VANISHED ARCHIVES, SECRET WRITINGS
The next day, Bazata was not
feeling well but agreed to let me look through his private papers. Already, there were a few of them spread around, the result of earlier discussions. Marie-Pierre went down to the basement and brought up the boxes from which they had come—about six of them. In one vein, I think I was lucky to have come to him when I did—following his stroke when he was not as guarded or reluctant as he undoubtedly would have been in earlier, headier days. Now he seemed almost unconcerned, telling me to go through the papers and take what I wanted.
Among the boxes were many handwritten diary-journals he had penned about himself and his clandestine activities. He had been trying to analyze himself and write a book about his life. There were also many letters he had written to friends and others, and files about himself from the FBI and CIA. He had acquired them through the Privacy Act, sister to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Privacy Act allows an individual—but only that
person, or kin, and not anyone else—access to what the government has about him in its files. In the case of a person like Bazata, there was a lot. I hoped I might find something in the FBI and CIA files about his Patton and Donovan claims, but Bazata told me there was no chance—there would not be any records about that unless Donovan had made some and they had agreed not to. At one point, he told me there was someone who could verify his involvement in the Patton accident. But the next day, he said I had misunderstood him.
I wondered.
In 1976, Bazata had met with
Washington Post
weekend magazine writer Gordon Chaplin, who was seeking spy secrets for an article. But Bazata, he wrote, after initial cooperation, turned silent when pressured by Chaplin. Chaplin had written, “Bazata’s monologue in the [Georgetown restaurant where they met] gathered steam and soon he was using a kind of ribald referential shorthand that he proudly calls ‘tripletalk’. . . his way of dealing with the doubters, the stuffed shirts, the friends who turn out in the end to be enemies.”
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Was Bazata giving me the same “tripletalk” he had given Chaplin in saying I had misunderstood him?
It was hard to tell. I had not pressured him but maybe he was getting leery of talking more. He had lived a life of secrecy and the habit of maintaining silence must have been a struggle to overcome. Regardless, I gathered as many of his papers as I could and that was promising. Soon I would be back home where I would have the time to go carefully through them. But first a trip to the National Archives would help verify his story. I wanted to dig up whatever I could about what Bazata had told me in order to see how much of it was the truth.
I was in for a shock concerning the Patton accident.
Almost everything Bazata told me about himself—other than the Patton/Donovan stories—was backed by documentation at the archives. I was lucky. By 1996, millions of records about the OSS, which had been kept secret by the CIA all the years since World War II, were finally released to the Archives and accessible. The acquired records contained much new information. I was able to find good records on Bazata’s “Cedric” mission. They all jibed with what he had told me—with the exception of one thing he had not disclosed. When he had returned from Cedric, he had been the subject of an investigation to determine what had happened to 90,000 French Francs which he insisted had been lost in his chaotic initial jump. The suspicion that he had stolen the money had angered Bazata, and eventually the French had come to his rescue, attesting that they had found it at the jump site and neglected to inform him. The money had been used as it was intended, they testified—to help the resistance.
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His CIA file confirmed much he had told me about his early civilian life and his service in the marines and the army. Similarly, his FBI file showed he had served on merchant ships as a teenager, and confirmed some, but not all, of his train-hopping wanderings as a young man out West—where he said he had been a saloon bouncer, prize fighter, cowboy, and lumber jack. He was also perhaps the most decorated Jedburgh of all. He had a Distinguished Service Cross Bronze Star, three or four Purple Hearts, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and campaign medals.
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I was not able to confirm his claim that David Bruce, head of the OSS in London during the war and a U.S. ambassador after it, wanted to award him the Medal of Honor for his Cedric actions. Nevertheless, it became obvious—based on the records—that Bazata was a bona fide war hero and had been telling the truth about everything in his background. I still had questions about what he had told me, especially
concerning several discrepancies in his Patton story during our interviews. But his memory problems could be a reasonable explanation. Ultimately, considering all the mysteries emerging in the Patton case, I concluded he deserved the benefit of the doubt—at least until other information proved him a liar.
What shocked me was the dearth of information at the Archives about the Patton accident. The National Archives is the repository for every shred of information available on the nation’s meaningful history—people, events, and places. Along with acknowledged treasures like the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, even seemingly meaningless documents are kept according to the view that they may someday be found significant in their own right or supplemental to other key documents and therefore helpful to researchers. Yet nowhere in all the millions of papers stored in its huge, cavernous main complex in College Park, Maryland—or anywhere else available to researchers, as it turned out—was there an official report from the actual scene of the December 9, 1945 Patton accident. At least, that is what I would be told by countless officials I queried then and for many years—not only at the National Archives, but at the Patton Museum in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, and numerous libraries, military and civilian, around the nation and even in Europe where the accident occurred. Such a report would certainly be the starting point for any investigation of what led to General Patton’s death. Yet it was—and is—nowhere to be found—at least according to archivists and my own digging.
And I knew such a report had existed.
In Seventh Army files, in whose U.S. occupation district in Germany the accident had occurred, I found a document dated 10 Dec ’45—a day after the accident—written by a Seventh Army Public Relations Officer, Captain William R. Conklin, and
addressed to “G-2,” or army intelligence (apparently interested in the event), which mentioned the on-scene report. It read in part, “. . . This office obtained the official report of the accident from the 818 MP [Military Police] Battalion at Mannheim, and furnished the details of the accident to correspondents . . . ’ ”
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(who, it added, were dissatisfied with not getting the report themselves). Another document by Captain Conklin, undated, said, “The official accident report compiled by members of the Eight Hundred Eighteenth [818] Military Police Company on the scene was made public today.” It identified “First Lieutenant Peter Babalas” as the person who signed the report.
