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PATTON’S LAST GAMBLE: The Disastrous Raid on POW Camp Hammelburg in World War II
Patton’s last gamble
Patton’s Last Gamble: The Disastrous Raid
on POW Camp Hammelburg in World War II (Stackpole Books, June 2022) recounts one of George Patton’s greatest mistakes: creating a special task force to venture more than fifty miles behind enemy lines and liberate a POW camp near Hammelburg, Germany. The camp held some 1,500 American prisoners, including Patton’s son-in-law. Hampered by ambushes and a lack of fuel and even maps, the raid was a nigh on total disaster.
In this adapted extract, author Duane Schultz explains how this ultimately doomed mission
came to pass.
George Patton walked confidently across a hastily constructed pontoon bridge over the Rhine River leading from France to Germany, looking like the conquering hero he was. He stopped halfway over, checked to make sure the photographer was ready to record the historic event, and then undid his fly. “Time out for a short halt,” he said to his aides. “I have been looking forward to this for a long time.” Later that same day, he sent a message to General Eisenhower at his headquarters. “I have just pissed in the Rhine.” Then, when he got to the end of the bridge and started to set foot on German soil for the
first time, he pretended to stumble, fell down on one knee, and grabbed some mud and dirt in each hand. Holding both hands up for everyone to see what they held, he proclaimed proudly, “Thus, William the Conqueror.” He was recreating the gesture made by the Norman duke who, when he set foot on British soil in 1066 for the first time, said, “See, I have taken England with both hands.” Patton knew his history. Three months earlier, he had said, “I’ve studied military history all my life. Georgie Patton knows more about military history than any other person in the United States Army today. With due conceit—and I’ve got no end of that—I can say that’s true.” And he also knew how to make his own history. He was once again at the height of his power and glory that month of March 1945. A week before he crossed the Rhine, he had written in his diary that he and his victorious Third Army were “the eighth wonder of the world.” He was not exaggerating, at least not by much. He had done the seemingly impossible time after time, becoming one of the most famous generals in American history. The year before, in August 1944, while driving through a battlefield in France strewn with hundreds of bloated and blackened dead
soldiers amidst fields of burned-out tanks, he had turned to his aide and said, “Just look at that, Codman. Could anything be more magnificent? . . . Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it.”
Three months before crossing the Rhine, on December 26, he had broken through German lines to relieve the besieged American troops at Bastogne in one of the most brilliant military feats of the war. He had quickly shifted three divisions of his Third Army 90 degrees to the north and sent them through roads covered with snow and ice in only forty-eight hours, to the astonishment of everyone. Then, in March 1945, his tanks covered 65
Right: Patton atop a tank near Brolo, Sicily, in 1943
miles from their former front line in only two days, speeding along on a single highway from the German Siegfried line, in a column that was only about 25 feet wide, all the way to the Rhine. His flanks were entirely unprotected, but Patton did not concern himself with that.
He happily let the Army Air Corps worry about his flanks, and they obliged, strafing and bombing every enemy target they could find, and doing an excellent job of it. The important thing for Patton was simply to keep moving relentlessly, as far and as fast as possible every day. And so his tanks and men stopped for nothing, not even, so it was claimed, for a retreating German parachute division, which they beat in a race to the river. And Patton’s force crossed the river with the loss of only twenty-eight men. But more important to Patton, he had beaten his hated British rival, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who had been preparing for days to make a massive crossing of the Rhine farther north. So swift was Patton’s crossing and consolidation of a huge bridgehead on the other side that nobody at headquarters knew about it yet. The next morning, March 23, Patton telephoned his immediate commander, Gen. Omar Bradley, and shouted over the phone. “Brad,” he said, “don’t tell anyone, but I’m across.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Bradley replied. “You mean, across the Rhine?” “Sure am,” Patton said. “I sneaked a division over last night. But there are so few Krauts around there they don’t know it yet. So don’t make any announcements. We’ll keep it a secret until we see how it goes.” The news did not stay a secret for long. A few hours later, Patton’s liaison officer at Bradley’s headquarters proudly told the press about Patton’s crossing of the Rhine. By then, it did not make any difference because the Germans had found out on their own, and the next day they sent 150 fighter planes to strafe and bomb Patton’s troops and the pontoon bridges they had built across the river. The German attack
did little damage, however, and that evening Patton called Bradley again and screamed even louder over the phone in his curiously squeaky, highpitched voice. “Brad, for God’s sake, tell the world we’re across! We knocked down thirty-three Krauts [aircraft] today when they came after our pontoon bridges. I want the world to know Third Army
made it before Monty starts across.” “This operation is stupendous,” he wrote to his wife, Beatrice. Congratulations and praise poured in from Eisenhower, Patton’s fellow generals, President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Winston Churchill. Public opinion polls conducted back home in the States showed that Patton was consistently rated as the most popular of all of Eisenhower’s generals. Even the enemy, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, said later that Patton was the best American general of them all. Newspapers and magazines devoted huge coverage to Patton—more than to any other general in the European theater, which irked both Eisenhower and Bradley. Two weeks after he crossed the Rhine, Time magazine did a cover story on Patton, reporting an alleged incident involving Eisenhower. “When asked where the fast-moving Patton was, Ike replied, ‘Hell, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in three hours.’ ”
On March 25, Palm Sunday, the day after Patton pissed in the Rhine, his beloved 4th Armored Division raced ahead to the next natural
barrier, the Main River. The first unit to reach the river, Combat Command B, was led by newly promoted, thirty-year-old Col. Creighton Abrams, who was one of Patton’s favorite officers. His men found a railroad bridge still standing, though they could see bombs that the Germans had strapped to the girders. It was ready to be blown up to stop the American advance.
