Sixty-five years ago this month, Gen. George S. Patton Jr., hero of World War II and an outspoken critic of the Soviets, was en route to a Sunday hunting trip, a day before permanently leaving Europe, when he was critically injured in a vehicle accident on a deserted two lane highway near Mannheim, Germany.
A large US army truck that Patton’s driver later said was waiting for them, suddenly  and without signaling  abruptly turned into his limousine’s path, causing a head-on crash. Even though Patton had an aide with him and the driver of the truck had one or two passengers in the cab, no one but Patton was hurt. He suffered a paralyzing broken neck.
Despite it being early on a no-work day, a horde of military personnel, including a brigadier general, quickly arrived at the scene. And although there were facilities in Mannheim, he was taken to a hospital 20 miles away where, when he arrived, the prognosis was bad. They expected him to die.
But the tough general, vowing to go home and tell “block-busting secrets,†rallied. And in a little over a week he was fit enough to be readied for a grueling trans-Atlantic flight home. On the eve of that flight, he had a sudden relapse. Blood embolisms choked his breathing. Within 24 hours he was dead.
Though he was a top general in Europe, had mysteriously requested a guard be posted outside his room, and rumors that he’d been murdered were rife, there was no autopsy. Bafflingly, the driver of the truck and his passenger or passengers disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Today, all reports and subsequent investigations of the crash  and there were at least five  have vanished.
It is a mystery for which even archivists have no explanation.
Was Patton, who foresaw the Cold War, wanted to fight the Russians to stop it, and was threatening to tell damaging secrets about how badly the war was run, assassinated?
The cause of death was ruled accidental, but two witnesses have emerged to dispute the official story. The first is Douglas Bazata, an Office of Strategic Services agent in World War II, the forerunners of the CIA. He claimed that he, an OSS assassin, was asked to kill Patton by OSS chief Gen. William “Wild Bill†Donovan. The order was the culmination of a long-running plot that had started as a non-lethal “stop Patton†plan.
Later, in interviews with me before his death in 1999, Bazata enlarged that scenario, claming that he, along with a Russian accomplice, set up the Dec. 9 “accident,†and that others  he believed Soviets  had finished the job in the hospital.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/was_patton_killed_x5l91wZO1qYF5REQ52sIjN#ixzz18yGmDv25
A large US army truck that Patton’s driver later said was waiting for them, suddenly  and without signaling  abruptly turned into his limousine’s path, causing a head-on crash. Even though Patton had an aide with him and the driver of the truck had one or two passengers in the cab, no one but Patton was hurt. He suffered a paralyzing broken neck.
Despite it being early on a no-work day, a horde of military personnel, including a brigadier general, quickly arrived at the scene. And although there were facilities in Mannheim, he was taken to a hospital 20 miles away where, when he arrived, the prognosis was bad. They expected him to die.
But the tough general, vowing to go home and tell “block-busting secrets,†rallied. And in a little over a week he was fit enough to be readied for a grueling trans-Atlantic flight home. On the eve of that flight, he had a sudden relapse. Blood embolisms choked his breathing. Within 24 hours he was dead.
Though he was a top general in Europe, had mysteriously requested a guard be posted outside his room, and rumors that he’d been murdered were rife, there was no autopsy. Bafflingly, the driver of the truck and his passenger or passengers disappeared, never to be heard from again.
Today, all reports and subsequent investigations of the crash  and there were at least five  have vanished.
It is a mystery for which even archivists have no explanation.
Was Patton, who foresaw the Cold War, wanted to fight the Russians to stop it, and was threatening to tell damaging secrets about how badly the war was run, assassinated?
The cause of death was ruled accidental, but two witnesses have emerged to dispute the official story. The first is Douglas Bazata, an Office of Strategic Services agent in World War II, the forerunners of the CIA. He claimed that he, an OSS assassin, was asked to kill Patton by OSS chief Gen. William “Wild Bill†Donovan. The order was the culmination of a long-running plot that had started as a non-lethal “stop Patton†plan.
Later, in interviews with me before his death in 1999, Bazata enlarged that scenario, claming that he, along with a Russian accomplice, set up the Dec. 9 “accident,†and that others  he believed Soviets  had finished the job in the hospital.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/was_patton_killed_x5l91wZO1qYF5REQ52sIjN#ixzz18yGmDv25
