I Marched with Patton, page 22
A nasty assignment had just come in. A Russian truck hit a woman and took off without stopping. No point in us trying to run him down; the Soviets would just protect him anyway. They needed me to go over with the ambulance, pick up the body, and deliver it to their version of a funeral home and morgue. The captain wanted me to get pictures of the entire scene.
“I wouldn’t take that woman who works with you on this one,” he said.
“Why?”
The captain handed me a sheet of instructions and raised an eyebrow. “You’ll see.”
I told my driver that I might need his help.
The Russians had a way of buzzing through our sector like they owned the entire town. No telling what had occurred. In ten minutes, we arrived at the scene of the accident. A crowd had gathered around for a look. I noticed many of the observers turn away quickly. A couple of American soldiers were standing there. After making sure my MP armband was in place, I walked up to one.
“What’s the situation, Corporal?”
“Bad news,” he said. “You aren’t going to believe it, but here’s the situation. A German woman dashed across the street and jumped up on the sidewalk. Apparently, her foot slipped, and she fell backward. About that time, this Commie nutcase came barreling around the same corner. The German woman tumbled under the front tire. Wacked her head right off.”
“God almighty!”
“Yeah, you’ll remember this one for a long time.”
I pushed my way through the crowd, my driver behind me. I heard him gasp.
The woman’s legs were still partially on the sidewalk; her arms sprawled on the street in a strange, haphazard design. She was wearing a dress that was lifted up to her midthighs. Lying on her back on the street added to the bizarre scene. Her head was gone.
I spotted it three feet from the curb, with the eyes still wide open. Her trachea—the windpipe—hung down from the remnant of her neck like a grotesque Halloween mask.
My driver leaned over my shoulder and stared at the head. I heard him gag, turn, and push through the crowd. On the other side of the street, he started to vomit. Not having any combat experience left him as green as grass.
The sound of a siren filled the air, and one of our ambulances pulled up. A couple more MPs were with the medics.
“Everybody out of the way!” the ambulance attendant yelled. “Officers! Clear the area so we can work.”
Two medics carrying a stretcher pushed in and stopped. The face of one of them turned white.
“God help us,” the other man groaned.
“Look,” the other attendant said to me. “You will need to go with us to the funeral home and sign this situation in with them. They tell me that a Russian hit the woman and took off.”
“That appears to be the case,” I said. “I’m sure we won’t catch the guy, and if we did, the Commies would protect him. By the way, I’m also taking pictures.”
The attendant nodded. “Sure.” He turned to the other medic. “Let’s get the body on the stretcher. We’ll have to take the head in a bucket.”
His buddy groaned again.
The two men got the lifeless form belted down on the stretcher and covered with a blanket. By now, the crowd had become a small army, but the other two policemen who came with them kept everybody back. They loaded the body into the ambulance and put the head in a bucket as they prepared to leave.
“You can follow us,” the driver said.
I looked at my driver, who still appeared shaken.
“Give me a minute to make sure my man is ready to go. He’s been a little shook up.”
The driver nodded.
“You okay?” I asked my driver.
He nodded for a minute. “Yeah, I’m more than ready to get out of here.” He glanced over his shoulder. “What about all that blood?”
“Are you kidding? Berlin is still floating in blood. Forget it. Time will take care of the problem.”
I could tell he didn’t agree with my answer, but then again, his lack of combat experience had left his finer senses intact. He shrugged.
I waved to the ambulance driver. “Okay, let’s roll.” Our little caravan took off.
We wound down the worn streets. In the last several months, they had made real progress in clearing up debris, and it had become easier to get around. The ambulance driver appeared to know exactly where to go, and we soon pulled up in front of the funeral home. Katzbachstrasse looked like most streets in Berlin. However, the Funeria Schmidt establishment appeared to have survived most of the war damage. Possibly, the Russians were superstitious and left the place alone. The funeral home was now also serving as a morgue. The ambulance pulled into a side entrance and began to unload. I followed them in.
The owner had the same professional demeanor of every funeral director I’d ever seen: that sweet, distant, “Can we help you?” smile that seemed far too nice under the circumstances. But he took one look under the blanket and recoiled like everybody else.
“I’m with the army,” I said. “I need to take pictures and will be making the report. I will need to follow the body in.” One of the other MPs came in behind me carrying the covered bucket. “We’re all together.”
The director nodded, and we proceeded down the hall. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a large room that looked almost like an operating theater. I photographed the entire establishment as well as the corpse lying on the table. An adjoining room, much cooler, was ringed with heavy doors on what looked like giant refrigerators. I couldn’t help but wonder what was inside. Nobody was watching me, so I opened the door to one and looked in.
To my surprise, I found trays of what appeared to be steaks, as if prepared for the grill. I looked again. From my time on the battlefield, I had seen the bodies of dead men lying in all kinds of positions, with the skin peeled away. I knew human tissue when I saw it. Those steaks weren’t from any cows. Somebody had been cutting up humans.
