In November 1943, Dwight D. Eisenhower faced a decision that would shape the last 18 months of World War II in Europe. The question was whether to fire his most gifted battlefield commander over two enlisted men most Americans had never heard of.
The commander was George S. Patton Jr. The men were Charles Herman Kuhl and Paul G. Bennett.
The story began on August 3, 1943, in a hot canvas tent on the dusty coast of Sicily. Patton, a three-star general, walked into a field hospital and slapped a 26-year-old private across the face with his own leather glove.
Seven days later, he did it again to a different soldier. This time he pulled his pistol.
Charles Kuhl was 26 years old, a carpet weaver from Mishawaka, Indiana. He had never traveled outside his home state before the army sent him to North Africa.
He served as a private first class with L Company of the 26th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, the Big Red One. He had survived the Tunisia campaign and the landings on Sicily.
Two days before he entered the field hospital, an army physician diagnosed him with chronic dysentery, malaria, and a temperature of 102.2 degrees. The medical file listed him as suffering from what the army called battle fatigue.
Paul Bennett was 21 years old, from South Carolina. He was a private in Battery C of the 17th Field Artillery Regiment and had served four years in the army.
He had a wife and an infant child at home he had never met. He had gone to pieces in the field the day before, after his best friend was wounded next to him and he could not stop the bleeding.
The doctors gave him sedatives and put him on a cot at the 93rd Evacuation Hospital in an olive grove near Sant'Agata di Militello on the northern coast of Sicily.
On the morning of August 10, 1943, Patton walked into that tent. He was 57 years old, the son of a Confederate cavalry family from Virginia, and the most feared American general in the war.
He walked down the row of cots and stopped at Bennett. He asked what was wrong. Bennett tried to answer but could not stop shaking.
What Patton said next was recorded verbatim in the after-action report filed by Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Currier, the hospital's chief physician. Patton called Bennett a coward.
He pulled one of his ivory-handled Colt revolvers from its holster and waved it in the young man's face. Then he slapped him twice, hard enough that Bennett's helmet rolled onto the floor.
Four thousand miles to the west, Eisenhower was sitting in a whitewashed villa in Algiers reading dispatches. He had known Patton for 30 years since they were young officers together at Camp Meade, Maryland.
Patton had once been his superior officer. Now Eisenhower was Patton's boss. He had already made Patton's career, and he was about to be asked whether to end it.
The report from Sicily reached Eisenhower's desk on August 17, 1943, exactly one week after the second slap. He read it in silence, then read it a second time.
He picked up a pen and wrote a private letter to Patton by his own hand, so that no record would exist in the army files. It was one of the harshest reprimands Eisenhower ever wrote to any officer.
The letter ordered Patton to apologize to the two soldiers he had struck and to the doctors and nurses of both hospitals. It ordered him to apologize in person to every division of the Seventh Army under his command.
It warned him that his career hung by a thread. It made no promises about what would happen if the story ever reached the American press.
For three months, it did not. Three American war correspondents had learned of the slappings from hospital staff in mid-August and had flown to Algiers to confront Eisenhower directly.
They agreed to hold the story for the war, for the boys still fighting. For three months, it sat in three notebooks in three American press offices.
During those months, Patton apologized division by division in front of every man in his Seventh Army. He stood on tank engine covers and wooden ammunition crates and said the words, "I am sorry."
Kuhl and Bennett returned to duty with their units. The war moved on to the landings at Salerno in September, to the mud of the Italian mountains, and to the beachheads at Anzio.
Then on November 21, 1943, a syndicated newspaper columnist named Drew Pearson went on the NBC Blue Network radio program he hosted every Sunday evening and told the country everything.
The reaction was immediate and terrifying. By November 23, congressmen were standing on the floor of the House demanding that Patton be relieved of command and sent home in disgrace.
The New York Times ran a full column story on the front page. The Washington Post editorialized against him. Senator Jed Johnson of Oklahoma introduced a resolution to strip Patton of his rank.
