Brad Meltzer TV - Telegraph online - General Patton’s Death: Accident or Murder? 2021 -
What is I told you that America’s greatest modern general – George S Patton – was murdered? Patton died on December 21st 1945 in a German hospital. Brad Meltzer’s Decoded s2e7: Patton, History 2011
No autopsy was performed. ibid.
From the beginning the accident was suspicious. ibid.
The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.
The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.
But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General Wild Bill Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname Old Blood and Guts.
His book Target Patton contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.
Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general. Telegraph online article Tim Shipman 20 December 2008, ‘General George S Patton was assassinated to silence his criticism of allied war leaders claims new book’
George S Patton was one of a handful of generals from World War II whose celebrity has endured for over 70 years. General Patton’s Death: Accident or Murder? Youtube 20.56, Mark Felton reporting, 2021
His final few months were marked by depression, anger and controversy. ibid.
His premature death in December 1945, at the age of only 60, has become the subject of intense speculation: was it an accident, or was he murdered by a shadowy conspiracy of Allied leaders fed up with Patton’s anti-Soviet rhetoric and embarrassing faux pas. Had George S Patton become a liability? ibid.