General Patton Invades Boston (episode 302)

Transcript

Introduction

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe. This is episode 302. General Patton invades Boston. Hi, I’m Jake. This episode should be released on June 2nd, which means that this Thursday is the 80th anniversary of the D day landings in Normandy. It’s always a day for solemn reflection for me when I think about my grand pop who was a captain in the US Army’s Fourth Infantry Division in June 1944. He was wounded by German Shrapnel on Utah Beach. Family lore says that he was triaged as a lost cause and left to die until he held his 45 on the navy chaplain who came to administer the last rites and forced him at gunpoint to take pop to an aid station.

Jake:
[0:58] After a number of surgeries and a long recuperation in Mississippi, he was able to return to active duty, eventually retiring as a colonel. Although one leg was always about two inches shorter than the other where the Nazi shell obliterated a chunk of bone on the first anniversary of D day. Boston was feeling surprisingly festive. Yes, there was a somber editorial cartoon in the globe picturing an allied cemetery in Normandy to remind people of the sacrifices the nation had made. But Germany had just surrendered, which made the sacrifice seem worthwhile. Now on D plus one, the city would turn out to hail a conquering hero as General George S Patton Junior set foot on American soil for the first time in 2.5 years. His speech in Boston honored the city’s wounded veterans but managed to deeply offend gold star families whose sons, fathers and brothers had died under Patton’s command. Was this a simple slip of the tongue or was it a symptom of a deeper and more concerning malady a closely guarded and dark secret?

Jake:
[2:06] But before we talk about General Patton’s reception in Boston, I just wanna pause and say thank you to our Patreon sponsors. One of the best things about podcasts is that they’re almost all free to listen to. I know that I have a list of about 20 shows that I’d never miss an episode of. And you probably do too. Unfortunately, while podcasts are free to listen to, they’re definitely not free to create. Our Patreon sponsors commit to chipping in $2.05 dollars or even $20 or more each month to offset the costs of making hub history, costs like web hosting and security podcast media hosting, automated transcriptions A I tools and audio mastering, when unexpected expenses pop up. That’s what I’m grateful for the listeners who make one time contributions on paypal. Also to help support the show, whether you give once or on an ongoing basis, we appreciate your support. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com/hubor or visit hubor.com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors. Now it’s time for this week’s main topic.

Jake:
[3:27] On the first anniversary of D day. Boston was eagerly awaiting the arrival of General George S Patton. One of the most popular officers to emerge from the war known as old blood and guts due to his colorfully profane inspirational speeches for his men. Patton was expected in Boston on June 7th D plus one. Sure. The anniversary of course was a time to reflect on the dead, but it was also a time for celebration. One of the newspapers touting Patten’s imminent arrival in Boston also carried a front page rumor that Soviet troops had recovered and identified the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Though this was later determined to be wartime propaganda, the war in Europe was over with Hitler’s death on April 30th setting the stage for Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8th.

Jake:
[4:21] By this time, Patton had seen action in three wars and by all accounts, he had not expected to come home from the battlefields of France and Germany alive. In his biography, General George S Patton junior man under Mars James Howard Wellard describes how Patton’s expectations collided with reality he had envisioned for himself. A special kind of homecoming, a triumphant entry into some valhalla with the distant plaudits of mortals echoing faintly in his no longer mortal ears. He the victor erect, be mettle and helmeted, striding past ranks of dead warriors to join the immortals in some martial heaven. But it became increasingly difficult for Patton to die on the battlefield as he progressed from commander of a small task force to commanding general of the largest army in American history. And so it came about that he returned home, not to Valhalla, but to Boston leaving the scene of his triumphs, not in the clap of thunder, but in the roar of an airplane’s engines.

Jake:
[5:27] Patton and his staff were Ferried into Bedford Airport. Now Hanscom Field aboard three big transport planes that were escorted by a huge formation of fighter planes and B 17 bombers. I’m not sure where they picked up the escort, but the fighters wouldn’t have carried enough fuel to be able to cross the Atlantic and neither the bombers nor the transports could do it in a single hop when my uncle Glenn was finally sent back to the States. After three years flying B seventeens over Europe, he wrote a note on the back of a photograph that was taken at the hotel Pennsylvania in West Palm Beach, Florida. It shows him grinning ear to ear alongside four other uniformed and smiling airmen around a cocktail table piled high with glasses and beer bottles. The note on the back says October 1945 1st evening in the USA. Since September 1st 1942 we flew B 17 flying Forts back from England to France to North Africa across the Atlantic to South America. Then up to Florida, Palm Beach. I’ll include the photo in this week’s show notes so you can see the pure joy on these young men’s faces to be home alive. After years of countless daytime combat missions.

