The olive grove outside Nicosia, Sicily, was heavy with the smell of dust, iodine, and cordite on the afternoon of August 3rd, 1943, when a 57-year-old lieutenant general with a pearl-handled revolver on his hip walked into a canvas hospital tent and changed the course of the war in a way no artillery barrage ever could. The man was George S. Patton Jr.
, commanding general of the United States Seventh Army, and the young private he found sitting on a stool in the middle of that tent was Charles Herman Cool, a 27-year-old carpet fitter from Mishawaka, Indiana, who had been diagnosed with psychoneurosis anxiety state, moderately severe, after three weeks of combat in the Sicilian mountains. Patton asked him what was wrong. Cool looked up and said, I guess I can’t take it, sir.
What happened in the next ninety seconds, a slap, a kick, and a shouted accusation of cowardice that echoed through the canvas, would cost Patton eleven months of his career, bring the United States Senate to the edge of formal hearings, and send Cool, ten months later, onto the sand at Omaha Beach with the First Infantry Division. The story of that slap, and the letter that followed it, is not a simple tale of a villain and a victim. It is a story of three men, of a generation’s doctrine about fear, and of a silence that carried the weight of the Second World War into the kitchens of America for decades after the guns fell silent.
To understand what walked into that tent, you have to understand what 1943 had done to George Patton. He was an American aristocrat of a very old kind, a man who rode horses, wrote poetry, believed in past lives, and carried an ivory-handled Colt single-action army revolver because he believed a general officer should be visible even in the dust of the modern battlefield in a way the enemy would remember. By the summer of 1943, he was at the peak of his powers, having raced Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army across Sicily in the fastest major Allied campaign of the war so far.
But the cost was being paid on Patton himself. He had slept on average four hours a night for thirty-four consecutive days. He had migraines that his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Codman, had begun logging in a private notebook.
He had been chain smoking Camel cigarettes since Tunisia. His temper, which was famous in peacetime and legendary in wartime, had become something his own staff officers were quietly afraid of. His diary from late July of 1943 contains repeated entries about his frustration with soldiers he considers to be shirking.
There is one entry from the 29th of July that reads simply, I will not tolerate cowardice. He meant it. And here is the thing you have to understand if you are going to understand what happened in a hospital tent in Nicosia on the 3rd of August.
George Patton was not an outlier in his views about combat stress. In 1943, the great majority of the general officers in the United States Army believed that what was then called battle fatigue was in most cases a form of cowardice dressed up in medical language. Dwight Eisenhower believed a version of it.
Omar Bradley believed a version of it. Bernard Montgomery in the British Army believed a stronger version. The doctrine had come out of the First World War where the term shell shock had been coined, misdiagnosed, mistreated, and eventually resolved in most Allied armies by simply sending men back to the line.
Patton was not a bad general because he believed battle fatigue was cowardice. He was a general of his time. He was going to slap Charles Cool not because he was cruel, but because he thought slapping Charles Cool was the right thing to do.
That is a much harder story than the movie version, but it is the true one
The second man in this story was Charles Herman Cool. He was born on the 6th of November 1915 in Mishawaka, Indiana, a small industrial town on the South Bend of the St. Joseph River, twelve miles east of the larger city of South Bend.
He grew up in the Depression. He went to Mishawaka High School. He did not go to college.
Nobody in his family had ever gone to college. By the time he turned twenty-five, he was working as a carpet fitter. He had a wife, a young woman named Loretta.
He listened to the war news on the radio at night in the front room of a rented house on the west side of Mishawaka, and he waited for the letter he knew was coming. The letter came in the late fall of 1942. Cool was drafted.
He was told he was going to be an infantryman. He was given eight weeks of basic training at an army camp in the southeast. He was shipped to North Africa in the spring of 1943.
On the 2nd of June, he was assigned to Company L, 26th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, the Big Red One, the oldest continuously serving combat division in the United States Army. He was there for the invasion of Sicily on the 10th of July. For the next three weeks, Charles Cool was a rifleman in an infantry squad that fought across the interior of central Sicily.
His platoon lost men. His squad lost men. He carried a bolt-action Springfield some days and an M1 Garand on others, depending on what came out of the supply chain.
He carried a bandolier. He drank water that tasted of iodine. He slept, when he slept at all, in the shadow of stone walls that had stood on those Sicilian hillsides since the sixteenth century.
By the last week of July, Cool had developed a persistent stomach ailment his medic could not identify. By the 28th of July, he had a fever. By the 31st, he was shaking.
He reported to his battalion aid station three times in the space of two weeks. Each time he was diagnosed with what the army was then calling exhaustion, given rest and sent back to his company. On the 2nd of August 1943, he reported to the sea company aid station of the First Medical Battalion for the fourth time.
This time the medics did not send him back. They evacuated him rearward to the 15th Evacuation Hospital near the town of Nicosia. His temperature was 102.
2 degrees. His medical card was updated with a new diagnosis, psychoneurosis anxiety state, moderately severe. Below that, in the handwriting of a junior medical officer whose name has been lost, was a note, soldier has been twice before in hospital within ten days.
He can’t take it at the front. Evidently, he is repeatedly returned. He was given sodium amytal, a barbiturate, to sleep.
He slept. He woke up on the morning of the 3rd of August. He drank a small amount of water.
He sat on a stool at the foot of his cot and waited to be told what was going to happen to him. At about noon, a jeep pulled up outside the hospital tent
The third man in this story is the one you are going to hear the least about because he could not tell his side of it after 1943 and because he never wrote a memoir. His name is Paul G. Bennett.
He is twenty-one years old on the day this story begins. He is from South Carolina. He is five feet four inches tall.
He weighs 130 pounds. He has been in the United States Army for four years. He is a professional soldier, not a draftee.
He is an artilleryman assigned to Battery C, 17th Field Artillery Regiment in the Third Infantry Division. He has been in combat continuously since he landed at Licata on the 10th of July. We will come to Paul Bennett in seven days.