Letters from grieving mothers of American soldiers began to arrive at the War Department by the thousand. Some contained photographs of dead sons.
Henry Stimson, the 76-year-old Secretary of War, prepared to testify before the Senate. He believed in officers as gentlemen, and he was being asked to defend a lieutenant general who had struck two enlisted men.
Behind all of this sat General George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff of the United States Army. A man Winston Churchill called the organizer of victory, Marshall had a decision to make, and Eisenhower was waiting for it.
On November 24, 1943, Eisenhower sent Marshall a cable. In it, he made an argument that would shape the last 18 months of the war in Europe.
He wrote that George Patton was, in his opinion, indispensable to the war effort and one of the guarantors of American victory. Marshall read the cable and put it in a folder.
He did not answer for another full day. When he did, he backed Eisenhower's decision fully and made clear he would defend it politically in Washington.
Patton would not be fired. But he would pay a price, and so would tens of thousands of American boys 18 months later in the snow-covered forests of Belgium.
Dwight David Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas, in October 1890, but raised in Abilene, Kansas. His mother, Ida, was a River Brethren pacifist who wept when her son accepted his appointment to West Point.
He had spent the First World War stateside training tank crews. He had never seen combat. He was 51 years old on Pearl Harbor Day and had never commanded a battalion or a regiment in combat.
In the space of 18 months, Marshall promoted him five times. By the summer of 1943, he was the supreme allied commander in the Mediterranean, in charge of every American, British, French, Polish, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian soldier fighting Nazi Germany in that theater.
He was a man who almost never lost his temper, who ate breakfast alone reading Zane Grey westerns, and who smoked three to four packs of Camel cigarettes a day. He suffered from crushing tension headaches no doctor could cure.
George Smith Patton Jr. was born five years earlier, in November 1885, on a citrus ranch in San Gabriel, California, into a family of Confederate generals. His grandfather had been killed at the Third Battle of Winchester in 1864.
He grew up believing quite literally and openly that he was the reincarnation of a Napoleonic marshal, and before that a Roman legionnaire, and before that a Viking warrior. He had told this to his wife Beatrice on their honeymoon in 1910.
He had been dyslexic as a child, in a time before the word existed. He had memorized entire chapters of the Bible by having them read to him.
He had ridden with John Pershing into Mexico chasing Pancho Villa in 1916 and had killed three of Villa's men with the ivory-handled Colt he would carry for the rest of his life.
He had commanded American tanks in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 and had been wounded in the leg leading his men out of a shell hole under machine gun fire.
By the summer of 1943, he was a 57-year-old lieutenant general with a public persona built on profanity so profound that his own aides could not always look him in the eye when he was talking.
He was also, and this is the thing lost under 80 years of legend, deeply and chronically afraid of failing. He wrote poetry about it and confessed to his wife in letters that he was terrified before every battle.
His answer was always to move faster, to shout louder, to attack sooner, because if he stopped, he thought the fear would catch him. Two days before he slapped Paul Bennett, he wrote in his own diary five words: "I feel utterly worn out."
The third man in this story was Omar Nelson Bradley. He was 50 years old in the summer of 1943, born in a two-room log cabin outside Clark, Missouri.
He had graduated in the same West Point class as Eisenhower in 1915, the class the army would later call "the stars fell on" because 59 of its 164 graduates would eventually wear the stars of a general officer.
Bradley was quiet where Patton was loud. He wore round steel-rimmed spectacles and spoke with a soft Missouri accent. He had served as Patton's deputy in the Seventh Army in Sicily.
Patton had liked him well enough but had not fully respected him. That would prove to be a mistake. By the time the snows fell on the Ardennes in December 1944, Bradley would be an army group commander, and Patton would be his subordinate.
That was the price. That was what Eisenhower did instead of firing him.
The Ardennes is a stretch of forested plateau in eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg about 80 miles across at its widest point. There are hills, dense woods of pine and spruce, small rivers with steep banks, and small stone villages.