Jake:
[6:46] According to the June 8th, 1945 Boston Globe, the clouds parted as General Patton landed like a scene straight out of a movie precisely at 3:44 p.m. The first of three huge C 54 sky masters of the Air transport command roared down out of the skies on the last leg of a 24 hour trip from Paris and landed General Patton at Bedford Airport. After six weeks of almost uninterrupted cloudy and rainy weather, the sun burst through heavy clouds just as he stepped off for the big transport with 45 of his decorated officers and men. This cinematic scene continued on the ground with a United Press story that was carried in the Waterbury Democrat reporting on the general’s first embrace with his wife, Beatrice in almost three years, garbed in his four star battle helmet and multi ribbon field jacket. Patton jointly stepped down the plane ramp and saluted Major General Sherman Miles at the first service command. He then shook hands with Governor Maurice J Tobin of Massachusetts. The formality is over. The general strode straight for his waiting wife who shoved aside several newspaper photographers and ran toward him. Hello, Missus Patten said and then she kissed him.

Jake:
[8:05] The general’s son, George the third, a West Point cadet who was granted special leave to greet his father cried. Hia pop Patton next kissed his daughters, Mrs Ruth Patton Totten and Mrs Beatrice Patton Waters, two black handled pistols bearing the initials GSP were strapped to his hips. Noting his blaze of decorations. Mrs Patten exclaimed, look at the patchwork. Yes. Said Patten. And it cost me 12 bucks.

Jake:
[8:39] While the general had logged 24 hours in the air on the trip from France, Beatrice had had a shorter journey to Hanscom. The Patent family home was in Southern California. But during the war years, Beatrice had moved back to her childhood home in Hamilton Mass on the north shore. Of course, the pair had been married since 1910 when George was a young West Point graduate, Beatrice was the daughter and heir to Frederick Eyre who owned most of the mills in Lowell and Lawrence. So George Patton was no stranger to Massachusetts by 1945, after his service in the Pancho Villa Expedition, his competition in the 1912 Stockholm Summer Olympics and his combat wound while leading some of America’s first tanks in World War one. Then major Patton was even assigned to Boston as a member of the army general staff. Here in the 19 twenties. He was a strong swimmer, having competed in the modern Pentathlon at the Olympic level and he saved a group of Children from drowning after they fell off a yacht near Salem in 1923.

Jake:
[9:44] In return, Massachusetts adopted patent is one of its own especially after his command of the third army through 281 days of continuous combat. Starting a couple of months after the d-day landings through the battle of the bulge across the Rhine and through the heart of Germany and to the very doorstep of Prague before the Nazis surrendered, when he landed at Bedford on June 7th, Governor Maurice Tobin and the local newspapers estimated that a million people came out and lined the streets leading from the airfield to downtown Boston. A pair of howitzers fired a 17 gun salute as General Patton reviewed the troops and then jumped into an open car for the drive to town all along the route. Neighbors had dragged their deck chairs into their front yards to watch the show while girl scouts and boy scouts stood at solemn attention and street vendors sold balloons, tiny American flags and buttons with the journal’s face on them. The newspapers made a big deal of the motorcade basically following the route of Paul Revere’s ride in reverse, but he was definitely following the one of by sea route of William Dawes and not rowing across the river like Revere did.

Jake:
[10:56] 25 state troopers on motorcycles led the procession and at each town line, local police joined the column all along the road to Boston. Fire engines sounded their sirens and church bells rang out through it. All the general sat up on the back of his seat where crowds could see him in the open car and he waved his old cavalryman’s riding crop, leading one third army veteran to tell a reporter, he always carried that crop just in case he should meet up with a horse.

