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the backseat, cradled in Gay’s right arm and pinning him with his weight. He was bleeding profusely from a gash that extended from the bridge of his nose to almost midway up his scalp. Patton complained that his neck hurt, and then said, “I’m having trouble breathing, Hap. Work my fingers for me.” Gay did but Patton persisted, “Go ahead, Hap. Work my fingers.”
    Patton was paralyzed.
    The accident occurred around 11:45 a.m. Military police quickly arrived on the scene. Lieutenant Peter K. Babalas and his partner, Lieutenant John Metz, had passed the general’s convoy on the road heading in the opposite direction before the accident. They heard what they described as a muffled crash. Questioning Woodring and the driver of the truck, Technician 5 th Class (T/5) Robert L. Thompson, Babalas “concluded that the truck had made a sudden sharp turn to the left just as the Cadillac was moving up,” and the crash “had become unavoidable.” Although Gay said he was looking out his side of the window at impact and had not seen what happened to General Patton, and Woodring had been looking forward and so also had not seen what had happened to Patton, they theorized that the general had been thrown forward from the backseat to the barrier dividing the car, injured his head on the car’s roof or divider between the front and back compartments, and then bounced
back at an angle into Gay’s lap. There were no seatbelts in those days, so no one in the vehicle was restrained.
    If the above were true, however, and the impact had been forceful enough to cause such substantial injuries to Patton, why were neither Gay nor Woodring likewise thrown forward or injured?
    The truck driver’s role in the accident also raises questions.
    It seems that Robert L. Thompson, about whom information is scarce, had no reason to be on the road that Sunday morning. Farago wrote, “Thompson was ‘in violation of the rules and his own routine. He had no orders to go anywhere . . . he had taken out the truck as a lark for a joyride with a couple of his buddies after a night of drinking . . . .The three of them were in the cabin, in another infraction of the rules. Only two persons were allowed.... ’” 6
    And despite the fact that he seemed to be at fault in causing the crash, he disappeared after the accident, along with the two unidentified passengers in the truck. Unmentioned in any account of the accident was what happened to Joe Spruce—or the dog.
    Did they too just disappear?
    An unnamed woman who worked for the Red Cross at a nearby coffee and doughnut hut witnessed the crash, and ran about five blocks to the 290 th Combat Engineer Battalion headquarters in Mannheim to summon help. The battalion’s commanding officer, Major Charles Tucker and Captain Ned Snyder, the medical officer and physician, soon arrived with the unit’s ambulance and attended to Patton, taking over from several others who had arrived earlier. Snyder decided to take him to the Seventh Army’s new 130 th Station Hospital, located some fifteen miles south in Heidelberg.
    They left with the general at 12:20 p.m. 7

    My cousin Tim knew Douglas Bazata through Edgar “Nick” Longworth who had worked with the super-secret Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in post-WWII Japan. He later became a Republican campaign leader and Veterans Administration official in several presidential regimes. Longworth had met Bazata through John Lehman, the powerful secretary of the navy under President Reagan in the 1980s. Lehman had a reputation for being tough and demanding, which later secured his position as a member of the 9/11 Commission. He was not known to suffer fools. Bazata had worked as a close aide to both men.
    Longworth was a savvy political veteran familiar with the intelligence world. He had become good friends with Bazata and was “in awe of all the things [Bazata had] done.” 8 He knew the Patton story. But, as he told me, “Douglas talks around things. It’s