Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton [Paperback]

Robert K. Wilcox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 19, 2010

The death of General George S. Patton is shrouded in mystery. While officially the result of an unfortunate car accident, the evidence points to a far more malevolent plot: murder. So says investigative and military journalist Robert K. Wilcox in his book: Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton. Written like a WWII spy thriller and meticulously researched, Target: Patton leads you through that fateful December day in 1945, revealing a chilling plan to assassinate General Patton. Backing up this shocking story with facts, photos, and eyewitness statements, Wilcox reveals long-hidden documents and accounts that explain how secrets Patton knew—and his strong anti-Soviet views—may have cost him his life. Not only does Wilcox reveal how, why, and when, he also names names—exposing little-known stories and secrets of such key players as General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the storied head of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA); an OSS assassin; an Army intelligence agent; and even Josef Stalin himself. Target: Patton challenges readers to look at the evidence and question the conventional wisdom. After reading it, few will think of General Patton—or the circumstances surrounding his death—in the same way again.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

He was the most controversial American general in World War II--and also one of the most successful, courageous, and audacious. As a post-war administrator of defeated Germany, he sounded alarm bells about the dangers of Soviet encroachment into Europe. Politically, he was a lightning rod--an outspoken conservative who continually embarrassed his superiors with his uncensored, undiplomatic, and unrestrained comments to the press. He was General George S. Patton Jr., old Blood and Guts.

In 1945, shortly before he was to fly home to the states as a conquering hero, he was involved in a mysterious car crash that left him partially paralyzed.

Two weeks later, just as his doctors were about to send him home to finish his recovery, he was dead.

The army ruled the car crash an accident, his death natural. Yet witness testimony on the crash conflicted, key players in the incident disappeared, official reports vanished, soldiers were ordered to keep silent, and there was no autopsy performed on the body.

Investigative and military reporter Robert Wilcox, author of Black Aces High and Wings of Fury, has spent more than ten years investigating these mysteries, and in Target: Patton he has written an electrifying account of the shocking circumstances--long hidden from the public--surrounding the death of America's most famous general. In Target: Patton, you'll discover:

* The extraordinary war hero, artist, and mercenary who said he was ordered by U.S. intelligence to assassinate Patton
* The OSS agent who knew Patton was in danger and tried to save him
* New evidence from recently declassified documents revealing doubts about the official version of Patton's death
* The final stories of those involved in the accident, including those who were thought to have disappeared--until now

Provocative, shocking, and compelling, Target: Patton takes you through the maze of denials, contradictions, and treacheries behind one of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

What really happened to General George S. Patton?

He was the most controversial American general in World War II—and also one of the most successful. As a post–war administrator of defeated Germany, he sounded alarm bells about the dangers of Soviet encroachment into Europe. Politically, he was a lightning rod—an outspoken conservative who continually embarrassed his superiors with his uncensored, undiplomatic, and unrestrained comments to the press.

In 1945, shortly before he was to fly home to the states as a conquering hero, he was involved in a mysterious car crash that left him partially paralyzed. Two weeks later, just as his doctors were about to send him home to finish his recovery, he was dead.

The army ruled the car crash an accident, his death natural. Yet witness testimony on the crash conflicted, key players in the incident disappeared, official reports vanished, soldiers were ordered to keep silent, and there was no autopsy performed on the body.

Investigative and military reporter Robert K. Wilcox, author of Black Aces High and Wings of Fury, has spent more than ten years investigating these mysteries and takes you through the maze of denials, contradictions, and treacheries behind one of the great unsolved mysteries of World War II.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 454 pages
• Publisher: Regnery History; Reprint edition (October 19, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596986069
• ISBN-13: 978-1596986060
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert K. Wilcox is the award-winning, bestselling non-fiction and novel writer of such works as Scream of Eagles, Wings of Fury and Target:Patton: The plot to assassinate Gen. George S. Patton. His latest book is The Truth About the Shroud of Turin. In addition to his writing for film and television, he has reported for The New York Times and written for numerous national and international publications including the Miami Herald's Tropic magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and National Geographic. He started his career as a reporter and editor for the Miami News. During the Vietnam War he was an Air Force Information Officer. He lives in Los Angeles. His website is www.robertkwilcox.com .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

133 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Target: Patton: Accident or Assassination, December 18, 2008

By 

David Kinchen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Hardcover)

BOOK REVIEW: 'Target: Patton' Explores the Suspicious Car Crash That Led to Controversial General's Death

By David M. Kinchen

On Sunday, Dec. 9, 1945, a day before he was to return to the U.S., Gen. George S. Patton Jr., the highest ranking American general in occupied Germany, went on his last hunting trip. On the way to hunt birds with another American general, Patton's 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine plowed into an army truck that had suddenly turned in front of them.