Jake:
[11:27] The column’s slow progress got even slower when they reached Cambridge with the next day’s globe reporting as the entourage passed through Harvard Square. Hundreds of uniformed officers and students at specialist schools of Harvard University formed a self appointed guard of honor. The Cavalcade was especially delayed through Cambridge because the police were unable to handle dense and enthusiastic crowds which disrupted the Cavalcade route, in front of City Hall in Central square, 2 100 ft fire department, aerial ladders were raised to form an arch over mass ave acting mayor John D Lynch with other city officials at his side stepped forward and sent to General Patton. I surrender the city of Cambridge to you, after crossing through Cambridge with only slightly less resistance than the Wehrmacht put up when Patton crossed the Rhine. The procession got on memorial drive outbound at the Harvard bridge, crossed into Boston across the bu bridge and then paraded down Com Ave to Arlington Street over to Boylston and from there to Tremont up Park street and back down beacon to the hatch shell there. 20,000 well wishers waited for the general to address them with a large contingent of third army veterans and about three or 400 wounded soldiers from local hospitals in the front rows.

Jake:
[12:51] James Weller describes the splendid martial figure that Patton cut that day, at nearly 60 years old, his face was deeply lined and much of his gray hair was gone, but he was still the very model of a modern major general. He came splendidly dressed for the part. He was indeed in full Buskin on his fine head balanced the lacquered helmet with its four stars and three army insignia, on his chest was a tailored tunic with four stars on each shoulder. 30 brightly hued decorations on the left breast, five horizontal and four diagonal gold stripes on the sleeve beneath the tunic. He wore a shirt with four stars on each lapel making a total of 20 stars. The rest of his costume consisted of a gold buckled belt with a pistol thrust into it, riding breeches, pack boots and a riding crop for more stars embossed on the pistol brought the grand total to 24 stars. Unlike the movie version of the general played by the bombastic and gravelly voice. George C. Scott, the real pattern was a reluctant public speaker with a high nasally voice. However, he overcome his hatred of oratory long enough to mount the stage at the hat shell to address his fans, praising the American military and encouraging the crowd to buy more war bonds.

George S Patton:
[14:20] Flying down from Nova Scotia today, I was looking at the country as I always do and there was something wrong. There were no shell holes, there were no bomb craters. The bridges were all in the houses still had roads. The marshaling yards where you collect freight trains didn’t look like junk, junk heaps.

Controversial Remarks in Boston

George S Patton:
[14:59] And it occurred to me how very fortunate you are, that through, our blood and your bonds? We crushed the Germans before we got here.

Jake:
[15:22] Globe reported that he continued referring to the allied cemeteries across France and Germany. These cemeteries are now occupied by 40,000 men who did not buy war bonds but who sold their blood and die. General Patton made brief references to the battle of the bulge and the fight through the Moselle Valley when the bitter cold left the path of the third army strewn with frozen corpses. When you realize what these men have done. He said, you realize that the ground soldiers of the third army and the men of the ninth Tactical Air Force who fought with them deserve much. This war is only one halfway around the corner. General Patton continued. Don’t pull up by failing to buy bonds. It is still possible for us to lose our country with about 400 wounded soldiers and sailors who come out from the area, hospitals, sitting in the front rows of the audience. Patton recalled the adulation and applause that greeted him all along the route from Hanscom Field to Boston and he dedicated it to the wounded.

George S Patton:
[16:29] This great ovation of the people of greater Boston was not for George Patton. George Pappy is simply hope on which the great X of the third army or hang. I don’t mean for death. I am simply a symbol. The ovation was for these men here. And remember this, remember this, you don’t have to be a corpse to be a hero. There. They sit, they’re not corpses.

Jake:
[17:23] Clip. It’s from the National Archives, but it’s been censored. The recording from the National Archives leaves out one of the most contentious phrases that a controversial general ever uttered. One that was also omitted from the Boston Globe’s coverage of the day but was carried in many other papers. He said it is a popular idea that a man is a hero just because he was killed in action. Rather I think a man is frequently addicted fool when he gets killed.

George S Patton:
[17:57] When I think of the hospitals in which over 130,000 other men of the third army, had a damn good time usually. Right. That is a backhanded compliment to the medical service of the United States Army because had it not been for that wonderful service, these men would not have had a good time. But when you think that only 1% of the soldiers who got to the evacuation hospitals died, you have to take off your hat to the doctors and the nurses.