Mostly there are roads, winding country roads cut through the trees between villages so small that a man walking briskly could cross one in three minutes. Places with names most Americans had never heard and would learn to remember for the rest of their lives.
The German army had come through here in 1914 on the way to the Marne. It had come through again in 1940 in the blitzkrieg that broke the French Third Republic in six weeks. Both times the world had been surprised.
By the autumn of 1944, after the breakout from Normandy and the race across France, the Allied line ran roughly north to south from the North Sea coast down through Luxembourg and into eastern France.
The line was too long. Eisenhower, at his headquarters in the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, did not have enough divisions to make every mile of it strong. He had to make a choice.
He put his best divisions on the shoulders. In the Ardennes, he put his weakest. The sector was held by four American infantry divisions and part of an armored division.
Two of those divisions, the 99th and the 106th, had never been in combat. They were green, fresh from the transport ships at Le Havre, most of them 19 or 20 years old.
The other two, the 28th and the 4th, had been mauled in the Hürtgen Forest earlier that autumn and had been sent to the Ardennes precisely because it was quiet. It was a rest area.
There were about 83,000 American soldiers in the entire Ardennes sector on December 15, 1944. Facing them, hidden in the same forest on the German side, were 410,000 German soldiers, 1,400 tanks and assault guns, and 2,600 artillery pieces.
It was the largest concentration of German force on the western front in the entire war. American intelligence had not seen them coming. This was the largest intelligence failure of the war in Europe.
The Germans had used only landline telephones for their operational planning, which meant Ultra, the Allied signals intelligence program, could not read them. They had moved their divisions at night under heavy cloud cover.
Eisenhower's intelligence officers had convinced themselves that the German army was finished, that it did not have the fuel, the manpower, or the will to launch another major offensive. They were wrong on all three counts.
An armored offensive needs roads. Tanks cannot drive cross country through 18 inches of snow, over frozen streams, up wooded ridges. The Ardennes had roads, but they were few and narrow, and they converged everywhere on small towns.
Whoever held those towns held the roads, and whoever held the roads could move armies. The single most important road junction in the entire Ardennes was a market town of about 4,000 people at the meeting of seven roads.
Its name was Bastogne. Every road in the southern half of the German attack plan ran through Bastogne. If the Germans could take it, they could pour armor westward toward the Meuse River and beyond it toward Antwerp.
That was Hitler's plan: split the Allied armies in two, retake Antwerp, force a negotiated peace on the Western Allies, then turn all of Germany's remaining strength east against the Soviet armies.
If the Germans could not take Bastogne, the plan fell apart. The armor would be trapped on the narrow forest roads, exposed to Allied air power the moment the weather cleared.
The winter of 1944 to 1945 was the coldest recorded in Western Europe in 40 years. From mid-December through mid-January, the temperature in the Ardennes ranged from about 10 degrees Fahrenheit at noon to 25 below at night.
At those temperatures, engine oil turns to sludge. Lubricants in rifles freeze solid, so the bolt will not cycle. Frostbite sets in on exposed skin in under 15 minutes. Entrenching tools shatter when they strike frozen ground.
Snow began falling on December 14, 1944, and kept falling on and off for the next 30 days. By the 23rd, the drifts were waist deep across most of the plateau. Country lanes disappeared entirely.
Soldiers wrapped their feet in burlap sacks and torn strips of blanket because there were not enough dry socks. Trench foot became an epidemic. Roughly 10,000 cases before the battle was over.
German artillery dropping shells into the tops of the pine trees produced what the Americans learned to call tree bursts. The shell exploded 30 feet up, and every foxhole below was pierced by falling wood splinters as deadly as shrapnel.
On the 15th of December, 1944, a Friday, most of the American soldiers in the Ardennes sector went to bed thinking they were in a quiet part of the war. Some had been given leave passes to Paris for Christmas.
At 5:30 on Saturday morning, December 16, 1944, the world exploded. The German artillery came first, 2,000 guns opening simultaneously along an 80-mile front.
