PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY

by Alan Axelrod

  Truscott’s men took heavy casualties, but they succeeded in pushing the Axis troops back. If Patton could have obtained more landing craft, he would have been able to cut off and capture or kill a substantial number of enemy forces. But, acting on his principle that it is better to attack with what you have, even if it is less than perfect, Patton made the hard-fought landing a success. By acting on another principle, attacking sooner rather than later, he cost the enemy more casualties. It is true that Truscott’s losses were also significant, but destroying the enemy here and now, Patton felt, would avoid even greater losses later. “I have a sixth sense in war as I used to have in fencing ... I am willing to take chances,” he noted in a letter to Beatrice on August 11.12

  Again overriding the objections of Truscott and Bradley, Patton ordered a third landing on August 16. This one turned out to be superfluous, however, as Truscott’s 3rd Division was already marching into

  Messina when the third landing commenced. The city fell by 10:00 P.M.; 40,000 Germans and 70,000 Italians had withdrawn to the mainland, along with 10,000 vehicles and 47 tanks. Patton did not dwell on the fact that a large portion of the enemy army had survived intact. Instead, at 10:00 A.M. on August 17, he rode out to a high ridge overlooking the city and surveyed his conquest. Rounding up a crew of war correspondents and photographers—“What in hell are you all standing around for?”—he drove into town, even as fire from Axis units now based on the mainland lobbed the occasional shell onto or near the road. British units had entered the city hours after the Americans early on the morning of the seventeenth. When Patton himself arrived, a British officer approached him, saluted, and extended his hand. As the two men shook hands, the officer said: “It was a jolly good race. I congratulate you. 13

  In terms of military history, the Allied invasion of Sicily was only a partial success. Just as the German blitzkrieg of France in 1940 had fallen short of achieving ultimate devastation when British and French troops were allowed to escape across the English Channel from Dunkirk, so the Allied failure to prevent thousands of Axis troops from evacuating Sicily reduced the magnitude and meaning of the victory in this campaign. Yet this failure did not deter Patton from writing to his cousin Arvin H. Brown that his “campaign . . . will ... go down in history as a damn near perfect example of how to wage war.” Nor did he hesitate in praising his soldiers and defining for them the magnitude of their victory. In General Order Number 18, issued on August 22, 1943, and addressed to the “Soldiers of the Seventh Army,” he wrote: “Born at sea, baptized in blood, and crowned with victory, in the course of thirty-eight days of incessant battle and unceasing labor, you have added a glorious chapter to the history of war.” Instead of dwelling on the Axis troops who got away, Patton precisely tallied the Seventh Army’s bag: “you have killed or captured 113,350 enemy troops. You have destroyed 265 of his tanks, 2324 vehicles, and 1162 large guns .... But your victory has a significance above and beyond its physical aspect—you have destroyed the prestige of the enemy.”14

  Patton closed the General Order with a sentence of timeless triumph: “Your fame shall never die.” Addressed to an army now numbering some 200,000 men, that sentence, he must have thought, applied above all to himself as conqueror of Sicily. What he was about to discover, however, was that he had yet to conquer the impulses of his own highly wrought emotions.15

  CHAPTER 9

  The Slap Heard ’Round the World

  IN TAKING PALERMO, PATTON TURNED THE TIDE of the Battle of Sicily—not in the sense of ensuring victory against the Axis on the island, but by making certain that the United States Army would no longer be seen—or see itself—as subordinate to the army of Great Britain. As Patton regarded them, Palermo and Messina were the forges on which he hammered out an American army strong enough to fight what he knew would be the far harder battles to come on the European mainland.

