WHO KILLED PATTON

Chapter 1
Invitation
Miami

World War II had been a bitch for me. It damn near killed me. I had a tough war, being assigned as a second lieutenant to Patton’s Third Army, in the very thick of his rampaging tank columns. I had stayed alive due to extraordinary good luck and the guardianship of a superior combat soldier, my first sergeant, Top Dog Bos Wheeler McCoy. Without the Mountain Man, as he was called in the Third Army, I would not have lasted a week.

My war came to an end during the Hammelberg Raid, which was as big a mistake as Custer’s Last Stand or the Charge of the Light Brigade. The last thing I saw in that war was the tableaux of the Mountain Man pointing an automatic at SS Major Wolf, who was holding a Schmeisser on Colonel Charles Hawkins. A bullet took out a chunk of my skull, and next thing I knew, it was months later and I was in a VA Hospital. The war was over for me.

After I got out of the hospital, collected my back pay and my medals, I headed for my Tampa home. The first thing I joined was the 52-20 club. Boy! That was like stealing money! To kids today, 20 bucks a week for 52 weeks doesn’t seem like much, but believe me, it bought a lot of 1946 beer.

My folks had kept my room just as I left it, with my Spads, Camels, Fokker D VIIs, and Nieuports still strung from the ceiling. I took down all my “Uncle Sam Wants You” posters and replaced them with pin-ups of Betty Grable and especially Rita Hayworth. I also brought my 78s up to my room and bought a small portable phonograph with a hand crank. Then I just lay back in my GI shorts, beer in hand, and ogled Rita on the ceiling as I caught up on jazz.

Fortunately, there had been a union beef with that crazy Petrillo, and the big bands were not allowed to cut new discs for over a year, so I hadn’t missed much. My waking hours got dramatically better; my nights did not. As that summer rolled by and I regained my strength, I returned to the Gulf beaches I loved as a kid. Some beaches around Indian Rocks or Anna Maria were fairly deserted and I spent a lot of time walking the white sands, swimming, surfing, fishing, and camping out under the stars.

Some of my close pals didn’t make it back, but most did, so we’d meet and spend a week on the beaches roaring around in stripped Model A Roadsters, drag-racing, having car-to-car fights with oranges that grew wild on the roads leading to the beaches...and girls; constantly looking for girls.

At night, we’d go down to the Big Pier in St. Pete, where teenage chicks were plentiful. They all loved to dance and swim in the surf in the nude. Man, did we make up for lost time! Those nights remain etched in my memory.                     

However, as August rolled around, we’d had enough of 52-20 and we started thinking about college and the wonderful opportunities offered by the GI Bill of Rights. All of my gang picked a field they liked and a college. As it turned out, most of them wound up at the University of Florida in the small town of Gainesville. I chose the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The choice was easy; Tennessee was co-educational and Florida was an all-male school in those days.

My dad, Phil Brannen, Sr., had worked hard all his life as a furniture salesman at Levy’s Furniture Store. He never got higher than a manager, and even that was a sort of honorary title, bestowed upon him late in his career by Mr. Levy’s son. His pension was small, but it really didn’t matter because he died at 60, a tired old man who never really enjoyed his life. So I was determined to get into a field with a future, with an eye on being my own boss. No gold watch or patronizing titles for me.

I chose chemistry because I liked it and found it easy, and because I saw that it was the future. To cut it short, I was right. Chemistry turned into plastics and for 20 years, I was a blue collar Joe, working for someone, like my dad did, on a budget, living from paycheck to paycheck, sitting in front of a new gadget called TV.

I married a wonderful girl when I was in my mid-forties and we had a beautiful, intelligent daughter who became a film editor after getting a degree from NYU. My life was complete. I had struck a lode of happiness.

Happily ensconced in my GI mortgage house, I knelt at my bedside and said a prayer of thanks to a bountiful God who had spared me and given me His blessings.

Eventually, I rose to factory supervisor and was handsomely rewarded with company stock and pension plan enhancements. Unlike my dad, I waltzed into a comfortable retirement in Miami.

We found a good house in the Bay Point section and hunkered down to let the years roll by. I listened to my jazz collection--which by now was huge--and followed sports on TV, especially football and basketball. I also kept in touch with my beach bum buddies of 1946.             

On the side, I made a good buck restoring Model A Roadsters in my garage and selling them to collectors. I also enjoyed writing, and tried my hand at a serious book on Patton, but realized it was too big a job. Then I tried to write a first-person account of my war experiences, but the effort only served to bring back the nightmares that had plagued me in the early post-war years.

It served to remind me, after so many years, how closely my life was connected to my First Sergeant–Top Dog. He had saved my life time after time; it was he who led us into battle, not I, the officer.

In the nightmares, Top Dog would step out of the fog and save us all in his own quiet way. I spent many of those horrible sleepless nights wondering what had become of Top Dog. Had he survived?

Therefore, it was with a great deal of amazement that I received a call from First Sergeant Bos McCoy, Top Dog,