Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

General George S. Patton Jr. was the most feared American commander of World War II, feared by the enemy, feared by his own superiors, feared by the politicians and officers who recognized that a man of his particular directness and ambition was difficult to control and impossible to predict. He died in December 1945, six months after the war ended, in a car accident in occupied Germany. For nearly seventy years, suspicion has persisted that it was no accident. In Killing Patton, Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard take readers inside the final year of the war and through the months that followed, reconstructing Patton's movements, his relationships, and his increasingly dangerous outspokenness about subjects, Soviet intentions, the management of the peace, the future of Germany, that powerful people on multiple sides would have preferred he keep to himself. The book names the individuals who wanted Patton silenced and assembles the documented evidence of what they were willing to do about it. Whether or not one accepts the assassination thesis fully, the portrait of Patton that emerges, brilliant, profane, strategically visionary, politically catastrophic, is the most vivid ever rendered in popular history. This is narrative history at its most compelling.