During the long Cold War many
Russians grew sufficiently disenchanted with the lies and omissions of their
own news outlets that they turned to Western radio for a glimpse of the truth.
The growth of the Internet has
now provided Americans with a similar opportunity to click on a foreign website
and discover the important stories that have somehow escaped the attention of their
own leading journalists. Ironically, much of such “alternative media” coverage
actually appears in the leading British newspapers, eminently respectable and
published in our closest historically.
For example, three or four
years ago I noticed a link on a prominent libertarian website suggesting
that George S. Patton,
one of America’s most renowned World War II military commanders, had been
murdered by order of the U.S. government. Not being someone much drawn to
conspiracy-mongering, the lurid claim seemed totally outlandish, but I decided
to click my mouse and harmlessly examine a bit of Internet fringe-lunacy.
However, the source turned out to be a lengthy article in
Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, one of the world’s
leading newspapers, describing a newly published book based on a decade of
detailed research and interviews undertaken by an experienced American military
affairs writer.
The book and the article had
appeared in 2008 and I had never heard a word about the story in any of my
major American newspapers. The description seemed sufficiently factual and
detailed that I consulted a couple of prominent academics I know, with
backgrounds in history and political science. They had also never encountered
the theory, being just as surprised as I was by the material and by the fact
that such remarkable revelations had never received any attention in our own
country, home of the freest and most scandal-mongering media in the world.
With curiosity getting the
better of me, I ordered the book for about $8 from Amazon.com.
Target Patton,
written by Robert K. Wilcox and published by Regnery Press, runs over 450
pages, with an extensive bibliography and nearly 700 footnotes. The many years
spent by the author on this project are clearly reflected in the contents,
which include numerous personal interviews and the careful analysis of an
enormous amount of primary and secondary source material. I’ve seldom
encountered so detailed and seemingly exhaustive a work of investigatory
journalism, quite understandable given the explosive nature of the charges
being made. And yet the expose had never reached readers of the American
mainstream media.
I personally found the evidence
for Patton’s assassination quite persuasive, even overwhelming, and any curious
readers can currently order the book for as little as $2.93 plus shipping and
judge for themselves.
Wilcox himself had been just as
shocked as anyone else when he first encountered the surprising claims, but the
initial evidence persuaded him to invest years fully researching the theory
before publishing the results. Some of his major findings seem quite telling.
In the months before his death,
Patton had become a powerful critic of the American government, its conduct of
World War II, and its policy toward the Soviets. He planned to resign from the
military after returning to the U.S. and then begin a major public speaking
tour against America’s political leadership; as one of our most celebrated war
heroes, his denunciations would certainly have had a huge impact. His fatal car
accident took place the day before his scheduled departure home, and he had
narrowly escaped death twice before under very strange circumstances.
There are extensive personal
interviews with the self-confessed government assassin, then attached to
America’s OSS intelligence service, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This
operative had a long and substantially documented career in exactly that sort
of activity, both during the war itself and
for decades afterward, allegedly working internationally on a free-lance basis
and “weeding” selected human targets both for the CIA and various other
employers. Towards the end of his life, he became disgruntled over what he
regarded as his ill-treatment by ungrateful U.S. government bureaucrats and
also a bit guilt-ridden over having been responsible for the death of one of
America’s greatest military heroes, prompting his decision to go public, with
his claims backed by a voluminous personal diary. Numerous other interviews
with individuals connected with the circumstances of Patton’s death seemed to
largely corroborate the theory.
The assassin recounted that OSS
Chief William Donovan had ordered the killing on the grounds that Patton had
“gone crazy,” becoming a major threat to American national interests. Around
this same time, a military counter-intelligence field agent began encountering
credible reports of a planned assassination plot against Patton and attempted
to warn his superiors, including Donovan; not only were his warnings
disregarded, but he was repeatedly threatened, and at one point, even placed
under arrest. It seems clear that Donovan’s orders came from his superiors,
either in the White House or elsewhere.