Jake:
[18:50] Full comment but plenty of papers around the country did. And editorial pages were soon flooded with angry letters from gold star families who had lost a beloved relative in combat. A letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph published on June 15th, 1945 said my son was one of Patton’s heroes. At least that’s what I thought he was until I read the ungrateful remark that Patten made to his 400 wounded men. He said that it was a popular idea that a man was a hero when he was killed. But Patton said a man is frequently a fool when he gets killed. God bless all the poor fools who will get killed by the Japanese signed a gold star mother.

Jake:
[19:38] Another letter published in the same day Sun Telegraph said, are we gold star mothers to believe our sons are fools because they gave their lives for our country. My son lost his life in Belgium in January. He was just 20 years old yet I have beautiful letters from commanding officers telling me of my son’s excellent work and his ability to handle men. He was a fine soldier and was respected by all officers and men in his unit. He was a sergeant. I have two other sons in the Southwest Pacific. I still think that my son was a hero because he gave his young life for his country and not a fool. As Patton puts it, signed a gold star, mother, a gold star. Father wrote to the editors of the Baltimore Sun on June 11th. I happened to have a son that was a fool according to General Patton, as he was killed in action in France in November 1944 only my son wasn’t a man. He was only 18 years old. In what category would Patton place? My son. In my opinion, the general’s remarks were one of the most dastardly injustices ever done. The gold star mothers shouldn’t parents of these so-called fools that gave their lives and made the supreme sacrifice be shielded from such abuse from men that hold such responsible positions in the army, signed John hs Leake senior.

Jake:
[21:06] Another letter on June 15th came from the sister of a fallen soldier. It makes me furious to think that my brother who was under Patten’s command is now in a grave somewhere in Germany and is to be considered a fool. Yes, I fully agree that wounded veterans are heroes but our dead are just as precious to us. How I wish I would have been present when he made that statement, General or no General, I would have slapped his face for that remark. Signed a real hero’s sister.

Jake:
[21:42] The war department, the Secretary of the Army and President Truman received similar complaints. A gold star father wrote to General George Marshall that it was quote heartbreaking for my son to lie in his grave in France and for Patton to be alive and telling who the heroes were.

Jake:
[22:01] The general probably didn’t yet realize the controversy that he created by the time he arrived in Copley Square just after 7 p.m. On June 7th that night, George and Beatrice Patten were the guests of honor at a formal state dinner at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Governor Tobin was the host and he presented Mrs Patten with a Paul Revere silver platter as a token of the commonwealth’s appreciation for her sacrifice as a military spouse. The other guests at the head table included the commander of the local Marine Corps barracks, a general from the Air Corps, representatives from the Navy yard and the coast Guard base and a whole load of generals and colonels representing a number of army divisions, along with the invited guests, thousands of citizens waited in the hotel lobby to try to catch a glimpse of the general. And when he began to speak. They were allowed into the dining room to listen quietly.

Emotional Tribute at State Dinner

Jake:
[22:56] The Boston Globe reported on the general’s comments at dinner sobbing as he spoke. General George S Patton Junior last night paid high tribute to his men describing the G I as the man who puts his naked bosom and it’s naked as hell. When they’re shooting at you against mortars, machine guns and artillery.

Jake:
[23:19] The general showed no shame in wiping tears from his eyes as he spoke of his men and his generals who helped finish the war in Europe. He cried audibly when he said it is a proud privilege for us to claim that we haven’t done anything. We haven’t. We’ve had the terrific honor and terrible responsibility to go in and go in and go in at this point. His face flushed and tears streamed from his eyes and the more than 1000 persons at this state dinner at the Copley Plaza sobbed along with him. I’ve seen them cross rivers that couldn’t be crossed. He said, complimenting his men, the plain soldiers who take the orders.

