George S. Patton

Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Patton deliberately cultivated a flashy, distinctive image in the belief that this would inspire his troops. He carried a flashy ivory-handled, Smith & Wesson Model 27 .357 Magnum. He was usually seen wearing a highly polished helmet, riding pants, and high cavalry boots. He was known to oversee training maneuvers from atop a tank painted red, white and blue. His jeep bore oversized rank placards on the front and back, as well as a klaxon horn which would loudly announce his approach from afar.

Historian Alan Axelrod wrote that "for Patton, leadership was never simply about making plans and giving orders, it was about transforming oneself into a symbol." Patton intentionally expressed a conspicuous desire for glory, atypical of the officer corps of the day which emphasized blending in with troops on the battlefield. He was an admirer of Admiral Horatio Nelson for his conspicuous actions in leading the Battle of Trafalgar in a full dress uniform. Patton had a preoccupation with bravery, wearing his rank insignia conspicuously in combat, and at one point during World War I rode atop a tank into a German-controlled village seeking to inspire courage in his men.[59] He was also a staunch fatalist, and was unabashed in his belief in reincarnation, specifically that he may have been a military leader killed in action in Napoleon's army in a previous life, or a Roman legionary.

Patton's final assignment was to command the Fifteenth United States Army based in Bad Nauheim. The Fifteenth Army at this point consisted only of a small headquarters staff tasked to compile a history of the war in Europe. Patton had accepted the post because of his love of history, but quickly lost interest in the duty.

He began traveling, visiting Paris, Rennes, Chartres, Brussels, Metz, Reims, Luxembourg, and Verdun, as well as Stockholm where he reunited with other athletes from the 1912 Olympics. Patton decided he would leave his post at the Fifteenth Army and not return to Europe once he left on December 10 for Christmas leave. He intended to discuss with his wife whether he would continue in a stateside post or retire.

On December 8, Patton's chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, invited him on a pheasant hunting trip near Speyer to lift his spirits. At 11:45 on December 9, Patton and Gay were riding in Patton's 1938 Cadillac Model 75 staff car driven by Private First Class Horace L. Woodring when they stopped at a railroad intersection to allow a train to pass. Patton, observing derelict cars along the side of the road, spoke as the car crossed the railroad track, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Woodring glanced away from the road when a 2½ ton GMC truck driven by Technical Sergeant Robert L. Thompson, who was en route to a quartermaster depot, suddenly made a left turn in front of the car. Woodring slammed the brakes and turned sharply to the left, colliding with the truck at a low speed.

Woodring, Thompson, and Gay were only slightly injured in the crash, but Patton had not been able to brace in time and hit his head on the glass partition in the back seat of the car. He began bleeding from a gash to the head and complained to Gay and Woodring that he was paralyzed and was having trouble breathing. Taken to a hospital in Heidelberg, Patton was discovered to have a compression fracture and dislocation of the third and fourth vertebrae, resulting in a broken neck and cervical spinal cord injury which rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. He spent most of the next 12 days in spinal traction to decrease spinal pressure. Although in some pain from this procedure, he reportedly never complained about it. All non-medical visitors, save for Patton's wife, who had flown from the U.S., were forbidden. Patton, who had been told he had no chance to ever again ride a horse or resume normal life, at one point commented, "This is a hell of a way to die." He died in his sleep of a pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure at about 18:00 on December 21, 1945.

Patton was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial in Hamm, Luxembourg alongside other wartime casualties of the Third Army, per his request to "be buried with my men."