Killing Patton

Many historians put the start of the Cold War at the Potsdam Conference in Germany in July 1945. Since there was no longer a need for a strategic alliance between the US and the Soviet Union, Truman told Stalin that “we have developed a new bomb far more destructive, than any known bomb, and we plan to use it very soon unless Japan surrenders” (346). The reveal of world’s first nuclear weapon defined the nature of the conflict to come. The Soviets were already well on their way to developing their own bomb, (it would be completed in 1949), so any direct future war between the two superpowers would be nuclear. Due to the geographic size of both powers, it would be difficult for one side to win retaliation and catastrophic loss of life for its own people. This meant that the superpowers would avoid overt military conflict. Instead, they would struggle for influence by other means.

One of these alternative means was already present at Yalta itself: espionage. When Truman announced the existence of the bomb, but Stalin already knew “all about the atomic bomb, thanks to his extensive global intelligence network” (348). Tellingly, as O’Reilly notes, the months surrounding the Yalta Conference saw the OSS, later CIA, and NKVD, later KGB, respectively, conduct “the largest, most concentrated and intense intelligence warfare in history” (355).

The peculiar logic of potential nuclear war between superpowers also helped create other distinctive characteristics of the Cold War. In order to make itself as broad a target as possible, and eliminate the chance of a decisive first wave of nuclear strikes, each power formed extensive alliance networks with militarily weaker nations. For the US, this was NATO. For the Soviet Union, it was the Warsaw Pact, officially ratified in 1955. Aligned nations exchanged mutual defense agreements for ceding bases used to house the superpowers’ nuclear arsenal. In non-aligned and under-developed nations, the superpowers fought proxy wars, arming or training pro-communist or pro-American forces, as seen in the Korean War of 1950, and in Africa and Latin America throughout the 1960s and 70s.

Patton was out of step with all this. Though he hated the Soviet Union and believed that it posed a grave threat to world peace, his desire for a “hot,” or conventional, war against the Soviets made him a dangerous liability. Patton naïvely believed that his political masters would countenance another world war, or that they would do this by rearming ex-Nazi units. Patton’s opposition to denazification—the Allied policy of removing all individuals associated with the Nazi regime from power and dismantling all Nazi institutional and administrative structures—was the reason he was sidelined.