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As Wolf notes, the Cadillac did not strike the truck flush or head on; i.e., make contact with the Cadillac’s entire front at a “90 degree angle.” Rather, Woodring says he swerved left to avoid the collision and therefore first hit the truck with the Cadillac’s right front bumper, where most of the car’s damage in photos can be seen. It was at that instant that the occupants would have been propelled forward from their seats. But since the car was now shifted to the left, the trajectories of its rear passengers would not have been longitudinally down the entire length of the rear passenger compartment toward the partition, but actually right of that direction toward the right side of the car which, because of the left veer, was now more in front of them. Patton would have therefore hit the window he was looking out of or at least the area, including the door, which the side window was in. “If the General were on the right side of the vehicle when the collision occurred,” she wrote, “he would move towards the direction of travel [i.e., towards the truck which stopped the Cadillac’s movement at impact]. If his driver turned the wheel towards the left [thus turning the compartment surrounding Patton to the left relative to his motion], the General would have hit the window next to him and then fallen back towards the other rear passenger.”

This was a new way of looking at what happened to Patton—at least what his probable trajectory causing his injuries would have been which rendered weak the speculation about him catapulting through the entire length of the rear compartment and hitting the mid-car partition or roof. This new information centered
what happened to Patton around the window he was looking out of, and that, in my mind, brings his injuries closer to what Douglas Bazata said happened. It also offered a new potential explanation for why Gay was not injured. Patton hit the window and ricocheted back on top of Gay, stopping Gay’s forward motion and pinning him. It even opened more the possibility that Patton was shot in the face by the unorthodox object Bazata claims was fired (thus possibly accounting for the odd nose-to-cranial laceration he had) and then was propelled back by that force to land on Gay—initially hard to believe, but now less improbable. Maybe even possible.

“Emotional, and with a
tremendous capacity for dynamic action, Patton was an unusual type of military man who was not only physically courageous but also possessed the rare quality which the Germans call ‘civil courage,’ wrote General Al Wedemeyer, sent by General Marshall in 1943 to observe Patton preparing for Sicily. “He dared to speak his mind and act according to his convictions.”
¹

Now that the war in Europe was over, Patton was even more vigorously displaying his penchant for frankness.

On the day the war in Europe officially ended, May 8, 1945, he addressed a press briefing in a manner that must have shocked leaders from Washington to Moscow. As War Correspondent Larry G. Newman recalled,
²
“Patton entered the room followed by his faithful English bulldog, Willie.” He had his “twin pistols with the ivory grips on each hip, [four] stars on the shoulders of his battle jacket... four more on his shining helmet.” Pointing to a map showing the Red Army in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Austria, Bulgaria, Rumania, Czechoslovakia and Germany, he began:

With tears in his eyes, wrote Newman, Patton recalled those

All of this was “off the record,” according to Newman, which apparently is why it is little known. I did not find it until uncovering Newman’s 1962 article in the National Archives.
³
But Patton had many enemies in the press—which he fully knew—and his remarks, without question, were certainly forwarded to those who were watching him and wanted to know what he was saying. That had to include leaders in Washington, Britain, and Moscow. Patton concluded:

And how Stalin, a murderer equal to if not surpassing Hitler, must have seethed in anger when he heard Patton’s remarks.

It was a few days later that Patton had shocked everyone—mostly diplomats and military brass—at the Paris hotel gathering he attended with his nephew, FBI agent Fred Ayer Jr., by saying basically the same things.

And that was only the beginning.

Asked to drink a toast with a Soviet general in Berlin, Patton told his shocked translator, “Tell that Russian sonovabitch that from the way they’re acting here, I regard them as enemies and I’d rather cut my throat than have a drink with one of my enemies!” At first the Russian linguist refused to translate, but was ordered by Patton to do so. The Soviet general retorted he felt the same way about Patton, which amused Patton. The two ended up toasting.
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In his diary, he wrote, “They [Russians] are a scurvy race and simply savages. We could beat hell out of them.”
⁵

Returning to the U.S. in June 1945 for his first leave home in nearly three years, Patton advocated to cheering crowds, among other controversial ideas, that the U.S., to contain the Soviets, continue the universal draft. The country would need it not only because it was “the simple duty of every man to serve” and “the strict discipline of two years of army life was a strengthener of personal and national character,” but because the Soviet menace demanded it. “Just you wait and see,” he told Ayer. “The lily livered bastards in Washington will demobilize. They’ll say they’ve made the world safe for democracy again. The Russians are not such damned fools. They’ll rebuild... if we have compulsory... military service . . . the world will know we mean what we say.”
⁶

