Image: Major General Walter M. Robertson (back seat), commanding the 2nd Infantry Division, with Lieutenant General Patton pass in review of elements of Patton’s Third Army in April 1944, prior to the Normandy invasion in June. (Public Domain)

On this day in history, General George S. Patton, commanding officer of the U.S. 15^th Army, died from wounds suffered not in battle but in an odd car accident. He was 60 years old. At 5:55 p.m. on December 21, 1945, Patton passed away in his sleep. A blood clot in his paralyzed body had managed to find its way to his heart, stopping it and ending the life of one of America’s greatest battlefield commanders.

Twelve days before he died, on December 9, 1945, Patton was in the back of his limousine when his driver, PFC Horace Woodring, raced too fast over a railroad crossing in Mannheim, Germany, and smashed into the passenger side of a left-turning Army truck steered toward a depot. The only person injured was Patton, who, despite a large laceration on his head, instantly recognized that he had been paralyzed. He asked his chief of staff, Major General Hobart “Hap” Gay, sitting next to him, to rub his fingers. When Gay did so, Patton barked, “Go ahead Hap, work my fingers.”

Patton was hurried to the 130^th Station Hospital in Heidelberg, 12 miles away. There, he was x-rayed, uncovering two crushed vertebrae. Patton had broken his neck. For the next 12 days, Patton lay in traction, at times with painful fishhooks inserted into his cheeks on either side of his upper jaw, attached to weights to stabilize his neck. His wife, Beatrice, arrived from Boston to be with him and read his books and letters from well-wishers. Showing slight signs of healing, his doctors put him in a body cast to prepare him for a flight home to the United States. Unfortunately, he yielded to his paralysis and breathed his last before making the move.

George Smith Patton was born in 1885 in San Gabriel, California. His family, formerly of Virginia, had a long military legacy, including service in the Civil War. From an early age, Patton knew he wanted to continue the family tradition, and he graduated from West Point in 1909. Patton acquired his first battle experience in 1915 when he led cavalry troops against Mexican forces led by Pancho Villa along the U.S.-Mexico border. He served as aide-de-camp to General John Pershing, commander of American forces in Mexico, and accompanied the general on his failed 1916 expedition against Villa.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Patton went with Pershing to Europe, where he became the first officer designated to the newly established U.S. Tank Corps. He soon became renowned for his leadership skill and knowledge of tank warfare. After the war, Patton served in tank and cavalry units at various posts throughout America. He had risen to colonel when the country began rearming in 1940.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Patton was given command of the 1^st and 2^nd Armored Divisions and organized a training center in the California desert. Patton headed to North Africa late in 1942 at the head of an American force; before the initial landings on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, he gave his troops his now-legendary philosophy of battle: “We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again.” Patton’s lust for battle would earn him the colorful nickname “Old Blood and Guts” among his troops, whom he ruled with an iron fist. With this daunting violence and relentless discipline, the general managed to put U.S. forces back on the offensive after many defeats and win America’s first significant victory against Nazi-led troops at the Battle of El Guettar in March 1943.

A month later, Patton gave up his command in North Africa to General Omar Bradley to train the U.S. 7^th Army for its intended invasion of Sicily. The operation was a huge accomplishment, but Patton’s reputation suffered terribly after an incident in an Italian field hospital where he assaulted a soldier suffering from shell shock and accused him of cowardice. He was forced to issue a public apology and received a severe reprimand from General Dwight Eisenhower.

He had truly wanted to lead the Allied invasion of Normandy; instead, Patton was publicly assigned command of a fictitious force purportedly planning for an incursion in southeastern England. With the German command preoccupied with a phantom invasion of Pas de Calais, France, the Allies could render their actual landings on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944). After the 1^st Army broke the German line, Patton’s 3^rd Army swept through the hole into northern France in quest of the Nazi military. Late that year, it played a crucial role in blocking the German counterattack in the Ardennes during the massive Battle of the Bulge. In early 1945, Patton led his army across the Rhine River and into Germany, helping to liberate the country from Nazi rule.

In the months following Germany’s surrender, the outspoken general caused another storm when he gave an interview criticizing the Allies’ rigid de-Nazification policies in the defeated country; Eisenhower removed him from command of the 3^rd Army in October 1945. That December, Patton broke his neck in an automobile accident near Mannheim, Germany. He sustained spinal cord and neck injuries and died from a pulmonary embolism because of the calamity in a Heidelberg hospital 12 days later.

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