The motivation may or may not
have ultimately had a foreign origin. Over the last twenty years, scholars such
as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have exhaustively demonstrated that during
the 1930s and 1940s a large network of Communist spies had gained enormous
influence in the uppermost reaches of the American government. Indeed, Wilcox
carefully documents how the OSS itself had been heavily infiltrated at the
highest levels by elements of the Soviet NKVD, and that during this particular
period, the two intelligence organizations were in an ambiguous
quasi-partnership, with Donovan being especially eager to curry political favor
with the pro-Soviet elements near the top of the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, Patton, a zealous
anti-Communist, had very different views, urging an immediate military attack
on the weakened forces of the Soviet Union. It is easy to understand how Stalin
and those American leaders in his orbit might have decided that Patton’s
physical removal was an absolute priority.
At the time of his death,
Patton was the highest ranking U.S. military officer in Europe, and the story
naturally became front-page news throughout the world. Several official reports
were produced regarding the exact circumstances of the very strange traffic
accident responsible, but all of these have completely disappeared from U.S.
government files. I find it difficult to imagine a non-sinister explanation for
this.
These few paragraphs provide
merely the smallest slice of the enormous amount of documentary material and
painstaking analysis that Wilcox spent ten years compiling for his outstanding
book. Obviously, many questions remain, and absolute proof is impossible
seventy years after the event. But from my perspective, the likelihood of an
assassination, almost certainly with the active involvement of top American
officials, seems overwhelming.
I have also been reliably
informed that for many years there has been a widespread belief within the
American intelligence community that Patton was eliminated by the U.S.
government for political reasons. Such quiet knowledge in those circles is
hardly surprising. The alleged government assassin first publicly confessed his
guilt in the plot decades ago in front of a journalist at an OSS reunion dinner
in DC, while seated at the table of his longtime friend and colleague William
Colby, former Director of the CIA. And although the resulting local news
stories were completely ignored by the national media, it is hardly surprising
that word soon got around within intelligence circles.
Perhaps some experienced
scholar with a different perspective could invest time and effort attempting to
refute the powerful case set forth by Wilcox, though none apparently has. But
suppose that the evidence for this theory is not nearly as overwhelming as it
appears, and only sufficient to provide a reasonable possibility that the story
is true, perhaps a 25% likelihood. I would argue that if there exists even a
slight chance that one of America’s most renowned generals—our top-ranking
military officer in post-WWII Europe—was assassinated for political reasons by
America’s own government, the scandal would surely rank among the greatest in
modern U.S. history.
The book was written by a
reputable author and published by a mainstream though conservative-oriented
press, but it went unmentioned in America’s major national publications,
whether conservative or liberal, nor was any subsequent investigation
undertaken. A leading British newspaper reported what American journalists had
totally ignored.
It seems likely that if a
similar book had been published providing such solidly-documented historical
revisionism regarding the sudden death of a top Russian or Chinese general at
the close of the Second World War, the story might have easily reached the
front pages of the New York Times, and certainly the weekly Book Reviewsection. Perhaps there might even have been
considerable media coverage if the victim had been a prominent Guatemalan
general, whose name was totally unknown to most of the American public. Yet
similar allegations surrounding the demise of one of America’s most famous and popular
military leaders of the 1940s have been of no interest to America’s mainstream
journalists.
Once again, we must distinguish
the two issues. Whether or not I am correct in believing that the case for
Patton’s assassination is overwhelming might certainly be disputed. But the
fact that the American media has completely failed to report these revelations
is absolutely undeniable.
As mentioned, I had originally
encountered this fascinating history a few years ago, and at the time had been
too preoccupied with other matters to publish a column as I’d intended. But
having decided to return to the topic, I quickly reread the book to refresh my
memory, and found it even more persuasive than I had the first time round.
Eight years after original publication, I still failed to find any coverage in
our timorous mainstream newspapers, but given the enormous growth of looser
web-based journalism, I wondered what might have appeared elsewhere.
