George S. Patton Jr. died on Christmas Day, 1945. But the shadow of that name was just beginning to fall on his family.
His widow, Beatrice, and their three children suddenly found themselves living in the legacy of one of America’s most celebrated and controversial military figures. The general who had led the Third Army across Europe was gone. For the Patton family, the weight of that name was only beginning to be felt. The circumstances of Patton’s death were as unexpected as they were ordinary.
On the morning of December 9, 1945, just months after Germany’s surrender, Patton set out on a pheasant hunting trip near Mannheim. He rode in the back seat of a 1938 Cadillac limousine with his chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay. His driver was 19-year-old Private First Class Horus Woodring, a Kentucky kid assigned to the general only a few months earlier. The morning was gray and cold.
Patton was commenting on the wreckage still visible along the roadsides when disaster struck. At approximately 11:45 a. m. , a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck driven by Technical Sergeant Robert Thompson suddenly turned left into the driveway of a depot, directly into the path of Patton’s limousine.
Woodring had no time to react. The impact threw Patton forward. His head struck the partition separating the front and rear compartments, gashing his forehead and breaking his neck. Gay and Woodring escaped with minor injuries.
But Patton, who was not wearing a seat belt, lay paralyzed from the neck down. He knew immediately what had happened. He told Gay to rub his fingers, testing for sensation that would not come. The general who had always led from the front could no longer move.
Beatrice Patton, preparing for her husband’s first Christmas at home in four years, received word from an Associated Press reporter. Within hours, she was on an emergency flight to Germany, accompanied by Colonel Roy Glenwood Spurling, a renowned neurosurgeon. General Dwight Eisenhower personally ordered the fastest transportation for Big B, as Beatrice was known within the family. Beatrice arrived at the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg on December 11.
She found her husband paralyzed but conscious. When Colonel Spurling, speaking man-to-man, told him he would never ride a horse again, Patton absorbed the news with characteristic bluntness. He understood the best he could hope for would be semi-invalidism. He thanked the doctor for being honest and promised to be a good patient.
For the next 11 days, Beatrice remained at her husband’s bedside. The medical staff worked desperately to stabilize him, but his condition deteriorated. Edema built up in his lungs. A blood clot formed and began its journey toward his heart.
On the evening of December 21, 1945, at 5:55 p. m. , George S. Patton Jr.
died in his sleep. He was 60 years old. His death came four days after his birthday and four days before Christmas. The question of where to bury him arose immediately.
Beatrice’s first instinct was to bring his body home for burial at West Point, but she knew what Patton himself would have wanted. The general had always been contemptuous of repatriating fallen soldiers, once calling it catering to a bunch of sniveling sob sisters retained by those carry-and-eating ghouls, the coffin makers and undertakers. When Eisenhower’s staff gently suggested that Patton should rest among the soldiers of his beloved Third Army, Beatrice understood at once. “Of course, he must be buried here,” she said.
“Furthermore, I know George would want to lie beside the men of his army who have fallen. ”
She chose the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm, where thousands of Third Army soldiers who had died in the Battle of the Bulge were interred. The burial took place on Christmas Eve 1945. A funeral train carried Patton’s body from Heidelberg to Luxembourg, a journey of 240 miles that took 13 hours.
At every stop along the way, crowds gathered to pay their respects, including many German civilians, former enemies who stood bareheaded in tribute to the general who had defeated them. Beatrice stepped out onto the platform at every station and addressed the crowds in French, thanking them for honoring her husband. The grave at Hamm has since become one of the most visited American military grave sites in Europe. Patton’s headstone, identical to those of the soldiers buried around him, stands at the head of the cemetery, as if the general is still leading his men in formation.
For Beatrice, the years after her husband’s death were marked by purpose and eventually tragedy of her own. Born in 1886 to a wealthy Boston industrialist, she had grown up in privilege but had never been a passive observer. She spoke fluent French, was an accomplished equestrian and author, and had been her husband’s confidant and tempering influence during his many controversies. After Patton’s death, Beatrice threw herself into advocacy.
She became a forceful speaker promoting universal military training in the emerging Cold War era. She guarded her husband’s legacy fiercely, growing frustrated with conspiracy theories claiming he had been assassinated. She dismissed them utterly. As her daughter Ruth Ellen later said, “He wasn’t murdered.
