Army & Navy – COMMAND: Conduct Unbecoming …

The first tendency of the people and the Congress (see p. 15) was to regard the Patton affair as a shocking but isolated incident in an officer’s career. It was not.

The isolated incident quickly became two. Bellicose Lieut. General George Smith Patton Jr. had degraded another enlisted man. Private Charles Herman Kuhl had written home to Indiana: “General Patton slapped my face yesterday and kicked me in the pants and cussed me.” Kuhl, like the unnamed artilleryman whose slapping precipitated the Patton case (TIME, Nov. 29), had also been hospitalized for psychoneurosis.

There were other stories of unsoldierly conduct by West Pointer Patton. On one occasion he had pounced on a group of anti-aircraft men who had just beaten off an enemy attack, with casualties. Those

who could stand were lined up and dressed down by Patton for not wearing their leggings. In Sicily, a Patton outburst was touched off by a mule cart which blocked a bridge. Patton ordered the cart tipped over, then ordered the mule shot.

Military men who guarded their code of conduct did not take a lenient, civilian view. Their attitude was reflected in their service journals. The Army & Navy Register attributed the “regrettable affair . . .

to the desire to suppress news. … If the incident . . . had promptly been disposed of and a truthful statement issued … it probably would have been passed by as a happening following the difficult campaign in Sicily when nerves of officers and men had been severely strained.” The Army & Navy Journal was even blunter: “General Patton [is] familiar with the Articles of War, and with the punishment of dismissal they prescribe for cruel treatment of a soldier or for conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the Service . . . [Patton] was not made subject to the Articles. . . . There are lessons to be drawn from this deplorable affair which the High Command hereafter should enforce. The kind of a democratic Army we have requires . . . discipline based upon mutual respect. . . . Officers, no matter what their rank, guilty of conduct undermining it, should be relieved instantly from their command.”