The Day of Battle (26 page)

Nothing in Seventh Army was more SNAFUed, TARFUed, and FUMTUed than the vital issue of medical logistics. “It resembles a maniac driving a machine at high speed without pausing to oil or service the machine,” a senior AFHQ surgeon reported. A combat force exceeding 200,000 had only 3,300 hospital beds, a number so inadequate that many minor cases were evacuated to North Africa for treatment and the 23,000 soldiers admitted for hospitalization during
HUSKY
tended to be stacked atop one another. Medics had only half as many ambulances as they needed; blankets and splints were scarce. Breakage and misplacement of medical supplies were enormous.

Sicily proved unforgiving. Many soldiers lost a pound per day to heat, dehydration, and intestinal miseries: Seventh Army appeared to be melting away. A chronic reluctance of cuts and bruises to heal was known simply as
“Sicilian disease.” AFHQ adopted an elaborate code for the various afflictions for patients’ general condition: “RNS” meant “recovery not satisfactory”; “SR,” “sinking rapidly.” Soldiers evacuated to the United States were “Z.I.’ed,” for “Zone of Interior,” and government-issue insurance policies provoked much sardonic banter. “I’ll have to write the old lady tonight,” said one soldier after a close call, “and tell her she missed out on that $10,000 again.” Truscott’s troops learned to ink their names and serial numbers on their leggings, which proved more durable in explosions than dogtags. The lucky extolled their good fortune. “Perhaps it will relieve you right at the start to know that I am still in one complete piece and
no
parts missing,” a badly wounded soldier wrote his wife in late July.

The unlucky relied on the heroic efforts of doctors and nurses working in dreadful conditions. Surgeons operated by flashlight, with white sheets hung in the operatory for more reflected light. After watching surgeons lop off limbs for an hour, Frank Gervasi, a reporter for
Collier’s
magazine, recalled Erasmus’s astringent epigram “
Dulce bellum inexpertis
”: Sweet is war to those who never experience it. “How am I doing, nurse?” a wounded eighteen-year-old in the 3rd Division asked. She kissed his forehead and replied, “You are doing just fine, soldier.” He smiled faintly. “I was just checking up,” he said, and then died. A physician described burn victims reduced to “cindery masses of burnt cloth and skin and hair.” One charred soldier told him, “I guess I’ve lost my sunburn.” For many, treatment consisted of a quarter-grain syrette of morphine and an “M” daubed on the forehead with iodine.

Now “M” took on another, more sinister connotation. In 1740, the writer Horace Walpole noted “a horrid thing called
mal’aria
” that afflicted Italy every summer. Before the war, the Rockefeller Foundation had published a sixteen-volume study on where the disease, which killed three million people each year, was most prevalent; Italy, infested with the mosquito
Anopheles maculipennis
—soon shortened to “Ann” in GI slang—had the highest malaria rates in the Mediterranean. Quinine had been used for centuries to suppress malaria’s feverish symptoms, but U.S. supplies came almost exclusively from cinchona trees in the East Indies, now controlled by the Japanese. American scientists seeking a substitute examined fourteen thousand compounds, including dozens tested on jailhouse volunteers; the best replacement proved to be a substance originally synthesized by the German dye industry and given the trade name Atabrine.

Soldiers detested the stuff, which they dubbed “yellow gall.” It tasted bitter, upset the stomach, turned the skin yellow, and was rumored to cause impotence and even sterility. Many soldiers stopped taking it, prophylactic discipline grew lax, and proper dosage levels were misunderstood. Moreover, some malaria control experts failed to reach Sicily until weeks after
the invasion. Soldiers also grew careless about covering exposed skin in the evening. Protective netting was in short supply, and insect repellent proved ineffective: troops agreed “the mosquitoes in Sicily enjoyed it very much.”

More than a thousand soldiers afflicted with malaria in North Africa on the eve of
HUSKY
had been left behind when the fleets sailed. On July 23, doctors detected the first case contracted in Sicily. By early August thousands of feverish, lethargic soldiers had been struck down. Ten thousand cases would sweep through Seventh Army, and nearly twelve thousand more in Eighth Army. (The swampy Catania Plain was particularly noxious.) All told, the 15th Army Group sustained more malaria casualties than battle wounds in Sicily. A medical historian concluded that “the disease record of the Seventh Army on Sicily was one of the worst compiled by any American field army during World War II.” With soldiers also suffering from dengue, sandfly, and Malta fevers, distinguishing one malady from another became so difficult that many patients were diagnosed simply with “fever of unknown origin,” soon known to soldiers as “fuo.”

Among the ailing at a 45th Division clearing station was “a frail little fellow in Army fatigue coveralls, carrying a bedroll.” Doctors originally diagnosed Ernie Pyle with malaria, then with dysentery, and finally settled on “battlefield fever,” which ostensibly resulted from “too much dust, bad eating, not enough sleep, exhaustion, and the unconscious nerve tension that comes to everybody in a front-line area.” Like so many others, Pyle had witnessed sights that gnawed at him, body and soul. Particularly grim was a field strewn with the bodies of two hundred Italian and German soldiers whose penises, swollen by rigor mortis, had “become hugely erect, some of them protruding through the buttons of their soiled trousers.”

Nearly a week in a field hospital brought more awful visions. “Dying men were brought into our tent, men whose death rattle silenced the conversation and made all of us thoughtful,” Pyle wrote. A trench outside a surgical tent was “filled with bloody shirt sleeves and pant legs the surgeons had snipped off wounded men.” Pyle noted “how dirt and exhaustion reduce human faces to such a common denominator. Everybody they carried in looked alike.” Among litter patients only “an extreme blond” seemed distinct, “like a flower in a row of weeds.” Doctors covered the faces of the moribund with thin white gauze. Pyle would long remember one patient in particular:

Under such circumstances Patton arrived at the 15th Evacuation Hospital, near Nicosia, for a visit shortly past noon on Tuesday, August 3. His morning had begun well, with a message from Eisenhower that Patton would receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroics at Gela during the July 11 counterattack. Driving on Highway 113 from Palermo before turning inland to Nicosia, Patton observed that “the smell of the dead along the road is very noticeable.”

