Target (23 page)

The day following his confrontation with Davidov, wrote Skubik, “all hell broke loose.” He was ordered to report to CIC sub-regional headquarters at Hoechst, near Frankfurt, where he had first encounted Ukrainian General Shandruk. “NKVD General Davidov had complained to OSS General Donovan. He wanted the papers to the car and he wanted my hide. Col. Rodin tore into me. He said my report is a bunch of crap. He told me that I’d had no authority to contact General Davidov. ‘Damn it!’ I said. ‘I risked my life to get Schoenstein. My orders didn’t say where or how I should catch Schoenstein.’ Rodin called Skubik ‘a damned fool’ and said ‘he had no choice but put me under house arrest.” Donovan had ordered it.

Skubik was restricted to quarters. “I was fuming. I did one helluva job. I arrested a mighty slick spy. But my reward was being arrested.” For six days he was restricted to his room, given no explanation beyond having overstepped his authority. On one occasion,
he said, they tried to entrap him, sending to his room “a guy. . . with a bottle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes, compliments of Colonel Rodin.” The visitor had a hidden tape recorder and made a sexual advance. Skubik threatened to “knock” his “head off” and the visitor “ran out . . . Rodin had tried to discredit me as a [homosexual].”

At last a “captain,” presumably CIC but not otherwise described, came and told Skubik he was free to go. Davidov had told Donovan that he, Skubik, was an agent for the UPA, one of the Ukrainian forces fighting the USSR. Donovan knew he had been meeting with Bandera, the UPA leader. That was why he had been held, said the captain. Skubik blew his top. “Bull!” he protested. He was not an agent! He was just doing his job. The captain was skeptical but sent him out to arrest a Nazi, which he did, and then back to Lieutenant Gillespie, who appears to have been on Skubik’s side.
¹¹

A few days later, Patton was injured in the December 9 crash. Skubik learned about it around 3:00 p.m. that Sunday and became convinced the intelligence he had gathered had become reality. He asked to be sent to the scene to investigate. But Colonel Rodin telephoned back in reply to Gillespie’s request with “strict orders” that Skubik “stay the hell out.” Others, said Rodin, “were assigned to the case.”
¹²
Subsequently, wrote Skubik—probably years later—he “learned that there is no record of a CIC investigation of the accident or of the death of Patton.” He believed the CIC investigation, if it was made, “was removed by the same people who stole the other files”—presumably the missing accident reports.
¹³

He was stymied.

While official records of
Patton’s accident have vanished, the opposite is true of his subsequent hospitalization. One of the largest single sections of files I have on Patton is crammed with hospital reports, news accounts, and personal recollections of the general’s December 1945 ordeal, beginning with his admittance to Heidelberg’s newly established 130
^th
Station Hospital.

The hospital, understaffed and still under construction, was not the biggest or best equipped in the area.
¹
That honor belonged to Frankfurt’s 97
^th
General which was also an army hospital. The 130
^th
had only been established in the former barracks of a German cavalry unit for about four months
²
so, fledgling as it was, there is reason to ponder why Patton, with a broken neck and in need of the best available treatment, was taken there. But Frankfurt was almost fifty miles away, while Heidelberg was less than half that—perhaps fifteen miles distant. The doctor credited with being the first physician to arrive at the accident and transport
Patton to Heidelberg, Captain Ned Snyder, of Brownwood, Texas, additionally decided to bypass hospitals in Mannheim. He and his commanding officer, Major Charles Tucker, had been summoned to the crash by a female Red Cross worker who had witnessed it and run to their headquarters for help.
³
Dr. Snyder had examined Patton at the scene and then helped load him onto a stretcher and into the battalion’s ambulance. The strange thing was that he had written in his article that Patton, when he, Snyder, had arrived, “had no head or facial wounds that I remember,” although he recognized the paralysis. Before they moved him from the Cadillac, Snyder wrote that Patton told him, “ ‘I am paralyzed from the neck down,’ Later as I tried to straighten his neck into an approved position for transporting neck injuries, [Patton] cautioned, ‘If you move my head I will die, go easy.’ Again, I remember no scalp wound to be repaired.”

This contradicts most other witnesses at the scene, and all those who mention seeing Patton’s bloodied face and scalp, including the two other occupants of the Cadillac, Woodring and General Gay, as well as hospital records and news accounts. It seems most probable that Snyder’s memory is faulty on this point, but his recollection might possibly be the source of a rumor that Patton was bludgeoned to death on the way to the hospital. You see the rumor on the Internet with no verifiable evidence substantiating it. However, someone reading Snyder’s account might theorize, given the doctor’s witness, that Patton’s bloody head wound was inflicted en route. If this was true, Captain Snyder, who died in 2001, would had to have been party to the attack since he drove with Patton to the hospital, presumably with others. “I remember practically no other conversation in the ambulance on the way,” he writes.
⁴
Snyder’s memory also appears to fail him in declaring that the car he helped Patton from was a “black Mercedes,” and not the olive drab Cadillac every other source mentions.

Other strange stories at odds with the accepted accounts of Patton’s accident have also surfaced. Are they true? It seems unlikely. But given the mysteries surrounding the accepted account, who really knows? One thing they ultimately prove is the suspicious level of murkiness surrounding an event that should have been extensively investigated.

