Pardoned After 55 Years, Court-Martial Still Rankles

His mother and father died without knowing. He told only his wife. His three grown sons just learned several years ago, when he wrote a war memoir.

Others heard Dec. 22--the day that President Clinton granted his pardon.

For so many years, he protected his secret as well as any Army post he guarded against Hitler’s soldiers. In 32 years as a police reporter, he kept it from colleagues while he exposed the secrets of others. He offered no hint to the jazz musicians who shared the stage with him at after-work gigs.

This was his secret: On April 2, 1945, the U.S. Army court-martialed Pfc. Roscoe Crosby Blunt Jr. for fraternizing with the enemy. This was his crime: chatting with a German teenager while her mother was washing laundry for him and his commander.

For that, the U.S. government took 55 years, eight months and 20 days to forgive Rockie Blunt. But he’s not ready to forgive the government.

In September 1943, as Allied soldiers wrested Italy from the Fascists and laid groundwork for the D-Day invasion of France, Roscoe Crosby Blunt Jr.--descendant of colonial settlers, lover of art and music, aspiring writer--was drafted from college into the worst conflict in human history.

At swampy Southern training camps swarming with chiggers, the 140-pound Yankee, barely out of high school, learned to shoot a nine-pound M-1 rifle and slosh on his belly through the mud.

He took to the skills of warfare with fervor and became, at age 19, the youngest Army soldier to win the Expert Infantry Badge.

The Army, though, had a habit of misplacing him. A drummer, he was classified as a bandsman, headed for a music unit. The transfer never came. He was picked for officer training, but it never happened--seemingly a clerical mix-up. Instead he was sent to fight as a foot soldier in Europe in the months after D-Day.

Despite his zeal, he never really took to Army discipline. When its rules seemed pointless, he ignored them with an almost merry nonchalance.

He would go absent without leave for a day or two on a lark. A simple private, he posed on the phone as Col. Blunt to reach a relative stationed at another military camp. If things were quiet, he’d fall asleep on guard duty.

“I thought I was crazy, but he was actually crazier. He cared absolutely nothing for discipline,” remembers a veteran of Blunt’s platoon, Daniel Driscole, of Madison Township, Pa.

At other times, Blunt was gung-ho to a fault, even at his own risk. He volunteered for dangerous unspecified duty, which turned out to be disarming land mines. In his six months of combat, he killed 17 German soldiers.

Once, as he tells it, he fell into the hands of Hitler’s fearsome SS troops--the ones with silver skulls on their lapels. When he overheard them talking of executing their prisoners, he piped up in German with a ludicrous-sounding lie hatched in terror and desperation: They should know they were surrounded by American artillery hidden behind those hills. By sheer luck, two shells came crashing down nearby within moments.

The 100 Germans laid their guns in the snow and surrendered to their 18 American captives. Blunt’s brazen tongue had saved them all.

It was a bloody, muddy affair blocking Hitler’s last offensive--what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. Blunt’s unit and others in the 84th Infantry finally punched through enemy lines and thrust deep into Germany, reaching the Rhine River by March 1945.

Blunt’s company commander summoned him one day and asked him to find somewhere to wash his uniforms. Blunt knew the rules against fraternizing with enemy civilians. But he also knew you don’t refuse your commander.

He knocked on a few doors in the town of Rheinhausen and found a woman who did laundry. Her 17-year-old daughter caught his eye. Soon the two were firing questions back and forth like pen pals. What is life like under Hitler? Are American streets really paved with gold?

The next day, Blunt returned with his own uniforms. He paid with two packs of cigarettes, a precious wartime commodity.

“In my mind, there was nothing wrong with what I had done. To this day, there is nothing wrong,” he says. “What strategic secrets are you going to give to an old washerwoman and a . . . girl?”

But an American officer from another unit saw him at the house and reported him to commanders. Within two weeks, he sat before six officers acting as judge and jury.

He stuck a drumstick up his sleeve as a charm but would need more than luck. Though Army protocol dictated legal representation, there was none, no one to bridle his loose tongue. Asked why he needed to converse while the laundry was cleaned, he snapped back his answer: Was he supposed to stare at the walls?

“From the looks on their faces, I knew instantly that wasn’t the right thing,” he says.

The commander who sent him on the errand intervened but could only reduce the punishment. Blunt was convicted and sentenced to three months of kitchen duty and a $120 fine.

“To me, it was the most terrible thing that happened to me--worse than the Bulge. I was so terrified that my mother and father would be ashamed of me.”

His combat buddies just teased him. Every real soldier gets at least one court-martial, they said. They weren’t so far wrong. During the war, 8 million soldiers served in the U.S. military. It convened no fewer than 2 million courts-martial.

In Blunt’s 12-member squad, at least one other infantryman, Driscole, was court-martialed for fraternizing with the enemy. Lonely and numbed by war, he too was caught in friendly conversation with a young German woman.

