The Patton slapping incidents

On 3 August 1943 the commander of the US Seventh Army, Lieutenant General George Patton, visited the 15th Evacuation Hospital near the small town of Nicosia in central Sicily. In the receiving tent, among the wounded, sat Private Charles H. Kuhl of the 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, who had no visible injuries. Asked what was wrong with him, he replied that he was “nervous” and that he guessed he could not take it. Patton struck him across the face with his gloves, grabbed him by the collar and kicked him out of the tent, shouting at the doctors not to admit “this coward” and to send him back to the front. A week later, on 10 August, a similar scene took place in another hospital – this time the general hit a soldier twice and reached for his pistol.

Both events, known as the slapping incidents, were at first kept under military secrecy. When they reached the American public in November, however, they caused one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the US Army during the war. They cost Patton his prestige and – as he himself was convinced – command in the invasion of France.

Patton in Sicily

At the beginning of August Patton was at the height of his fame. His Seventh Army, which after the landing in Sicily had been meant only to cover the flank of General Bernard Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, had swept through the western part of the island in a few days and on 22 July taken Palermo. Now the Americans were pushing east towards Messina along two roads, one along the north coast and one through the mountains. The fighting was hard: from 31 July to 6 August the 1st Infantry Division fought a bloody battle to take the mountain town of Troina, defended by the German 15th Panzergrenadier Division. Patton drove his men forward because he wanted to enter Messina before the British.

For years the general had cultivated the image of a tough, ruthless commander: the polished helmet, the ivory-handled revolvers, the coarse language. He punished subordinates severely for minor lapses, but also rewarded generously those who distinguished themselves. Dwight Eisenhower, Allied commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and his friend of many years, valued his energy but also knew of his impulsiveness and lack of self-control.

Combat exhaustion

Patton did not believe that a soldier could break down without a wound to his body. During the First World War doctors had spoken of “shell shock”, initially linking it to exploding shells; in time the term was extended to cover any breakdown caused by the stress of combat. In 1943 the US Army classified such cases as “exhaustion”, and doctors wrote of “psychoneurosis” or “battle fatigue”. The symptoms were trembling, sleeplessness, apathy, fits of weeping and an inability to carry out orders.

The Tunisian campaign had taught army doctors that such soldiers had to be treated quickly and close to the front: a few days’ rest, sleep (often induced with sedatives), a hot meal and a calm talk returned many of them to duty. At the start of the Sicilian campaign this principle was not followed – the sick were evacuated to North Africa, and according to American medical figures only about 15 per cent returned to their units. Once the system was better organised, the proportion rose to nearly half. Among line officers, however, the conviction persisted that “nerves” were an excuse for malingerers and cowards. According to one account, Major General Clarence Huebner, the new commander of the 1st Infantry Division, complained to Patton about a “very large number of malingerers” in the hospitals.

Private Kuhl, 3 August

Charles Kuhl, a 27-year-old private in L Company of the 26th Infantry Regiment, had been in the army for eight months and with the 1st Infantry Division since 2 June 1943. On 2 August he reported to an aid station. The doctors diagnosed “exhaustion” – for the third time since the start of the campaign – and wrote on his card “psychoneurosis, anxiety state, moderately severe”. He was given a sedative and sent to the 15th Evacuation Hospital for further examination.

Patton arrived there the next day during a tour of the units of Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s II Corps. He talked to the wounded and praised them until he came upon Kuhl. According to witnesses’ statements he flew into a rage at once: he slapped the soldier with his gloves, dragged him by the collar to the exit and kicked him out of the tent. Orderlies took Kuhl to a ward, where he turned out to have a temperature of almost 39 degrees; later he was found to have malaria parasites. That evening Patton wrote in his diary that he had met “the only errant coward” he had ever seen in his army and that such men should be tried for cowardice and shot. Kuhl wrote to his parents about the incident, asking them “just to forget about it”.

On 5 August Patton issued a circular to the commanders of the Seventh Army. In it he wrote that “a very small number of soldiers” were going to hospital on the pretext that they were nervously incapable of combat. He called them cowards who left their comrades in danger, and ordered that such cases were not to be sent to hospital but dealt with in their units, and that those who refused to fight were to be court-martialled for cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Private Bennett, 10 August

Paul G. Bennett, a 21-year-old private in C Battery of the 17th Field Artillery Regiment, had served in the army for four years and had no previous health problems. On 6 August a friend of his was wounded; Bennett stopped sleeping and grew increasingly shaky. A doctor sent him, against his wishes, to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital – the soldier wanted to stay with his battery. In hospital he had a fever and symptoms of dehydration.

On 10 August Patton found him huddled and trembling in the receiving tent. When Bennett said it was his “nerves” and that he could not stand the shelling any more, the general flew into a fury. He struck him in the face, called him a coward, told him to stop crying and then hit him a second time, knocking the liner of his helmet off his head. He threatened that if the soldier would not fight, he would have him stood up against a wall before a firing squad – and even that he ought to shoot him himself – and reached for his pistol. The hospital commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier, physically separated the two men. As he left, Patton shouted at the doctors to send Bennett back to the front, and afterwards spent a long time telling Currier that it made his blood boil to see cowards being pampered.

