Target (5 page)

If the above were true, however, and the impact had been forceful enough to cause such substantial injuries to Patton, why were neither Gay nor Woodring likewise thrown forward or injured?

The truck driver’s role in the accident also raises questions.

It seems that Robert L. Thompson, about whom information is scarce, had no reason to be on the road that Sunday morning. Farago wrote, “Thompson was ‘in violation of the rules and his own routine. He had no orders to go anywhere . . . he had taken out the truck as a lark for a joyride with a couple of his buddies after a night of drinking . . . .The three of them were in the cabin, in another infraction of the rules. Only two persons were allowed.... ’”
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And despite the fact that he seemed to be at fault in causing the crash, he disappeared after the accident, along with the two unidentified passengers in the truck. Unmentioned in any account of the accident was what happened to Joe Spruce—or the dog.

Did they too just disappear?

An unnamed woman who worked for the Red Cross at a nearby coffee and doughnut hut witnessed the crash, and ran about five blocks to the 290
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Combat Engineer Battalion headquarters in Mannheim to summon help. The battalion’s commanding officer, Major Charles Tucker and Captain Ned Snyder, the medical officer and physician, soon arrived with the unit’s ambulance and attended to Patton, taking over from several others who had arrived earlier. Snyder decided to take him to the Seventh Army’s new 130
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Station Hospital, located some fifteen miles south in Heidelberg.

They left with the general at 12:20 p.m.
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My cousin Tim knew Douglas Bazata through Edgar “Nick” Longworth who had worked with the super-secret Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in post-WWII Japan. He later became a Republican campaign leader and Veterans Administration official in several presidential regimes. Longworth had met Bazata through John Lehman, the powerful secretary of the navy under President Reagan in the 1980s. Lehman had a reputation for being tough and demanding, which later secured his position as a member of the 9/11 Commission. He was not known to suffer fools. Bazata had worked as a close aide to both men.

Longworth was a savvy political veteran familiar with the intelligence world. He had become good friends with Bazata and was “in awe of all the things [Bazata had] done.”
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He knew the Patton story. But, as he told me, “Douglas talks around things. It’s hard to pin him down. But I’ve never known him to lie.”

Bazata had lived a fascinating life. Not only had he been a spy, saboteur, and intelligence agent, he had been a wine expert who had managed the famous Mumm Champagne works near the French-German border, and an artist so good that he had been touted by the so-called “Jet-set” of European high society and been given one-man shows by patrons such as Princess Grace of Monaco, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. And it had all been a cover for Bazata’s secret work.
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Longworth, who had been urging Bazata to put his life story into a book, broached my interest to him and Bazata agreed to meet.

The big, four-engine,
B-24 “Liberator” winged low over the dark Channel waters, leaving nighttime England shrinking behind. World War II was raging and maintaining low altitude was a way for the plane to try to avoid German radar on the continent and night fighters prowling the moonlit skies above. Both threats were the chief menaces to the heavy U.S. bomber, which, in this case, was stripped of much of its armament, carried no bombs, and was internally reconfigured to accommodate parachutists and supply canisters.

It was late in the evening of August 27, 1944 or just after midnight the next day.
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Moonlight was needed to illuminate landmarks, or those aboard would have preferred a moonless and starless sky to hide in. Occupied France, invaded at Normandy on D-Day nearly three months before, loomed menacingly ahead. General George Patton and his stampeding Third Army was
sweeping across Northern France—somewhere far in the darkness ahead—pushing the retreating Germans back toward their homeland. The parachutists inside the plane would be aiding Patton’s push, but not in the main fighting. The Liberator would continue flying low and away from the main battlegrounds in one of many top secret Carpetbagger missions
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to drop professional saboteurs, equipment, and supplies behind enemy lines to help the French resistance known as the Maquis. The Maquis was largely a civilian force, untrained militarily, which was now being urged to action by the invading Allies. It was hoped the Maquis would be another indigenous Allied army—more help for the invaders now attacking the Germans.

