In the fall of 1944, the Third Army was pushing through France at a pace that often left German units probing its lines for weaknesses. On one particular night, a German reconnaissance force struck a platoon position. The position was occupied, but the officer in charge was not there.
Lieutenant Francis Webber had left the position roughly 45 minutes before the Germans arrived. He claimed he was going to report patrol activity to the company commander. The company commander’s account stated that Webber never reached him and no such report was received. The distance between the platoon position and the command post was about 800 yards.
During that time, the German probe found the position. Three men were killed: Private First Class Raymond Morse, 20, of Beaumont, Texas; Private Walter Gaines, 22, of Chicago; and Private Lewis Carver, 19, of rural Alabama. The platoon was left without an officer to direct its response.
Corporal Daniel Reeves, 21, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was Morse’s closest friend. They had enlisted the same week and trained together. When Reeves learned Morse was dead and that Webber had not been at the position, he went looking for the lieutenant. He found him and hit him once in the face. Webber went down. Reeves stood where he was and waited.
Under the Articles of War, the charge was unambiguous. Assault on a superior officer was punishable by dishonorable discharge and imprisonment. A general court-martial was pending. The file moved up the chain of command until it reached the desk of General George S. Patton.
The file was three inches thick. It opened with a straightforward charge sheet. Patton read past it. He read the witness statements, the incident report, the medical examiner’s documentation, and the JAG officer’s case preparation. He also read Reeves’ statement, which was four sentences long.
It said: “Lieutenant Webber left the position during the German probe.” It said: “Three men died while he was gone.” It said: “When Lieutenant Webber came back, I hit him.” It said: “I would do it again.”
The witness accounts did not support Webber’s version of events. They described a lieutenant who left his position without informing the senior NCO, which doctrine required in a combat zone. They described a confused and undermanned response when the probe arrived. They described three men dead in a position that had been left without its officer.
The file also contained a notation in the investigative section. There were prior complaints about Webber’s conduct under fire from two NCOs in the platoon. Those complaints had not been formally acted on, but they were now in writing.
Patton sat with the file. He read it again. Then he tore it in half. The court-martial did not happen. The charge disappeared. Corporal Daniel Reeves served out the war.
Lieutenant Webber, who had filed the assault complaint, became the subject of a different kind of inquiry. The findings of that separate examination are not fully available in the documentary record, but the shape of what followed suggests they were not favorable.
Reeves went home to Baton Rouge after the war. Before enlisting, he had worked at a plant near the river, the kind of work that begins before sunrise and leaves a mark on the hands. He had enlisted because Morse had enlisted, and they had been doing important things together since they were 14.
Morse is not in any file that survived, because Patton destroyed the file that contained him as the reason for the punch. He is remembered in Beaumont, Texas, on a wall that lists the men from that place who did not come home.
What Patton did was not ignoring the law. He was reading the full factual situation and making a judgment that the formal charge inverted the moral reality of what had happened. Reeves had struck an officer. That was a fact. Webber’s conduct had left three men dead. That was also a fact. The army’s legal machinery was preparing to address the first fact formally and the second fact not at all.
Some would say a general who destroys court-martial files is replacing institutional process with one man’s judgment. Others would say that when the formal machinery is about to produce a manifestly unjust outcome, the commanding general with the authority to intervene is obligated to use it. Patton did not tear up the file because he liked Reeves. He tore it up because he read it.