The Americans in the foxholes could feel it before they could hear it, a vibration coming through the frozen ground. Then the sky lit up in the east like a false dawn, and the shells began arriving thousands per minute.
Behind the shells came the infantry. Behind the infantry came the tanks. The Sixth SS Panzer Army in the north was commanded by Sepp Dietrich. The Fifth Panzer Army in the center was commanded by Hasso von Manteuffel.
In three days they intended to be across the Meuse River, 60 miles inside the Allied lines. In a week, they intended to be in Antwerp.
The green American divisions in the way of the Sixth SS Panzer Army in the north were overrun by mid-morning. Whole regiments of the 106th Infantry Division, boys who had been in Europe for six weeks, were surrounded by dark on the 17th and surrendered on the 19th.
Seven thousand American prisoners were taken in that single surrender, the largest single mass surrender of American troops in the entire European theater of the war.
But farther south, at a country crossroads called Baugnez near the town of Malmedy, something else happened. An American convoy from Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, about 140 men in trucks, ran into the leading tanks of Kampfgruppe Peiper.
The Americans surrendered without a fight. They were disarmed and herded into a field beside the road. Then members of Peiper's command opened fire on the prisoners with machine guns from a passing halftrack.
Eighty-four American soldiers were killed in that field. Some tried to run and were shot in the back. Others played dead in the snow and were finished off by pistol shots to the head.
A handful survived by lying still under the corpses of their friends until the German column moved on, then crawling to a farmhouse whose Belgian owner hid them for two days.
The survivors' stories reached First Army headquarters within 24 hours. Within 48 hours, they had reached every American unit fighting in the Ardennes. The response was immediate and quiet and unwritten.
American soldiers stopped taking SS prisoners. It was not policy. It was not sanctioned. It happened because Malmedy had happened, and the SS in the Ardennes that winter knew the rules had changed.
On the same day, 20 miles to the west at the small town of Bastogne, an even more consequential thing was beginning. Elements of the Panzer Lehr Division and the 26th Volksgrenadier Division were driving hard for the road junction.
Bastogne was defended by a scratch force: some engineers, some tank destroyers, part of the shattered 28th Infantry Division falling back from the border in whatever vehicles they could find.
Eisenhower saw the size of the German attack by the evening of the 17th. He acted immediately and without asking Washington. He committed his strategic reserve, the two American airborne divisions, the 82nd and the 101st.
He ordered the 82nd north to plug a gap on the northern shoulder of the German penetration. He ordered the 101st to Bastogne.
The 101st Airborne Division had been in continuous combat since the 6th of June. Its men were tired. Many were on leave in Paris. They were loaded onto open cattle trucks in the middle of the night on the 18th.
They arrived in Bastogne cold and confused in the small hours of the 19th of December. Their commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was in Washington for a conference. His deputy, Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, was in charge.
McAuliffe was a small, dark-haired artillery officer with a reputation among his men for staying calm under fire. He had jumped into Normandy with the artillery on the night of D-Day and into Holland in September.
Now in December, he was going to defend a Belgian crossroads town against three German divisions without adequate air support, without adequate supply, in the coldest week of the war.
On the 19th of December at Verdun in eastern France, 130 miles to the south, Eisenhower called an emergency conference of his senior American commanders. The meeting was held on the second floor of an old French barracks called the Caserne Maringer.
There was no heat. The generals kept their overcoats on. Eisenhower opened the meeting by saying the German offensive represented an opportunity as well as a crisis. There would be, he said, only cheerful faces at the conference table.
Patton, whose son-in-law had been a German prisoner of war since February 1943 and who was chewing an unlit cigar, is said to have replied, "Hell, let's have the guts to let those bastards go all the way to Paris. Then we'll cut them off and chew them up."
Eisenhower smiled, then asked Patton how quickly he could turn the Third Army north. This was the moment for which he had kept Patton alive as a commander in November 1943.