His time had come. ”
The darker aspects of Patton’s personal life surfaced after his death as well. His niece by marriage, Jean Gordon, had been a constant presence in the family. The daughter of Beatrice’s half-sister Louise, Jean had been best friends with Ruth Ellen since childhood and served as a bridesmaid at both Patton daughters’ weddings.
During the war, she worked as a Red Cross staff assistant in Europe, and her proximity to the general sparked rumors of a romantic relationship. Beatrice believed the rumors. Shortly after Patton’s death, she arranged a meeting with Jean Gordon at a Boston hotel. The confrontation was brief and brutal.
According to family accounts, Beatrice uttered a Hawaiian curse she had learned years earlier, wishing ill upon the younger woman. Just days later, in the early morning hours of January 8, 1946, barely two weeks after Patton’s death, Jean Gordon committed suicide in a Manhattan apartment. She was found on the floor surrounded by pictures of the general, with gas hissing from the four open jets of a kitchen stove. She was 30 years old.
The tragedy cast a pall over a family already reeling from loss. Yet Beatrice carried on. She lived for nearly eight more years, maintaining the family estate and continuing her advocacy work. On September 30, 1953, while participating in a drag hunt with her brother, she suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm.
She fell from her horse and was pronounced dead upon arrival at Beverly Hospital. She was 67 years old. The equestrian who had shared her husband’s passion for horses died doing what she loved. Beatrice’s wish to be buried with her husband was well known to her children.
Unable to obtain official permission to inter her remains at the Luxembourg cemetery, they honored her desire in their own way. After a brief Episcopal service, she was cremated. Some years later, her children scattered a portion of her ashes over Patton’s grave in Hamm. In this way, Beatrice finally joined the husband she had loved, supported, and occasionally suffered for throughout their tumultuous marriage.
The Pattons had three children. The eldest, Beatrice Ayer Patton, known as B, was born in 1911. She married Lieutenant John K. Waters, a cavalry officer and West Point graduate, in June 1934.
It was a union that would bring both distinction and heartbreak to the family. Waters rose through the ranks, serving with distinction in North Africa during World War II. In February 1943, he was captured by German forces during the Battle of Kasserine Pass. He spent the next two years as a prisoner of war, eventually being held at Oflag X-B near Hamburg.
His imprisonment became the catalyst for one of the most controversial episodes of Patton’s career. In late March 1945, as the Third Army pushed deep into Germany, Patton ordered a raid on the Hammelburg POW camp. Task Force Baum, as it came to be known, consisted of approximately 300 soldiers, 10 medium tanks, six light tanks, and various supporting vehicles. The mission was ostensibly to liberate the prisoners, but the camp was 50 miles behind enemy lines, and the task force was vastly undersized.
The raid reached the camp on March 27 but was overwhelmed by German counterattacks. Nearly the entire task force was killed or captured. Waters himself was shot by a German guard while attempting to serve as an intermediary between the American raiders and the camp’s defenders. He survived the wound but spent additional weeks in captivity.
Patton publicly denied knowing that his son-in-law was held at Hammelburg when he ordered the raid. The claim strained credulity. Intelligence reports had indicated Waters’s presence at the camp, and Eisenhower was furious at the waste of men and equipment on what appeared to be a personal mission. The controversy damaged Patton’s standing with his superiors.
Waters recovered and went on to a distinguished military career, rising to the rank of four-star general. But personal tragedy struck again. B Patton Waters died of a heart attack on October 24, 1952, near West Point. She was only 41 years old.
At the time of her death, her husband was serving in Korea. He learned of his wife’s death from halfway around the world. The second Patton child, Ruth Ellen, was born in 1915. Unlike her older sister, Ruth Ellen would live a long life devoted to preserving and interpreting the family’s history.
In 1940, she married James W. Totten, a career army officer who would rise to the rank of major general. Their marriage produced three children. Ruth Ellen became the unofficial historian of the Patton family.
She supervised the collection and editing of family papers and collaborated extensively with biographers. Her contributions were invaluable to Carlo D’Este, whose 1995 biography *Patton: A Genius for War* remains one of the definitive accounts of the general’s life. Ruth Ellen possessed a photographic memory and shared freely with researchers, offering both glowing tributes and unflinching assessments of a father whose flaws she had witnessed as well as his genius. She believed passionately in reincarnation, a conviction she shared with both her parents, and approached death as merely a passage to a new existence.
Beyond her family work, she became a noted speaker and essayist on subjects including the Salem witch trials and the life of General George Armstrong Custer. In 1967, she settled in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and founded an organization supporting military families. She wrote a biography of her mother, published after her death as *The Button Box*. Ruth Ellen Patton Totten died on Thanksgiving Day 1993.
