Target (24 page)

In 1986, Woodring gave an interview to Suzy Shelton, believed to be a relative.
¹⁶
In that interview, while omitting the second truck from his recollection, Woodring reiterated the truck driver’s suspicious behavior. He told Shelton, “When the train passes, the only vehicle in sight either way was an army truck which is facing me a half mile down the road, pulled off the shoulder of the road, and starts moving in my direction. Approximately a quarter mile from the railroad crossing, he makes a vicious turn into the front of the car. I had no opportunity to avoid him whatsoever.”

General Gay, who died in 1983, never did much public talking about the accident. (He was strangely silent about it considering it was probably his greatest claim to fame.) But after it, date unknown, he authored, probably at the behest of higher authorities, a four-page statement describing what he recalled happening. As they left the railroad tracks, approximately “600 yards” into their acceleration, he wrote,

What had Patton seen? Possibly it was the truck turning into their path. But Farago, who interviewed Gay years later, quotes Gay as saying Patton’s exclamation referred to seeing a “heap of goddamn rubbish!” Whatever it was, neither Gay nor Woodring could know for sure. At the moment he spoke, Patton, according to their accounts, was looking to his right out one of the back windows, Gay, sitting on the same backseat in the other corner, was looking left out a window in the opposite direction. Woodring, in the front seat, was also looking elsewhere. They could only assume they knew what he saw—just as they assumed they knew how his face and scalp had been cut. Might then, the general, instead of seeing just rubbish or the oncoming truck, have seen something equally worthy of exclamation like a figure or a weapon, or both, peeking out from the debris? Maybe he did not recognize what he was seeing, if he did see something. Perhaps it was something unusual that caught his eye and made him exclaim.

In confidential Seventh Army documents
¹⁹
discussing how the press was being handled during Patton’s hospital stay, Gay, in probably his earliest statement, is quoted as saying Patton’s exact words at that crucial moment were, “Look at that!”—a somewhat curious phrase if the intention was “Look out!” (in warning against an oncoming truck) but quite in line with something less dangerous but possibly more curious to his perception. And if Patton had been suddenly thrown any distance in the car, as is presumed by Gay and Woodring at the collision, would not he have
extended his arms out to shield himself? Accident investigators say that is the natural reaction in such a situation. No one, however, including physicians who examined Patton shortly after the accident, reported any injury to his hands, arms or elsewhere, only to his neck and head.

But if he had seen something suspicious or just out of the ordinary, would not he have remarked about it later? Had his trauma erased or blocked what he saw from his memory? It is hard to imagine a warrior like Patton, old Blood and Guts, fearless survivor of so many close calls in war, being so spooked. But then nothing he had encountered before had ended in such traumatic injury. And with the reports missing, who can know what they might contain about what he said or saw?

The scene immediately following the accident begs more questions.

According to several accounts, the collision occurred on a wreck-strewn stretch of a flat, two-lane straightaway running through the northern Mannheim suburb of Kaeferthal, a sparsely populated industrial section on the city’s marshy outskirts. Not many Germans were permitted to drive in Occupied Germany and there were few American installations in that area so traffic was irregular. Nevertheless, a procession of military people quickly arrived. Initially, these officers included, variously, Brigadier General Nicholas B. Cobb, Major Curran,
²⁰
an army “ambulance” with a “med” sergeant,
²¹
and Sergeant Leory Ogden
²²
—all in the first few minutes. A Sergeant Armando DeCrescenzo,
²³
said in a newspaper article from the time to have “rushed to the scene” with “three other soldiers” and administered “treatment” to Patton, was probably the medical sergeant. Ogden, most likely, was one of the soldiers with him. Apparently, DeCrescenzo put a makeshift bandage on Patton’s head where he was said to be
bleeding profusely. Later—as many as twenty minutes after the accident, according to Gay—Captain Snyder and his commander, Major Tucker, arrived with the 290
^th
Engineer ambulance which would take Patton to the hospital. None of these arrivals, with the exception of Snyder, were ever heard from again publicly. Gay wrote that Brigadier Cobb drove him to the hospital in Heidelberg, but then he too disappeared—at least in the retrievable record.

