It’s no exaggeration to say that George S. Patton was one of a handful of World War II generals whose fame has endured for over 70 years. He was arguably the most famous American general of the war, a household name alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur. Patton led U.S. forces to victory in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany, breaking out of Normandy and racing east until the war ended with his Third Army just inside Czechoslovakia. He was decorated and celebrated by all the Allied nations.

What fewer people realize is that his final months were marked by depression, anger, controversy—and a premature death in December 1945 at the age of only 60. That death has become the subject of intense speculation. Was it a simple traffic accident? Or was Patton murdered by a shadowy conspiracy of Allied leaders who were tired of his anti-Soviet rhetoric and embarrassing outbursts? Had George S. Patton become a liability instead of the asset he was during the fighting?

Patton was a brilliant but difficult man. He never hesitated to express strong opinions and often created problems for Allied authorities. He first commanded U.S. troops in combat during Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942, and then in the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily in July 1943. His flamboyant dress, aggressive style, and salty language won him admiration from the troops and the press, but some of his orders and decisions drew sharp criticism.

An early and serious example was his illegal “no prisoners” order given in a public speech on June 27th, 1943, just before the invasion of Sicily. Unsurprisingly, U.S. soldiers executed 73 Italian prisoners of war following the capture of Biscari. Two soldiers were tried for this war crime, but Patton’s culpability made the case politically explosive. The Allies did not want their most famous general—or the U.S. Army itself—tainted. The investigation into Patton was dropped by order of his superior, General Omar Bradley.

Just weeks later came the infamous “slapping incidents.” During hospital visits in August 1943, Patton physically slapped two U.S. soldiers suffering from combat fatigue and called them cowards. He also shouted that one of them deserved to be shot. The incidents, once reported, damaged his reputation severely. They exposed an ugly side of his personality: unstable, explosive, and sometimes cruel when confronted with what he perceived as weakness.

Even toward the end of the war, controversy followed him. In March 1945, Patton ordered “Task Force Baum,” a tank and infantry unit, on a raid 50 miles behind German lines to liberate a POW camp at Hammelburg. Out of 314 men, 16 Sherman tanks, and numerous vehicles, only 35 men returned. All tanks and vehicles were lost. It later emerged that Patton’s own son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Waters, was a prisoner at that camp. It looked very much like Patton had used his position to authorize a poorly planned rescue mission for personal reasons, heedless of the cost in lives and equipment. Eisenhower and others hushed up the episode because Patton’s tactical performance elsewhere was considered too valuable to jeopardize.

As the war neared its end, Patton also became increasingly vocal about his hostility toward the Soviet Union. He did not want his army stopped at the Bavarian–Czech frontier and even allowed some units to push into territory that had been assigned to the Soviets. He is famously quoted as saying of Russians, “I have no particular desire to understand them, except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them.” His fellow generals and Allied leaders did not appreciate such remarks. Some thought he was overrated, similar to criticisms aimed at Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. British Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke described Patton as “a dashing courageous wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push, but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment.”

Eisenhower, however, recognized Patton’s value. After Patton’s death, Ike said, “It is no exaggeration to say that Patton’s name struck terror into the hearts of the enemy.” Bradley, by contrast, disliked Patton in almost every respect. President Harry Truman did not admire him as Franklin Roosevelt had; Truman grouped Patton with MacArthur and Custer as dangerous egotists.

Once Germany surrendered in May 1945, Patton immediately demanded a transfer to the Pacific and a new army to lead against Japan. He was denied. Instead, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson decided Patton would return to Europe as military governor of Bavaria. It was a poor fit. Bored and restless, Patton had little interest in de-Nazification. He saw the process as unimportant compared to the looming Soviet threat. He told Secretary of War Robert Patterson that the U.S. Army in Germany must be kept at full strength and bitterly regretted handing over territory his army had liberated to the Soviets. “We have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them,” he said, “but we have failed in the liberation of Europe. We have lost the war.”

His attitudes toward defeated Germans caused fresh embarrassment. In a private conversation later made public, he stated that “SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat in America.” That remark triggered another press storm. Patton was also very vocal in opposing Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s plan for a harsh postwar Germany. His resistance, combined with several remarks that bordered on anti-Semitism, alienated influential people in Washington and in the press. Describing the destruction of Berlin, Patton wrote, “Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what could have been a good race, and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages, and all Europe will be communist.” Statements like that made managing his public image increasingly difficult.

As the early Cold War took shape, Patton became obsessed with the Soviet threat and furious that the U.S. was, in his view, punishing Germans instead of preparing for a confrontation with Moscow. The U.S. and even the Soviets became concerned enough about Patton’s behavior that his telephone was tapped. Eisenhower eventually removed him as military governor of Bavaria and assigned him to command a largely administrative force, the Fifteenth Army in Germany—a paper army with no combat role. Patton accepted the new job with some relief, no longer having to oversee de-Nazification. But his outspoken criticism of U.S. policy in Germany and his anti-Soviet statements continued.

By late 1945, George Patton—the most famous American general of the war—had become a political and diplomatic liability. Some people have since suggested that this made him a target.