Patton had come to the meeting knowing what would be asked. Before leaving Nancy that morning, he had ordered his staff to prepare three alternate plans for turning the Third Army 90 degrees from an eastward attack to a northward attack into the German flank.
He had not been ordered to prepare these plans. He had simply done it on the basis of his own reading of the situation. He gave Eisenhower his answer: 48 hours, three divisions attacking north.
Bradley did not believe it. The British representatives did not believe it. To pull three divisions out of a live front, disengage them, wheel them 90 degrees, move them 100 miles north through winter weather, and put them into combat in 48 hours was a maneuver no army in modern history had ever attempted at that scale.
Eisenhower asked him if he was serious. Patton said he was. Eisenhower said, "Do it."
That was the 19th of December. Patton drove back to Nancy through the snow. He had already made a coded telephone call to his headquarters and given the three-word signal that activated the plan his staff had prepared.
Back at Third Army headquarters, Patton summoned the Third Army chaplain, a Roman Catholic priest named Colonel James H. O'Neill, and asked him to write a prayer for good weather.
O'Neill was startled. He said he had never written a prayer for weather before. Patton told him to try. About an hour later, O'Neill produced a short prayer asking God to restrain the immoderate rains and grant fair weather for battle.
Patton read it, signed his name to a Christmas greeting on the back, and ordered a quarter of a million copies printed. He had them distributed, one to every soldier of the Third Army in the days before the offensive began.
The Third Army wheeled north on the 21st of December. Three divisions came off the line facing east and began the long, cold movement north. They drove through the night without headlights because of the fear of German night fighters.
They drove through snow so heavy that the men in the trucks could not see the trucks in front of them. Drivers fell asleep at the wheel and had to be shaken awake. Fuel trucks broke down and had to be pushed by the men behind them.
By the morning of the 22nd of December, 1944, the leading elements of the 4th Armored Division were in contact with the Germans at the town of Martelange, about 25 miles south of Bastogne.
Bastogne itself was by that same morning completely surrounded. The German ring had closed on the night of the 21st. The 101st Airborne, together with elements of the 10th Armored Division and other troops, about 18,000 men in all, were cut off.
They had limited ammunition, almost no medical supplies, and were low on food. Wounded men lay in a converted riding hall because the town's field hospital had been overrun by German patrols on the first day of the siege.
At about 11 in the morning on the 22nd, a German delegation approached the American perimeter under a white flag. They carried a written surrender demand from General Heinrich von Lüttwitz, commander of the 47th Panzer Corps.
The demand promised the annihilation of the American forces if they did not lay down their arms within two hours. It was carried to McAuliffe's command post in the cellar of a Belgian army barracks on the edge of Bastogne.
McAuliffe read it. He is reported by every officer present to have said the same word out loud: "Nuts." His operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry Kinnard, suggested he send that word back to the Germans as his formal reply.
A typed response was prepared on a manual typewriter in the cellar. It read in its entirety: "To the German commander: Nuts. Signed, the American commander."
The Germans receiving the reply did not understand what it meant. An American colonel named Joseph Harper had to be sent forward to translate. He told them roughly that it meant "go to hell."
That afternoon the German artillery on Bastogne intensified. The Germans knew now that they would have to take the town by force.
Meanwhile, the weather broke. For six days since the 15th of December, the sky over the Ardennes had been solid gray cloud. The Allied air forces, thousands of aircraft that would have annihilated the German columns on the open roads, had been grounded.
On the 23rd of December, 1944, the wind shifted. A high pressure system pushed the clouds east. The sun came out over Belgium for the first time in a week.
The transports came first, hundreds of C-47 Skytrain aircraft. More than 400 sorties over the days that followed flew low over Bastogne and dropped parachute containers filled with ammunition, medical supplies, plasma, food, and on Christmas Eve, gasoline.
The men below stood in the snow and watched them come and cheered. Some of them cried and ran to pull the parachutes down before the Germans could shell the drop zones.
