Conquer Club

London, Dec 21 : The death of George S. Patton, America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Now, a new book has claimed that the officer was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders.

The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, has revealed that the US spy chiefs wanted Patton dead as he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

The controversial US officer died in December 1945.After 10 years of investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General "Wild Bill" Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname "Old Blood and Guts".

His book, "Target Patton", contains interviews with Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton's Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin's death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

"You have two strong witnesses here," Mr Wilcox said. "The evidence is that the Russians finished the job."

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton's body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.