For now, back to Nicosia. Back to the tent. Back to the stool where Charles Cool is sitting, waiting to find out what is going to happen to him.
At approximately 12:15 in the afternoon, the tent flap opens. Patton walks in. He is with an aide.
He is with the hospital commander, Major Charles B. Eder. He is wearing his riding pants, his high polished boots, his short tanker jacket with three stars on the shoulder tabs, and his ivory-handled Colt on his right hip.
His helmet, also polished, is under his left arm. He has come to Nicosia as he has come to two other evacuation hospitals that week on a morale visit. It is standard army practice.
A senior commander visits the wounded. The wounded see him. The wounded feel seen.
Morale improves. This is doctrine. On the 3rd of August, 1943 in the United States Army, and Patton is following it.
He works down the tent. He kneels beside a cot on the right side and talks quietly to a private with a leg wound. He asks the man where he is from.
He shakes his hand. He moves to the next cot. He does this for several men.
He does it well. He does it with the specific attention that made George Patton in the eyes of the men who served under him the most personally memorable senior commander in the United States Army of the Second World War. The men whose hands he shakes that afternoon will remember his voice, his touch, his eye contact for the rest of their lives.
That is not a movie invention. That is the historical record. Patton was very good at this.
He was in his own way honoring the wounded. Then he stops because in the middle of the aisle sitting on a stool is a man he cannot classify. He looks around.
Every other man in the tent has a wound. This man has no wound. This man is sitting up.
This man is slouched forward, shaking slightly, looking at the ground. Patton walks to him. He asks him in a voice everyone in the tent can hear, What is wrong with him?
Cool looks up at him. Cool says, I guess I can’t take it, sir. There is a long pause.
The pause is important because in that pause, everything that George Patton has been carrying for thirty-four days of the Sicily campaign, the sleeplessness, the migraines, the frustration with the pace of the advance, the report that Major General Clarence Huebner had given him two days before about malingerers at the hospitals, all of it comes together and finds a target. The target is Charles Cool. Patton takes off his black leather gloves.
He holds them in his right hand. He slaps Charles Cool across the face with them once hard. Then he grabs Cool by the collar of his uniform, lifts him off the stool, and drags him toward the entrance of the tent.
He is shouting. Everyone in the tent can hear it. The wounded men on the cots hear it.
Major Eder hears it. A nurse in the corner whose name has been lost from the record hears it. Patton is shouting in substance, Don’t admit this son of a bitch.
I don’t want yellow-bellied bastards like him hiding their lousy cowardice around here, stinking up this place of honor. You hear me? You gutless bastard.
You are going back to the front. He shoves Charles Cool through the tent flap. He kicks him in the backside as he goes through.
Cool stumbles, catches himself, and stands upright in the sunlight outside the tent, blinking, dizzy from the fever, still trembling. Patton turns back to the doctors and nurses in the tent. He is still shouting.
The medical staff are staring at him. According to Major Eder’s later report, in a silence that Eder described as absolute, what happens next is now on the record because of the reporting of the British historian Anthony Beevor in his 2012 book, The Second World War. Patton, according to medical staff present that afternoon, is heard to say in a voice loud to carry into the tent behind him, Shell shock is an invention of the Jews.
He says it once, then he leaves. He gets in his jeep. He drives back toward his headquarters.
He is calmer now. He has in his own mind done a difficult but necessary thing
Charles Cool is helped back to a different cot in a different corner of the hospital by a corpsman. He is given a sedative. He sleeps that night or the next morning he writes a letter to Loretta.
The letter is dated the 4th of August, 1943. It is four sentences long. It reads, General Patton slapped my face yesterday and kicked me in the pants and cussed me.
This probably won’t go through censorship, but I don’t know, but just forget about it in your letters. Loretta will read those four sentences some weeks later. Her father-in-law, Herman F.
Cool, will read them, too. When Loretta shows him the letter, neither of them will tell anyone. They will do what their son asked.
They will forget about it in their letters. Herman Cool will keep the original letter in a locked drawer in his desk in Mishawaka, Indiana for the next 110 days. He will bring it out on the 22nd of November 1943 when he sees the front page of the South Bend Tribune and he will drive to their offices and he will hand them the letter and everything is going to change
Now, let me tell you about the ground where this happened. Sicily in August of 1943 was a hard place. The interior mountains rise almost immediately from the beaches on the south and west coasts and climb in a series of jagged ridges and volcanic slopes toward the peak of Etna in the northeast.
The roads that connected the villages had been built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for donkey traffic. They were narrow. They were unpaved.
They twisted around every terrace hillside and every dry stream bed. When the American Seventh Army moved north from the beaches at Licata and Gela in the second week of July, they moved at the pace of the terrain, not at the pace of their trucks. The temperature in the interior of Sicily on any afternoon in August of 1943 ran between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
There was no rain. The dust from the roads kicked up by every jeep and truck and tank column hung in the air for hours after the vehicles had passed. Every American soldier who fought in Sicily that month came home with his lungs coated in white limestone dust that would take a year to clear.
Malaria was endemic. The Sicilian countryside had been malarial for two thousand years. The Roman colonists had died of it.
The Byzantine garrisons had died of it. The Norman conquerors of the eleventh century had died of it. When the Americans and British came ashore in July of 1943, they walked into an active mosquito environment for which their standard issue quinine tablets were only partially effective.
Between the 10th of July and the 17th of August, the United States Seventh Army recorded more than twenty thousand cases of malaria among its own troops. That was more than were killed and wounded by German fire in the same period. Charles Cool had one of those cases of malaria.
So did over half the men in his platoon. So quietly did General Patton himself, though he refused treatmentand did not appear on any casualty roster
The hospitals, the 15th Evacuation Hospital was a canvas facility set up in an olive grove on the outskirts of Nicosia in the last week of July 1943. It was a four hundred bed facility. It had six surgical tents.
It had a receiving tent. It had a triage tent. It had a psychiatric tent.
