The GI and the General: Charles H. Kuhl and George S. Patton

When Private Charles H. Kuhl of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, checked himself into an aid station in Sicily, doctors believed he suffered from “psychoneurosis anxiety state, moderately severe (soldier has been twice before in hospital within ten days). He can’t take it at the front, evidently. He is repeatedly returned.” 

Doctors transferred the combat-stressed soldier to the Fifteenth Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia for further evaluation. “I never did like war or being overseas,” Kuhl, a Mishawaka, Indiana, native told an interviewer years after the war. “I never could get used to it.” Even as a civilian, he could remember the awful screams of wounded on the Normandy beaches and the shells streaming overhead. 

Admitted on August 3, 1943, Kuhl, who had been serving in the army for eight months, had the misfortune of being at the hospital the same day that the commander of the Seventh Army in Sicily, Lieutenant General George S. Patton, decided to visit. The general had already earned fame for his leadership in North Africa, invigorating dispirited U.S. troops and defeating the vaunted German Tenth Panzer Division at the Battle of El Guettar in Tunisia. One of the officers who served under him, Lucian Truscott, described Patton as “perhaps the most colorful, but certainly the most outstanding battle leader of World War II.”
 
Others, however, were disgusted by Patton’s combative personality. Beloved columnist Ernie Pyle “hated Patton’s guts,” remembered Pyle’s friend and fellow correspondent Don Whitehead of the Associated Press. According to Whitehead, the officer’s “bluster, show and complete disregard for the dignity of the individual was the direct antithesis of Ernie’s gentle character.” Soldier-journalist for the Star and Stripes newspaper Andy Rooney, best known for his 60 Minutes commentaries, also loathed Patton “and everything about the way he was. It was because we had so few soldiers like him that we won the war.” While soldiers in the Seventh Army were justifiably proud of their battle record under Patton, they bristled at his strict discipline and hunger for glory. “He likes to be called Blood and Guts Patton—his guts and our blood,” a soldier told war correspondent Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s magazine.
 
While battling German and Italian troops as part of Operation Husky in Sicily, Patton had repeatedly urged his troops forward, advising them to never “take counsel of your fears. The enemy is more worried than you are.” He desperately hoped to beat the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery to the critical city of Messina. “This is a horse race in which the prestige of the US Army is at stake,” Patton wrote one of his officers. “We must take Messina before the British.” When one of the American armored columns had to halt its advance because some balky Sicilian mules blocked the way on a one-way bridge, Patton handled the problem by taking out his revolver, shooting the mules and having soldiers throw the carcasses and the cart they were pulling off the bridge. He wrote in a letter to his wife Beatrice that he had also struck the mules’ owner with his walking stick, breaking it in the process, adding, “Human rights are being exalted over victory.”
 

A few days before visiting the Fifteenth, Patton had been informed by a major in the First Division that the front lines had been thinned out, not only because of casualties caused by enemy fire but also due to “a very large number of ‘malingerers’ at the hospitals, feigning illness in order to avoid combat duty.” According to Colonel F. Y. Leaver, the Fifteenth’s commanding officer, Patton came into a tent full of wounded GIs and made sure to praise each of them, either shaking their hands or patting their heads and thanking them for what they had done in the war. Patton’s mood changed drastically when he encountered Kuhl, sitting on a stool fully clothed and appearing to have no visible injuries. Upon questioning by Patton, the private tried to explain about his nervous condition, finally noting, “I guess I can’t take it.” An officer accompanying Patton remembered hearing Kuhl comment that he “wasn’t hurt, he was nervous, and added that he had been to the front three times but couldn’t stay there.”
 
Enraged by what he heard, Patton responded by smacking Kuhl in the face and roughly removing him from the tent—a court-martial offense under army regulations. “I gave him the devil,” Patton wrote in his diary, “slapped his face with my gloves and kicked him out of the tent. Companies should deal with such men and if they shirk their duty they should be tried with cowardice and shot.” Patton later added: “One sometimes slaps a baby to bring it to.” Kuhl ended up being shipped to North Africa to undergo treatment as doctors had diagnosed him as being afflicted with chronic dysentery and malaria, maladies that had plagued Allied forces on the island. On August 5 Patton issued a directive to his command that read:
 
“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 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.”
 
The incident involving the Hoosier soldier might have been enough on its own to endanger Patton’s military career, but he made matters worse a week later when he visited the Ninety-Third Evacuation Hospital near Sant’Agata di Militello and encountered Private Paul G. Bennett of C Battery, Seventeenth Field Artillery Regiment. Although Bennett, a North Carolina native, showed signs of nervousness and confusion, he had repeatedly told doctors he did not want to be evacuated, asking instead to be returned to his unit. 

