The Last Confederate
member
- Joined
- Jun 11, 2004
- Messages
- 114
Patton and his Third Army press deep into Germany to crush the dying Reich. On March 23rd, 1945 Patton addressed his officers and troops;
In the period from 29 January to 22 March, you have wrested 6,484 square miles of territory from the enemy. You have taken 3,072 cities, towns, and villages including … Trier, Coblenz, Bingen, Worms, Mainz, Kaiserslautern, and Ludwigshafen ... You have captured 140,112 enemy soldiers and have killed or wounded an additional 99,000, thereby eliminating practically all of the German Seventh and First Armies. History records no greater achievement in so limited a time..
The world rings with your praises: better still, General Marshall, General Eisenhower, and General Bradley have personally commended you. The highest honor I have ever attained is that of having my name coupled with yours in these great events.
However even as Patton was delivering these words, his mind was on other matters. He was planning a raid to go deep into Germany. His objective was a POW camp called by the Germans Oflag XIIIB. Patton expected to liberate approximately 200 American POWs, one of those POWs was his son-in-law, Lt.Col. John Waters. To make a long story short; Patton sent 294 men and 53 vehicles on the night of March 26th to liberate the Oflag XIIIB. There were two problems; one Oflag XIIIB held 1,500 American POWs not 200, two the camp and the town of Hammelberg were on the other side of river Patton was ordered by high command not to cross.
Patton’s men liberated the camp then ‘all hell broke lose’, and it became literally an everyman for himself struggle to get back to American lines. Why did Patton risk his men like that, with the war so close to being over? Why wasn’t Patton willing to let the POWs and his son-in-law just wait another 5 weeks? The answer will shock you. On that mission Patton wrote;
I can say this – that throughout the campaign in Europe I know of no error I made except that of failing to send a combat command to Hammelburg.
Had Patton taken Hammelberg, OflagXIIIB might have been evacuated safely.
On the other side of Germany the soviets were fighting tooth and nail to seize as much of Germany as possible. Along the way the Russians ‘liberated’ several POW camps in Eastern Germany. Here is where the problem started. The Russians kept American, British, and Commonwealth POWs as hostages to be bargained with. The Russians wanted every ‘Russian citizen’ back when the war was over. This included Russians who fought for the Germans, the Cossacks, Russian POWS, and any ethnic Russian who lived in Eastern Europe. Stalin wanted to silence practically everyone in one stroke. Any Russian who fought for or helped the Third Reich in any way would be executed. Many Russian POWs would be executed. In short pretty much everyone who would be ‘repatriated’ would either be killed or worked to death in Siberia. The Russians and the allies reached an agreement at the Yalta conference (Eisenhower’s ‘plan’?). At Yalta the allies agreed to ‘repatriate’ thousands of Russians to their deaths, in exchange for the allied POWs held by the Russians. Needless to say the deal fell through on both ends. The British Intelligence Section IX kept several key soviet officers who hated Stalin and fought against him. Kim Philby, the Russian spy, who was head of Section IX no doubt inform Stalin of the allies’ deception.
Stalin kept 23,500 Americans and about 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers forever. The US and England gave Stalin most of his ‘Russian citizen’ back, and they were disposed of. The allies’ POWs have since vanished into history. Most have been reported as dead in some battle that never happened. Some Americans and Canadians escaped from the Russians and were ordered to remain quiet about the whole affair. The German POWs who were released in 1955 told Americans about the Americans and British still in the Russian gulags. This was hushed up and made to go away.
So what did Patton know of this? We will never know the answer to that one. However, Patton was not at all willing to let the Soviets liberate his son-on-law. After the war had ended and Patton was made into a military governor, he certainly would have been made aware of the ‘repatriation’ of the Russians back to their ‘homeland’. In fact he would have had to participated, in some capacity, in the exchange of prisoners as he was supposed to ‘de-nazify’ his district and return ‘ethnic’ Russians home. How much Patton knew of the Yalta agreement, or Ike’s ‘plan’ is debatable. Obviously he knew enough to get his son-in-law out of Russian hands. I personally suspect Patton was going to go public with the POWs and the shady dealings of handing Eastern Europe over to Stalin. Needless to say that would not have been good for American communists.