Then came the fighters, P-47 Thunderbolts and P-38 Lightnings and P-51 Mustangs, hundreds of them working over the German columns on the roads around Bastogne.
The Germans, caught in the open in the middle of movements they thought were hidden by weather, were slaughtered. Tanks burned in the snow. Trucks exploded. Horse-drawn artillery batteries were caught in strafing runs.
Chaplain O'Neill's prayer, it seemed, had been answered. The 4th Armored Division of the Third Army, meanwhile, was grinding north toward Bastogne. Progress was measured in yards.
Late on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, commanding the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division, took the risk of ordering a single tank company under Captain William Dwight to charge directly at the German line south of Bastogne.
Abrams was under orders to take a longer, more careful route. He decided the situation would not wait. At about 4:45 in the afternoon, the lead Sherman tank of C Company, nicknamed Cobra King, rolled across the American perimeter into the outskirts of Bastogne.
First Lieutenant Charles Boggess of that tank made contact with an officer of the 326th Airborne Engineers of the 101st Airborne. The two men shook hands in the snow.
Patton had been asked to make Bastogne in 48 hours. He had needed six days, but he had done it. That night at his headquarters in Nancy, he wrote in his diary that this was probably the biggest and most difficult attack of his life.
He wrote that he was proud of the Third Army. He did not write about the two men he had struck in the field hospitals of Sicily 16 months earlier. He never wrote about them again for the rest of the war.
The relief of Bastogne on the 26th of December was not the end of the battle. It was the moment the American army began, at enormous cost, to grind the German offensive back down into the ground it had come out of.
By the second week of January 1945, the German advance had been stopped everywhere. The great westward drive toward the Meuse River had gotten as far as a village called Celles, about four miles from the river, before being cut off and destroyed by the American 2nd Armored Division.
The northern shoulder of the German attack had been broken by the American First and Ninth Armies under the temporary command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, whom Eisenhower had placed in charge of the American forces north of the German penetration on the 20th of December.
That decision to put a British field marshal in temporary command of two American armies would produce a crisis of its own. On January 7, 1945, Montgomery held a press conference at his headquarters in Zonhoven in the Netherlands.
He had been asked by Winston Churchill to be careful about what he said. He had been warned by his own staff that the American generals were sensitive on the question of who had actually stopped the German attack. He held the press conference anyway.
He described the Ardennes battle as if he had come in to sort out an American mess. He said the American soldier made a great fighting man when given the proper leadership. He implied that the battle had been won because Montgomery had taken charge in the north.
He barely mentioned Patton. He did not mention Bastogne. The transcripts reached Bradley's headquarters at Luxembourg City on the 8th of January. Bradley, normally the most controlled of men, went into a kind of controlled fury that lasted for days.
Patton, when he heard about it in Nancy, told his staff that he would resign his commission before he would serve another day under Montgomery's command.
Eisenhower read the transcripts on the 9th. He sat down at his desk in Versailles and in longhand began drafting a cable to General Marshall in Washington.
The cable said in effect that if the American press coverage continued to credit Montgomery for the victory, and if the American command structure was going to be reorganized to give the British field marshal permanent command of American armies, Eisenhower could not continue to serve as supreme allied commander.
The tone of the cable amounted, in the words of his own aides, to what came to be summarized as "he goes or I go." He did not send it. He held it in his desk for 24 hours.
On the 10th of January, Winston Churchill, who had been quietly briefed by his own military staff about how bad the situation was becoming, went before the House of Commons in London and delivered a speech.
He praised in the plainest terms he could find the American soldiers as the principal victors of the Ardennes. He called the battle the greatest American battle of the war. He said Montgomery had played only a supporting part.
The speech was carried on American radio the next day. It defused the crisis. The cable in Eisenhower's desk was never sent. Bradley and Patton never fully forgave Montgomery, but the alliance held.
The armies met at Houffalize on the 16th of January, 1945. Elements of the First Army coming south made contact with elements of the Third Army coming north in the rubble of a town that had been bombed into unrecognizability.