Though the psychiatric tent in August of 1943 was not staffed by a full-time psychiatrist. The senior psychiatric officer for the entire Mediterranean theater, Major Frederick Hansen, was based in Algiers, several hundred miles away, and worked by telegram consultation when men presented at the 15th Evac with what the medical charts of the time called nervous conditions. They were diagnosed by general practitioners, given sodium amytal, allowed to sleep for twelve hours, and in the great majority of cases, returned to their units within seventy-two hours.
That was the doctrine. That was what happened to Charles Cool three times in the two weeks before his fourth admission. The 93rd Evacuation Hospital, which is where Paul Bennett was going to be on the 10th of August, was farther east, near the coastal town of Santo Stefano di Camastra.
It was smaller, two hundred forty beds. Its commanding officer was Colonel Donald E. Currier.
Currier was forty-eight years old. He was a career army medical officer. He had served in France in 1918.
He was not a man given to public statements. He kept meticulous records. His after-action report on what happened at the 93rd Evac on the 10th of August is the primary source for almost every detail of the second slapping incident
The doctrinal environment must be understood before going any further, because if you do not understand what the army believed, you cannot understand what Patton didand what Eisenhower did about it. The army believed that combat stress in the vast majority of cases was a failure of character, not a disease, not an injury, a failure of character. The medical term for it in the summer of 1943 was psychoneurosis.
The lay term was battle fatigue. Both terms were in most army medical training programs of that year taught with the implicit assumption that most cases of battle fatigue were in current language malingering. A soldier claiming battle fatigue was unless proven otherwise presumed to be a soldier trying to get out of combat by feigning a nervous condition.
There was a small and growing minority of army medical officers who disagreed with this doctrine. Major Frederick Hansen in Algiers had written a paper in April of 1943 arguing that combat stress was a physiological response to sustained danger, could be objectively measured, and should be treated as a legitimate medical condition. His paper had been forwarded up the chain to the Surgeon General of the Army in Washington.
It had not by August produced a change in doctrine. The doctrine that was in effect on the afternoon of the 3rd of August 1943 when Patton walked into the 15th Evac and saw Charles Cool slouched on a stool was a doctrine that told Patton he was looking at a coward. He acted on the doctrine.
On the 5th of August 1943, two days after the Cool incidentand five days before the Bennett incident, Patton issued a directive to every commanding officer in the United States Seventh Army. It has been preserved in the Army archives. It reads in part, It has come to my attentionthat a very small number of soldiers are going to the hospital on the pretext that they are nervously incapable of combat.
Such men are cowardsand bring discredit on the armyand 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.
This is the directive. This is on paper. This is signed by the commanding general of the Seventh Army.
It is not a diary entry. It is not a private conversation. It is official policy of the United States Seventh Army in the field under fire in the middle of the Sicily campaign signed by George S.
Pattonand distributed to every regimental commander in the theater on the 5th of August 1943
The day Patton signed that directive, a young man named Paul Bennett of Battery C, 17th Field Artillery, was sitting in a slit trench outside a village called Troina, watching his best friend bleed to death from a mortar fragment that had gone through his abdomen. Nobody could get to the man. The German mortars were still coming in.
Paul Bennett sat in the slit trench fora long time, holding his friend’s hand while his friend died. Two days later, on the 7th of August, Bennett began to shake. He could not stop shaking.
His hand tremor was so bad he could not tighten the elevation screw on the 105 millimeter howitzer he served. His battery commander watched him for three days. On the 10th of August, he ordered Bennett to report to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital.
Bennett protested. Bennett said he wanted to stay with the battery. His battery commander said no.
Bennett went. He walked into the receiving tent at approximately 11:00 in the morning on the 10th of August, 1943. He was still shaking.
He was dehydrated. He had a fever. He was diagnosed by the first medical officer he saw with combat exhaustionand was told to lie down on a cot.
He lay down on a cot. He was still there four hours later
Now, let me tell you about the second slap because the second slap is the one that ended Patton’s career for eleven months that reshaped American public opinion about combat stressand sent by a chain of consequences no one could have predicted. An Indiana carpet fitter named Charles Cool onto Omaha Beach. The morning of the 10th of August, 1943 opens badly for Patton.
At about 8:00, he takes a phone call at his forward headquarters from Omar Bradley, commanding Second Corps. Bradley is calling to plead for a postponement of an amphibious landing at Brolo, a coastal village east of Santo Stefano that Patton has scheduled for 4:00 the next morning. The landing is meant to leapfrog a battalion of the 30th Infantry Regiment forward of the German lines to unhinge the German defense of the Etna lineand force a general retreat toward Messina.
Bradley thinks the timing is wrong. Truscott’s Third Infantry Division, which is supposed to link up with the amphibious force by mid-morning, is not moving fast enough. If the landing goes inand the linkup fails, the battalion at Brolo will be destroyed.
Patton listens. Patton disagrees. Patton shouts.
Bradley on the other end of the line does not shout. Bradley never shouts. Bradley hangs up twenty minutes later having secured no postponement.
Patton comes out of his headquarters, walks to his jeepand tells his driver to take him to Second Corps command post. He is going to have this out with Bradley in person. On the road on the coastal highway, he sees signs pointing off the highway to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital.
He looks at the signs. He tells his driver to turn. He tells Codman, his aide, sitting in the front passenger seat,that he wants to go to the hospital to raise his spirits by seeing the wounded.
He says the sentence in exactly those words. Codman writes it down that night in his personal journal, which was later published under the title Drive. They arrive at the 93rd Evac at approximately 1:30 in the afternoon.
Patton walks unannounced into the receiving tent. The chief admission officer, a lieutenant colonel, comes forward to greet him. Patton starts walking down the aisle between the cots.
At the third cot on the right, he stops because on that cot, curled up on his side with his uniform blouse folded under his head as a pillow, is a small young man, five feet four inches, 130 pounds, shivering under a thin army blanket. This is Private Paul G. Bennett, four years in the army, artilleryman, Battery C, 17th Field Artillery Regiment, Third Infantry Division.