On December 9th, 1945, Patton’s chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, invited him on a pheasant hunt near Mannheim. The party used two vehicles: Patton’s 1938 Cadillac 75 staff car, driven by 19-year-old Private First Class Horace Woodring, a combat veteran, and a jeep ahead carrying Sergeant Joseph Spruce, the guns, ammunition, and a hunting dog. On the way, Patton asked to stop at the Roman ruins at Saalburg. Afterwards, because of the cold, he moved to the front passenger seat of the Cadillac to warm his feet near the heater, then later moved back to his usual position in the right rear seat, with Gay on the left.

At a railway crossing on the northern outskirts of Mannheim, the jeep crossed the tracks, but the Cadillac was stopped by a passing train. Once the train cleared, Woodring drove on. Ahead, two U.S. Army trucks were pulled off to the side of the road. One of them—a 2½-ton GMC 6×6—pulled out just as the Cadillac approached. As the vehicles converged, the truck suddenly veered left into the Cadillac’s path. At about 20 miles per hour, Woodring had no time to evade. The Cadillac hit the truck.

The impact threw Patton forward. He struck his head on a metal frame behind the driver’s seat and suffered a serious head and neck injury. He collapsed into Gay’s lap, bleeding heavily from a cut that extended from the bridge of his nose to the top of his scalp and complaining that he could not move. Woodring flagged down the first vehicle he saw—an Army ambulance. Sergeant Leroy Ogden, the medic, stopped the bleeding and transported Patton to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg, arriving roughly an hour after the crash.

Military police investigated. The truck driver, Technical Sergeant Robert Thompson, was acting oddly—grinning and seeming unconcerned. Woodring felt that Thompson and his two companions might have been drinking. Thompson was also 50 miles from where he was supposed to be, apparently on an unauthorized excursion. Two officers from the 818th Military Police Company questioned all involved. No one was charged. The accident was recorded as a routine traffic collision, not as an attempted assassination.

At the hospital, doctors found that Patton had suffered a severe cervical spine injury and was paralyzed from the neck down. Specialists were flown in, as was his wife. After a week, there were signs of improvement—some respiratory muscle recovery—and plans were made to fly him back to the United States for further treatment. Then, on December 20th, he suddenly worsened. On December 21st, 1945, George S. Patton died of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure. On December 24th, he was buried, according to his wishes, among his men at the American cemetery in Hamm, Luxembourg.

So where did the murder conspiracy come from?

For thirty years after Patton’s death, no serious allegation of foul play surfaced. It wasn’t until 1974 that the idea began circulating, with the publication of a novel called The Algonquin Project by British writer Frederick Nolan. The book was fiction—emphasis on fiction—about a plot to kill a famous general. It later became a weak film, Brass Target (1978). From that work of fiction, some readers began to spin theories that Patton’s real-life accident had been an assassination.

In 1979, a former OSS operative, Douglas Bazata, who was by then broke and looking for money, claimed he had been ordered by OSS director William Donovan to assassinate Patton. Bazata’s story was elaborate and dramatic: he said he jammed Patton’s car window open during the stop at the Roman ruins to allow a gunman to shoot him later with a special weapon that fired a projectile resembling a rock, making the wound look like it came from the crash. When Patton survived the accident, Bazata claimed he was later poisoned in the hospital.

The media loved it. Bazata’s war record and decorations made him sound credible at a glance. But when his claims are compared with the known accounts from General Gay, Woodring, the MPs, medical staff, and other witnesses, his story simply doesn’t fit. There is no evidence of a gunshot wound, no indication of poisoning, and no corroborating witness to any such plot.

Bazata’s account, combined with the earlier novel, fueled public imagination. The fact that no autopsy was performed on Patton’s body has also been used to support suspicion. But at the time, the crash was treated as a tragic accident, not a homicide. Autopsies were not routine in such cases. The later discovery that some accident-related records were missing from the National Archives added another layer of intrigue, and biographer Ladislas Farago incorporated these elements into his 1981 book The Last Days of Patton, further spreading doubts.

Since then, more books have elaborated on assassination theories, including claims that Soviet NKVD agents had a motive to kill him. Yet, despite these assertions, no concrete evidence has ever surfaced that contradicts the original eyewitness testimony or medical findings. No verifiable documents, no ballistic evidence, no credible witnesses support the idea of murder.

The simpler explanation remains the most convincing: Patton died from injuries and complications caused by a car accident.

People often struggle to accept that such a larger-than-life figure could die in such an ordinary way. A man who survived countless battles, who seemed bulletproof on the battlefield, ends his life in the aftermath of a low-speed road collision. It feels somehow wrong, out of proportion. That emotional mismatch fuels the desire for a more dramatic explanation. But until real, credible evidence emerges, the theories must remain just that—stories.

Given all we know, the most reasonable conclusion is that George S. Patton died from a chain of unfortunate events—a tired driver far from his assigned post, a sudden swerve, a bad angle, a broken neck, and a vulnerable heart. It was not a shadowy conspiracy. It was an accident.