I slammed the door shut and thought about what I’d seen. No one had to tell me what those cuts of meat meant. Starving people would eat anything. If I reported this place directly to the authorities, all hell would break loose. I knew an investigation could keep me in Germany long after I was scheduled to leave. But I felt I had to do something.
When I got back to the station house, I reported the entire incident to the lieutenant. He listened attentively and kept nodding. He said he would run it up the flagpole but would allow me to leave Berlin once my appointment was up.
Relieved, I saluted and left.
Interestingly enough, a couple of months after I returned to America, I picked up a copy of the army newspaper. The Stars and Stripes always kept the soldiers up on what was happening in the occupation. To my surprise, I found a story reporting that the military police and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had uncovered the crime of cannibalism in a morgue in Berlin. My, my! Who would have thought such a thing!
46
The Curtain Falls
Winter arrived with a bang—or, I should say, a blizzard. Huge flakes of snow swirled and settled down on the sidewalks and streets, covering them with a beautiful, sparkling white coat. The debris and destroyed buildings looked newly hopeful. Maybe with the coming of Christmas, things were looking up for Berlin.
During the storm, I was sitting in the army’s dining hall. The GIs’ kitchen was manned by chefs disguised as soldiers. These guys really knew how to cook. The smell of a Christmas feast of roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, spice-flavored dressing, and mince pie tickled my nose. Seated around a huge table, I dug into the best dinner I could have imagined. Almost made the entire trip to Europe worthwhile. Well, not quite.
Taking a break from eating, I went to the window to see how much snow had collected in the street. I was stunned to see children standing in the snowbanks peering back at me. The smell of our dinner had drawn them there. Here I was living like royalty, and those hungry-eyed children standing in the cold would have been satisfied with a crust of bread. I remembered feeding kids hamburgers earlier and knew what I had to do.
My hunger slipped away.
I hurried to the PX (post exchange) and asked the cook to fix as many hamburgers as he could stuff into two large paper sacks. He was to call me when they were ready. I simply couldn’t let those little kids stand out there with nothing. In short order, the cook came in with a sack in each arm.
“Don’t know what you’re going to do with all these hamburgers while you got turkey sitting in front of you,” he said quizzically. “But here are the sacks.”
“Watch and see.” I grabbed them and headed for the door.
Outside, I brushed the snow off the curb and sat down with my sacks. The hot, alluring aroma of a cooked hamburger drifted through the air. I figured the children would catch on in a hurry. And here they came: kids of all sizes bounding through the snow. Most looked fairly ragged. One youngster had been bundled up with a bath towel around his neck. Their hands were extended, even without gloves on.
“Now, don’t run off,” I said. “Stay here to eat.” I didn’t want parents taking the hamburgers away from any of these kids. I started handing out the burgers. “Eat slow. C’mon, take it easy. One bite at a time.” They ignored me and wolfed down the meal.
Before long, I was surrounded by a dozen children. They began to smile, laugh, and even cheer. I laughed with them as they ate. Everyone wanted seconds. I kept handing out burgers until the two sacks were empty. They hugged me, thanked me, and hugged me again.
Soldiers began to spill out of the dining hall. Captains, majors, and even a company commander walked by. Each smiled and saluted me. To my surprise, the hamburger handout outside in the snow tasted better than that turkey inside the hall.
On December 9, 1945, the front-page story got through to us. The day before, Major General Hobart “Hap” Gay had invited General Patton to go pheasant hunting with him near the German town of Speyer, on the Rhine. Apparently, Patton had been feeling depressed about the results of the war. His request to go to the Pacific had been rejected, and he ended up with what he considered a mere desk job. As they were coming back from the pheasant hunt, Patton was lamenting how bad war was. He had just talked about how war was such a waste of life and property when their car collided head-on with an American army truck abruptly crossing the road.
The other passengers in the car were only slightly injured, but General Patton hit his head on the glass partition in the backseat. A gash in his head sent blood running down his shirt. Patton complained that he felt paralyzed from the neck down and was struggling to breathe. He was brought to a hospital in nearby Heidelberg, where the doctors diagnosed him with a broken neck and cervical spinal cord injury. He would be paralyzed from the neck down.
The report left all of us in shock. How could it be?
Patton would spend the next twelve days in spinal traction, as his medical team tried to reduce the pressure on his spine. I imagine he must have been devastated. He knew he would never again live a normal life. Someone else would have to attend to all of his needs.
He began to decline, day by day. His wife, Beatrice, flew in to be with him. After a career spent dodging flying bullets and exploding bombs, Patton had been laid low by a simple car wreck. It just didn’t fit the man.
The rumors began to fly immediately. Every soldier claimed to have inside secrets about what really happened. Some men thought that Allied secret intelligence believed Patton would reveal American collusion with the Russians that cost U.S. lives. The spy chiefs wanted him dead before he exposed those details.