The bulge had been cut in two. What remained of the German penetration was now two isolated pockets, and both were being ground down under continuous artillery and air attack.
By the 25th of January, 1945, the Battle of the Bulge was officially over. The German army had been pushed back to approximately the line it had held on the 15th of December. The offensive had gained nothing.
The cost has to be stated plainly. The American army suffered about 81,000 casualties in the Ardennes campaign. Approximately 19,000 of them were killed. About 23,000 were captured, most from the divisions overrun in the first three days.
It was and remains the largest single battle the United States Army has ever fought. More Americans died in the Ardennes than in any battle before or since other than the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 and the fight for Okinawa a few months later in 1945.
The German army lost about 80,000 men, plus almost all of the tanks and assault guns and aircraft it committed to the offensive. The Luftwaffe, which had made one final effort to regain air superiority on January 1, had been effectively destroyed as a fighting force by the middle of the month.
George Patton drove his Third Army east through the rest of the winter and into the spring. On the 22nd of March, 1945, at a place called Oppenheim on the west bank of the Rhine River, he ordered a night assault, crossing under cover of darkness without preliminary artillery bombardment.
His men were across the river before the Germans on the other side understood what was happening. It was one of the great small-unit river crossings of the war. He was at that moment 24 hours ahead of Montgomery, who had spent weeks preparing an elaborate assault crossing near Wesel to the north.
On the morning of the 23rd of March, Patton stopped his jeep on the eastern bank of the Rhine, ordered his staff photographer to bring up a camera, and relieved himself into the river. He said for the record that he had promised himself he would piss into the Rhine and by God he had kept the promise.
He drove his army through southern Germany into Bavaria, into western Czechoslovakia, into Austria. He was in Pilsen on the 7th of May, 1945, when the German surrender was signed at Reims. His army had traveled roughly 1,000 miles in nine months of combat.
Dwight Eisenhower on the 7th of May was in Reims. He accepted the German surrender in the map room of the small schoolhouse he had been using as his forward headquarters.
He wrote a cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It read in its entirety: "The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7th, 1945." He signed it Eisenhower.
George Patton, on the 9th of December, 1945, was riding in a staff car near Mannheim in the American occupation zone in Germany. He was on his way to a pheasant hunt with his old friend Major General Hobart Gay.
The car, driven by a young private named Horace Woodring, collided at low speed with an American 2.5-ton truck at a railroad crossing near Käfertal on the outskirts of Mannheim. Nobody else in either vehicle was seriously injured.
Patton, sitting in the back seat, was thrown forward. His head struck the metal frame of a partition inside the car. His neck was broken. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He was taken to the 230th Station Hospital in Heidelberg. His wife Beatrice flew in from the United States to be with him. He spent 12 days in traction.
He was, by all accounts of the doctors and nurses who cared for him, calm and clear-headed about what had happened. He told one of his doctors at one point in a quiet voice that this was a hell of a way for a soldier to die.
He died on the 21st of December, 1945, in his sleep of a pulmonary embolism. He was 60 years old. He was buried at his own request alongside the men of the Third Army who had died with him.
His grave is in the American military cemetery at Hamm in Luxembourg, in the sector his army had liberated on the way north to Bastogne. He is one of about 5,000 American dead there.
His headstone is the same white marble Latin cross as all the others, marked with the same information in the same size letters: name, rank, unit, date of death. He is not buried in the front rank or in any special place set apart from the men.
Dwight Eisenhower flew from Frankfurt to the funeral. He did not speak. He stood in the winter mud in his overcoat and watched the coffin lowered into the ground beside soldiers his general had led. Then he flew back to his headquarters.
Charles Herman Kuhl went home to Mishawaka, Indiana. He returned to the carpet weaving business at the Ball Band factory. He raised a family. He rarely spoke of the war.
According to family accounts, he said that Patton had done him no permanent harm, that he had been sick that day, and that he thought perhaps Patton had been sick too. He said in later years that the general had come to see him weeks after the slap and shaken his hand and told him he was sorry.