Reprimand and apologies

The second incident, especially the sight of a general threatening a sick soldier with a weapon, shocked the medical staff. The II Corps surgeon, Colonel Richard Arnest, submitted a report. Bradley, out of loyalty to his superior, locked it in a safe, but the report also went through medical channels to Brigadier General Frederick Blesse, chief surgeon at Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers, and from him on 16 August to Eisenhower. Eisenhower sent Blesse and Major General John P. Lucas to Sicily, and the medical consultant Lieutenant Colonel Perrin Long questioned witnesses and wrote a detailed report on the “mistreatment of patients” in both hospitals.

Eisenhower did not open a formal investigation or issue an official reprimand that would have gone on file. In a private letter of 17 August, however, he wrote to Patton that firm measures were sometimes necessary, but that this did not excuse “brutality, abuse of the sick, nor exhibition of uncontrollable temper in front of subordinates”; if the charges were largely true, he had to call seriously into question Patton’s good judgement and self-discipline and his future usefulness. He ordered him to apologise to the victims and witnesses. Patton did so reluctantly: on 21 August he apologised to Bennett, the next day to the staff of both hospitals, and on 23 August to Kuhl. Kuhl later declared that Patton was a “great general” and that at the time he “did not know how sick I was”. Between 24 and 30 August the general toured all the divisions of the Seventh Army and apologised in short speeches without naming outright what had happened; the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division interrupted him with shouts that he should not apologise. In his diary Patton wrote bitterly of having to “soft-soap a skulker” to placate the timidity of his superiors.

War correspondents also knew about the incidents. Four of them questioned witnesses, but instead of sending the story to their editors, on 19 August they passed it to Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith. Eisenhower asked the journalists to keep quiet, arguing that the army could not afford to lose Patton, and for the time being they complied. On 24 August he described the affair in a letter to the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, noting that Patton still displayed the “unfortunate traits” of which they had both always known, but was a commander of exceptional value.

The scandal in November

The secret held for three months. On 21 November 1943 the popular radio journalist and columnist Drew Pearson told the story in his Sunday broadcast. His version mixed up the details of the two incidents and was partly untrue – Pearson claimed, among other things, that Patton had knocked the soldier to the ground – and his prediction that the general would never again lead troops into battle had no basis whatever. Allied headquarters denied that Patton had received an official reprimand but confirmed that he had struck at least one soldier.

In Congress and in the press there were demands for the general’s dismissal. By mid-December some 1,500 letters had reached the War Department – some demanding Patton’s removal, others defending him. Kuhl’s father wrote to his congressman that he forgave the general. A former Army Chief of Staff, General Charles Summerall, dismissed the whole affair as a trifle, whereas Patton’s mentor, General John J. Pershing, publicly condemned him. Secretary of War Henry Stimson presented Eisenhower’s report to the Senate Military Affairs Committee and defended the decision to keep Patton in service, because the army needed his “aggressive, winning leadership” in the hard battles that lay ahead.

Significance and aftermath

Eisenhower never seriously considered sending Patton home. By his own account he said that if the affair came out, people would be “howling for Patton’s scalp”, and that he could not allow that, because Patton was “indispensable”. Even so, after the capture of Messina the general did not command troops in battle for eleven months. The Seventh Army took no part in the landings in Italy in September; its combat forces were placed under General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, and Patton remained in Sicily until the end of the year at the head of an army that consisted of little more than a headquarters and garrison troops. In September command of the US First Army, which was preparing in England for the invasion of France, went to Bradley – Patton’s junior in rank and experience. Eisenhower maintained that he had chosen him earlier, for the calm and judgement that Patton lacked; Patton himself was convinced that he owed it to the incidents. Historians generally accept that the scandal at least confirmed Eisenhower in that decision.

In the end the enforced idleness proved useful. At the end of 1943 Patton made conspicuous trips around the Mediterranean – to Algiers, Tunis, Corsica, Cairo, Jerusalem and Malta – designed to mislead the Germans about the direction of the next blow. In January 1944 he took command of the Third Army in England, and German intelligence, which rated his abilities highly, readily believed that he would lead the main invasion. In Operation Fortitude the Allies presented him as the commander of the fictitious First US Army Group, which was supposedly to land in the Calais area. He returned to the fighting in France in August 1944 and became one of the most successful army commanders of the Western Allies.

The Sicilian incidents nevertheless remained a lasting part of his legend and one of the best-known examples of a clash between the old “soldierly” view of psychological breakdown and the emerging discipline of military psychiatry. According to various estimates, the US Army lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers during the war – temporarily or permanently – to psychiatric causes, and the experience of the doctors in Tunisia and Sicily – treatment close to the front, quickly and with the expectation of a return to the unit – became the basis of practice in later campaigns. Patton and the hospital scene were fixed in the collective memory by the 1970 film Patton.