Killing Patton

The Prologue of Killing Patton describes the last hour of General George S. Patton’s life. He is in an American military hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, with Beatrice, his wife of 35 years, on a chair beside him. 12 days earlier, on the December 8, 1945, Patton was paralyzed from the neck down in a collision with an army truck. Despite expectations that he might recover, Patton dies on December 21 of a pulmonary embolism caused by prolonged immobility. He is buried in the American cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg.

Contrary to official army claims, O’Reilly proposes that several suspicious circumstances surround this death. First, an unidentified allied fighter plane had attacked Patton’s personal airplane in April. Second, the men in the truck that hit him were never charged, vanishing after the accident. Finally, in 1979 ex-American intelligence agent Douglas Bazata claimed that he had been asked to participate in Patton’s murder. 

On June 5, 1944, in the British countryside, one day before the D-Day landings in Normandy and the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, Patton delivers a speech to the men of his Third Army. Patton praises the virtue of battlefield courage, as “Americans despise cowards” (18). He also talks about the importance of an army fighting as a team.