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Babalas and his partner, John Metz, had been the two MPs mentioned as first on the scene by Ladislas Farago
u
so their inclusion rang true.
In several trips to the National Archives up to 2006, I must have looked through thousands of documents as possible sources for this report. But it was never there. Even archivist Will Mahoney, who kept his own personal file on Patton, told me he did not think any such record existed. Eventually, I was to get similar negative responses, verbally and written, from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which has one of the largest files on General Patton; from Bruce Siemon of the Historian’s Group at the U.S. Army European Command in Heidelberg, Germany, the very city where Patton had died; from the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Ft. McNair, Washington, D.C., and many lesser archives. Typical of the responses was that from Daun van Ee, Historical Specialist in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, a behemoth which may have more documents than even the National Archives: “Dear Mr. Wilcox, I was unable to locate a formal accident report in any of the files that we discussed over
the telephone . . . .” Underlining his opinion, he referred to the fact that Carlo D’Este’s book
Patton: A Genius For War
states that “no accident report could be found”
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—I was not the first researcher to notice its absence.
Long before D’Este, Ladislas Farago had lamented the disappearance. The missing report had been noted as early as 1953 when a reporter for the Gary, Indiana,
Post Tribune
newspaper, Allen T. Naive, had written the army for details about Patton’s death.
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Replying to Naive’s request, Major General William E. Bergin, “Adjutant General,” sent Naive a “Memo For Record.” The memo, apparently a compilation of what General Bergin had found, stated, “Rept [sic] of investigation is not on file and details of accident are not shown in 201 file . . . .Casualty Br [Branch] has no papers on file regarding accident.... There is no info re the accident in Gen. Gay’s 201 file . . . Mr. Litsey, Safety Br., G-1. . . said they have an unofficial rept [sic] of the accident in their files. There is a signed statement by Horace L. Woodring taken in 1952 that he was the driver in which Gen. Patton was riding . . . .”
Obviously, the Woodring statement—which, deepening the mystery, Woodring told Farago he had never made
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—was not the on-scene accident report. It had been made (fake or not) seven years after the crash. In any case, a single missing report—if that, in fact, was the number made at the scene—does not constitute a bona fide mystery. The report, as I was often told by archivists, could have been lost or unintentionally destroyed over time, a speculation I would certainly agree with—except for one thing. The on-scene report was not the only report involving the Patton accident that was missing. At least three others concerning the accident that I found mentioned in my searches were also missing.
For example, no copy of the probe that Patton’s friend and subordinate in charge of the Seventh Army, Lieutenant General
Geoffrey Keyes, conducted independently of the army, can be found. According to Ladislas Farago, who researched the accident while many of the witnesses were still living, Keyes heard rumors of foul play at the time and had his own suspicions. He had actually dined with Patton the night before the accident, stayed the night at Patton’s Bad Nauheim residence, and left, like Patton, early Sunday morning, although for an appointment at his Mannheim headquarters, not the hunting grounds. Woodring and Thompson, driver of the truck, were questioned in the Keyes probe and Woodring was absolved. But Thompson, Farago writes, “was quite a bit equivocal. He actually sounded, as Lieutenant Babalas put it, too good to be true.” Thompson told the probe he was delivering the truck to a depot and did not spot Patton’s car—or see the stars on its license plate—until he had already turned and it was too late. “Thompson’s testimony could have been challenged in every one of his separate statements,” wrote Farago. “But it was not. And the case was left at that.”
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Why Thompson was not grilled more, Farago does not explain. Certainly, if it was available, at least one copy would be somewhere amidst Patton’s files at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, or the National Records Center in St. Louis. It might possibly be hidden in some dark archival corner, but I doubt it. The archivists, who are pretty good, would know about it, and none of them throughout the years I was looking ever mentioned it. Farago, who does not give a lot of sources in
The Last Days of Patton
, does not say how he heard about it, although my guess is from Babalas, whom he interviewed. But both Babalas and General Keyes are dead, so neither can be questioned or used to retrieve the probe. Thus, another key Patton accident document has disappeared.
Similarly, an investigation of the accident by the “Provost Marshal”—otherwise unidentified—is also missing. This is clear from
a two-page “Headquarters Seventh Army” letter addressed to the “Provost” which I found in the National Archives.
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Dated “18 December 1945” and signed by Seventh Army chief of staff, Brigadier General John M. Willems, the letter begins: “SUBJECT: Accident investigation.... The following information is furnished as a basis for your investigation of the automobile accident in which General George S. Patton was seriously injured . . . .” Clearly the Provost Marshal, who apparently was in charge of military police, was, nearly ten days after the accident, looking into it. Yet his investigation appears unknown to custodians of our historical records since it was never once mentioned to me in all my queries. Interestingly, the letter concerning the Provost’s investigation, which was accompanied by a “routing slip” to “G-2” (army intelligence), offered additional confirmation of the missing on-scene accident report, and new information about the accident itself and its aftermath.
For instance, on the evening following the crash—December 9—the letter said, a
Stars and Stripes
reporter “named Sontag” had telephoned the 818
th
Military Police Company (Babalas’s unit) looking for details of the accident. He had spoken to a “Sgt. Jack Parrish . . . . As the conversation progressed, it became apparent that the sergeant was reading from some sort of record. When the reporter asked if he were reading the accident report, the sergeant said he was, and that he had the report right in front of him.” Parrish, it said, had given certain details, like the names of the drivers, the road on which the accident had occurred—“N 38”—and that the truck had been making a left turn into the “Class II and IV Quartermaster Depot at Mannheim.” However, it continued, “Sgt. Parrish did not tell the reporter that the cause of the accident was that the General’s car was speeding in a 25-mile [per hour] zone. He did not give the exact position of the vehicles at the moment
of impact; did not disclose that a German civilian employe [sic] was riding in the truck . . . .”