Coming upon the shivering Bennett, who had seen his buddy wounded in action, Patton heard him complain about his nerves and the constant shelling at the front. The general repeated his performance with Kuhl, slapping the enlisted man and threatening him: “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, I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned whimpering coward.” Patton even started to make good on his threat with the pistol he carried until Colonel Donald E. Currier, the hospital’s commander, and other medical personnel stopped him. After a week’s rest, Bennett returned to the front, pleading with authorities not to tell his wife what had happened. Patton had no regrets about his actions, telling his staff, “I may have saved his soul, if he had one.”
 

Although correspondents covering the Seventh Army uncovered details about the slapping incidents, and medical officers issued scathing reports decrying Patton’s actions as incalculably harmful “upon the wellbeing of patients, upon the professional morals of hospital staffs and upon the relationship of patients to physicians,” no dispatches about the general’s behavior reached the American public for three months. On November 21 broadcaster and newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, on his fifteen-minute national radio program, broke the news about Patton slapping a soldier—an action Pearson incorrectly predicted would sideline the general from any important command for the rest of the war.
 
The story quickly blew up, embroiling all of those involved, especially Patton and Kuhl. Even years after the war ended, and Patton’s untimely death in a car accident at the age of sixty in 1945, the matter continued to dog the mild-mannered Kuhl as he reestablished his civilian life in Mishawaka after seeing additional combat in France. “I think it should be forgotten and dead,” he told a reporter in 1970 upon the release of the film Patton, which included one scene of the general berating and slapping a crying soldier. “I’ve been trying to keep it quiet and I wish sometimes that everyone in the world would too. The whole experience is still nerve-wracking.”
 
Before enlisting in the army on December 11, 1942, Kuhl had worked for a floor- covering business in South Bend. He received his basic training at Camp Wheeler in Georgia, with additional service at Camp Shenango in Pennsylvania. Sent overseas by the army on Mother’s Day 1943, Kuhl joined the First Division in June. He was one of more than 150,000 American, British, and Canadian forces involved in the amphibious landings on the island of Sicily in early July, battling Axis troops.

Accompanying members of the First Division engaged in close combat with the enemy in the hilly, rocky countryside, correspondent Richard Tregaskis of the International News Service remembered that the conditions at the front were so tough that the vaunted American Jeeps could not get through to deliver rations and ammunition. After an intense shelling, Tregaskis observed a GI stumbling with his “head bowed, arms dangling like an ape’s, short legs swaying and slipping like rubber things as the little figures stumbled down the side of the mountain.” His comrades grabbed the man by his arms and helped him sit. “The strain of the fighting on this knoll had been too great for one man on this day,” Tregaskis reported. Lamenting the casualties his unit had endured, a sergeant told the veteran correspondent: “If we keep on like this, we won’t have any platoon leaders left.”

During the Sicilian campaign Kuhl had been admitted three times to Company C, First Medical Battalion, for exhaustion, eventually receiving a dose of amytal sodium to help calm his nerves. His experience with Patton at the evacuation hospital did not help his fragile condition, as the general not only slapped him across the face with his gloves but also shouted at the private: “You can’t stay in here with these brave, wounded Americans.” Patton went as far as to grab Kuhl by the collar and drag him out of the tent, finishing off by kicking him in the rear with his cavalry boots. According to a report about the incident from Lieutenant Colonel Perrin H. Long of the Medical Corps, after being kicked out of the tent Kuhl had been picked up by a corpsman and taken to another ward. “There he was found to have a temperature of 102.2 degrees F and he gave a history of chronic diarrhea for about one month, having at times as high as ten or twelve stools a day,” Long wrote. “The next day his fever continued and a blood smear was found to be positive for malarial parasites. The final disposition diagnosis was chronic dysentery and malaria.”
 
Details of the slapping episodes had reached not only fighting men in Sicily and North Africa but also reporters covering the Seventh Army, with some, including Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post and Merrill “Red” Mueller of the NBC network, investigating the incidents by interviewing witnesses at the hospitals. A delegation of correspondents—Bess, Mueller, and Reynolds—flew to Algiers, Algeria, in North Africa to discuss the situation with Patton’s superior and commander of Allied forces in the region, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The general already knew about his subordinate’s belligerent conduct, as he had received a detailed report from Long on August 16. With the fighting on Sicily about to end with an Allied victory, and busy with planning for the invasion of Italy, Eisenhower wanted to save Patton for “service in the great battles still facing us in Europe, yet I had to devise ways and means to minimize the harm that would certainly come from his impulsive action and to assure myself that it would not be repeated.”
 

Instead of sending Patton home in disgrace, Eisenhower wrote him “a sharp letter of reprimand,” warning him that the conduct he had displayed at the hospitals “will not be tolerated in this theater no matter who the offender may be.” Provided that the reports he had received about the incidents were true, Eisenhower told Patton to make an apology “or other such personal amends to the individuals concerned as may be within your power.” No letter he had been called upon to write in his long military career, said Eisenhower, had “caused him the mental anguish” of the one he had to write Patton, “not only because of my long and deep personal friendship for you but because of my admiration for your military qualities.” Patton did apologize to those involved, but privately believed that he had been justified in doing what he did “because one cannot permit skulking to exist. It is just like any communicable disease.” He admitted, however, that his actions had been wrong, and he would make “what amends I can. I regret the incident as I hate to make Ike mad when it is my earnest study to please him . . . I feel very low.”
 
Remembering what had happened between him and Patton, Kuhl theorized that the general, who apologized and shook hands with him on August 23, might well have been “battle fatigued. He seemed about halfway nuts at the time.” Charles Daly, a CBS correspondent who had investigated the incidents, also believed that Patton had gone “temporarily crazy.” According to Eisenhower, he would have understood if Patton’s assault had been at the front with a combat platoon. “It would merely have been an incident of battle—no one would have even noted it, except with the passing thought that here was a leader who would not tolerate shirking,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs. But to abuse an enlisted man in a hospital, he added, was “nothing less than brutal, except as it was explained by the highly emotional state in which Patton himself then existed.” 

Patton may also have been driven by his combat experience in World War I. One of his friends suffered from what was then known as shell shock, a condition called battle fatigue or exhaustion in World War II and today commonly known as Post-traumatic stress disorder. Patton’s friend and the doctors who treated him later shared their belief that if “he had been roughly checked at the time of his first misbehavior, he would have been restored to a normal state,” Patton recalled.
 

By 1943 army psychiatrists had abandoned what Patton had been told by medical personnel in the previous conflict. Instead, they stressed treating the exhaustion of soldiers who suffered a mental breakdown in battle—an important point considering a study found that out of the 75 percent of the men in a rifle company expected to be wounded in action, 18 percent were put out of action due to combat fatigue. As historian John C. McManus discussed in his work on American soldiers in World War II, combat exhaustion “almost always occurred not because a man was psychologically unfit but because he was physically or mentally exhausted. This exhaustion had lowered his resistance to stress the same way it would to disease.” If given time away from the front, fed good food, and offered plenty of rest, most combat-exhaustion cases would recover and rejoin their units. “It was found that the farther behind the lines battle fatigue cases were shipped,” McManus noted, “and the longer they were held out of combat, the less inclined they were to ever function effectively again.”
 
Correspondents Reynolds, Mueller, and Bess Meeting met with Eisenhower at his headquarters at the Hotel Saint George in Algiers, outlining what witnesses had told them about Patton’s outbursts. Reynolds remembered that when he telephoned Captain Harry C. Butcher, naval aide to Eisenhower, for an appointment, Butcher immediately knew the meeting’s purpose. “The general hasn’t slept for two nights, worrying about it,” Reynolds remembered Butcher saying about Patton’s actions. Reynolds let the military men know that Patton was not universally loved by GIs, stating that “at least 50,000” of them would be happy to shoot the general “if they had the slightest chance.” Despite this, Bess told Eisenhower that he and Mueller had discussed what might happen if they reported the story. They had concluded, he said, they were “Americans first and correspondents second. Every mother would figure her son is next.”
 
Although there were approximately sixty correspondents in Algiers and Sicily, the story, for a time, remained untold, until Pearson’s dramatic broadcast. Eisenhower later insisted that he had told the newsmen to use “their own judgment” on whether to print the story, and his staff and Patton had been told that “under no circumstances was there to be any effort to suppress the story.” Ed Kennedy of the Associated Press did point out that while military censors had not “specifically ruled” about dispatching articles about the uproar, the army had “made it plain that it looked with disfavor on seeing the news of the incident in print.”
 