Men of the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion, led by Lt. Col. Harold Cohen, made their way cautiously out onto the bridge and, one by one, disarmed the bombs. The battalion then
went over the bridge and set up a defensive perimeter on the other side. Patton’s men were once again deeper into Germany than any other Allied unit, and both Abrams and Cohen, as well as a bad case of hemorrhoids, were about to play leading roles in what happened next. It seemed that nothing could stop Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. “Patton was a hero,” historian Michael Keane writes, “to his men, to his superiors at SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force], to the public, and to the press. In the experience of George Patton this could only mean one thing—something bad was about to happen. Patton himself wrote to his wife on March 23, ‘I am really scared by my good luck.’ He was right to be worried. Perhaps the most controversial episode of Patton’s career was about to unfold.”
That was when he decided to take the biggest gamble of his career and put into effect what one army historian called “the most fascinating yet enigmatic military escapade in the European theater during World War II.” It was a mission to a POW camp located 60 miles behind German lines in a tiny town few Americans had ever heard of, called Hammelburg. If the mission to Hammelburg failed, and the real reason behind it became known, he would end his illustrious army career in absolute disgrace and shame. He would go down in history as one of the most reviled military commanders of World War II for having deliberately exposed his men to mortal danger for what everyone would know was a highly personal and selfish reason on his part. Even if the mission succeeded, he could still be vilified for risking several hundred lives to save one man who might not even be at Hammelburg. The consequences would be far worse than what happened to him after the slapping incidents two years before in Sicily, which had almost cost him his command.
He survived that embarrassing setback to his career and again became a national hero, but he knew he would not be so fortunate if word
got out about the real purpose of his mission to Hammelburg. The war in Europe was going to end in a matter of weeks, and he would not be needed anymore. His service, his career, his reputation, his role in history would all be in
Left: The book’s cover Facing: Patton with Henry Kent Hewitt, off the coast of North Africa, 1942
jeopardy. But that did not stop him. The incidents in Sicily could be explained away, his defenders argued, by the stress he was under at the time leading his successful campaign there. They could even be described as a onetime overreaction on the spur of the moment. His defenders said it was simply Patton being his usual impetuous self. Even one of the soldiers he slapped seemed to almost rally to Patton’s defense when he said, “I think he was suffering a little battle fatigue himself.” The Hammelburg operation would, in sharp contrast, be recognized as a deliberately planned, conscious decision made for a highly personal and selfish reason that had nothing to do with defeating the Germans and ending the
war.
Patton was willing to take such a gamble to save just one man. The man was a lieutenant colonel, a graduate of West Point who had been captured in North Africa two years earlier, in 1943, by Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. He was a tanker and former cavalry officer like Patton. When he was listed as missing in action not far from the major American defeat at Kasserine Pass, Patton was frantic with worry and personally sent a graves registration team to comb the dead in search of this one man at the
battle site. They did not find him. Patton himself walked among the debris of the battle and picked up an ammunition clip from what was left of an American tank; he sent it to the man’s two young children to serve as a memento of their father if
he did not return.
Finally, several weeks later, the man’s name appeared on a prisoner of war list of the Germans. John Knight Waters was Patton’s sonin-law. Patton would later deny to everyone, including Waters, that he knew Waters was at Hammelburg, and, indeed, he did not know for certain that he was there. Patton would also
claim that the purpose of the mission had been to rescue all of the POWs at Hammelburg, not
just one man. Patton was so worried about public criticism and possible censure for what he was about to do that he classified the mission as top secret, meaning that nothing was to be said to the press and that his men were not to talk about it to The mission to Hammelburg would last only forty hours over two nights and a day from start to finish, a blink of an eye in the many months and years that World War II in Europe lasted. It was only one of hundreds of decisions Patton made during the war. Yet, it stood out enough for Patton’s biographer to describe it as “the most controversial military decision of his career, and one that many would argue ranked as his worst.” Before it even began, Creighton Abrams and Harold Cohen, who had to plan the raid, both called it a suicide mission. So did Capt. Abe Baum, the man chosen to lead the rescue force to Hammelburg. Sgt. Nat Frankel, a tanker who made it through the war in Patton’s 4th Armored Division, called the mission “stupid and selfish.” Patton’s gamble, as Bradley later wrote, “began as a wild goose chase and ended as a tragedy.” Bradley called it “foolhardy” and said it was “doomed from the start.” He was right.
Patton’s Last Gamble: The Disastrous Raid on POW
Camp Hammelburg in World War II (Paperback, 9780811770903, £16.95) by Duane Schultz publishes
