Army & Navy – COMMAND: War’s Underside

The U.S. was shocked by the first scandal in the U.S. Army High Command in World War II. It centered on a hero of Casablanca, El Guettar and Sicily: gaudy, profane Lieut. General George Smith Patton Jr., Commander of the U.S. Seventh Army.

The very serious charge against “Old Blood & Guts” was that he had committed one of the unforgivable military sins: he had struck, vilified and degraded an enlisted soldier. Worse than that, the soldier was a casualty of battle.

Congressmen learned of the incident through the radio and from carefully qualified newspaper accounts. The story:

During the action in Sicily, General Patton visited an evacuation hospital. He was conducted to the receiving tent, where 15 casualties had just come in from the front.

“Where Were You Hurt?” The General went down the line, asking each patient where he had been hurt. On the edge of the fourth bed sat a soldier with no visible wounds. He had been sent back by his divisional medical officer, tentatively diagnosed as a severe case of psychoneurosis. He was still in battle dress.

The General asked him the routine question. The soldier answered: “It’s my nerves. I can hear the shells come over but I can’t hear them burst.”

Patton turned to the medical officer and asked, “What’s this man talking about? What’s wrong with him—if anything?” Patton began to shout at the man. His high voice rose to a scream, in such language as: “You dirty no-good — — — —! You cowardly —! You’re a disgrace to the Army and you’re going right back to the front to fight, although that’s too good for you. . . .” Patton reached for his white-handled single-action Colt.

The man sat quivering on his cot. Patton slapped him sharply across the face, turned to the commanding medical officer who had come in when he heard Patton’s high-pitched imprecations. “I want you to get that man out of here right away. I won’t have these other brave boys seeing such a bastard babied.”

“It Breaks Me Down. . . .” Patton started to leave the tent, wheeled when he heard the man sobbing, ran back and hit him again. The medical commander was helpless. He accompanied Patton to another tent. The General asked more questions of wounded men. Then he broke into a sob: “I can’t help it, but it breaks me down to see you brave boys.”

As he left the hospital, General Patton spoke again to the medical officer: “I meant what I said about getting that coward out of here.”

This, according to witnesses, is what happened.

The soldier whom swashbuckling Georgie Patton struck was a volunteer; he had been in the Army four years. He had enlisted when he was 18, had served in both the Tunisian and Sicilian campaigns. The preliminary diagnosis turned out to be incomplete. He was also suffering from malaria, had a high fever.

On his record he was no malingerer. Before the General appeared, he had asked the receiving officer to let him go back as soon as possible.

“You Brave Boys. . . .” Patton’s treatment dropped him into black anxiety. The other men tried to comfort him. Said one of the “brave boys” Patton had addressed: “It made me want to get out of the Army as fast as possible, because I thought we were fighting against such stuff, not for it.”

The colonel in command of the hospital saw no use in making a report “through channels” to General Patton himself. But he promised to back up the correspondents who questioned the many witnesses. One of them wrote a full report, sent it to General Eisenhower. General “Ike” acted immediately. He sent a general officer to Sicily in a special plane the day he received the report.

When the investigating officer confirmed the report, Eisenhower wrote Patton a slashing rebuke. Patton was ordered to apologize publicly to the patients concerned, to the staff of the hospital, and to make a clean breast of the affair to the staff officers of each division of his command. He was told bluntly that he was on probation.

“Great Nervous Tension.” At first Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers denied the whole story. Then came an official confirmation of the incident and an announcement that General Patton had apologized.

“When these things are happening,” General Patton said, “a commanding general is under great nervous tension. He may do things he may afterward regret. I know a great many people regard me as a — — -—. . . . I dealt harshly with a couple of soldiers and was wrong.”

But to many people the General’s crime was no greater than the Army’s in hushing it up for so long. Said Senator Harley M. Kilgore (D. W.Va.) : “When officers make mistakes they should not be shielded. . . .”