Googling around a bit, I didn’t
find a great deal. A couple of times over the years, Wilcox had managed to
place short pieces of his own somewhere, including the New York Post in
2010 and in the American Thinker webzine in
2012, with the latter including mention of a possibly important new witness who
had finally decided to come forth. But otherwise his astonishing book seems to
have been entirely shoved down the memory-hole.
On the other hand, others have
recently begun trying to take advantage of his research, while refashioning the
narrative into one more likely to find favor within the American establishment
and the media it controls.
Most notable was Bill O’Reilly,
the FoxNews pundit, who
published Killing Patton in
2014, another in his series of popular history best-sellers co-authored by
Martin Dugard. The very title itself challenged the official story of an
accidental car crash, and I eagerly opened the book, only to be severely
disappointed. The presentation seemed thin and padded, with perhaps 10% of the
text merely rehashing the analysis provided by Wilcox while the remaining 90%
represented a rather conventional historical summary of the Western Front near
the end of the Second World War, including heavy coverage of the Nazi
concentration camps, and with little of this material having any connection to
Patton. The only interesting part of the text seemed based on Wilcox’s original
research, and that relationship was heavily disguised by the total absence of
any footnotes, with the only indication being a single short sentence near the
end citing the Wilcox book as a very helpful summary of “the conspiracy
theories.” Not unreasonably, the latter author seemed somewhat irritated at
the lack of appropriate notice or credit he received.
O’Reilly’s dumbed-down book
sold over a million copies, with a title proclaiming Patton’s assassination.
But the resulting media coverage was still rather scanty and largely negative,
criticizing the supposed indulgence of “conspiracy theories.” Media Matters summarized the reaction
as “Historians Rip O’Reilly’s
New Patton Book,” and given the near-total lack of any
documentation provided by O’Reilly, much of that criticism may not have been
unreasonable. Thus, the media totally ignored a heavily documented and
persuasive book, while attacking and ridiculing a weak one on the same subject,
with this dual approach constituting an effective means of obscuring the truth.
America’s opinion leaders tend
to rely upon our most elite national newspapers for their knowledge of the
world, and the only coverage I found in these of O’Reilly’s best-seller
was a rather odd opinion piece
by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.
Cohen seemed rather uninterested in the assassination question one way or
another, but harshly condemned O’Reilly for devoting insufficient pages to
discussing Patton’s alleged anti-Semitism. Indeed, he almost implied that some
of the remarks later found in Patton’s private diaries were sufficiently nasty
toward Jews that perhaps no American should even care whether our highest
ranking general in Europe had been killed by his own government or anyone else.
The mentality of our mainstream media these days is very strange indeed,
and we live in the world it creates for us.
Most recently, the success of
the O’Reilly book and our revived Cold War with Russia may have led to
production of a new documentary making the case for Patton’s assassination, but
possibly reconstructing the facts with a distorted twist. Wilcox’s original
research had demonstrated that top American leaders organized Patton’s
assassination, though probably in conjunction with the Soviets. O’Reilly
provided some of those facts in his book, but his media interviews airbrushed
out the American role, simply declaring that “Stalin killed Patton.” And based on news reports,
I wonder if this new documentary, apparently made without Wilcox’s involvement,
will similarly ignore the massive evidence of direct U.S. government
involvement, while perhaps attempting to fix the blame solely upon the
nefarious Russians.
Finally, this important
historical incident provides a useful means of evaluating the credibility of
certain widely-used resources. For years I’ve emphasized to people that
Wikipedia is absolutely worthless as a source of reliable information on any
relatively “controversial” topic. Given Patton’s enormous historical stature,
it is hardly surprising that his Wikipedia entry is
exceptionally long and detailed, running over 15,000 words, with
nearly 300 references and footnotes. But this exhaustive exposition contains not the slightest
suggestion of any suspicious aspects to his death. “Wiki-Pravda”
indeed.
For Further Reading:
