Target (30 page)

On Patton?

Skubik could not help but wonder. And, in addition to knowing that the Soviets certainly had reason enough to kill Bandera for his anti-Soviet activities alone, he became convinced they had also murdered him because of his Patton knowledge. “The fact that UPA General Stepan Bandera was himself assassinated, and UPA/NKVD agent Ivan Malij was executed by the NKVD, lead me to believe that they were killed to silence them about the Patton assassination,” he wrote.
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He wondered if the Soviets had
him
on a hit list. “I think Dad took Bandera’s assassination personally,” says Mark. What exactly he did about the concern is unclear. He continued working his job and helping the Republican Party. Among other things, he co-edited a book for the party entitled
Republican Humor
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and gave political speeches. But in 1976, his wife Ann died unexpectedly of a stroke. “My Dad went into a deep inward depression and in working his way out of it, did some very unusual things,” recalls Harriet.
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Among them was traveling to Eastern Europe. He had a lifelong interest in icons, possibly because of his Ukrainian background. “He started taking uncharacteristic risks,” writes Harriet, traveling to communist-dominated countries and returning with iconographic art. A Florida church museum exhibited some of it, she says. He had a
helper-interpreter in Czechoslovakia named Helena Copova. In 1978, Harriet and Mark visited Copova while their father traveled through the communist block.

The trip had an aura of mystery, writes Mark, because prior to their leaving, his father, he says, was contacted by Israeli intelligence “who offered him an emergency phone number to use while in Prague,” presumably if he got in trouble. “We talked about this a little bit at the time. It seems somebody had noticed that he’d applied for visas to Russia and Czechoslovakia . . . . My guess is that his name was on a list of Americans friendly to their [the Israeli’s] cause, and that his record of working with the Jewish Underground to capture Nazi war criminals in Germany is documented.”
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While the three were in Eastern Europe, things got stranger. Harriet’s passport was pick-pocketed from her at a Czech nightclub—a misfortune, she was informed by the American embassy, that could have kept her a virtual prisoner in the communist country which would not have made exception for missing papers for up to six months. But then the documents were returned by a hotel employee who cautioned her to be more careful. A mysterious phone call followed in which she was told the theft was just a warning. “Get out of the country and never come back.” She never discovered the meaning.

Meanwhile, as they visited Eastern Europe, their house in D.C. was broken into and Skubik’s important historical papers, including the reports he had made about the Patton threats, appear to have been stolen. In truth, he had not looked at the Patton reports since returning from Germany so he could not know for sure exactly when they were taken. In 1994, with the publication of his book about Patton’s murder, he told
New Hampshire Sunday News
writer Pat Hammond, “All the papers relating to Gen. Patton’s
murder were stolen from my files. Whether they were taken in transit from Europe . . . or in the United States, I have no idea.”

But they were stolen—either in 1976 or earlier.

Finally, returning to Czechoslovakia from his sojourns, where his children were staying with his aide, Mrs. Copova, Skubik was strip-searched, detained, and almost arrested. He had only been hunting icons, he insisted, and was eventually able to talk his way out. But a year or so later, Mrs. Copova mysteriously died in what was said to have been a fall in which she had broken her skull on a Czech street. “I was never really sure that was as much of an accident as we were told,” writes Mark. “She seemed a little too healthy for the kind of accident described to us by her husband.”

Was any of this related to Patton’s death?

One can only speculate.

Why would someone
murder Patton?

In considering such a question, a good place to start is North Africa, 1942, three years before his mysterious accident and death. That, it appears, is when his fall from grace began in earnest.

Recognized by General George C. Marshall, head of the army, as one of the country’s top pre-war combat officers, Patton had, by late 1942, successfully led American troops ashore in French Morocco as commander of the main U.S. contingent in the joint British-American “Torch” operation, the Allies’ first big offensive aimed at taking Europe back from the Nazis. The Vichy French, rather than their stronger German allies, defended the North African beaches so the landing and resultant victory was comparatively easy. Then, months later, plucked from where he had been reassigned to help plan the upcoming invasion of Sicily, Patton had been rushed by a worried Eisenhower, overall theater commander, back to the North African battlefields to help regroup
green and demoralized U.S. troops routed by General Erwin Rommel’s experienced Afrika Korps at Tunisia’s Kasserine Pass. The Germans had mounted a successful counter-offensive and inflicted heavy loses on the relatively inexperienced Americans. In record time, Patton, principally, had reshaped the battered U.S. troops into an improved fighting force and saved Eisenhower further losses which, had he not done so, probably would have cost Eisenhower his job. Combined with the British, Patton had gone on to help drive the Germans out of North Africa and become, for a short while, military administrator of some of the conquered territory.

But he was a soldier, not a diplomat. And French North Africa, secured as a staging area for the Sicily invasion, was a precarious political minefield. The Vichy government had been formed as the new authority over the portions of France (mostly in the south) not occupied by the Germans after her defeat in 1940. Vichy France was in limited collaboration with the Nazis in return for partial freedoms. Many French citizens opposed it. Britain, which fought Vichy, had broken off relations. The U.S. had not. Feelings were high on all sides. Patton needed cooperation from the North African locals who, for all practical purposes, were controlled by Vichy officials. The conquered cities—Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers—still had to function. With the Germans his primary concern, he did not want to have to worry about Vichy subversion or Arab revolt as they planned the Sicilian invasion. So he decided to make friends with the collaborators, in particular the right-wing commander of Vichy Forces in Africa, General Auguste Nogues, whom he regarded as somewhat of a scoundrel but a good soldier.
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In addition, heady with confidence from his victory, and believing he had a better grasp of the situation than his distant bosses, Patton disregarded War Department requirements that
Vichy representatives sign a formal surrender. Instead, at the public surrender ceremony, he deliberately ripped the surrender documents sent from Washington into pieces. It was a presumptuous act on his part calculated to show respect to the prideful losers and thus gain their favor. All he required was Nogues’s sworn word as a soldier that he would cooperate.