Robert K. Wilcox explores the accident and the widely held theory that the controversial general was assassinated in "Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton" (Regnery, 444 pages, $27.95).

It's a thoroughly researched book that raises many questions about a general that many people are familiar with through the 1970 multiple Oscar-winning movie "Patton" starring George C. Scott as "Old Blood and Guts."

"Patton" the film was based in part by a book by Ladislas Farago, Wilcox tells us, one of the many writers who delved into the accident which left Patton with a broken neck and partial paralysis, although no one else in the big Caddy received more than a few scratches and bruises.

What was the driver of the 2 1/2-ton GMC Army truck, Specialist Robert L. Thompson, doing out on a Sunday morning and what happened to the two men who were in the truck's cab with him -- in violation of a regulation that limited the cab to a driver and a passenger?

Among the issues Wilcox raises are:

* What happened to the five known accident reports on the Dec. 9, 1945 crash involving a four-star general? The reports are nowhere to be found.

* Patton was making a remarkable recovery in a German hospital when he suddenly had a relapse and died on Dec. 21, 1945. The death certificate lists "pulmonary edema & congestive heart failure" as the cause of death. Why was there no autopsy?

* Patton's life had been threatened earlier in several odd incidents, including a fender bender and a road incident with a farmer's cart. Patton had been warned that he was on a hit list and he told his family that he didn't expect to leave Europe alive.

* What happened to the Cadillac that Patton was riding in? The car in the Patton Museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky, is a 1939 export model that is made to look like the '38 Caddy that Patton used, according to a Cadillac expert Wilcox employed to examine the museum car. The museum car has a "Body by Fisher" emblem -- but the Series 75 car Patton used was built by Fleetwood.

* Why was Patton the only one injured in the crash? The driver of the Cadillac, Horace L. "Woody" Woodring, wasn't injured in those pre-seat belt, air bag days, nor was Gen. Hobart Gay, Patton's hunting companion.

* Why was truck driver Thompson spirited out of Germany?

Patton was 60 when he died, five years older than the Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and -- in Wilcox's opinion, a far more experienced and talented leader. Unlike Eisenhower, he had been in combat in World War I and was the logical leader in the European theater since he was far and away the best general and the one most feared by the Germans, Wilcox writes.

But, as any viewer of the excellent film knows, Patton was a controversial leader, a loose cannon who pretty much said what he was thinking. He hated the Russians, the allies of the Americans, British, Canadians, Australians and free French armies, calling them the "degenerate spawn of Genghis Khan." He even suggested using SS troops to fight the Russians and was widely believed to be an anti-Semite, despite the fact that his intelligence chief, Col. Oscar Koch, was Jewish, as was his authorized biographer, Martin Blumenson.

Wilcox explores the relationship of Patton with his commanding officers, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Gen. George C. Marshall, the commanding general of the U.S. Army and William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency.

One of the theories Wilcox examines is singles out Donovan, a friend of FDR and an advocate of friendship with the Russians, as the one who ordered an assassination of Patton before he left Germany.

Patton had telegraphed his plans to resign from the Army, rather than retire -- he was independently wealthy -- allowing him to speak freely about the war and the mistakes he believed Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and other generals had made, Wilcox writes.

Despite the controversial soldier slapping incidents that many writers -- including Wilcox -- have said were blown out of proportion by reporters, Patton was extremely popular back in the States. His brilliant moves with the Third Army to resolve the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944--January 1945 had been well publicized and his drive across Germany had also been praised by many.