Who were these first responders? How and why, in a seemingly lightly traveled and sparsely populated area, did most of them arrive so quickly at the scene of an unexpected accident? Why, if they participated in what clearly has to be called a momentous event for those times,
^an
have we heard so little from or about them? Relying on available accounts yields few answers. The accounts in circulation of those on the scene are meager and conflicting—a veritable “maze of contradictions,” according to historian Denver Fugate.
²⁴

According to Farago,
^ao
the first military policemen (MPs) to arrive did so fairly quickly.
²⁵
Lieutenants Babalas and Metz, motoring to their 818
^th
Military Police Company headquarters in Mannheim,
²⁶
had passed the Patton limousine going the opposite way on the Kaeferthal road. They had noticed the four stars on the Cadillac and were speculating that it was Patton, since he was “the only four-star left in Europe,” when they heard the crash behind them. They turned around and drove to the accident, which certainly—if within hearing distance—would have put them there as
soon as any of the others. Yet, Woodring has repeatedly said Babalas was not at the scene, or at least not there when he was.
²⁷

Curiously, Babalas’s military separation papers,
²⁸
which should contain a record of all his assignments, do not list his MP billet. They show him arriving in Europe in May 1944, participating in the battles of Normandy (D-Day invasion of Northern France), the Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge), and the Rhineland (Germany), and being part of the 423
^rd
Infantry’s “Anti-Tank Company” until discharge in June 1946. He was later called up in early 1950 for the Korean War and ended up serving for two years as a lawyer in the army’s Judge Advocate Corps.

However, a Seventh Army memo confirms that Babalas
was
there. It says that information obtained on the accident by authorities and later given out to the press came from a report made by Babalas at the scene.
²⁹
Ladislas Farago, who interviewed Babalas in 1971 for
Last Days
, writes that the young MP, a law school graduate of Greek heritage, was suspicious enough of Patton’s major injuries—given that Gay and Woodring were barely scratched—that he decided to make an on-the-spot investigation.
³⁰
“Blood [was] smeared on the cushions,” and in a “four-inch pool” on the limousine floor, said one press report.
³¹
“The backseat... was covered with blood,” said another.
³²
Babalas told Farago that he tried to get a copy of the report he had made but had been informed by military authorities no such report existed. Either through “misfiling or misplacing . . . or by some higher intervention that removed these records . . . . General Patton’s accident has acquired sinister connotations,” wrote Farago, who, in
Last Days
, both dismisses and incites suspicion.

But Babalas’s integrity, it turns out,
is
in question. Although he seemed beyond reproach when Farago interviewed him in the 1970s, his subsequent career as a Virginia state legislator ended in
controversy. Following service in Korea, the Boston-born, Harvard-educated first lieutenant, an eventual graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, became, in 1967, a state representative from districts including Norfolk and Virginia Beach. In the ensuing years, his power grew, and he became a broker in the state’s budget, port, and real estate affairs. In 1986, however, he was accused of “casting votes that benefited one of his private firm’s clients.”
³³
The client was a large mortgage company seeking to keep buried loan charges high. Babalas, it was alleged, received bribe money for a vote to kill legislation lowering the hidden charges. He was later acquitted in court of criminal charges but “became the first member of the Virginia General Assembly to be censured by his colleagues for unethical conduct.”
³⁴
In 2002, a book,
Friend of the Family: An Undercover Agent in the Mafia
,
³⁵
charged that Babalas, who died of cancer in 1987, was involved with the mob.

If Babalas consorted with outlaws in Virginia, might he have done the same in Germany?

