Patton’s “take no prisoners” order to the 45th Infantry Division

Patton’s “take no prisoners” order to the 45th Infantry Division was not merely a battlefield slogan: in speeches before and during the Sicily campaign, George S. Patton instructed soldiers to kill enemy troops rather than accept their surrender. The order’s consequence became starkly visible after the killings at Biscari airfield, when two servicemen from the 45th Infantry Division faced murder trials and Patton’s words were invoked as a defense. The different outcomes of those trials exposed the distance between a commander’s rhetoric and the military justice applied to the men who acted on it.

Origin and Wording

In the fall of 1942, while the 45th Infantry Division was still training in the United States, Patton addressed its soldiers from a theater stage at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. According to Colonel George E. Martin, the general described British infantry bypassing German positions and later coming under fire from the enemy behind them. If German soldiers then surrendered, Patton said, the 45th Infantry Division should not accept their surrender but should kill them. The instruction was presented as a response to the danger of leaving enemy forces alive behind advancing troops, but it went beyond a warning about combat and explicitly rejected the surrender of those soldiers.

Patton also told the division that it would probably see more combat than any other American division and that he wanted the Germans to know it as the “Killer Division.” The name joined a prediction of heavy fighting to an expectation of deliberate ferocity. His language was not confined to the initial address: on June 27 in Algiers, North Africa, he urged the men to keep killing, arguing that killing more at that point would mean fewer enemies to kill later. He warned against wasting time with prisoners because they would have to be fed, and declared that “there was only one good German and that was a dead one.”

Another officer’s account extended the reported instruction to civilians. Patton was said to have directed the men to kill people who remained near the battle if they were enemy civilians. This report, like the accounts of the speeches, shows the breadth of the violence attributed to Patton’s rhetoric; it does not establish that every soldier heard or interpreted each instruction in the same way.

The Division and the Meaning of Surrender

The book places the order alongside a recollection by Frank Sheeran of a warning he heard after digging his foxhole. Diggsy told him that soldiers on both sides hated snipers and that captured snipers might be killed immediately. He described American soldiers lining up about forty Italian soldiers who had surrendered after sniping near Biscari airfield, even though they could not identify which prisoners had fired. He also recounted a sergeant taking about thirty prisoners behind the line, seizing a machine gun, and shooting them. Sheeran recalled that the account made him think twice about surrendering himself. The episode shows surrender as a peril faced not only by enemy troops but, in the soldier’s imagination, by anyone who might one day be captured.

The division’s battlefield praise sharpened the contradiction. In August 1943, after the 45th Infantry Division’s combat success in Sicily, Patton called it one of the best divisions in American military history. The book connects that commendation to his belief that the division was acting as he had instructed it. Yet, on July 14, after the battle to take Biscari airfield, Captain John T. Compton ordered a firing squad to shoot approximately forty unarmed prisoners of war, including two civilians. In a separate incident that same day, Sergeant Horace T. West personally machine-gunned thirty-six unarmed prisoners of war. The speeches and the killings thus meet in a concrete place and date, rather than remaining an abstract dispute about a general’s style of command.

Trials and Unequal Consequences

Patton’s diary entry of July 15 records that Omar Bradley informed him a captain in the 180th Regimental Combat Team of the 45th Infantry Division had shot prisoners in cold blood. Patton suggested the report might be exaggerated, then advised Bradley to have the officer certify that the dead had been snipers or had tried to escape, warning that the incident could cause a press scandal and anger civilians. Bradley did not follow that advice or cover up the killings. His investigation led to murder charges against Compton and West.

Compton was tried by a military court and acquitted. His defense was that he had followed Patton’s explicit instructions to shoot prisoners. West used the same defense. A lieutenant testified that, on the night before the invasion of Sicily, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaefer had reminded the soldiers over the ship’s loudspeaker that they “would not take any prisoners.” That testimony carried Patton’s language into the trial as an instruction relayed down the chain of command, rather than merely a remark heard at a speech.

The court convicted West and sentenced him to life in prison. The contrast was immediate and difficult to reconcile: an officer and an enlisted man had committed killings on the same day, after the same battle, in the same campaign, while serving in the same division, yet Compton was acquitted and West received a life sentence. The resulting outcry led to West’s prompt release and return to combat; he served the rest of the war as a private. Four months after his acquittal, Compton was shot and killed as he approached German soldiers displaying a white flag of surrender—a deadly trick that made the sign of capitulation, which Patton’s speeches had taught soldiers to distrust, part of Compton’s own death.

Command Responsibility and Lasting Significance

The account does not reduce the Biscari killings to an uncontested, written order with a single wording. It brings together Martin’s report of the Fort Devens address, an officer’s account of the June speech, the loudspeaker testimony at West’s trial, Sheeran’s recollection of killings he heard about, and Patton’s diary. Taken together, these details show how repeated public instructions could be understood as permission to kill prisoners, while the trials tested whether obedience to those instructions excused the acts.

Reports of other atrocities in Sicily further complicate the record. A British newspaperman reportedly witnessed two busloads of prisoners, about sixty in each, being shot. He did not publish the account after Patton promised to stop the atrocities, but told a friend, who prepared a memorandum. That memorandum stated that Patton’s bloodthirsty language and instructions before the Sicily landing had been taken too literally by American troops, particularly those of the 45th Infantry Division. The account preserves both the promise to halt abuses and the accusation that the earlier rhetoric had helped make them possible.

The order’s significance lies in that unresolved collision: Patton’s language cast killing as a practical means of reducing future danger and avoiding the burden of prisoners, while military courts judged individual soldiers for carrying out killings of unarmed men. The differing verdicts did not erase the commander’s words; the testimony and diary instead made those words part of the evidence through which the killings, the chain of command, and the limits of obedience were understood.