Killing Patton: The Strange Death Of World War II’s Most Audacious General – Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard, 2014 ★½

Death Comes for the General

He came, he saw, he conquered. Then, some months after, en route to a pheasant hunt just days before his scheduled return home, he died.

Was it really an accident? Or did certain powers-that-be rule Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. too dangerous to live?

The latter notion is entertained in this, the most recent release in the Killing series of books co-authored by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Taking a theory that has been around for years, and in 1978 was even made into a minor John Cassavetes-Sophia Loren movie called Brass Target, O’Reilly and Dugard speculate on who might have wanted the general killed, coming up with an unusual list of suspects that include Joseph Stalin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Wild Bill Donovan, who created the Central Intelligence Agency. The general talked too much, especially about not trusting the Soviet Union to keep its wartime promises. Even more dangerously, he was right.

“I’ve obeyed orders,” O’Reilly and Dugard quote Patton saying during dinner after the war. “I think that I’d like to resign from the Army so that I could go home and say what I have to say.”

The authors continue: “But powerful people do not want this to happen. George Patton knows too much – and saying what he knows would be a disaster.

“He must be silenced.”

As conspiracy theories go, I found this wanting, written too much like third-rate Ludlum, employing a lot of begging-the-question logic the authors treat like ipso facto evidence. Killing Patton has other problems, too, such as a patchy narrative.

We begin in the tiny hospital room where a paralyzed Patton is about to breathe his last. Then we zoom backward in time to a German fortification in eastern France, where an American soldier struggles to make a breach under machine-gun fire. Then we move forward some three weeks and 700 miles to “The Wolf’s Lair,” a Nazi command center where Adolf Hitler walks his dog. He plots to take the offensive against the Western Allies. Then we see the Allied supreme commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, contemplating a “furtive romantic liaison” with his chauffeur, Kay Summersby, while Patton cools his heels. The narrative drifts back to recall that time in Sicily when Ike had to take Patton out of combat duty for slapping a couple of soldiers.

This, the first four chapters, set the stage for the rest. Basically, what you get here is a lot of jumping around for the sake of cheap drama, pulled together by a novelistic, present-tense writing style. This is the format employed in the other Killing books, too, but here one is quickly, painfully aware how jammed together everything is.

In fact, there’s awfully little of Patton in the first two-thirds of Killing Patton. Instead, lengthy segments feature Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the suicide of Joseph Stalin’s first wife, the German massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy, and the story of twin girls who escaped from Auschwitz. Some of the narrative can’t help but be interesting, even as it offers more in the way of tidbits than anything substantial (I didn’t know Hitler had an uncontrollable flatulence problem called meteorism, as related here) but the more you read, the farther afield you find yourself drifting from the title character.

The other Killing books, as I say, do this, too. I didn’t mind it in those cases; why did I here?

In each of the prior books, Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, and Killing Jesus, the killing of the title figure was a major historical act. One could see how various narrative detours lent context and drama to the final business of the respective books.

Patton's sudden death hardly packs the same historical weight. It was a tragedy, but whether accidental or otherwise not something that affected very much of anything in terms of the fate of the earth. Nor was it one of those events that one thinks about in connection with the rest of the figure's life, whereas with Jesus, Lincoln, and Kennedy, their killings are well-recalled, dramatic climaxes to their overall stories.

Here’s where O’Reilly and Dugard overegg the pudding in favor of the conspiracy idea. It’s strange territory for them; in Killing Kennedy they rejected the idea of a conspiracy despite its continued popularity with the majority of the American people.

Here, instead, you feel them pressing to justify the book’s title:

“Throughout the course of the Second World War, [Patton] made many high-ranking enemies in Moscow, Berlin, London, and even Washington, D. C. Patton’s fiery determination to speak the truth had many powerful men squirming not only during the war, but also afterward.”

General George S. Patton takes an active pose during his campaign in Sicily, July 1943. It was the site of some of his most spectacular military victories, as well as two cases of soldier-slapping which pushed his career back considerably. [Image from http://ww2today.com/10th-august-1943-general-george-s-patton-slaps-another-soldier.]

Much of the Patton-centered narrative in the book points to this “squirming” effect Patton had on people, and why it made for problems in his career. As O’Reilly and Dugard put it, Patton was the best tank commander in the American army, the one general the German High Command respected over all others. But he wasn’t someone who schmoozed or did the politically-correct thing. He swore a lot, complained about his supply lines, and didn’t hide his resentment about the British field marshal, Bernard Law Montgomery, who grabbed at the glory Patton felt should have rightly been his.

All this made the guy bothersome, no doubt. But a target for killing? The book keeps coming back to this point with various hints, like a bad meal that might suggest poisoning, or an unidentified Spitfire that inexplicably attacked Patton’s aircraft.

The auto accident that claimed Patton’s life appears suspicious for a couple of points O’Reilly and Dugard draw out. The truck that Patton’s staff car rammed into was making a turn despite the absence of any road to turn in to. Also, the paperwork of the investigation mysteriously disappeared.

Yet the accident itself hardly appears to have been executed under extreme prejudice. Patton was one of three occupants in his vehicle, and the only one seriously injured. Riding in the back seat, Patton slammed his head against a steel partition screening him from the driver’s compartment when the collision occurred. The result was instant paralysis. It certainly reads like a freak accident.

The book spends a lot of time pushing against that idea, especially with sections detailing Wild Bill Donovan, who is painted here as someone actively assisting the Soviet Union in its postwar takeover of Eastern Europe:

“While he may be relaxing at home, Donovan is well aware that troops of the Soviet Red Army are rolling into Yugoslavia on board American tanks, trucks, and jeeps. Donovan soon orders that ten tons of medical supplies be flown into the Balkans at U. S. expense, an extravagance that will assist the Communist takeover. The OSS is also sowing seeds of discord in Greece…”

The book also notes a member of Eisenhower’s high command saying Donovan had a “predilection for political intrigue.” Add to that the fact Stalin killed a lot of people, Patton’s aforementioned comments against the Soviet Union, and that’s pretty much the case for Patton as murder victim.

Like I said at the start, it’s not much. The authors’ take on Patton overall is very positive, if not that original. The Patton we meet in Killing Patton isn’t much different at all from the version with which most readers will likely be familiar, as the title character in the 1970 movie Patton, starring George C. Scott. This Patton even says many of the same lines. He prays for good weather so he can get air support to relieve American troops surrounded by the enemy; he talks about going through the Germans “like crap through a goose;” and wisecracks back to HQ when he is ordered, too late, not to take the fortress city of Trier: “What do you want me to do? Give it back?”

It’s not an original take on Patton or his times, apart from the notion of his murder, which frankly comes off as an insulting marketing ploy rather than a sincerely-held idea. I didn’t quite hate the book; it made for a breezy read and offers some striking points of fact amid the quasi-novelistic clutter. But as someone who has enjoyed the other O’Reilly-Dugard offerings, not to mention the subject of World War II, this left me more than a bit disappointed.