  At the end of the Sicily campaign, FDR personally sent his “thanks and enthusiastic approbation” and General Alexander his “sincerest admiration for not only your recent great feat of arms in taking Messina, but for the speed and skill you have shown in the Sicilian operation.” Even General Marshall, always parsimonious with praise, wrote to tell Patton that he had “done a grand job of leadership and your corps and division commanders and their people have made Americans very proud of their army and confident of the future.” This was a man who, Patton believed, understood the significance of Palermo and Messina. But perhaps most of all, Patton relished a message from Bernard Law Montgomery: “The Eighth sends its warmest congratulations to you and your splendid Army for the way you captured Messina and so ended the campaign in Sicily.”1

  But Patton, who (despite his claims to the contrary) still craved approval, was also always acutely uncomfortable resting on his laurels. Anxious to know what the Seventh Army would be assigned to do next, he could get no definitive answer. All Alexander would tell him was that the Seventh was to rest and then begin training for operations in terrain similar to that of Sicily. This suggested to Patton that the outfit had been earmarked for a campaign on the Italian mainland. However, Eisenhower informed him that the Seventh would play no part in Italy. Did that mean that it would form part of the planned cross-Channel invasion force? Eisenhower was not saying. Then, after weeks of silence, came the blow: Patton was instructed to retain certain essential garrison units and to send the rest of the Seventh Army’s personnel and equipment to Mark Clark’s Fifth Army.

  After Messina, Ike had personally assured Patton that he would not long remain in Sicily, which had become a quiet backwater of the war. Yet if this were true, why was his army being dismembered beneath him?

  Anxious, driven by a sense of destiny, yet deeply worried that those above him meant to withhold realization of that destiny from him, Patton passed the time with administrative duties and by visiting the wounded, something he did far more frequently than any other senior commander. Patton, whose appearance was purposely calculated to set him apart from the men he led, spent as little time as possible in his headquarters and was always present along the front lines. He wanted to see the battle for himself, but, more than that, he wanted those fighting the battle to see him. Visiting field evacuation hospitals was part of this see-and-be-seen philosophy. He believed his presence improved morale. “Inspected all sick and wounded,” he noted in his diary on August 2. “Pinned on some 40 Purple Hearts on men hurt in air raid. One man was dying and had an oxygen mask on, so I knelt down and pinned the Purple Heart on him, and he seemed to understand although he could not speak.” On August 10, at another evacuation hospital, “one boy with a shattered leg said, ‘Are you General Patton? I have read all about you.’ All seemed glad to see me.” But the visits took a heavy emotional toll on Patton, who struggled to maintain his command presence. “One man had the top of his head blown off,” Patton noted in an August 6 diary entry, “and they were just waiting for him to die. He was a horrid bloody mess and was not good to look at, or I might develop personal feelings about sending men to battle. That would be fatal for a General.”2

  What Patton dared not acknowledge was that he had long since developed such “personal feelings.” On August 3, he learned that General Eisenhower was to award him the Distinguished Service Cross for his “extraordinary heroism” at Gela on July 11. It should have been welcome news, but in a letter to Beatrice, Patton admitted that “I rather feel that I did not deserve it, but wont say so.”3 Later in the day, on his way to visit II Corps, Patton stopped at the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia. Among the sick and wounded, he encountered Private Charles H. Kuhl, Company L, 26th Infantry Regiment (1st Division). Kuhl did not appear to be wounded.

  A report by a senior medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel Perrin H. Long, headed “Mistreatment of Patients in Receiving Tents of the 15 th and 93rd Evacuation Hospitals,” reveals what happened next:

  [Patton] came to Pvt. Kuhl and asked him what was the matter.

  The soldier replied, “I guess I can’t take i
t.” The General immediately flared up, cursed the soldier, called him all types of a coward, then slapped him across the face with his gloves and finally grabbed the soldier by the scruff of his neck and kicked him out of the tent.

