World Battlefronts: News in the Night

From Germany TIME’S Chief Military Correspondent, Charles Christian Wertenbaker, cabled:

Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton had put in a busy day. They had inspected the horrid concentration camp at Ohrdruf, visited the salt mine with its hoard of gold and art, traveled several hundred miles by plane and jeep. When they returned to General Patton’s headquarters they were tired—and a little sick from the things they had seen at Ohrdruf. They dined, then sat in a big, sparsely furnished room, talking against the steady roar of supply trucks passing outside. Around midnight they went to bed. Eisenhower and Bradley took two bedrooms upstairs. Patton’s heavy boots clattered across the bare floors of the former German commandant’s house, down the front steps and out to the caravan where he slept.

General Patton undressed and was about to get into bed when he noticed that his watch had stopped. He turned on his radio, spun the dial to BBC and an instant later heard a voice, un-British with emotion, say: “We regret to announce that the President of the United States has died.” A precise man, the General waited exactly two minutes to get the time. Then he set his watch at 12:15, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and walked back to the house.

General Bradley had just fallen asleep when the light woke him. Patton was standing in the doorway. He beckoned. Bradley and Patton went into Eisenhower’s room and the three men talked for more than an hour. Sometimes it was hard for them to hear each other because the trucks still roared by outside.

That was how the news of the Commander in Chief’s death came to the commanders of his armies in Germany.