A different smell wafted from the hospital receiving tent, an odor of disinfectant and blood and oozing wounds. Green light filtered through the canvas, and the sound of labored breathing filled the ward as if the tent walls themselves suspired. General Lucas, who accompanied Patton while visiting from AFHQ, noted the “brave, hurt, bewildered boys” on their cots, including one who “had lost his right arm at the shoulder. He was still suffering from shock and was in tears…. A general has to develop a thick skin if he can, but it is sometimes hard to do.”

On a stool midway through the ward slouched a private from the 26th Infantry, Charles H. Kuhl. A carpet layer from Indiana in civil life, Kuhl had been a soldier for eight months and in the 1st Division since early June. Examined at a battalion aid station the previous day, he received sodium amytal—a barbiturate to induce sleep—before being moved back to the 15th Evac, where an initial diagnosis concluded: “Psychoneurosis anxiety state—moderate severe. Soldier has been twice before in hospital within ten days. He can’t take it at the front, evidently.” A more discerning evaluation would reveal that Kuhl had malaria, chronic diarrhea, and a fever of 102.2 degrees.

Patton asked Kuhl where he was hurt. The soldier shrugged. He was “nervous” rather than wounded, Kuhl said. “I guess I can’t take it,” he added. To the astonishment of doctors and patients alike, Patton slapped the man across the face with his folded gloves. “You coward, you get out of this tent!” he shouted. “You can’t stay in here with these brave, wounded Americans.” Grabbing Kuhl by the collar, he dragged him to the tent entrance and shoved him out with a finishing kick from his cavalry boot. “Don’t admit this sonuvabitch,” he bellowed. “I don’t want yellow-bellied bastards like him hiding their lousy cowardice around here, stinking up this place of honor.” Alternately barking at the doctors and the quailing Kuhl, Patton said, “You send him back to his unit at once. You hear me, you gutless bastard? You’re going back to the front.”

His rage spent, Patton returned to his command car and drove off, already composing the message he would send his subordinates: “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.” Private Kuhl would be evacuated for treatment in North Africa; returning to the 26th Infantry, he landed at Normandy eleven months later and after the war worked in a South Bend factory before dying of a heart attack in 1971 at age fifty-five. Lucas, who saw “nothing serious” in the incident, soon returned to Algiers and neglected to mention it to Eisenhower. In his diary, Patton wrote of Private Kuhl, “I gave him the devil…. One sometimes slaps a baby to bring it to.”

A week later, on August 10, a similar outburst would occur under nearly identical circumstances at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital, near Santo Stefano on the north coast. Private Paul G. Bennett, a gunner from South Carolina who had enlisted before Pearl Harbor, had been evacuated from the 17th Field Artillery despite pleading with medics to remain with his unit. Dehydrated, feverish, and unsettled by the severe wounding of a comrade, he appeared “confused, weak, and listless.” At 1:30
P.M
., during an impromptu visit to the receiving tent, Patton came upon the trembling Bennett, who tried to sit at attention on his cot. “It’s my nerves,” Bennett said. “I can hear the shells come over, but I can’t hear them burst.”

“What’s this man talking about? What’s wrong with him?” Patton demanded. The attending physician reached for a chart but before he could reply, Patton erupted. “Your nerves, hell. You are just a goddamned coward, you yellow son-of-a-bitch!” he shouted. “You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. I ought to shoot you myself right now, goddam you.” Tugging a pistol from his holster, he waved the gun in Bennett’s face, then struck him with the flat of his hand. A nurse lunged toward Patton but was restrained by a doctor. “I want you to get that man out of here right away,” Patton told the hospital commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier, who had been drawn to the tent by the commotion. Patton turned to leave but then whirled on Bennett again, smacking him with enough force to knock the soldier’s helmet liner from his head. A few moments later, in an adjacent ward, Patton broke into sobs. “I can’t help it. It breaks me down to see you brave boys.” His voice rose nearly to a shriek. “It makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied.”

As he returned to his car, Patton told Currier, “I won’t have these cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals. We’ll probably have to shoot them sometime anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.” A reporter for the London
Daily Mail
who arrived at that moment heard Patton add, “There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews.” The fuming army commander drove to Omar Bradley’s II Corps headquarters. “Sorry to be late, Bradley. I stopped off at a hospital on the way up. There
were a couple of malingerers there.” He had struck one, Patton added, “to put a little guts into them.”

Few acts of corporal punishment would be more scrutinized, analyzed, and condemned than the two slapping incidents on Sicily in August 1943. If it seems likely that Patton suffered his own stress-induced breakdown, that makes his conduct no less “inexcusable and asinine,” in Colonel Currier’s words. He had brought shame on himself and on the Army he cherished, and for decades his name could hardly be uttered without conjuring not only his battlefield panache but also his reprehensible behavior, unworthy of an American.

For now, the occurrences in those two hot, malodorous tents remained hidden from public view, although whispers soon spread through the ranks. Private Bennett returned to the front after a week’s rest and pastoral counseling. “Don’t tell my wife!” he pleaded. Bradley took the initial report from the 93rd Evac and ordered, “Lock it up in my safe,” a derelict act of misguided loyalty. No safe was likely to hold the secret for long.

As for Patton, he exhibited neither remorse nor introspection. After thrashing Private Bennett, he told both his staff and his diary, “I may have saved his soul, if he had one.”