Pearson’s report unleashed a flood of news stories, including reports in Indiana. Kuhl’s father, Herman F., a casket maker and a German-born naturalized American citizen, shared with the South Bend Tribune an August 4 letter from his hospitalized son in which the Hoosier soldier had written that Patton had “slapped my face yesterday and kicked me in the pants and cussed me. This [his letter] probably won’t go through. But I don’t know. But just forget about it in your letters.” 

Other letters from Kuhl informed his family, including his wife, Luretta, who worked at the Studebaker automobile plant in South Bend, that the general had apologized to him in person and had told him that he had acted in haste. Later, the sixty-six-year-old Herman indicated to Tribune reporters that he and his family held no grudge against Patton. “If he is a good man, as they say, let’s keep him,” Herman said. “We need good men. I’m willing to leave the case rest as is and drop the whole thing and get on with the war. He [Patton] was good enough to apologize.” Herman went on to say that his family had made the letter from his son public not to spite Patton, “otherwise we would have made it public long ago. As it was, we kept silent about the whole affair until the report of the incident was made in the newspapers. Then we felt we could inform The South Bend Tribune of the letter we had from our son.”
 
By the end of November Kuhl had been sent to an army replacement center in England, where he expressed surprise about the attention the slapping incident had received from the press. According to an article from Joseph Azrael, a special correspondent for the Baltimore News-Post and the International News Service, officials at the center had issued an order prohibiting anyone from talking to newspapermen. The order also directed that “any reporters appearing at the camp [should] be taken to the battalion commander.” One soldier at the center did describe to Azrael what he had seen when Patton apologized to members of the First Division:
 
“The division was assembled on a hillside between Palma and Licatta [Sicily]. Gen. Patton arrived and we were told to sit down. Patton spoke from a platform equipped with amplifiers. It was the same place and platform on which Bob Hope had performed for a week. Patton spoke for almost half an hour. He complimented us on our work and talked in general terms about army discipline. Toward the end, Patton said: “Many of you men have heard me curse you occasionally and get angry with you. But for every time I cursed a soldier there were hundreds of times when I’ve given you praise. And as for getting angry, I’m trying to get results and when things aren’t done right I’m likely to lose my temper. That’s the way I am.”
 
Although Reynolds believed that Eisenhower had managed a difficult situation “as well as a commander could hope to handle it,” Pearson’s report created an uproar. General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff and a Hoosier, issued a statement that Patton had not been reprimanded for his actions. Although the statement was technically correct, as no such mark had been made on the general’s official army record, Eisenhower himself called the statement “factually wrong,” and recalled that a reporter had called him after the conference to complain about what he called “the shabby treatment of the press.” Eisenhower admitted that he and Smith had learned a valuable lesson: “In dealing with them [reporters] we plainly had to be right the first time.” Smith apologized to correspondents for what he called his “tongue-in-cheek” communique. Some of the reporters who had sat on the story paid a price for their inaction, with Kennedy noting that his AP superiors chastised him for “not having informed the home office on the situation” before Pearson’s scoop.

Patton played no role in Operation Avalanche, the Allied landings near the port of Salerno, Italy, on September 9, 1943, led by General Mark Clark. Patton remained without a combat command for eleven months, serving as a decoy in part to fool German officials, who were always fearful of the general’s battle expertise. Following the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, the Allies were bogged down in the tough Normandy countryside. Patton swung back into action as commander of the Third Army, whose men during nine months and eight days of campaigning in Europe liberated or captured 12,000 cities, towns, and villages and killed 47,500 enemy soldiers, wounded 115,700, and captured approximately 1.3 million. Even Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, was impressed, noting that his “Red Army could not have conceived and certainly could not have executed” what Patton’s soldiers had accomplished.
 

Discharged from the army on September 27, 1944, Kuhl returned to Mishawaka and found a job with the South Bend Carpet and Window Shade Company. He had to quit the firm due to his nerves, eventually finding work as a janitor at Bendix. The stress he endured during the war, Kuhl believed, might have been responsible for a heart attack he suffered in 1953 after years of what had been good health. Most of his fellow workers at Bendix had been unaware of the slapping incident until the release of the hit Patton movie in 1970 and a subsequent appearance Kuhl made on the David Frost television show. “I’m not a glory hunter,” he told reporters, “and I’ve been hesitating about giving out information to keep this thing alive but there are so many, too many, who have been after me.”
 
Kuhl died on January 31, 1971, and was buried in Mishawaka’s Fairview Cemetery. Asked for a comment about the general who had shamed him following Patton’s death in 1945, Kuhl had been magnanimous. “General Patton was a very good leader for his country,” he said. “It was with deep regret that I heard of his passing.”