Nogues and his Vichy officers were impressed. From then on, the two collaborated, Nogues basically doing Patton’s bidding. And, according to Robert Murphy, Eisenhower’s personal representative (and watchdog) in the area, Patton, who spoke French, was wise to have done what he did because the War Department documents “ignored the special conditions prevailing in Morocco” and “would have virtually abolished the [French] protectorate [giving native Moroccans independence], thus infuriating all patriotic Frenchmen and creating chaotic administrative conditions.” Patton, whose “action certainly was irregular and probably illegal,” in the opinion of Murphy, had nevertheless advanced the Allied cause.
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As a result, the more important job of planning and preparing for the Sicilian invasion continued unhampered.

But back in the U.S., the political Left, particularly prominent New Dealers, cried foul. They objected to any Vichy collaboration—just as they would Nazi collaboration. And to them, it looked like Patton was flaunting it. Influential liberals like Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, top presidential advisor Harry Hopkins, and syndicated radio and newspaper journalist Drew Pearson criticized the administration and Patton in particular for fraternizing with fascists.
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The criticism began to reflect badly on Eisenhower who had already come under fire for a similar deal earlier with Vichy Admiral Jean Darlan, the top military man in the North African Vichy government. In exchange for help with Torch, Eisenhower agreed to honor Darlan as the political
head of North Africa. America was in bed with Nazi collaborators and anti-Semites, howled the critics. It got so bad after Patton favored Nogues, writes Murphy, that General Eisenhower’s brother, Milton, associate director of the Office of War Information in Washington, came to North Africa and demanded, “Heads must roll.” At the very least he wanted Nogues fired. His brother was getting creamed. Leading newspapers and radio commentators were “even calling [
Eisenhower
] a ‘Fascist.’”
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President Roosevelt was uncomfortably in the middle of all this and hoping to duck the criticism. The dominant philosophy amongst war-runners in Washington was to do anything necessary to aid the Allied effort. Extreme measures were needed. So the president, as best he could, was trying to turn a blind eye to the Vichy-courting. FDR received flak for it not only from the press but privately from aides like Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, who broke ranks with his colleagues in being angry over any deals with anti-Jewish collaborators.
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FDR did not particularly care for the French and, to boot, was an anti-colonialist which sometimes put him at odds even with close ally Britain who had a substantial colonial empire—and wanted to keep it. More important to the president in North Africa was the well-being of native Moroccans and those oppressed by Vichy, which included North African Jews. The U.S. had a longstanding relationship with Morocco’s sultans, and the president was maneuvering to end France’s grip on North Africa. In that spirit, Roosevelt had penned a letter to the reigning sultan sending his greetings and asking help for U.S. war aims in the region. But he was perplexed when he heard nothing back.

As it turned out, the reason for the silence involved more of Patton’s brashness.

According to Robert Murphy, Patton’s protege Nogues, somehow intercepting Roosevelt’s letter and fearing it “might encourage the sultan to feel more independent in his relations with France,” had “pigeonholed” it. Brought to Patton’s attention, he read the letter himself and, surprisingly,
agreed
with Nogues. “Not enough mention of the French in it,” Murphy quotes him as saying. Patton then set about rewriting the letter, ignoring incredulous protests from U.S. authorities “that nobody should change a Presidential message without the President’s consent.” Not until a perturbed Eisenhower’s office officially intervened was the original letter finally delivered.
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When FDR learned of this, as he certainly did, he must have been angered. Patton worked for Roosevelt—not the other way around. Eisenhower, feeling the brunt of the anti-Vichy protest, certainly was not happy either. He and Patton had an unusual relationship. Patton was older and had been Eisenhower’s superior right up until America entered the war. But a favorite of Marshall, for whom he had worked in obscurity in Washington in the pre-war years, Eisenhower had suddenly been elevated above Patton and others higher in rank, to what, in effect, was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, a title he later officially was given. The relationship between the two amounted to a rookie ruling a veteran. Patton had taken part in the Mexican border wars and had been decorated in World War I. Eisenhower had never been in combat. Patton felt professionally superior to Eisenhower, although he was dutifully and sincerely respectful.
^ax
For his part, Eisenhower acknowledged Patton’s combat prowess but now had
the responsibility and added power of a commander’s job. He was Patton’s boss. The situation was touchy and Patton, flaunting Nogues, was bringing attention to what Eisenhower had hoped to keep quiet—his and Patton’s dealings with the enemy. He withheld personal condemnation, but as Murphy, Eisenhower’s eyes and ears on the scene, wrote, “This was the first time, but by no means the last, when Patton created a problem in public relations for General Eisenhower”—and by extension, for Marshall and FDR too.

In the meantime, Darlan, more powerful in the Vichy hierarchy and therefore harder to silence than Nogues, was mysteriously (and conveniently) assassinated in a clandestine act that appears to have been a forerunner to future Allied political assassinations during the war and after. Facts in the murky murder are, even after all these years, still in debate. A French gunman, F. Bonnier, was arrested and quickly shot for the crime. But it was never certain that he had acted alone. Who had put him up to it, and aided him with weapons and information, were unanswered questions. Among the chief suspects were the OSS and its British counterpart, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), one of the West’s oldest clandestine organizations. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in particular loathed Vichy and its collaborator officials. Donovan biographer Anthony Cave Brown writes that Donovan actually had fore-knowledge of the assassination and had warned his Algiers station that “the murder was contemplated.”
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