Fraternizing with the enemy was explicitly banned under combat rules but not formally spelled out in Army law. Some military courts may have convicted when they found bad intent or harm to U.S. security. Others punished soldiers just for talking to a civilian without authority.

Blunt was convicted under No. 96 of the Articles of War, which gave officers general authority to punish any deviation from “good order and military discipline.”

“All of the cases prior to 1950 are really suspect,” says Korean War veteran Fred Bauer, a civilian lawyer who defends soldiers accused of violations. “The lack of due process in the military system at that time was truly outrageous.”

In 1950, in the face of many complaints, the Uniform Code of Military Justice established new law. It handled lesser infractions with administrative discipline short of military courts.

Courts-martial are much less frequent today. Army lawyer Lt. Col. Larry Morris says the Uniform Code has helped “correct some of the imperfections” evident in World War II.

With the help of conspirators, Blunt turned his court-martial into a joke on the Army. He gave a uniform to a hungry German prisoner, who was happy to serve Blunt’s sentence in the kitchen. Blunt went right back to fighting Germans in the last weeks of the war.

He even signed on for another year of duty in exchange for a paid furlough in Switzerland. He took his vacation, but the Army lost track of that record and put him on a boat for home two months later. For once, he kept his mouth shut.

He left with an honorable discharge testifying to “honest and faithful service to this country.” He holds a Purple Heart for his badly frozen feet, which still ache from too many hours in icy foxholes. He got a Bronze Star for bravery.

Convicted of fraternizing with the enemy, he was later awarded a Good Conduct Medal.

*

A civilian again, Blunt tried to put the court-martial out of his mind.

He went back to central Massachusetts and lived as if it had never happened, working as a reporter at the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester and playing part-time in jazz bands. He never listed his court-martial on any employment or other form. Mostly, he didn’t think about it, though deep down it left a sore.

In December 1998 he read a news story about presidential pardons granted for the holidays.

A young congressional aide, Stephen Kellicker, had been charmed by the old fighter’s spirit when he helped Blunt get the service medals he deserved, decades after the war.

Why not a pardon, too?

Kellicker helped fill out a pardon application from the Justice Department. It outlined Blunt’s military service and life since the Army. Blunt doesn’t drink and rarely swears. He had never even received a traffic ticket. Two congressmen marshaled by Kellicker wrote affidavits testifying to Blunt’s good character. FBI agents interviewed him and his neighbors.

But when he was asked if he was sorry for his crime and ready to take responsibility, he almost choked. “I’m not. I never have, and I never will,” he recalls saying.

The vast majority of pardon requests are refused. Morris, the Army lawyer, says it is especially hard to gain a pardon without accepting blame. And sure enough, Blunt’s request languished for months. Another Christmas passed. Blunt, who keeps virtually every scrap from his past, threw away his copies of the pardon papers in disgust.

Kellicker, though, was writing letters to the pardon office. “Having worked with the congressman for four years, I know that if you pester and badger long enough, it will work. That’s the way government works sometimes, unfortunately,” he said.

Finally, two years into the process, the phone rang: Blunt had been granted a “full and unconditional pardon.” His name was listed with 58 other people convicted of lying, conning, cheating, drug trafficking and other wrongs. Most of the attention went to former U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, pardoned for misusing public funds. (This was in December, before the controversial pardons of financier Marc Rich and others in the last hours of the Clinton presidency.) Still, Blunt was satisfied.

But then he received a letter from the U.S. Justice Department’s pardon attorney, Roger Adams.

“A presidential pardon,” Adams explained, “is a sign of forgiveness. It does not erase . . . the record of conviction and does not indicate innocence.”

And just like that, Rockie Blunt’s joy flashed into outrage.

“Frankly, I got screwed and the Army never admitted it, and they’re still not admitting it!” says Blunt. “I was foolish enough to think somebody might apologize!”

*

Blunt’s wife has Alzheimer’s; he visits her often at a nearby nursing home. Her disease is advanced, and she can’t understand that her husband was pardoned.

The commander who sent him to the laundry is dead. So too is the regimental administrator who authorized his court-martial.

Only Inge Baumler survives.

Now 72, the laundrywoman’s daughter, still living in Rheinhausen, barely remembers the young soldier who traded cigarettes for clean uniforms. She never even knew, until a reporter called recently, that the moments they chatted together cost him a court-martial.

“It is nice he has been pardoned,” she offered.

Yes, it is nice, says Richard Blunt, one of Rockie’s sons. But it’s also irrelevant. “I don’t need the Army or president of the United States to tell me my dad is a patriot,” he says. “His country asked him to do what no man should be asked to do, and he did it with honor.”

Richard Blunt serves as a Navy commander, stationed at the Pentagon.