Discipline and the Death Penalty in the British Army in the War against Germany during the Second World War

Abstract

On 3 August 1943, General George S. Patton, commander of the US 7 Army, visited 15th Evacuation Hospital in Sicily. While touring the hospital he met Private Charles H. Kuhl, who had recently been evacuated from 1 Division suffering from battle fatigue. Patton was incensed, called the soldier a coward and ordered him to leave the tent. When he sat motionless, the general slapped him with his gloves and personally ejected him from the tent. That evening he wrote in his diary that men like Kuhl should be shot. A week later, while visiting a second field hospital, he encountered another private suffering from battle fatigue whom he also slapped, telling him, 'You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you myself right now, god damn you.'1 These incidents nearly wrecked Patton's career. He was compelled to make a public apology for his actions and only Eisenhower's support made it possible for him to be given command of the US 3 Army in time for the Normandy campaign. There is no recorded instance of a senior British general acting in a similar manner. On the contrary, it is now sometimes assumed that, following their own experiences of front-line service during the first world war and the publication in 1922 of the report of the War Office Enquiry into 'Shell-Shock', senior British officers during the second world war adopted a more compassionate policy towards the victims of 'battle fatigue'. The literature on discipline and the death penalty in the British army in the twentieth century stops in 1930, in the belief that, with the abolition of the death penalty for desertion, capital punishment for purely military offences ceased to be an issue which concerned the army.2 Far from equating 'battle fatigue' with cowardice, Research for this article was made possible by a Small Personal Research Grant from the British Academy. I am grateful to the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College London, for permission to refer to material in which they own the copyright. Crown copyright material appears by kind permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. I have not been able to trace the copyright holder of the papers of E.P. Danger. I apologize to them and to anyone else whose copyright I may inadvertently have infringed.