Patton stops at the foot of the cot. He looks down at Bennett. He asks him in the same voice he had asked Cool seven days earlier what is wrong with him.
Bennett looks up at him. Bennett does not know who Patton is. He has been serving in the Third Division fora year and a halfand Patton until the previous month had been commanding the Second Corps in Tunisia, not the Seventh Army.
Bennett has never seen him before. Bennett says in a shaky voice, It’s my nerves, sir. Patton says, According to Colonel Currier’s after-action report, and I am quoting from that report directly, your nerves.
Hell, you are just a goddamned coward. You yellow son of a bitch. Bennett begins to cry.
He tries to stop. He cannot. He is a professional soldier of four years service.
He has never cried in front of a superior officer in his life. and he cannot stop crying in front of this one. Patton loses control.
He shouts. He shouts that Bennett ought to be lined up against a walland shot. He shouts that he ought to shoot Bennett himself right now.
Goddamn him. He unbuttons the flap of his hip holster. He draws his ivory-handled Colt single-action army revolver.
He waves the revolver in Paul Bennett’s face. Colonel Currier is now standing three feet away. Currier is a forty-eight-year-old career medical officer.
He has seen a great many things. He has never seen this. He does not move.
He does not speak. Every man in the tent has gone silent. Patton lowers the revolver.
He slaps Bennett across the face with his open hand. Bennett’s head snaps to the side. Bennett is still crying.
Patton’s to Colonel Currier over his shoulder. I want this man out of here immediately. He is a disgrace to the armyand he is going back to his unit to fight.
Then Patton turns around, takes two steps toward the tent exit, stops, turns back, and hits Paul Bennett a second time backhanded with the same hand. Then he walks out. Codman in the front passenger seat of the Jeepas they drive away towards Second Corps command post tries to make small talk.
Patton does not respond. Patton is quiet, according to Codman’s journal,for the entire drive. When they arrive at Bradley’s command post, Patton walks in, says hello to Bradley as if nothing had happened,and proceeds to have the meeting about Brolo he had come to have.
The Brolo landing goes in the next morning. It nearly ends in disaster. It is saved by the 30th Infantry Regiment, holding out longer than anyone expected
Colonel Donald E. Currier does not sit down for the rest of the afternoon. He walks through his own hospital.
He talks to his medical staff. He collects statements. He writes down every word he remembers Patton saying.
He writes down the sequence of events. He telephones the chief medical officer of the North African theater of operations. He is told to put everything in writing.
He does. His report is dated the 10th of August 1943 and is signed with his own signature. It goes up the chain the next morning.
The next stop up the chain is Brigadier General Frederick A. Bless, Chief Medical Officer of the Mediterranean Theater. Bless reads the report on the 11th of August.
He reads it a second time on the 12th. He signs a cover memorandum. He walks it personally into the office of the Commander-in-Chief Allied Force Headquarters in Algiers.
That office is General Dwight David Eisenhower. Eisenhower is fifty-two years old. He has been a full four-star general for eight months.
He has been in Algiers running the Mediterranean theater since the fall of 1942. He has known George Patton for twenty-four years. They served together at Fort Meade, Maryland in 1919 in the Tank Corps when both of them were majorsand lieutenant colonels.
They had been friends. They had been rivals. They had been men who each thought the other one hadthe more promising career.
Now Eisenhower is Patton’s boss. And Patton is a lieutenant generaland Eisenhower is a full general. And they are twenty-four years past the Tank Corps in Maryland.
Eisenhower reads Currier’s report on the 16th or 17th of August 1943 in his private office in the St. George Hotel in Algiers. The war record does not preserve his exact first reaction.
What it preserves is the letter he writes to Patton on the 17th of August,the same day the Sicily campaign officially ends with the American entry into Messina. The letter is marked personal and confidential. It runs three pages.
It is one of the most extraordinary documents produced by an American commander during the Second World War. Eisenhower begins by saying, In effect, I have reports that on two occasions, you struck subordinate soldiers under circumstances that make questionable your good judgmentand your self-discipline. Then he does something remarkable.
He tells Pattonthat he does not intend to make the incident public. He tells Pattonthat he does not intend to open a formal investigation. He tells Pattonthat his continued value to the war effort is too great to be sacrificed to what he calls in the letter an act of impulsive irritation.
Then he tells Patton what he must do. He must apologize in person to Charles Cool. He must apologize in person to Paul Bennett.
He must apologize to the medical staffs of both the 15th Evacuation Hospitaland the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. He must in a series of public assemblies before every division of the Seventh Armyaddress his menand without directly admitting to what he had doneexpress his regret for what he calls in the letter recent events that have come to his attention. He must do all of this within thirty days.
Eisenhower closes the letter with a sentence that Patton would quote in his own diary many months later. The sentence reads, I clearly recognize the possibility that some good may have resulted, but nothing that produces disloyaltyand unhappiness among your soldiers can be regarded lightly. Patton reads the letter on the 20th of August in his headquarters in Palermo.
He reads it twice. He writes a diary entry that night that begins, It is rather a commentary on justice when an act of mercy like this is misunderstood. He calls it an act of mercy.
He believes in the summer of 1943 that slapping Charles Cool was an act of mercy. That is not a story you can tell in Hollywood, but it is what the man’s own diary says. It is what he believed at the time.
And it is one of the reasons this story is so much harder than the version most Americans have been told. He obeys Eisenhower’s instructions. He goes to the 15th Evac.
He apologizes to Major Eder. He apologizes to the medical staff. He apologizes to Charles Cool in person in a small back office with only Ederand a stenographer present.
Cool in a later account he gave to an autograph collector in 1970 said that Patton was cordialand appeared genuinely sorry. Cool accepted the apology. Then Patton goes to the 93rd Evac.
He apologizes to Colonel Currier. He apologizes to the medical staff. He apologizes to Paul Bennett in person.
