The general spots him.

“Why are you here?” Patton demands. His nerves are on edge. The race to Messina has him taking dangerous tactical chances. The ego that has so often defined him has pushed him to his emotional limits.

“I guess I can’t take it, sir.”

Patton seethes. “You coward,” he bellows. “Leave this tent at once.”

Kuhl remains motionless, sitting straight up at attention. The silence so unnerves Patton that he explodes. The general slaps Kuhl hard across the face with the gloves he is holding. He then lifts Kuhl off the stool by the collar of his uniform, shoves him toward the exit, and kicks him hard in the rear end. “You hear me, you yellow bastard. You’re going back to the front,” Patton screams at him.

The doctors and nurses working in the small field hospital are horrified, yet, surprisingly, they soon move on from the incident. As a professional soldier, Patton thinks nothing of it. Indeed, when news of the confrontation starts to spread, and eventually reaches his German counterparts, they are mystified that anyone would be bothered in the slightest by Patton’s treatment of Kuhl. In the German army, such men are not slapped. They are forced to their knees and a bullet is shot through their brain.

Patton writes as much in his journal that night: “Companies should deal with such men, and if they shirk their duty they should be tried for cowardice and shot.”

The press knows Patton’s arrogance. The British understand his competitive nature. The Germans believe him to be America’s top general. But now he is battling his own generals, who despite the rapid American advance toward Messina are appalled by his willingness to embrace unnecessary danger. But only those close to him understand how emotional he becomes at the sight of wounded American soldiers. He is deeply moved by their bravery, and thus cannot stand the sight of those he considers cowards.

Two days after slapping Kuhl, he writes a memo to each of his commanders, ordering them not to allow men suffering from combat fatigue to receive medical care. “Such men are cowards and bring disgrace to their comrades,” he writes, “whom they heartlessly leave to endure the danger of battle while they themselves use the hospital as a means of escape. You will see that such cases are not sent to the hospital.”

On August 10, as Allied troops approach Messina, and Nazi soldiers begin evacuating to the Italian mainland, Patton visits the Ninety-Third Evacuation Hospital in Santo Stefano, a city nestled in a long green valley. Patton steps from his staff car after a long drive through the twisting mountain roads and is surprised to see a soldier without battle dressings or a splint sitting among the litters.

“And what’s happened to you?” Patton asks the young man. His name is Pvt. Paul Bennett. He has been in the army four years, serving with C Battery of the Seventeenth Field Artillery Regiment. He is just twenty-one years old. Until a friend died in combat, he had never once complained about battle. But he now shakes from convulsions. His red-rimmed eyes brim with tears.

“It’s my nerves, sir. I can’t stand the shelling anymore.”

“Your nerves, hell. You’re just a goddamned coward.”

Bennett begins sobbing. Patton slaps him. “Shut up,” he orders, his voice rising. “I won’t have these brave men here who’ve been shot see a yellow bastard sitting here crying.”

Patton hits him again, knocking off Bennett’s helmet, which falls to the dirt floor. “You’re a disgrace to the army and you’re going back to the front to fight,” he screams. “You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. In fact, I ought to shoot you right now.”

Patton pulls his ivory-handled pistol from its holster with his right hand. With his left, he backhands Bennett across the face with such force that nearby doctors rush to intervene.

The medical staff is disturbed by Patton’s actions and file a report. Word of the incidents soon reaches Eisenhower. “I must so seriously question,” Ike writes to Patton on August 16, “your good judgment and your self-discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness.”

But that is to be the end of it. Eisenhower needs Patton’s tactical genius. As Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy will later remind Ike, Abraham Lincoln was faced with similar concerns about the leadership of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. “I can’t spare this man,” Lincoln had responded to those calling for Grant’s dismissal. “He fights.”

Patton fights.

*   *   *

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery is in his command post far from the front lines when he receives news that lead elements of the British army are marching into Messina. Montgomery beams. He believes he has won the race. Brigadier J. C. Currie of the British Fourth Armored Division, who will lead the British forces as they enter the ancient city, has even brought along bagpipes to celebrate their victory.

Currie and his commandos enter Messina. Many of the men are perched on the exterior of their American-made Sherman tanks as the overjoyed people of Messina spill into the streets and throw bouquets of flowers at them. But when the British column rumbles into the town center, Currie is shocked to see American soldiers standing in formation. Their uniforms are filthy from days of fighting, and many are so exhausted they can barely stand. But they have clearly won the race. And then, even as Currie struggles to make sense of this surprising scenario, George S. Patton rumbles into the piazza in his specially modified jeep command car, its three-star pennants on either side of the front hood flapping in the breeze. Patton’s arrogant grin is not lost on Currie.

The British general has no choice but to step down from his Sherman tank and extend a hand in greeting. “It was a jolly good race,” Currie concedes to Patton. “I congratulate you.”

Patton shakes Currie’s hand and thanks him. He revels in the victory, and in the look of surprise on the British officer’s face. “I think the general was quite sore that we had got there first,” Patton writes in his journal that night.

Any doubts about the efficacy of the American fighting men are now banished—thanks to George S. Patton. His picture graces the cover of Time magazine. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hails him as a national hero. To the victor go the spoils, and Patton’s glory spreads worldwide.

But that glory will be short-lived. Despite Eisenhower’s best attempts to cover up the slapping incidents, the story is leaked to the press. For three months, nothing happens. Patton personally apologizes to both soldiers and to the medical staff who witnessed his actions, and for a time the matter seems settled. But Ernest Cuneo, a liaison officer in the Office of Strategic Services, leaks details of the slaps to NBC radio correspondent Drew Pearson, who announces the story to the nation on November 21, 1943. Public outrage leads the American Congress to call for Patton’s immediate dismissal, even in the face of his battlefield triumphs.

“I have been a passenger floating on the river of destiny,” he writes to Beatrice, adding a hopeful comment: “At the moment, I can’t see around the next bend, but I guess it will be alright.”

Patton is correct. Ike firmly believes that Patton’s methods are deplorable, and he fears that Patton’s ego is so monumental that he will sacrifice the lives of other men to gain greater fame.

But Patton fights.

And more than anything else, Eisenhower needs fighters.

*   *   *

By October 21, 1944, as Eisenhower passes a quiet afternoon in his villa at the Hotel Trianon, and Hitler plots far to the east in the Wolf’s Lair, the fall of Messina is a distant memory. Since then, Dwight Eisenhower, a man whose keen sense of self-preservation has led him from civilian obscurity to wartime fame, did something extremely unusual: he defied the U.S. Congress and protected George Patton.