  Corpsmen picked Kuhl up and rushed him to a ward tent. “There he was found to have a temperature of 102.2 degrees Fahrenheit and he gave a history of chronic diarrhea for about one month, having at times as high as ten or twelve stools a day. The next day his fever continued and a blood smear was found to be positive for malarial parasites.” Patton, of course, had been unaware that Kuhl was sick. That night, he wrote in his diary that he had met “the only arrant coward I have ever seen in this Army.” He noted that “Companies should deal with such men, and if they shirk their duty, they should be tried for cowardice and shot.”4

  Those who witnessed the “slapping incident” on August 3 were appalled by the spectacle of a general in necktie, shiny helmet, and shinier boots striking an enlisted man. By any measure, it was a brutal act, and by army regulations, it was a court-martial offense. Yet it also suggests something of the inner struggle within Patton, whose outburst came on the very day he learned that he was to be decorated—undeservedly—for heroism. The troops who were lying, shattered, in 15th Evac—they were the real heroes, and their wounds pained Patton, as he pinned medals on the dying.

  Private Kuhl was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not only for himself but for Patton as well. To the general, Kuhl may well have seemed the ugly embodiment of his own feelings of guilt over having sent boys to be torn apart in order to advance what many said was a quest for personal glory. Moreover, beginning in his cadet days, when he raised his head above the shooting-range trench in front of the targets during live-fire practice, and then through the Punitive Expedition, World War I, any number of polo matches, and now in World War II, Patton repeatedly defied death as if in a compulsive effort to prove to himself that he was not a coward. Suddenly, as if from ambush, Charles H. Kuhl materialized, appearing to Patton the very embodiment of cowardice, the yellow beast he feared was alive and lurking within himself. Some time after the encounter and with considerable insight, Kuhl observed to reporters that “at the time it happened, [General Patton] was pretty well worn out ... I think he was suffering a little battle fatigue himself.”5

  Patton, of course, did not think he was suffering from battle fatigue— a condition he did not even believe real—nor did he subject himself to selfanalysis. Instead, two days after the encounter with Kuhl, he issued a directive to all Seventh Army commanders summarily and categorically forbidding “battle fatigue”:

  It has come to my attention that a very small number of soldiers are going to the hospital on the pretext that they are nervously incapable of combat. Such men are cowards and bring discredit on the army and disgrace to their comrades, whom they heartlessly leave to endure the dangers of battle while they, themselves, use the hospital as a means of escape. You will take measures to see that such cases are not sent to the hospital but are dealt with in their units. Those who are not willing to fight will be tried by court-martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy.6

  Beyond the directive, surprisingly little was made of the August 3 incident. Then, on August 10, Patton toured the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. There he came across Private Paul G. Bennett, C Battery, 17th Field Artillery, II Corps. According to Lieutenant Colonel Long’s official report, Bennett had already served four years in the army and had been in II Corps since March.

  [He] never had any difficulties until August 6th, when his buddy was wounded. He could not sleep that night and felt nervous.

  The shells going over him bothered him. The next day he was worried about his buddy and became more nervous. He was sent down to the rear echelon by a battery aid man and there the medical officer gave him some medicine which made him sleep, but still he was nervous and disturbed. On the next day the medical officer ordered him to be evacuated, although the boy begged not to be evacuated because he did not want to leave his unit.

  Indeed, he had a fever, was sick, dehydrated, fatigued, confused, and listless. In that condition, despite his protests, he could not be returned to the front.

  Patton, who knew nothing of this, looked at Bennett, who, like Kuhl, was unwounded. He asked him what the trouble was. Long relates the exchange:

  “It’s my nerves,” [said Bennett and] began to sob. The General then screamed at him, “What did you say?” The man replied, “It’s my nerves, I can’t stand the shelling any more.” He was still sobbing. The General then yelled at him, “Your nerves, hell; you are just a Goddamned coward, you yellow son of a bitch.” He then slapped the man and said, “Shut up that Goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men here who have been shot at seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying.” He then struck the man again, knocking his helmet liner off and into the next tent. He then turned to the admitting officer and yelled, “Don’t admit this yellow bastard; there’s nothing the matter with him. I won’t have the hospitals cluttered up with these sons of bitches who haven’t got the guts to fight.” He then turned to the man again, who was managing to sit at attention though shaking all over and said, “You’re going back to the front lines and you may get shot and killed, but you’re going to fight. If you don’t, I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose. In fact,” he said, reaching for his pistol, “I ought to shoot you myself, you Goddamned whimpering coward.” As he left the tent, the General was still yelling back to the receiving officer to “send that yellow son of a bitch back to the front line.”7