Bennett does not leave a record of what he thought. Over the following weeks, Patton stands in front of each of the major divisions of his Seventh Armyand delivers a version of what has become known in the Patton literature as the apology speeches. He never directly admits to slapping Cool or Bennett.
He never uses either man’s name. He speaks in general terms aboutthe importance of morale,the importance of respect between officers and men,the burden of command,and in a phrase that he uses in almost every version of the speech,the regret every commander feels when he has in his own words spoken more sharply than he intended. By the end of September, he has completed all of it.
Eisenhower has done what he intended. He has disciplined Patton without destroying him. He has preserved for the coming invasion of France,the general he believes is his best combat commander.
He has kept the American home front, still absorbing the casualty lists from Sicily from being distracted by a public 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 involving one of the war’s most famous officers. He has in his own mind closed the file. He has not
The correspondents attached to Seventh Army have known about both incidents from the beginning. There were three men who knew the full story by the middle of August, Demaree Bess of the Saturday Evening Post, Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s Weekly,and Merrill Mueller of NBC radio. All three were combat correspondentson the Mediterranean theater.
All three had contacts in servicesof supply. All three had been told unofficially by nursesat the 93rd Evac about what Patton had done. Demaree Bess is the one who acts on the information.
On the 19th of August,two days after Eisenhower’s letter to Patton, Bess flies from Palermo to Algiers. He requests a private meeting with Eisenhower. Eisenhower grants it.
Bess tells Eisenhowerat that meetingthat the correspondents know. He tells Eisenhowerthat he believes it is the correspondents duty to reportthe story. He asks Eisenhower whether Eisenhower is going to release a statement.
Eisenhower does not. Instead, he asks Bessand the other correspondentsas a personal request to hold the story until the campaign in Italy is further advanced. He argues in that meetingthat a public disclosure of the incident would damage American morale,damage the reputation of the officer corps,and give the Axis powers a propaganda victory at a moment when the Allies could not afford to give them one.
Bess thinks about it. Reynolds thinks about it. Mueller thinks about it.
They agree the story does not run for three months. It does not run. The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s,and NBC Radio, three of the most influential news organizations in wartime America, are holding of their own free will.
A story that would be at any other moment in twentieth century American journalism, an immediate front page 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁. They are holding it because Dwight Eisenhower asked them to,and because they believed that request came from a commander who knew what he was doing. They hold it through September, through October, throughthe first three weeks of November.
Then on the 21st of November,1943, a Sunday evening at 7:00 Eastern time, a syndicated Washington newspaper columnist named Drew Pearson opens his fifteen-minute radio programon the Blue Networkwith a story he has, by his own later admission, been sitting on for a few days. Pearson had been given the story in the middle of November by an unnamed medical officer who had rotated home from the Mediterranean theater. The medical officer had not been part of the correspondents informal agreement.
The medical officer knew what he knew. The medical officer told Pearson. Pearsonthat Sunday evening tells the country.
He says on the air, Lieutenant General George S. Patton has been severely reprimanded by General Dwight Eisenhowerfor striking an American soldier in a field hospital in Sicily. Pearson does not name Cool.
Pearson does not know Cool’s namebecause his source did not know it. Pearson also does not know about Bennett. He knows about one incident.
He reports one incident. He adds in a sentence that will become famousthat he does not expect Patton to be used in important combat again. Millions of Americans hear that broadcast on the evening of the 21st of November 1943.
At about 10:00 the same evening in Mishawaka, Indiana,the phone rings in the front room of Herman F. Cool’s house. It is a neighbor calling to ask whether Herman has heard the news on the radio.
Herman F. Cool has heard the news on the radio. He hangs up the phone.
He walks upstairs. He goes to the desk deck in his bedroom. He unlocks the top drawer.
He takes out the letter dated the 4th of August,1943 from his son, Charles. He reads it. He reads it a second time.
He goes downstairs. He calls his daughter-in-law, Loretta,and asks her if she still has her copy of the letter. She does.
He tells her not to do anything with it until he tells her. The next morning,the 22nd of November, Herman F. Cool drives to downtown South Bend.
He walks into the offices of the South Bend Tribune. He asks to see the city editor. He shows the city editor the letter.
The city editor, whose name has been lost from the record, calls the managing editor. The managing editor comes down from his office. He reads the letter.
He asks Herman F. Cool if he can keep it. Herman says he can.
The South Bend Tribune that evening runs the letter on the front page. Under the headline, Local Soldier Named as the GI Patton Slapped for the First Time. Charles Herman Cool has a name in the newspapers.
The Associated Press picks up the story within an hour. By the morning of the 23rd of November, every major American newspaper is running some version of it. The Chicago Tribune,the Washington Post,the New York Times,the Boston Globe,the Los Angeles Times.
In small town papers across every state in the Union, there is now a faceand a nameand a hometown attached to what Drew Pearson had reported forty-eight hours earlier, only as a rumor. Congress reacts within twenty-four hours. On the floor of the Houseand the Senate, members from both his party call for Patton’s relief.
Some call for court martial. Some call more cautiously for a formal investigation. The chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina, announces on the 26th of Novemberthat he intends to open hearings.
George Marshall,the Chief of Staff of the Army, is in Cairoon the 22nd of Novemberwith President Roosevelton the way to the Tehran conferencewith Stalinand Churchill. He receives the news of the Pearson broadcast by telegram. He reads the coverage in the wire dispatches on the morning of the 23rd.
He does not act publicly. He sends a private telegram to Eisenhowerin Algiers dated the 24th of November 1943. The telegram has been preserved in the Marshall papers.
It is one sentence long. It reads, You may relieve him if you think it necessary. Eisenhower receives that telegram on the morning of the 25th of November.
He reads it. He sits at his desk fora long time. Then he writes a reply.
His reply is three pages long. It is dated the 25th of November 1943. It has been preserved in the Eisenhower papers.
In it, Eisenhower makes the case for keeping George Patton. He argues that Patton is in his professional judgmentthe finest combat armor commander in the United States Army. He argues thatthe coming invasion of Europe being planned for the spring of 1944 will require armor commanders of exactly Patton’s temperament.