She was 78 years old. A memorial service was held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms, the same church where her parents had married in 1910. The youngest of the Patton children, and the one who bore the heaviest burden of the family name, was George Smith Patton Jr.
, known as George IV. Born on Christmas Eve 1923 in Boston, he grew up in the shadow of a father who was already becoming a legend. He entered West Point in 1942, just as his father was preparing to lead American forces into North Africa. The correspondence between them, father at war, son at the military academy, reveals a relationship of deep affection and high expectation.
George IV was still a cadet when his father died. He graduated from West Point in June 1946, just months after the general’s burial in Luxembourg. At his graduation, an old veteran shook his hand and delivered a blunt assessment: “Well, George, you’ll never be the man your father was, but congratulations. ” The pressure to live up to the family legend would define much of his life.
Following his father’s death, he legally changed his name, dropping the Roman numerals. He chose to be known simply as George Smith Patton. His military career spanned 34 years and three major conflicts. After his first assignment in West Germany, where he participated in the 1948 Berlin Airlift, he deployed to Korea in 1953 and received his first Silver Star and Purple Heart.
It was in Vietnam that George truly proved himself. He served three tours. During his final tour from January 1968 to January 1969, he commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment known as the Blackhorse Regiment. He was wounded in combat and shot down three times.
He was awarded two Distinguished Service Crosses, along with the Distinguished Flying Cross, additional Silver Stars, and more Purple Hearts. George proved himself as brave, aggressive, and occasionally as controversial as his father had been. He developed a reputation for blunt speaking. During his command in Germany, he confronted issues of racial integration head-on.
He led from the front and earned the fierce loyalty of his soldiers. One of the more remarkable relationships of his later career was his friendship with Manfred Rommel, the son of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who had been his father’s most respected adversary in North Africa. The two men discovered they shared a birthday, December 24, and formed a bond that endured until George’s death. The Patton and Rommel families would spend Christmas Eve together, a tradition unimaginable during the war.
In 1975, George made military history when he assumed command of the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood, the same unit his father had first commanded before World War II. It was the first time in American military history that a son had taken command of a division previously led by his father. George retired from the army in 1980, having risen to the rank of major general. Unlike his father, who had died longing for one more war, George found peace in retirement.
He settled at the family property in Hamilton, transforming it into a working farm. In a gesture that spoke to the losses that haunted him, he named the fields after soldiers who had died under his command in Vietnam. In 1986, tragedy struck. George accidentally set fire to the basement of his home.
The blaze destroyed dozens of journals he had been keeping throughout his adult life, identical volumes bound in red canvas containing his memories and reflections. George suffered second-degree burns trying to rescue them, but nearly all were reduced to ash. His son Benjamin would later write that the burning of his office extinguished something in him. George worked to preserve his father’s legacy even as he struggled with his own.
In 1997, he collaborated on a book about the family and the evolution of military culture. In his final years, he suffered from a degenerative form of Parkinson’s disease. He died on June 27, 2004, at his home in Hamilton. He was 80 years old.
True to his wish to be buried among his soldiers, George was interred at Arlington National Cemetery. George and Joanne Patton had five children, each of whom chose their own path in relation to the family legacy. The eldest, Margaret Georgina Patton, became a Benedictine nun. George S.
Patton V remained in Hamilton, sharing memories of his grandfather and father and helping to keep the legacy visible to new generations. Robert H. Patton became the family’s literary voice, bucking the military tradition and publishing *The Pattons*, a personal history of the family, in 1994. Helen Patton settled in Germany, devoting her life to reconciliation and remembrance.
Benjamin Wilson Patton became a documentary filmmaker and published *Growing Up Patton*, reflecting on what it meant to carry the family name. The Patton family story extends beyond the direct descendants. Ruth Ellen’s children carried on their mother’s commitment to family history. The grandchildren of John K.
Waters maintained the military tradition. The legacy of the Patton family is inseparable from the legacy of American military history itself. The Pattons trace their martial heritage back to the Revolutionary War, through the Civil War, and across nearly three centuries of American conflict. For the descendants of George S.
Patton Jr. , the challenge has always been to honor that tradition while finding their own paths. Some embraced the military life fully. Others chose different vocations while still engaging deeply with the family’s history.
The question of what it means to be a Patton, and whether anyone could ever truly live up to the legend of Old Blood and Guts, has haunted the family for generations.