Wilcox is a harsh critic of Eisenhower, blaming him for allowing the Germans to put the Ardennes Offensive -- the Battle of the Bulge -- into play. He also faults Eisenhower's reliance on British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, not a friend of Patton's, and the man whose failure to secure the port of Antwerp, Belgium is cited by Wilcox as one of the reasons for the failure of Operation Market Garden, the largest airborne effort in military history, which was dramatized in the 1977 film "A Bridge Too Far."

A central figure in the book is Douglas Bazata, an OSS operative who specialized in "wet work", who said he had been asked by Donovan to assassinate Patton. Bazata said he didn't do the deed, saying the "accident" in Bad Nauheim near Germany's Black Forest had been staged by an acquaintance whom he did not or would not name. Since Patton didn't die in the crash, Bazata said the death of the general was caused by a "refined form of cyanide that can cause embolisms, heart failure and things like that."

Bazata himself is worthy of a movie with his background of decorated war hero, artist, and mercenary who said he was ordered by U.S. intelligence to assassinate Patton.

Wilcox says that Patton could have been killed by the Soviet equivalent of the OSS, the NKVD (later renamed KGB and now known as the FSB in post-Soviet Russia), an organization that specialized in both deadly car crashes and poisonings. Wilcox cites several Ukrainian operatives and others who said the Soviets had Patton on their hit list.

Investigative and military reporter Wilcox, author of "Black Aces High: and "Wings of Fury," has spent more than ten years investigating these mysteries, and in his new book he draws on the famous declassified Venona documents to probe the death of Patton.

"Target: Patton" is a book that anyone who is interested in World War II history should put on his or her must-read list. It reads like a spy thriller.

50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Matter of Reasonable Doubt .... now, December 21, 2008

By 

Steven Shrader (Sewanee, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Hardcover)

Like most people of my generation (post WW2), I had a cliched and inadequate understanding of the complicated and brilliant Gen. George S. Patton. Most of what we know derives from the film "Patton" (1970), an admirable achievement, but not history. We know (vaguely) that Patton was a brilliant field commander, that he slapped a soldier whom he considered cowardly, that he was envied by other Allied commanders, and that he was considered a talented problem child by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Bedell Smith. We understood that he died after the war in an automotive accident (usually decribed, incorrectly, as a jeep accident).

Robert Wilcox's book "Target: Patton" is valuable for two reasons: (1) he does not outrun the evidence that he offers and declare that he has solved the case, and (2) he has uncovered a wealth of information which raises troubling questions about Patton's demise. He demonstrates that official accounts of the accident were lacking -- or that they had disappeared. He shows that the "death car" (a Cadillac limo, not a jeep) in the Patton Museum is in fact not the car in which Patton was riding. And finally, he brings forth the witness Douglas Bazata, who claimed that Wild Bill Donovan himself commissioned the hit on Patton.

Bazata's confessions, if such they were, are both the strength and weakness of the case which Wilcox offers. Bazata, a fascinating figure in the "black ops" of WW2, was certainly in a position to know whereof he spoke, but at the same time he seemed unable to decide whether he had actually participated in Patton's murder or simply was aware of who did. As the author himself admits, the evidence could perhaps bring an indictment, but not a conviction in a court of law.

Nonetheless, Wilcox's work is a very provocative and valuable addition to the Patton literature. It is difficult to read the book and not draw the conclusion that Patton was a uniquely talented warrior-general who was constantly thwarted by desk generals such as Ike. Certainly his views concerning the Soviet threat were prescient.

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Skeptical Reader, June 4, 2009

By 

R. Land (Columbia, SC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Hardcover)

I am very familiar with the life of General Patton, owning a library of over 30 volumes. It was with this background that I skeptically purchased and read this book. There were questions that I believed could not be answered, the most important being the unplanned hunting trip on that fateful day. The author has convinced me of the possibility that our greatest combat Commander was, indeed, the target of assassination. From European operative reports of a Stalinist hit list, the clandestine operations of the OSS, the leftist concerns in the US Government about Patton's post-war outspokenness against our 'ally,' Russia, to all the missing significant documents (investigation reports), I finished this book angry. We will never know as all those who could have shed light on this troubling assertion are now dead. I am not a conspiracy adherent by nature ... but this one gave me pause. A worthwhile book written thirty years too late.