Kuhl said he had accepted the apology. He died on the 31st of January, 1971, of natural causes. He was 54 years old. His obituary in the local paper did not mention Patton. His family had requested that it not.
Paul Bennett went home to South Carolina after his discharge in late 1945. He never gave an interview about what had happened to him in Sicily. He rarely mentioned it even to his own children. He raised a family, worked, and lived quietly.
He died in 1974. His family did not permit reporters to attend the funeral. The two boys Patton had struck did not become symbols. They did not become causes. They lived normal American lives and died in their beds.
Omar Nelson Bradley became a five-star general of the army in 1950. He was the last man in American history to hold that rank. He served as the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He died in 1981 at the age of 88.
Dwight David Eisenhower became the 34th president of the United States in January 1953. He served two terms. He warned the country in his farewell address in January 1961 about the growing influence of what he called the military-industrial complex.
He retired to a farm near the Gettysburg battlefield, on the edge of the same ground where his great-uncle had fought for the Union in 1863. He died in 1969 at the age of 78 of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
In his memoir "Crusade in Europe," published in 1948, Eisenhower devoted more than a page to the slapping incident. He said it had been one of the most difficult episodes of his war.
He said he had believed then and believed now that keeping Patton in uniform had been the correct choice, but that he had understood the cost of it, and that the cost had been borne primarily by two enlisted men whose names most Americans would not remember.
Whether he ever wrote personally to Charles Kuhl or Paul Bennett after the war is not recorded in the Eisenhower papers at Abilene. What we do know is that he wrote about the incident in his own hand more than once. He returned to it. He weighed it. He did not close the book on it easily.
The title of this story promises an ultimatum: "Fire Patton or I resign." There is no record that anyone ever spoke those exact words to Dwight Eisenhower in the autumn of 1943.
It is a phrase invented in later retellings to give shape to a pressure that was in fact less dramatic and more diffuse. The pressure came from the newspapers, from Congress, from the mothers of dead soldiers whose letters piled up at the War Department.
It came from Henry Stimson, who was preparing to face a Senate hearing on Christmas Eve of 1943. And it came most heavily of all from Eisenhower's own conscience.
The answer he gave in November 1943, the answer that has haunted every American general since who has had to decide whether to protect a difficult subordinate for the sake of a larger mission, was that George Patton was worth the cost.
He turned out to be right in the coldest arithmetic of war. Patton relieved Bastogne. Patton crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim. Patton drove the Third Army into the heart of the Reich and shortened the war by an amount no one can precisely measure.
Whether it was worth it in the moral arithmetic is a question Eisenhower himself never fully answered. He noted the cost. He named the incident. And then he moved on.
The men who fought under Patton in the Third Army mostly did not question it. In the surviving letters and diaries of the men who drove north from Nancy in the week before Christmas of 1944, there is exhaustion, fear, and homesickness so profound it comes off the pages like a scent.
But there is not, so far as the historical record can show, resentment of the man in the ivory-handled Colts who had made them do it. They just went where he sent them.
Some of them, of course, did not come back. Nineteen thousand American men died in the Ardennes. They died with letters from home in their pockets and photographs of their wives and daughters.
None of them, so far as the records show, ever asked whether their general had been worth keeping. And most of them in the end went home.
Some of them, like Charles Kuhl and Paul Bennett, went home to lives so quiet that their neighbors never knew what had happened to them in Sicily on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1943.
Their children grew up not knowing. Their grandchildren, when they learned, learned it from history books rather than from the men themselves.
That is the whole of it. A decision made by one man in Algiers in November 1943 that saved another man's career and cost the country nothing that could be measured on a balance sheet, except the two boys in the tent.
Their names were Kuhl and Bennett. They were young. They were ordinary. They came home. They lived. They died. They rest in Indiana and in South Carolina, in ground so quiet that today, 80 years later, no marker distinguishes their graves from the graves of the men beside them.