  Again, those who witnessed the outburst saw an act of almost incomprehensible brutality. What actually occurred, however, was an episode of raw emotion. Patton resumed touring the tent wards, but he kept talking about Bennett and was on the verge of tears himself when he was heard to say “I can’t help it, but it makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied.” He clearly saw cowardice as an infectious disease (to which, doubtless, he was as vulnerable as anyone): “I wont have those cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals,” Patton said to the hospital commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier. “We’ll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.”8

  It was the second incident, coming as it did just days after the first, that motivated the medical officer to send a report through army medical channels to Omar Bradley, who was now commanding officer of II Corps. Doubtless out of loyalty to Patton and a sense of his importance to the war, Bradley did nothing more than lock the report in his safe. But the medical officers also sent a report directly to Eisenhower, who received it on August 16. The very next day, Ike wrote Patton what Patton himself described as “a very nasty letter,” in which he pulled no punches: “if there is a very considerable element of truth in the allegations ... I must so seriously question your good judgment and your self discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness.” However, Eisenhower took pains to make it clear that the incident had not been entered into the records of Allied Headquarters. He did not want to bring Patton up on official charges, and when Demaree Bess, a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, and other reporters heard about the incident, they complied with Eisenhower’s request to bury the story because, Ike explained, the American war effort could not afford to lose Patton.9

  Contrary to some accounts, Eisenhower did not order Patton to make a round of apologies for his outburst. Patton himself decided that such amends were necessary, albeit mainly to placate his commander: “I hate to make Ike mad when it is my earnest study to please him,” he wrote in his diary on August 20. Patton made his first apologies to the doctors and nurses of the hospitals involved, then to Kuhl and Bennett personally and in private (he insisted on their shaking hands with him), and, in September, to a body of troops assembled for a USO show. Each time, he spoke sincerely, if defensively, insisting that while his method had been, beyond question, wrong, his motive had been unimpeachable.
To the group of doctors and nurses, he even told a story about a World War I friend who had lost his nerve in battle and subsequently committed suicide. Patton suggested that, had someone slapped sense into him in a timely manner, his life might have been saved. As for Kuhl and Bennett, Patton explained that he was urgently trying to return them to an understanding of “their obligation as men and soldiers.” When he addressed the large assembly of troops in September, Patton offered humor. “I thought I would stand here,” he said as he took the stage, “and let you see what a son of a bitch looks like and whether I am as big a son of a bitch as you think I am.”10

  The troops ate it up. But Patton remained in the doghouse.

  Clark, not he, was leading the Fifth Army on the Italian mainland. Bradley, not he, had been chosen by Eisenhower to organize an army for the cross-channel invasion. Patton remained on Sicily overseeing the dismemberment of the Seventh Army. Soon his entire command, nothing more than a headquarters and antiaircraft batteries, consisted of just 5,000 men, down from 200,000.

  The newspapers, which had been filled with stories about Patton, now rarely mentioned him. Only in German headquarters was the name of Patton constantly in the air. What was he doing? What army and operation would he lead next? When would his attack come? He was one of the few Allied officers the German generals truly feared, not only for his consummate skill on the field, but because they saw clearly what he was: a warrior.

  Eisenhower made good use of Patton’s reputation—among the Germans. Knowing that the Germans would hear about it all, he sent Patton on high-profile trips to Algiers, Tunis, Corsica, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Malta, all places from which Allied operations were plausible. By using Patton as a decoy to keep the enemy guessing, the Allies sought to force the Germans to spread themselves thin and to waste effort and resources moving from one place to the next. It was a useful role, playing decoy, even as it was utterly humiliating.