Jake:
[24:04] In man under Mars James Weller describes this dinner as an anticlimactic coda to Patton’s combat career. So on the seventh day of June 1945 General George Smith Patton junior came home to America, the commander who had killed, wounded or captured nearly a million Germans came home to weep into a handkerchief at a Boston dinner party. The soldier who had hoped to die on a foreign field was banqueting not in the halls of Valhalla but in the ballroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Jake:
[24:39] The general’s tears were understandable and a humanizing touch for a soldier long known as old blood and guts. They would not go unremarked upon though with a globe reader writing in a letter that was published on June 14th to the editor when I looked at my globe the other day and saw the picture on page one of patent and tears. I was deeply touched at the thought of our brave general, a professional soldier crying, by the way, wasn’t it for crying? That Patton slapped that amateur soldier in the hospital signed basil sea. Barbie. Barbie was referring back to two separate incidents in August 1943 when General Patton abused shell shocked American soldiers during the Sicily campaign. In both cases, he encountered days privates at field hospitals while visiting the wounded. And in both cases, he slapped the soldiers in the face while insulting them and cursing at them. In one case, he even pulled one of his pistols and threatened to summarily execute the soldier for cowardice in the face of the enemy. Biographers have pointed out that Patton himself may have been shell shocked at the time but press reports on the incidents earned him a reputation as a loose cannon and may well have cost him the command of the D day landings in favor of General Eisenhower.

Jake:
[26:01] Patton seems to have thought little of the damned fools comment during his brief stay here in Boston the day after the general’s speech at the hatch shell and the reception at the Copley plaza. The patents were returned to Bedford Airfield with the evening edition of the globe on June 8th reporting, General George S Patton, junior commander of the third army is on his way home to Los Angeles by air today after receiving one of the greatest receptions ever accorded an army leader in Boston, and one of the three C 54 4 engine planes assigned to his party that left the Bedford Airbase at 830 o’clock this morning was Mrs Beatrice Patten. Why of the General? They were scheduled to make their first stop at Denver, Colorado and to spend the night there.

Jake:
[26:50] The general was originally from San Gabriel, California. And that was his next stop on the homecoming tour, telling reporters for the globe. I would like to stop over in Los Angeles to see my sister. There is a church near there in which I was baptized and in which I was confirmed, it is the church of our Savior in San Gabriel. God has been very good to me. I would like to go there and give thanks. Long time listeners will remember that the old Spanish mission in San Gabriel benefited from the expertise of a Bostonian named Joseph Chapman, who’s given credit for introducing the industrial revolution into California. If you haven’t heard it, go back to episode 206 to learn how Chapman traveled from Boston to Hawaii with a whaling crew got captured by the Spanish as a pirate and evaded execution in California. Then designed to build a woolen mill in San Gabriel in 1821.

Jake:
[27:49] General Patton’s Church of our Savior was an episcopal church about a mile and a half from the old mission. Today, there’s a statue of the general in the courtyard. Even in California. George Patton couldn’t outrun the comments he had made at the hat show. Gold star families were complaining to the army chief of staff to George Marshall, the general of the army and to editorial pages all over the country. While in Los Angeles, Patton received orders to return to Washington where his hopes to join the Pacific Theater were dashed. On June 14th, Secretary of War, Stimson ordered him to return to Europe. Ray would serve as military governor of Bavaria. Fun fact, after his wound on D day, my grandpa received orders not long after VJ day to serve as military governor of Hakata Prefecture in Japan.

Jake:
[28:45] The same day when he got his orders to Germany, General Patton asked American newspapers to help him clarify the comments that he had made in Boston with the globe reporting. General George S Patton Jr asked reporters today to help him explain a remarque of Maiden Boston a few days ago to the effect that a lot of soldiers get killed because they are fools. He said at a press conference here that because so many references are made to the heroic dead. He was trying in Boston to make the point that there are many heroes among the living too. It is a matter of fact, he said that many soldiers are killed because they make mistakes. A soldier must have a certain amount of experience. Patten said before he learns not to take unnecessary risks. The New York Daily News quoted the journal directly in their attempt to clarify the record for it. My point was and I should have framed it differently that there are many heroes among the living said, Patten, I know brilliant soldiers who constantly risk their lives and the only times their skins have been punctured were those when they were decorated. The Austin statesman also quoted the general on his regret over his choice of words, some men get killed for trivial reasons. I said foolish. That was a bad word.