He argues that no other officer in the army can do what Patton can do in mobile warfare across open ground. He acknowledges that Patton is a difficult subordinate,that Patton has serious character flaws,that Patton is,in Eisenhower’s own phrase in the letter,a problem child. But he closes with a sentence that has since 1943 been quoted in almost every biography of both men.
The sentence reads, In effect, I have come to the conclusionthat his usefulness in this war is such that I must retain him. Marshall receives the reply on the 26th of November. He accepts Eisenhower’s judgment.
He does not press for Patton’s relief. The congressional storm continues for another four weeks. Senator Reynolds hearings never open because Marshall intervenes quietly with the committee chairmanand asks for time.
By the middle of December, other war news,the fighting in Italy,the buildup for the coming invasion of France,the political maneuvering at Tehranhas pushed the Patton story off the front pages
But George Patton does not command troops in combat again for eleven months. From the 25th of August 1943, when the Sicily campaign officially endeduntil the 1st of August 1944, when the United States Third Army was activatedin Normandy under his command, George Patton spent one of the longestand most humiliating stretches of his career on the sidelines. He was sent to England in January of 1944.
He was given a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 command of a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 army. The First United States Army Group, or FUSAG, existed on paper only. Its purpose under Operation Fortitude,the great deception plan for D-Day,was to convince the German high commandthat the Allied invasion of France would come across the Pas de Calaisopposite Dover rather than at Normandy.
Patton,the Germans knew,was the American army’s most aggressive commander. If Patton was commanding an army in southeast England,the Germans reasoned,then the invasion was coming at Calais. Patton spentthe winter and spring of 1944 commanding no soldiers,giving speeches to inflatable tanks,and moving between his headquarters at Peover Hall in Cheshireand various field camps in the English countryside so that German aerial reconnaissance would photograph his staff cars in different locationsand conclude that his headquarters was operational.
He hated it. He wrote to his wife Beatricein the spring of 1944. It is hell to be on the sidelinesand see all the glory eluding me.
But Operation Fortitude worked. It worked because Patton was there. The German Fifteenth Army,nearly twenty divisions strong,was held at Calaison the 6th of June 1944and for weeks afterward waiting for the second invasionthat Patton was going to lead.
That second invasion never came. Those divisions,which could have crushed the Normandy beachhead if released,remained in place watching an empty channelbecause Adolf Hitler believed George Patton was in Kent. The slapping incidents of August 1943 had,by a chain of consequences neither Eisenhower nor Patton could have designed,become an element of the single most effective deception operation assisted world war
Now let me tell you what happened on the 5th of June 1944and on the 6th of June 1944because those two days are the ones on which this entire story comes togetherand closes. On the 5th of June 1944 at a training camp somewhere in the English Midlands, Lieutenant General George S. Patton stood on a wooden platformand delivered a speech to the assembled soldiers of the United States Third Army.
Third Army had been activated. His 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 command was behind him. In sixty days, he would be in France leading real armor across real ground.
But on the 5th of June, he had one last speech to give. The speech has come down in American memory as the Third Army speech. Most Americans when they think of it think of the profanity-laced versionthat the actor George C.
Scott delivered in the opening scene of the 1970 film Patton. That film version is a heightened, stitched-together compilation of Patton’s actual speeches delivered to different divisions on different days in the springand early summer of 1944. The actual speech Patton gave on the 5th of June in front of the men who would go into the breakout at Avranches was quieter,more measured,and in its middle third took a turnthat has never fit comfortably into the Hollywood version.
He talked about fear. He talked about it in a way that no American commander of the Second World War at his rank had ever talked about it in public before. He said in a passagethat has been preserved by soldiers who took the speech down in shorthandand by later biographers who have collectedthe various versions into a composite text.
Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best. It removes all that is base.
Then he pausedand then he said six words. He said, All men are afraid in battle. The soldiers in front of him, most of whom had never seen combat, did not react to those six words.
They did not know that George Patton had ten months earlier in a hospital tent in Sicily slapped a private soldier for admitting that he was afraid. They did not know that he had drawn his pistol on another private soldier for the same reason a week later. They did not know aboutthe letter Eisenhower had sent to Patton on the 17th of August 1943 or the eleven months on the sidelines that had followed.
They did not know thatthe man on the platform in front of them had spent a full year of the Second World War coming slowlyand privatelyand without ever quite admitting it to a new understanding of what fear does to men in combat. He gave them the rest of the speech. He talked about duty.
He talked about aggression. He talked about the enemy. He told them in the phrase that became famousthat he wanted a soldier who could go through Germany like crap through a goose.
Then he stepped down from the platformand the next day on the 6th of June 1944, 156,000 Allied soldiers landed on five beachesin Normandy, France. One of the men who came ashore at Omaha Beachwith the First Infantry Division on the morning of the 6th of June was Private Charles Herman Cool. He had after his brief evacuation to North Africa in August of 1943 been treated for his malariaand his dysentery.
He had been returned to the First Division. He had trained throughthe fall and winter of 1943 in England. He had climbed down a cargo net into a landing craftin the early hours of the 6th of June.
His landing craft had gone in on the eastern half of Omaha Beachinto the killing field of the German machine guns,firing from the bluffs above. Cool came ashore,according to his later account,without shaking. He was not crying.
He carried his rifleand his bandolier. He made it across the beach. He climbed the bluff.
He fought inland with his regiment through the Normandy campaign. He was still with the First Division whenthe breakout at Avranches came at the end of Julyand the Third Army of George S. Patton,whose ivory-handled pistol had been waved in Paul Bennett’s face ten months earlier,was pouring throughthe gap in the German linesand racing east across France.
Charles Cooland George Pattonthat summer of 1944 were both in the same war. They were both in France. They both in the aggregate were doing whatthe American army had trained them to do.