Another claim that popped up was that Patton had actually been recovering from his serious injuries and was on the verge of being flown home. The story was that the chief of the recently disbanded U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, ordered a skilled marksman named Douglas Bazata to silence Patton. Supposedly, Bazata arranged for the truck to come rolling into Patton’s path. Bazata then shot a low-velocity projectile that broke Patton’s neck, leaving the other passengers in the car unharmed. Rather far out, but that was some of the hearsay.
Douglas Bazata made statements that only added to the confusion. He claimed American officials looked away while the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB) actually poisoned General Patton. Supposedly, Patton was also on Stalin’s hit list. Of course, it was no secret that Patton and the Russians hated each other. So, the gossip claimed, the Russians finished him off. A decade later, Bazata would assert that all of this was true by giving the story to a journalist. Bazata supposedly claimed all of this happened at the command of General Donovan, a highly decorated World War I hero.
Douglas Bazata had been part of an elite unit that parachuted into France to help organize the resistance before D-Day occurred. During his career, he was awarded four purple hearts and a Distinguished Service Cross as well as the French Croix de Guerre medal. With significant artistic talent, he was to become a friend of Salvador Dalí, who painted him as Don Quixote. Later, Bazata was also rumored to enjoy the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco as well as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Near the end of his career, Bazata was an aide to U.S. president Ronald Reagan.
Another report stated that the driver of the truck that hit Patton was immediately transferred to London before he could be questioned. As part of this story was the claim that Patton’s body was never autopsied. Never was a general’s death surrounded by more intrigue and mystery. Once a conspiracy gets started, the results become like a landslide, with everyone tossing on another boulder. Long after the dust settles, people still have their own ideas, which are often bizarre, while the truth remains simple.
I heard it all and wondered if there hadn’t been a conspiracy of some sort, but I could see how various individuals promoted themselves through fables about their involvement in Patton’s death. On December 21, 1945, at six in the evening, General Patton died in his sleep. Pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure were given as the cause.
When the news came in over the radio, we discussed it among ourselves. We had been sitting around a table finishing supper. Of course, the report stopped all of us, no matter what we had been doing. The general opinion was that the collision was no accident. Somebody all the way from Stalin to the top of the American command wanted General Patton out of the way. We knew they considered him too dangerous.
We all grieved.
47
All Good Things Come to . . .
General Patton’s death really cut. I found myself walking around virtually talking to myself. Other soldiers appeared to be in the same fog. I admired his skills and loved him as a person. Having lost my own father, I had come to see Patton as a sort of father figure. I just couldn’t get away from thinking about it. He had been an invisible force that guided me through the days of danger and struggle. General Patton had embodied what our ideals of Americanism were.
The weather stayed cold, and the snow hung on. The nightly raids got a little easier, and we didn’t see nearly as many fistfights break out that required us to haul in somebody. The drunks kept on being drunks but usually weren’t difficult to handle. My daily rounds became more routine.
On the other hand, Edda started giving me the big eye again. Maybe she thought I’d change my mind, but I just kept on being a nice guy who maintained a polite distance. Her invitations for a home-cooked meal became more frequent, and I had a hard time turning them down. Edda certainly knew how to cook, and the conversations were always interesting. Periodically she would give me a kiss on the cheek or reach for my hand, but I didn’t allow the gestures to go anywhere. I tried to keep everything casual.
Winters in Berlin were cold enough, but nothing like we experienced during the fighting when the bottom dropped out of the thermometer. Of course, the army provided us with more than adequate coats, gloves, and whatever was needed. Even in the cold weather, the Germans were certainly industrious enough. Often working only by hand, they cleared the streets and began rebuilding the bombed-out buildings. Traffic picked up, and we could see that life was moving back toward a normal pace. However, nothing got better with the Soviets. The Russians continued to be difficult as well as aggressive.
As usual, I walked into our military police office for the morning assignments. The clerk looked up and grinned. “Ah, Sergeant Sisson,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
I laughed. “Really, what did I do now?”
“The big man wants to talk to you. Lieutenant Franks is waiting.”
“Franks!” I swallowed hard. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me. I only run the front desk.”
Lieutenant Franks was well known. He had been born and raised in Berlin. Though his parents were American, his German had the accent of a native, and he knew the city well. When the occupation forces were setting up their offices in Berlin, Franks was a natural to run any important facility. He became the head of all military police. Going to see him was talking to the top dog.
I walked in and saluted. “Sergeant Sisson reporting for duty.”
“Sit down, Sergeant,” Franks said. “I have some important information for you.” He picked up a sheet of paper. “This memo just came in today. Your work in Berlin is finished. In two weeks, you will return to the United States and become a civilian.”
I gasped. “Praise God!” I exclaimed and then retreated. “I mean . . . yes, sir.”
Franks smiled. “Of course you’re delighted. Who wouldn’t want to get out of this war-torn city? You’ve done a good job and deserve a trip home. You will return by ship to the Houston, Texas, area and then take the bus to Camp Chaffee. They’ll process you out so you can return home.”
“Thank you, sir!” I saluted.
Out in the hall, I let out a whoopee holler and could hear men laughing. I was going home.