Jake:
[30:08] This problematic comment in Boston seems to have been meant as a way to honor the living wounded in the front rows of the hatch show just a simple slip of the tongue. It was however, also part of a disturbing pattern of behavior for the general. By the time he flew home to the States, Patton was already being covertly monitored by an army psychiatrist, during the last few days of the war in the European Theater. Patten had a number of run ins with Russian officers that weakened the partnership with the Soviets who were still our uneasy allies behind closed doors. He called them savages. Mongolian bandits and a scurvy race while publicly pushing to open a new front in the war in an attempt to drive the Soviets out of Europe. This deep vein of prejudice also extended to the Jews that his troops had just liberated from the death camps. His private comments revealed a deep disdain for them with a letter written on October 4th 1945 including this paragraph. So far as the Jews are concerned, they do not want to be placed in comfortable buildings. They have no conception of sanitation, hygiene or decency and are as you know, the same subhuman type that we saw in the internment camps.

Jake:
[31:28] He also harbored a growing anti Semitic paranoia, expressing belief in a conspiracy between Soviets and Jews to take over all of Europe in the name of international communism. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why he mostly ignored Dwight Eisenhower’s orders to undertake denazification in occupied Bavaria. Instead allowing former SS officers to reoccupy their pre-war offices and complaining that imprisoning Nazi hardliners was pointless and only served to weaken post-war Germany’s defenses against the Soviets.

Jake:
[32:01] After one, too many of these comments in front of one of the highest ranking American civilians in Europe. Doctor James K Pollock, a psychiatrist was ordered to observe the general in an article about this period in Patton’s career. Major general Michael Reynolds wrote that Pollock was meant to be, disguised as a supply officer to be posted to Patton’s headquarters to study his behavior and unbelievably for Patton’s phones to be tapped and his residents bugged. It is not clear if or what the psychiatrist reported. But needless to say it was not long before the wiretappers heard their subject expressing violently anti Russian views and even suggesting that ex members of the Wehrmacht should be rearmed and used to help the US army force, the red army back into Russia. In one conversation with Ike’s deputy mcnerney. He allegedly went as far as to say in 10 days, I could have enough incidents happen to have us at war with those sons of bitches and make it look like their fault.

Jake:
[33:05] Patten held two disastrous press conferences during the following month at the first in Frankfurt on August 27th, he spoke out against the Russians and signed a letter proposing the release of some Nazi internees. This apparently so angered Eisenhower that he is said to have demanded that patent carry out the denazification program as ordered instead of molly coddling the goddamn Nazis. But Patton was not going to change. Two days later, he wrote in his diary, the Germans are the only decent people left in Europe if it’s a choice between them and the Russians, I prefer the Germans.

Jake:
[33:44] Eisenhower refused to relieve patent of command instead offering him the choice between resigning or accepting orders to prepare a military history of the European campaign. He chose to be assigned to the desk job though that same paranoid October 4th letter makes it clear that he saw himself as having been fired. While I regret being relieved for what amounts to cause or rather perhaps to lack of guts. Not on my part though from the Third Army, it may all work out for the best because various rules and regulations imposed on us from Washington and elsewhere, chiefly at the best of the press are practically unsolvable.

Jake:
[34:27] Carlo De Ests biography titled Patent was first published in 1995. A decade before the first paper described the disorder among NFL players and named it chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And nearly three decades before the NIH recognized that this disorder could be caused by repeated head injuries.

Jake:
[34:46] Before this diagnosis existed. Boxers and others who experienced repeated brain trauma were described as suffering from punch drunk syndrome when they experience symptoms such as memory loss, social instability, impulsive behavior and poor judgment, des wrote it has been conjectured that in the final months of his life, Patten was suffering from the long term effects of too many head injuries from a lifetime of falls from horses and from road accidents. Various explanations have been offered to substantiate his increasingly peculiar behavior and including the fact that his prejudices became more open and virulent. Well, it’s perfectly true that Patten suffered repeated and potentially serious injuries to his head. The worst of which was the injury in Hawaii in 1936 that resulted in this two day blackout and seemed to give the appearance of being punch drunk like a boxer who’s been hit in the head too often. Medical evidence to support the notion of a subdural hematoma is wholly lacking. Nonetheless, it seems virtually inevitable as evidenced by his amnesia in Hawaii that Patton experienced some type of brain damage from too many head injuries.

Jake:
[35:56] The extent to which it influenced Patton’s behavior will never be known. The only certain means of determining the degree if any of brain damage would have been an autopsy after his death. But Beatrice adamantly refused to allow what she regarded as the desecration of the remains of her beloved Georgie despite a request from the Army.

