Patton. Her sister, Ruth Ellen, married a career army officer, James Totten, who rose through the ranks to become a major general. They had two sons, Michael and James, both of whom continued the family lineage of service in the army. In her memoir, The Button Box: A Daughter’s Loving Memoir of Mrs. George S. Patton, Ruth Ellen wrote that at the moment of her father’s death, she woke up and saw him standing at the foot of her bed in full uniform. “I sat up in bed—I could see him plainly. When he saw I was looking at him he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen.” In the morning, she called her sister, Beatrice, who reported a similar occurrence. “She said she had been fast asleep when the phone by her bed rang. She picked it up and there was a lot of static, as if it were an overseas call, and she heard Georgie’s voice ask, ‘Little Bee, are you alright?’” But when young Beatrice Patton called the overseas operator, she was told that there had been no call.

Gen. George Patton’s only son, George Patton IV, got the news at West Point, where he was midway through his senior year. His father was buried on his twenty-second birthday. George Junior was unable to leave West Point for the funeral. After his commissioning, he followed in his father’s footsteps, and rose to the rank of major general. He served in the Korean War and also did several tours in the Vietnam War. Like his father, he spoke fluent French and was passionate about history. During his lifetime, Patton legally changed his name to avoid any confusion between him and his father, who had gone by George S. Patton Jr. even though his actual name was George S. Patton III. The younger Patton dropped the Roman numeral four so that he was simply George Patton. He died in 2004, at the age of eighty. General Patton and his wife, Joanne, had five children, among them their oldest son, George Patton V.

Notes

Chapter 2

1 Operation Panzerfaust, a.k.a. Operation Mickey Mouse, was launched on October 15, 1944, in response to Miklós Horthy’s public declaration of alliance with the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler’s security forces had advanced knowledge of Horthy’s plans, and Skorzeny was already in place in Budapest to remove Horthy from power. The name “Mickey Mouse” was based on the nickname of Horthy’s son, Miki. In addition to capturing the younger Horthy, the Germans also took the regent prisoner. Miklós Horthy was taken to Bavaria by Skorzeny, where he lived out the war under round-the-clock SS guard.

2 “Greif” refers to the griffin, a mythological beast with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. In Greek antiquity, it was considered the most powerful of all creatures.

Chapter 3

1 The first meeting of the Big Three (Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill) in which it was agreed that the Americans and British would open a second front in Europe. This strategy was designed to take the pressure off the Russians, who had been battling the Nazis on Soviet soil for more than two years, at the cost of more than twenty million dead, wounded, or missing Soviet soldiers and citizens. The meeting was held at the Soviet embassy in Tehran, Iran. Eisenhower and other top military commanders were also in attendance, along with their personal staff.