Another mystery of the accident scene is the presence of a Lieutenant Vanlandingham. Neither Farago’s interviews with people at the scene nor Gay’s account mention him. But Woodring, in several interviews,
³⁶
insists he was the main investigating officer.

I learned of Vanlandingham in the following way:

One of the first persons to publicly raise the question of Patton possibly having been assassinated was Frederick Nolan, a British-born writer and historian whose novel about the alleged assassination,
The Algonquin Project
,
³⁷
became a 1978 film titled
Brass Target
.
^ap
First published in England in 1974, the book and movie
both show the killer using a specially constructed rifle very similar to the description of the one Bazata claims he used. It shot a non-penetrating rubber bullet, not identifiable as such at a crash scene. Did Bazata get the idea for his claim from reading the book or seeing the movie? If so, that would impugn his claims. Or, conversely, had Nolan heard the story and used it? That would bolster Bazata.

At least three people—two of his colleagues and a professional journalist—say Bazata told them about causing Patton’s accident prior to 1974, which means his story was hatched before Nolan’s. Two fellow former Jedburghs, Phil Chadborne, who roomed with Bazata in France in the 1960s, and Bernard Knox, a renowned classics professor in Washington, D.C., told me
³⁸
Bazata had disclosed his claim to them of somehow being involved in Patton’s demise prior to 1972, although neither could be absolutely sure of the date or recall exact details of what Bazata told them. Both, at the time, said they were skeptical and so largely dismissed the claim. But Joy Billington, a British-born writer working for the old
Washington Star-News
then, distinctly remembers that Bazata disclosed his involvement to her when she interviewed him for a story about his art which appeared in the
Star-News
September 17, 1972.
³⁹
“He said he’d done it,” she told me. “I could hardly believe my ears. I, of course, knew of Patton from my school days in Cheshire (England). He was a hero.”

It had been Billington’s public disclosure in 1979 of what she first learned in 1972 that had led to the
Spotlight
articles. When Bazata disclosed the secret he had asked her not to write about it, and she had honored his request.
^aq
But by 1979, he was ready to
go public. He arranged to have her at the OSS veteran’s dinner in September that year and ask him about it in front of OSS colleagues, including William Colby, who said he knew nothing about it. Bazata countered, according to his diaries, by saying of course Colby and others were ignorant. “We didn’t discuss such things.”
Spotlight
editors saw Billington’s subsequent story in the
Star-News
and called Bazata.

It turned out, Bazata
had
read
Algonquin
. I found mention of the book in his diaries. It had been brought to him, he writes, by an acquaintance who had read the
Spotlight
articles in October 1979. His comments were basically that the book was accurate in some parts and fantasy in others. Novelist Nolan, having written
Algonquin
before Bazata went public, had never met the former OSS operative. He emailed me that he “made up” most of the book, including the gun, although “I cannot be entirely sure . . . . It’s been so long ago now.” He remembered that he checked the “mechanics” of the gun with a “gunsmith friend” who told him, “it would work” but “be damned clumsy. . . .I’d overheard some Pentagon brass talking about Patton at a reception and one of them said something along the lines of, ‘Everyone knows they killed the old bastard.’” He thought to himself, “now there’s a story that needs telling.” Researching, he said he found “a lot of loose strands” supporting assassination. Interviewing Woodring, which he wrote he did at “endless length,” two things stuck in his mind. One was truck driver Thompson who had disappeared “even though... he had absolutely no reason or right to be where he was . . . had taken a joyride after a night of boozing,” and had “two other GIs in the cabin although regulations permitted only driver and one passenger.” The other was “an officer at the scene...whose involvement,” Woodring had lamented, “was never mentioned again.” That officer was Vanlandingham.
Woodring had given Nolan a photo of himself standing next to the wrecked Cadillac. On its back, he had scribbled “Lt. Vanlandingham” and “7340” beneath it, indicating it was Vanlandingham’s service number.
⁴⁰
Nolan emailed a copy to me.