Earl Staats of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, claimed that Patton was not in a Cadillac when injured. It was a “1941 or 1942 Plymouth staff car,” he is quoted as saying in another
Military
magazine article.
⁵
He knew, he said, because the accident occurred in Heidelberg where he was stationed—not on the outskirts of Mannheim as all other witnesses attest. Staats claimed to have been at the scene. He said Patton, on that December 9 morning, had stopped by in Heidelberg “on the way to Mannheim”
^ah
to see his boss, Colonel Sitzinger, a Patton friend whom Staats identified as commander of the 14
^th
Field Observation Battalion of the Fifteenth Army.
^ai
Patton told them he was going home to resign and “straighten this mess out.”
^aj
The accident had occurred moments after Patton left their office. They heard the crash and ran several blocks to see the car and truck “smashed” and Patton incapacitated. He claimed an ambulance took Patton not to the 130
^th
but to the 115
^th
Station Hospital where he expired not two weeks later, but
that very day
. In addition, claimed Staats, General Gay, contrary to reports he had seen, was not in the car when Patton stopped to visit their headquarters, nor was he at the scene of the accident.

A Niagara Falls, N.Y. policeman, Kazmir L. Sawicki, claimed that as an MP serving in Germany when Patton died, he had been the first person to the accident scene and had cradled the general until he was basically ordered to leave by higher-ups who arrived and stated they would take over. Patton, he said, was not injured inside his car, as all other witnesses claim, but was hit by a passing truck while he was urinating outside and beside his vehicle.
⁶

Lester Gingold, a Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper publisher who claims to have taken the only photo of truck driver Robert S. Thompson at the crash scene, says contrary to the charge that Thompson and his passengers were drinking prior to the accident, he only saw empty bottles of whiskey in
Patton’s
car.
^ak
7

Dr. Gerald T. Kent, one of the physicians who later attended Patton at the 130
^th
hospital, wrote that General Gay told him the reason Patton had been injured was that they were doing seventy-five miles per hour on the autobahn had swerved to avoid the truck, and ended up in an ditch.
^al
8

Finally, Farago writes that in the early 1950s, the
Post-Tribune
of Gary, Indiana, was contacted by an “A.D.C. Atchison” who claimed
he
—not Woodring—was driving the Cadillac on December 9.
⁹

As dubious as these alternative stories might appear, without the missing reports and investigations, who can really be sure of the truth? In addition, certain aspects of the accepted story also raise questions.

Horace Woodring, driver of the Patton Cadillac, has probably been the most vocal witness to the crash—and not because he necessarily wanted to be. Accessible like others involved were not, questioners continually sought him. Generally, he told the same basic story, although sometimes details differed: he accelerated from a stop at a railroad track crossing and was listening and reacting as Patton, from the backseat, pointed out war debris piled along the roadside. Then a truck he noticed ahead advancing toward them in the opposite lane had suddenly, without warning, turned across their path. Although it does not appear in all his retellings, in several, most notably the one in Martin Blumenson’s,
The Patton Papers 1940-1945,
one of the earliest of Woodring’s published accounts, he is quoted as saying there were
two
trucks ahead, not just one.
¹⁰
This coincides with what Bazata said, although it is not clear on which roadside each truck seen by Woodring was, or if they were separate or together.
¹¹

More ominously, most of Woodring’s retellings, including the long quote in Blumenson, say the truck that turned into them was stationary and parked on the roadside until the train had passed and they started up again. Only then had it moved out onto the road and started slowly toward them. Woodring’s statement in Blumenson reads in part, “. . . . When the train got by, we passed the Quartermaster Depot which the General was looking at and commenting on. About six hundred yards beyond the railroad track, I noticed two 6 x 6 trucks ahead. When I first started up, one of these also pulled away from the curb and approached in our direction . . . .”

That sounds like the truck was
waiting
for them.

In most of the public interviews Woodring gave during his lifetime he indicated that while he never totally dismissed the possibility that the accident was part of an assassination plot, he
himself did not believe it was. Brian M. Sobel, author of
The Fighting Pattons
, who interviewed Woodring for his book in the 1990s, shows this conflict in Woodring’s thinking by quoting him as saying: “To this day I don’t know where the truck was going. The only entrance they could have been pointing towards was a large German [barracks] with a big stone wall around it and an iron gate which was probably fifteen feet from the pavement. The accident happened so quickly I didn’t even hit the brake pedal.”
¹²

Several who have studied the accident believe Thompson, the truck driver, was turning into the driveway of an outlying quartermaster installation. But his actual destination is still a matter of debate.
¹³
In any case, turning at that precise location, which apparently had some kind of entrance, would probably have been part of any sinister plan, had one existed. The entrance would have provided justification for the sudden swerve into Patton’s path and also for why the truck was going slowly—to enable it to time its turn at a precise moment and location.

In May 2005, I contacted Woodring’s son John, who told me his deceased father always had suspicions about the accident but did not feel it was his place to air them in public. “There was a 6x6. . . sitting up front a quarter of a mile down the road on the other side,” he said.

Sitting there?

“Yes, sitting there on the shoulder. And as they left the railroad tracks, he [the truck driver] pulled out as well. So they were heading towards each other. My dad had gotten up to about twenty-five miles per hour
¹⁴
. . . and as soon as he [the truck driver] got to him he veered right into the car—three drunk [truck occupants] who pretty much disappeared....With all the general’s flags and what not, [they] accidentally turn into that? I don’t think so. Not even if they were drunk.”

Did John’s father think it was a set up?

“No, he never really....Well, you know, he always had his thoughts possibly that it could have been. But he was just a kid at that time . . . .He never really brought it to the public . . . .He always felt it wasn’t his place to suspect.”
¹⁵