The return-in-triumph speeches, reaching the world’s capitols, caused another Patton controversy. Most Americans were tired of war. Without question, the world was. Among those protesting Patton’s ideas were church leaders. Patton, a man of considerable one-on-one persuasive powers, according to Ayer, decided to meet with Archbishop (later Cardinal) Richard Cushing of Boston, his wife’s hometown, in hopes of gaining the prelate’s support. He asked his brother-in-law (his nephew’s father), Fred Ayer, Sr., who knew Cushing, to set up a meeting, which he did, and, mindful of
army requirements, informed the War Department of his intention. Suddenly, according to Ayer, he had to call it off. Phoning Ayer’s father, he said, “Fred, if you’ve made that appointment with Cushing, cancel it. I’ve just been told to keep my mouth shut and that I’m a warmonger.”
⁷

The details of Patton’s admonishment are not revealed by Ayer. But it was at this same time, according to Patton biographer Farago, that joint chiefs’ head Marshall, in what Farago calls a “bizarre” move, tried to have Patton surreptitiously observed by a psychiatrist in order to possibly declare him insane. In response to reporters’ requests that he clarify his draft statements, Patton had scheduled a press conference for June 14. Marshall, according to Farago, was afraid Patton might “go off the rocker.” The chief of staff had found a Navy psychiatrist who had “treated several high-ranking officers... for nervous breakdown,” writes Farago, and was ready to send him to the press conference. His plan “showed how seriously the Patton problem was considered by the superiors.” But Secretary of War Stimson, for whom Patton had been a trusted aide years before, vetoed the idea, saying he would go instead and make sure his favorite general did not say anything he should not.
⁸

Contrary to Marshall’s expectations, the press conference went well. Stimson, according to Farago, handled the proceedings like a “combination master of ceremonies, interviewer, and censor.” He asked most of the questions and gave most of the answers. Patton, according to Farago, “did not seem to mind.” There were no further attempts to “evaluate” him—at least while he was still in the States. Regardless, like Eisenhower, Marshall was through with his outspoken and controversial subordinate. But curiously, he did not fire him. While Patton lobbied vigorously during his stay to go to the Pacific and fight the Japanese,
his requests, which went all the way up the chain of command to a personal meeting with newly installed President Truman, were denied. Truman, in the dark about nearly everything important when Roosevelt died and trying to catch up, had vowed to continue his predecessor’s policies. That included deference to the Soviets and letting Marshall run the war, which at that stage Truman was glad to do. Some have written that General Douglas MacArthur did not want Patton in the Pacific, which may be true. But it was Marshall, MacArthur’s boss, who denied Patton his request—which appears to be one of the more curious decisions at the end of the war. Patton clearly was the United States’ best fighting general. The atomic bomb was still just a possibility at this time, although a month later, a first test in the New Mexico desert would be positive. Marshall was faced with planning the greatest invasion in the history of the world, yet he rejected the one American commander he had who had run roughshod over the enemy? Biographers argue Patton was already slated for retirement and that his fast-moving type of lightning war using tanks was not appropriate for the Pacific. But the decision still makes little sense. At crucial times, one uses the best resources available. Rather, Marshall sent Patton back to a job for which he had no liking, training, or aptitude—occupation governor of Bavaria.

Why? Was something in the works?

Before he returned to Germany, Patton, waiting until his wife had left the room, told his daughters, Bee and Ruth Ellen, that he would not see them again. “What are you talking about?” Ruth Ellen and Bee protested. “The war is over. You’ll be home in a few months for good.” No, he retorted, “my luck has all run out. I’ve used it up... like money in the bank . . . I’ve had increasingly narrow escapes. It’s too damn bad I wasn’t killed before the fighting stopped, but I wasn’t. So be it.”
⁹
He had always told them, Ruth
Ellen writes, that he would die on foreign soil. But this was very specific. He was not returning home. He was going to die when he returned to Germany. How could he know? Was it the result of Bazata’s claim that he told the general about a plot?

Despite his fatalistic outlook, Patton was not about to stop his criticisms of Allied post-war policies nor warnings about the Soviets. He returned to Bavaria and quickly became involved in more controversy. He opposed the repatriation of “fascist traitors,” Stalin’s characterization of Soviet POWs and ex-patriots, which the Russian dictator had secretly gotten Roosevelt and Churchill to agree to at Yalta and which Eisenhower vigorously—brutally—enforced. “The roundup and mass deportation of some 2 million Russians, known as Operation Keelhaul, is one of the saddest chapters in American and British history,” wrote John Loftus, a former Justice Department investigator who helped uncover the top secret American “Keelhaul” in the early 1980s. The majority of those repatriated