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1915 – 1971
The tie, exactly: Charles Herman Kuhl was born November 6, 1915, the son of Herman F. Kuhl, a Mishawaka casket maker, and he died in Mishawaka; the standard accounts, including the Indiana historian Ray E. Boomhower's, call him a Mishawaka native. His exact birthplace is not independently established in the sources read for this section, and the gap is named in this build's people note. Before the war he worked as a carpet layer and floor-covering man in the Bend — one account says South Bend, another Mishawaka — and after the war he came home to Mishawaka and worked for the Bendix Corporation in South Bend. What history kept him for happened in Sicily.
The course: Kuhl enlisted on December 11, 1942, trained at Camp Wheeler, Georgia, and Camp Shenango, Pennsylvania, and shipped overseas on Mother's Day 1943 with Company L, 26th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. He landed in Sicily in July 1943. In ten days he was admitted to hospital three times for exhaustion. On August 3, 1943, at the 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia, General George S. Patton, visiting the ward, found Kuhl sitting on a stool at the foot of a bed, asked what was wrong, and — when Kuhl answered that he guessed he could not take it — slapped him with his gloves, seized him by the collar, and kicked him out of the tent. The examination the general had interrupted found a fever of 102.2 degrees and diagnosed chronic dysentery and malaria. Kuhl was evacuated to North Africa.
The aftermath: Patton slapped a second soldier, Private Paul G. Bennett, on August 10; the columnist Drew Pearson broke the story on national radio on November 21, 1943, and Patton apologized at General Eisenhower's direction. Kuhl recovered, returned to his unit, and, on one account, landed in Normandy on D-Day; this section prints the Normandy landing as one account's claim, not as settled. His settled postwar view is on the record and is the more remarkable document: Patton, he said, had not known how sick he was — "I never did like war or being overseas." The scene was carried into the 1970 film Patton, where Kuhl was played by Tim Considine. He died of a heart attack on January 31, 1971, at Mishawaka, aged 55, and is buried in Fairview Cemetery, Mishawaka. Crime owns no part of this entry and this section enlarges no incident beyond the documented record: it is a life course — a workingman taken sick in a war, wronged in a hospital tent, and honest about it ever after.
Sources:
- Ray E. Boomhower, Indiana historical writing on Charles Kuhl (Mishawaka native; family; the Sicily record), as carried in the standard accounts
- Wikipedia, "Charles H. Kuhl," read November 2026 (service course; the August 3, 1943 incident; postwar life; death and burial) — birthplace not independently established therein