US, Soviet intelligence murdered General Patton, new book alleges

On December 9, 1945, a chauffeur-driven US military vehicle carrying US Army General George S. Patton was involved in what appeared to be a minor collision with another US military vehicle. The collision fatally injured General Patton a day before he was scheduled to leave US-occupied Germany and return to the United States. On December 21, 1945, Patton mysteriously died from his injuries, even though he appeared to be recovering. Now a new book by military historian Robert Wilcox claims that General Patton was assassinated in a combined operation by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and the NKVD (forerunner of the Soviet KGB). In his book, Target Patton, Wilcox claims that a colorful OSS assassin, Douglas Bazata, was ordered directly by OSS Director, “Wild” Bill Donovan to assassinate Patton. This he did by “getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then [shooting] the General with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch”. A few days later, US military officials reportedly “turned a blind eye” while NKVD  operatives injected the bedridden General with poison. Wilcox believes that the OSS decided to liquidate Patton to stop him from revealing the extent of the secret tactical collusion between Western and Soviet military operations during the final stages of World War II, which, Patton believed, cost thousands of US lives in Europe. The researcher explains that “Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians. The [US] administration thought he was nuts”. Wilcox’s book is based on extensive interviews with Bazata, who died in 1999, as well as extracts from Bazata’s diaries, which allegedly point to extensive removal of documents relating to the December 9, 1945, accident from US archives. [JF]