On December
9, 1945, General George S. Patton Jr.—the audacious commander whose Third Army
raced across Europe—set out for a pheasant hunt near Mannheim, Germany. In the
back seat of his 1938 Cadillac staff car, driven by PFC Horace Woodring, Patton
sat beside Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Hobart “Hap” Gay. At 11:45 a.m., near a
railroad crossing a slow-turning 2.5-ton U.S. Army truck cut across their path.
The low-speed collision—barely 20 mph—sent the unrestrained Patton slamming
forward into the steel-framed glass partition.
He suffered a
severe spinal cord injury. Bleeding from a deep scalp laceration, Patton
remained conscious. He lay in traction
for twelve days.
On December
20 a blood clot traveled to his lungs. He died in his sleep at 5:55 p.m. on
December 21, 1945, at age 60, from a pulmonary embolism. On Christmas Eve he was buried, at his own
request, among the men of his Third Army in Luxembourg American Cemetery.
A conspiracy
theory surrounding General Patton's death alleges that his December 9, 1945,
low-speed car accident was deliberately staged as part of an assassination
plot, rather than a tragic mishap, with the goal of silencing his outspoken
anti-Russian views. Believers in this
theory claim Patton was a loose cannon who might expose scandals, run for president
in 1948, or spark WW 3, making him a threat to U.S., British, or Soviet
interests.
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