In May of 1945, a little girl approached a U.S. check point in Kronberg, Germany. She was maybe 7 years old. Dirty, holes in her shoes, blond pigtails, wearing a dress hanging on her frail body. Silent. She held out her hands. Corporal Jimmy Hayes, a 23-year-old farm boy from Iowa, watched. He had a chocolate bar in his pocket, a Hershey’s he’d saved from his ration pack.
Sargent Mike Donovan saw what was happening and placed a hand on Hayes’s shoulder, warning him it was against regulations to feed the enemy.
“She’s just a kid, Sarge. Look at her. She’s starving,” Hayes pleaded.
“She’s a German kid. Yesterday her father may have been shooting at us. Civilians are not our responsibility. They wait for relief organizations,” the Sargent replied.
Hayes looked back at the little girl still standing there with her hands outreached. “Did she support Hitler, Sarge? Did she start this war?” The Sargent’s face hardened as he gave his final warning.
Then one of the younger girls started to cry. Silent, weak tears.
And Hayes made a decision. He took out the chocolate bar, unwrapped it and broke it into small pieces. He gave the first piece to the little girl and then gave pieces to as many children as he could. It wasn’t enough. As the children turned to walk away, the little girl was the last to leave. She looked back at Hayes one more time and then followed the others.
Lieutenant Parker walked over. “Corporal, you disobeyed a direct order.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know that’s a court-martial offense.”
“Yes, sir.”
The report quickly reached General Patton’s desk. It said a corporal had defied direct orders not to feed enemy children and asked how to handle it — to proceed with discipline or to let it go.
General Patton immediately called the division commander and said not to do anything until he arrived. The next morning his jeep rolled into the checkpoint. Hayes was terrified as everyone knew General Patton’s reputation for not tolerating insubordination.
The General looked Hayes up and down. “You gave away your ration to enemy civilians.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because they were hungry, sir. And they were just kids.”
When the General asked Lieutenant Parker for his recommendation, the Lieutenant recommended discipline. But General Patton walked over to the children huddling near and knelt down in front of the girl with the pigtails. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a candy bar and handed it to her.
Then turning back, “Lieutenant, you were right about discipline. Corporal, you were right about humanity. We don’t give out rations randomly but we also don’t let children starve either. Corporal Hayes, you’re in charge of setting up distribution stations. Make sure each child gets fed something every day until relief organizations arrive.”
Two weeks later, the little girl with the pigtails came up shyly to Hayes and handed him a folded sheet of paper. She had drawn, in pencil, a picture of him giving her a piece of bread. Hayes kept the drawing for the rest of his life, eventually hanging it in his Iowa home.
One decision. A court-martial offense. Still, one man had the courage and compassion to risk it all to place food into outreached hands.
The Trump administration talks a lot about “winning” with epic fury, objectives met, charting milestones by points of devastation. They’re hoping the vibrato will drown out the memory that, in fact, Iran did not pose an imminent threat. And they are betting that the civilian toll, now exceeding 1,400, including more than 200 children, will soon be forgotten, and that the actual bodies, buried under the rubble out of sight, will soon be out of mind.
I’d guess there are many Corporal Hayes serving in our military today. But where is our General Patton?
When I remember the school children killed early on, I wonder what might have happened if, instead of posturing around blame, America’s top commanders and generals had simply acknowledged this horrific, tragic accident and offered some sort of humanitarian help and support to the grieving families?
Perhaps because Hegseth has called this a religious war, he and the top brass still standing were only able to imagine Middle Eastern children practicing Islam. The enemy. But Corporal Hayes didn’t notice race, nationality and likely wouldn’t have given a thought to religion. Neither did General Patton. All they saw was the innocent, the starving, the victims. And they responded.
And still today we remember a true hero and the picture he kept for a lifetime drawn by a small child with dirty hands.
And all it took was a chocolate bar.
Rev. Dr. Stephanie Rutt is founding minister of the Tree of Life Interfaith Temple in Amherst. She lives in Nashua.