Speculations on General Patton’s Health

Jake:
[36:19] It seems all but certain that if the same book was published today, the armchair diagnosis would have been CTE in the fall and winter of 1945. Patten was restless, paranoid and increasingly erratic. He made plans to take a month’s leave at Christmas and privately told Beatrice that he was planning to resign rather than to return to Europe in an attempt to distract him from his sorrows. His chief of staff invited him on a hunting trip in Southern Germany and General Reynolds wrote that they, left Bena Heim at about 0 900 hours on December 9th in Patten’s 1939 model 75 Cadillac driven by PFC Horace Woodring. A jeep driven by technical sergeant Joe Spruce. Follow, carrying the guns and a gun dog, at about 1145 hours in the northeast suburbs of Mannheim, an oncoming 2.5 ton US army truck swung across the path of Patten’s Cadillac in an attempt to turn into a Quartermaster Depot. Woodring was unable to stop in time and the two vehicles collided at a 90 degree angle with the right front bumper of the truck smashing the radiator and bumper of the Cadillac.

Jake:
[37:33] Neither driver was injured and Gay received only slight bruises Patton. On the other hand, although conscious was bleeding profusely from head wounds received when he was thrown forward against the steel frame with a glass partition, separating the front and rear seats and then backward again into his seat.

Jake:
[37:52] There were of course no seatbelts in those days. And whereas Gay and Woodring having seen the oncoming truck had braced themselves for the impact Patton who’d been looking out the side window had not, he knew he was seriously injured and apparently murmured, I think I’m paralyzed. And later, this is a hell of a way to die.

Jake:
[38:15] Patten was rushed to an American hospital in Heidelberg where the best surgeons flew in from Washington and London to treat him. His 3rd and 4th cervical vertebrae were fractured and pressing on his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. Today, he might be able to make a full recovery but spinal surgery hadn’t advanced that far. In 1945 Beatrice rushed from her North Shore home to Heidelberg to be at his side. And after 10 days together, that general died of a pulmonary embolism in his sleep. He was buried among the soldiers of the third army in an American cemetery in Luxembourg.

Veterans Day Celebration in Boston

Jake:
[38:58] Nine years later, America first celebrated Veterans Day as a national holiday. Then Boston took the opportunity to dedicate a statue of Patent just steps away from the hatch shell. The Boston Globe reported today is Veterans Day, a grateful nation’s first combined tribute to our living servicemen of all wars. Traditional military displays, dedicatory ceremonies and other patriotic exercises will mark Massachusetts first Veterans Day observance. A five division parade steps off through Boston starting at 2 p.m. Included in the line of March will be veteran detachments from all branches of the service as well as regular army Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard and ROTC units. A statue of the late General George S Patton Junior. World War two, commander of the Third Army will be unveiled and dedicated on Storrow Drive. The common insinuating that dead soldiers were damned fools had been forgotten or at least forgiven.

Jake:
[40:04] To learn more about General George S Patton Junior. Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/three 02. I’ll have links to news articles from the Boston Globe and other papers covering General Patton’s visit to Boston as well as some other papers that contain letters to the editor criticizing his comments here. I’ll include links to a couple of news articles consisting primarily of pictures of his visit as well. There will be links to major general Michael reynolds’ article about Patton’s last days and a couple of patent biographies. Also, I wish that I could still send you to the Museum of World War Two in Natick which housed an amazing collection of artifacts before it was dissolved with no warning. In 2019, among Patton’s personal papers and other effects, a pair of steel spurs were on display. Patton had taken these spurs as a souvenir during a series of border disputes with Pancho Villa’s Mexican revolutionaries in 1960. And the first motorized attack ever undertaken by the US army, Patton and a small detachment and three Dodge convertibles exchanged pistol fire with Via’s second in command, Julio Cardenas and two bodyguards. All three Mexican nationals were killed and the Americans drove back to headquarters with their bodies tied to the hoods of their cars like trophy deer and Patton kept Cardenas’s spurs.

Jake:
[41:31] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com. We are Hub history on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and most active on Twitter. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as at Hubor at better dot Boston or you can go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link, while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do drop me a line and I’ll send you a hub history sticker as a token of appreciation.

Jake:
[42:11] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.