told General George Patton on the morning of the 15 July 1943 that US troops had murdered some 50-70 prisoners in cold blood. Patton noted his response in his diary: I told Bradley that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the Officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or had attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad. Anyhow, they are dead, so nothing can be done about it. Bradley refused Patton's suggestions. Patton later changed his mind. After he learned that the 45th Division's Inspector General found "no provocation on the part of the prisoners.... They had been slaughtered," Patton is reported to have said, "Try the bastards." The U.S. Army charged Sergeant Horace T. West for "willfully, deliberately, feloniously, [and] unlawfully" killing 37 prisoners of war in the first incident. At his trial, which began on 2 September 1943, West pleaded not guilty. Although he admitted the killings, his non-lawyer defense counsel raised two matters in his defense. The first was he was "fatigued and under extreme emotional distress" at the time of the killings and was essentially temporarily insane at the time of the commission of the acts. However, First Sergeant Haskell Y. Brown testified that West had borrowed the Thompson and an additional magazine of 30 rounds and had appeared to act in cold blood. The second defense raised by West's counsel was that he was simply following the orders of his commanding general, who he testified had announced prior to the invasion of Sicily that prisoners should be taken only under limited circumstances. West's regimental commander, Colonel Forrest E. Cookson, testified that the general had stated that if the enemy continued to resist after US troops had come within 200 yards of their defensive position, surrender of those enemy soldiers need not be accepted. The problems with that defense were that the prisoners-of-war had already surrendered, and the surrender had been accepted. The court-martial panel found West guilty of premeditated murder, stripped him of his rank, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was detained in North Africa for fear that his presence in a federal penitentiary could bring unwanted publicity to him and to his crime. On reviewing West's record of trial, Eisenhower decided to "give the man a chance" after he had "served