Neither of them,so far as the record shows,ever saw the other one again
Charles Cool was rotated home before the end of the war with an honorable dischargeand a Combat Infantryman Badge. He returned to Mishawaka, Indiana. He and Loretta bought a small house on the east side of South Bend.
He took a job at a factory. He worked there for the next twenty-five years. He did not talk aboutthe war.
He did not talk aboutthe slap. He never gave any comment on the record to any journalist for the rest of his life. But in 1970, an autograph dealer wrote to Cool asking if he would be willing to describe the incident in his own handwriting fora private collector’s archive.
Cool, who was fifty-four years oldand retired, agreed. He sat down at the kitchen table of his house in South Bend on the 4th of August,1970, a date twenty-seven years after his own letter to Loretta describingthe slap. And he wrote four pages in his own hand describing what had happened to him at the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosiaon the 3rd of August,1943.
The four-page letter has survived. It is currently held in the Alex Autographs collection. It reads in part, I always thought at the time,and I still thinkthat General Patton was under a great deal of stress,and that he did what he did because he thought it was right,and that a man who does what he thinks is right cannot be entirely blamed for it.
I have never held any bad feeling against him. He signed the letter, Charles H. Cool.
Less than six months later, on or aboutthe 30th of January 1971, Charles Herman Cool died of a heart attackin his home in South Bend. He was fifty-five years old. His obituary ran in the South Bend Tribune on the 2nd of February,1971 under the headline, Services Set for Patton GI.
That was the headline his family read at the breakfast tableon a cold Indiana morning. Not his name,not carpet fitter,not veteran. Patton GI,the identitythat had followed him quietly for twenty-seven yearsand would follow him forward even into the small print of the paper of record in his own town.
On the morning after he was gone, Paul G. Bennett of Battery C, 17th Field Artillery Regiment, disappeared from the historical record after the war. He returned to South Carolina.
He is presumed to have died at some point in the second half of the twentieth century, but no obituary,no news account,and no family record has surfaced. He never wrote aboutthe incident. He never gave an interview.
He never namedthe general who had drawn a pistol on him in a hospital tent. He is one of the many hundreds of thousands of men who came out of the Second World Warand simply went home
George Smith Patton Jr. did not live to see the peace he had spent thirty years training for. On the 9th of December 1945 near Mannheim in the American occupation zone, his staff car was struck at low speedby a two-and-one-half-ton truck making a left turn across an intersection.
He was thrown forward,struck his head on the glass partition between the front and rear seats,and broke his neck at the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He lived for twelve more days.
He died in the Seventh Army Hospital in Heidelbergon the 21st of December 1945. He was fifty-nine years old. He is buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery in Hamm.
His grave is in the front row. It faces the graves of the more than five thousand American soldiers of the Third Army who died in the campaigns from Normandy to Bavaria in the ten months between his taking command of the Third Army in August of 1944and the end of the war in Europe. He asked before he died to be buried in the front row facing them.
His widow Beatricehad that request honored. Dwight David Eisenhower became the thirty-fourth president of the United Stateson the 20th of January 1953. He served two terms.
He signed the Interstate Highway System into law. He warned in his farewell address of the 17th of January 1961 of the growing power of what he calledthe military-industrial complex. He died on the 28th of March 1969 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC of congestive heart failure.
He was seventy-eight years old. He is buried in Abilene, Kansas in the small chapel behind the Eisenhower Presidential Library. Omar Bradley,who had commanded Second Corps under Patton in Sicilyand had been on the phonewith Patton about Brolo on the morning of the 10th of August,went on to commandthe American Twelfth Army Group in Northwest Europefrom August of 1944 onward.
He was made a five-star general of the army in 1950. He served after the waras the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He died in April of 1981,aged eighty-eight,in New York City.
He was the last of the American five-star generals of the Second World War to die. Colonel Donald E. Currier,who had watched George Patton draw a pistol in his own hospital tent,and had written the reportthat changed the course of Patton’s career,continued to serve as a medical corps officer through the remainder of the war.
He retired quietlyin the years afterand never wrote publicly about what he had seen. His after-action report of the 10th of August 1943 is the reason we know in the specific detailthat we know it. What Patton saidand did that afternoon.
Major Charles B. Eder of the 15th Evacuation Hospital,who had been standing in the tent when Patton slapped Charles Coolon the 3rd of August,likewise served outthe warand returned to a private medical practice in the United States. He too did not seek out publicity.
He too made his contribution to the historical record through his official reportsand his cooperation with Army investigators. Major Frederick Hansen,the psychiatrist who had been trying from his post in Algiersin 1943 to persuade the United States Armythat battle fatigue was a legitimate medical condition rather than a failure of character,was proven right bythe passage of time. His forward treatment model was expanded in the Italian campaignand formed the basis for what the army called by the end of the war combat exhaustion doctrine.
In the Korean War,the doctrine was expanded further. In the Vietnam War,the psychiatric literature began for the first time to describe combat stress not as psychoneurosisbut as post-traumatic stress. And in 1980,thirty-seven years after the slap in Nicosia,the American Psychiatric Association formally recognized post-traumatic stress disorderas a diagnostic categoryin the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Charles Cool did not live to see that recognition. He died nine years before it happened. Paul Bennett,wherever he was,may have lived to see it.
We do not know. But the medical profession,the military,and the country as a whole came by degrees to understand something that George Patton in a hospital tent in Sicilyin the summer of 1943 could not have understood,which is this. What Charles Cool was doing on that stoolin Nicosiawas not cowardice.
What Paul Bennett was doing on that cotat the 93rd Evac was not cowardice. Both men were carrying a woundthatin 1943 had no namethat would fit on a medical chart. In 1943,the name available for it was psychoneurosis.
It has other names now. The name most Americans know it by is post-traumatic stress disorder. Charles Cool was carrying it on the 3rd of August,1943 when he told George Pattonin a quiet voicethat he guessed he could not take it.