The specific mission on this night was to drop a three-man Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Jedburgh team, code-named “Cedric” into Haute-Saone, a largely rural, lake-and-forest-strewn region of northeastern France near the German and Swiss borders—an area behind enemy lines that Patton’s forces were rapidly approaching. Flanked by mountains and named for the Saone River which winds its way through the region’s western reaches, the picturesque area was prized in peaceful times for its hunting and fishing, as well as a special French cuisine featuring freshwater fish and forested game. Now, however, it was occupied by the Nazis; an angry place of police and military patrols, late night surprise searches, executions, reprisals, and rumblings of distant gunfire and troops—Allied and enemy—constantly on the move, advancing and retreating.

As the plane roared in above the French coast and over the mainland, evidence of sporadic firefights and bombings could be glimpsed in the darkness below along with scattered anti-aircraft bursts at night-sky intruders detected on searching German radars. The three Jedburghs waiting stoically in full gear in the Liberator’s
dimly lit innards were part of the OSS’s first large-scale Special Operations. They were hand-picked fighters, trained in England for pre- and post-invasion missions.

Although largely controlled by British officers, the Jedburghs were U.S. pioneers. They were named, so it is said, by their British trainers for a small town on the Scottish border that was infamous for its ferocious guerrilla warriors who fought the English in the twelfth century. The men of Jedburgh, says a Scottish plaque in the region,
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wielded “the Jedburgh ax and staff to such purpose that their war cry struck terror.” U.S. “Jeds” were the forerunners of what would become America’s vaunted green-bereted Special Forces who would hunt Islamic terrorist leaders years later. In fact, Aaron Banks, who would later become known as the “father” of U.S. Special Forces, was also, at this time, a Jedburgh.
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Leading team Cedric, which included young Sergeant William Floyd of Brooklyn, N.Y., a radio operator, and Captain F. Chapel, a Free French officer, was Douglas deWitt Bazata, thirty-four, a tall, muscled American infantry captain who had been an ace weapons instructor at Fort Benning. He was one of the first Jeds, handpicked by General William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, creator and head of the OSS.
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Bazata was older than most of the Jedburghs who primarily were young men in their twenties with fighting skills as well as language and technical abilities. The son of a noted Newark, New Jersey Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Charles F. Bazata—one of the greatest athletes ever to play sports for Southern California’s Occidental College
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—Douglas was also larger than the other two on his team at six-foot-one and weighing over two hundred pounds. He was lean, lanky, and red-haired, with a strong nose that had been broken many times and a patrician face that, despite its rough hewn toughness, made him appear almost aristocratic. And he had, when needed, charm and
savior faire. An OSS evaluator, for instance, would later write that he had a “poised, articulate and almost suave personality... adroitly promoting social contacts for personal benefit.”
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common terms, he had, on occasion, been called an operator, a promoter, and a smooth talker; in short, a guy with disarming sensibility or no-fear fury, whichever suited him best.

But right now he was devoid of emotion or pretense. Quiet and concentrated, the ex-Syracuse University football player just wanted to get on with the job—which was always his way at crunch time. Inwardly, it could be deduced from his writings and those who knew him, he was impatient, as he always was when the goal was in sight.

At fifteen, big for his age and looking older, Bazata talked his Princeton-ordained father into allowing him to join the Merchant Marines where he crewed steamers voyaging to the Caribbean and Latin America. It was during those summer cruises that he got, he said,
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his first taste for what he liked to call “the clandestine” or “clandestiny”—secret intelligence work. Seeing his size and talent, he was asked by the U.S. Marine detachment on the boat to be a spy for them. The crews often included natives from the ports of call and the marines were interested in “scuttlebutt,” or rumors, and whatever else he could pick up as they monitored revolts and insurrections in the tropics. He coolly agreed. But, in truth, he was excited. It was the kind of adventure he had been seeking.

He killed a man for the first time during one of those summer voyages.
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He claimed self-defense. A crewmember was pimping girls and had beaten one of them. He got into an argument with the abuser and knocked him over the side of the ship. There was no rescue.

In addition to playing football, Bazata had run high hurdles at Syracuse but left the school during the Depression, lusting for adventure. He bummed his way on railroad cars out West where he became a cowboy in Colorado, a saloon bouncer and Friday-night, take-on-all-comers prizefighter in Wyoming, and a lumber-jack in Washington State.
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It was on this trek out West that he was forced to kill again when four hobos, seeing his relatively expensive clothes and leather briefcase, jumped him intending to rob him in a speeding, open boxcar.

“I did not intend to be killed,” he wrote decades later in one of many diary-journals he secretly composed about his life.
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