He was tellingthe truth. He was also at the same time running a 102 degree feverfrom malaria,racked with dysentery,and diagnosed on his medical chartwith the mildest available termthe army had at the time for a mental injury. He was every kind of casualty at once.
And George Patton,who could not see that,saw only what his own doctrine told him he was allowed to see. One year later,Charles Cool came ashore at Omaha Beach. That is the whole story
I want to close it with two observations because if you have listened this far,you have earned them. The first is about Patton at the podium on the 5th of June 1944 about those six words. All men are afraid in battle.
That sentence,delivered by George Pattonin that room on that day ten months after Nicosiaand eleven months after the directive of the 5th of August 1943,is one of the strangestand most quietly consequential sentences of the entire Second World Warbecause it is not an apology. Patton never apologized publiclyfor the slaps. It is not a policy statement.
Patton never rescinded his August directive,and the directive was in fact quietly superseded by later army guidance rather than repealed by him. What that sentence is is a private admission of something delivered in public,buried in a speech about combat aggression,in languagethat no one in the room would have caught unless they knew exactly what they were listening for. Nobody in that room knew.
Charles Coolon the 5th of June 1944 was in southern England being briefed for the assault landingthat would happen the following morning. If somebody had woken him up in the middle of the nightand read himthe six words in Patton’s exact cadence,he might have understood what he was hearing. He would have understood in a waythat no man in the actual room could have understood.
That the general he had never seen againhad,in some waythat could not be spoken out loud between them,come to know what he,Cool,had been trying to tell him on the 3rd of August 1943. But nobody woke Cool up. Nobody was going to.
Patton would go to his death without ever knowingthat Cool had landed at Omahathe day after that speech. Cool would go to his death without ever knowingthat Patton had saidthe six words. That is often how these things end in real history.
Not with the two men shaking hands,not with the confrontationand the resolutionand the closing chord of orchestral music,just with each of them in his separate room in his separate silence coming as close as he was going to come to somethingthe other one had been trying to say
The second observation is about you. The men who came out of the Second World War,the fathers and grandfathers of most of the men listening to this,were a generationthat carried this particular story quietly for the rest of their lives. Not because they were ashamed of Patton,though many of them had complicated feelings about him.
And not because they were ashamed of Cool,though most of them had never heard his name. They carried it quietly because they carried everything quietly. That was their generation.
That was how they had been trained. That was how they had come home. But every one of them,if you had asked,knew a man like Charles Cool.
Every one of them had served with a man who could not take it. Every one of them had,at some point in their own service,watched another soldier break in a waythat could not be repaired by discipline,and could not be explained by cowardice. They knew.
They always knew. even whenthe doctrine said they were not supposed to. And when thirty and forty years later,their own sons came home from Vietnamwith a woundthat finally had a name.
Most of them understood immediately what they were looking at. They had seen it before. They had seen it in Sicilyand in Normandyand in the Ardennes.
They had just never had permission from their own army to call it what it was. Some of them quietlyin their own kitchensin their own late yearstold their sons what they had seen. Some of them did not.
Some of them died with it inside them still unspokenbecause that was what the discipline of their generation required of them. Every American man of a certain age has in his own family a version of that silence. The uncle who never talked aboutthe Pacific.
The father who would not answerthe question about Bastogne. The grandfather,who on the one afternoon he agreed to speak,said only that he had known some good men over there. The silence was not indifference.
The silence was the waythe generation carried the weight. Charles Cool diedin South Bend,Indiana in the winter of 1971 without seeing the medical recognitionthat would arrive nine years later. But his letter written six months before his deathis on the record.
He forgavethe man who slapped him. He forgave himbecause he understood in his own quiet Indiana way something that took the rest of the country another decade to accept. He understood thatthe man who had slapped him was in his own way another kind of casualty.
That both of themin that hospital tentin Nicosiain 1943 were carrying more than either of them could name. That is not a Hollywood ending. It is not a movie of the week.
It is not a two-line quote you would use in a graduation speech. It is what actually happened. That is why we tell it.
If your father was in that war,or your uncle,or your grandfather,and if he never told you the whole story of what he saw over there,this is one of the reasons why,the doctrine of his generation did not always allow him to name it. The doctrine of our generation at last does saythe name. Charles Herman Cool,Paul G.
Bennett,the two men whose lives crossed with George S. Pattonin the summer of 1943in two hospital tentson an islandin the Mediterranean,and who each in his own way toldthe truth about fear when nobody wanted to hear it. They deserve their names spoken.
And now in the year 2026,we speak them. The Second World War is passing out of living memory. There are,as this account is being recorded,fewer than one hundred thousand American veterans of that war still living.
Every day,on average,the American Legion counts the deaths of approximately 230 of them. Within five years,the last of them will be gone. Within ten,the war will be in the way thatthe First World War is now,entirely history.
Nobody alive will have carried a rifle in it. Nobody alive will have written a letter home from it. Nobody alive will remember what it smelled like,or what the food tasted like,or what it was to be twenty-one years oldand coldand afraid in a country you had never heard ofthe year before.
But the record will remain. The letters will remain. The hospital reports of Colonel Donald E.
Currierand Major Charles B. Ederwill remain in the National Archives,on paper,in the ink they were signed in,for as long as this country continues to keep its records. The diary of George Pattonwill remain.
The four pages Charles Cool wrote in his own hand at the kitchen tablein South Bendon the 4th of August 1970will remain in the Alex Autographs collectionfor as long as anyone cares aboutthe story. And if you have listened this far,then a small part of that record now lives in you,too. You have heard the names.
You have heard the dates. You have heard in as much detailas the historical record permits. What happened in a hospital tent in Sicilyon a hot afternoon,eighty-three summers ago,and what happened in the eleven monthsand the twenty-seven yearsand the eighty-three yearsthat followed.
That is what one man was doing when he toldthe truth. That is what another man did when he could not acceptthe truth. That is what a third man did when he had to decide whetherthe truth would be told publicly or held privately.
That is what all of them in their different ways left us. They did not ask us to remember them,but they left usthe record. And now you have heard