Race, crime and penalties for GIs in WWII

WHEN the U.S. Army invaded France, it wanted to make clear that it did so as a liberating and not an occupying force. Gen. George S. Patton issued a stern decree that soldiers convicted of crimes against the local population would face the maximum penalties. We might be forced to occupy the country, he argued, but we were not to be confused with an occupying power. Today we have daily reminders of how difficult it is to keep this distinction as U.S. troops clash with insurgents in Iraq.

The novelist Louis Guilloux was hired as an interpreter by the advancing American army and worked on several trials of U.S. soldiers accused of crimes against the French. In the 1970s he would write “OK, Joe,” a sharp, spare political novel about the racism he witnessed as an interpreter.

In France, Alice Kaplan writes in “The Interpreter,” 130 of 180 GIs convicted of rape were African American. Across Europe, she says, 55 of 70 men executed for rape and murder were African American.

Even though they made up only 8.5% of the armed forces, they were held responsible for 79% of its capital crimes. This was the Jim Crow army, a fighting machine built on strict segregation (President Truman’s order to desegregate the armed forces would not be issued until 1948). The American liberators in 1944 were supposed to bring justice, but Guilloux and Kaplan see that they brought the racism that remained endemic to U.S. society.

It should surprise no one that in a massive military campaign there would be crimes, and that in judging those crimes, the racist double standard common in the domestic arena would also be applied. But what may be surprising to readers of Kaplan’s book is the great effort made to show the local population that our armed forces were accountable to basic principles of justice.

Even if we failed to live up to those principles consistently in 1944, in 2005 it is worth being reminded that military justice can be more than a legalistic effort to redefine torture and legitimate physical abuse.

“The Interpreter” recounts the cases of two men from this period: James Hendricks and George Whittington. Hendricks was an African American private in a Quartermaster Truck Company; Whittington was a white officer in the Army Rangers. After drinking with fellow soldiers, Hendricks went to a nearby village to “get some,” Kaplan writes. He tried to break into a hut by shooting through a barred door, killing the father of the family inside.

In another Breton town, Whittington was drinking all night in a bar filled with officers and, apparently, a French resistance fighter. After disputes and what seemed to be reconciliation, Whittington killed the resistance fighter. He then returned to his table and awaited the arrival of the MPs.

Hendricks declined to speak at his trial, during which his defense attorney asked for leniency because there was no clear intent to kill. After all, there was general agreement that Hendricks was drunk and that he had no idea that someone was just on the other side of the door when he shot through it. Whittington, by contrast, did not dispute his intent to kill, but he mounted a strong effort to show that he acted in self-defense. Hendricks was hanged. Whittington was acquitted.

Kaplan’s inclusion of the white officer’s treatment is supposed to be relevant to Hendricks’ case, but it is not clear why the acquittal of Whittington makes the execution of Hendricks any more cruel or inhumane. Whittington’s case doesn’t provide a real point of comparison because both his crime and its context were so different from Hendricks’. Hendricks’ execution would seem just as pathetic if Whittington too suffered the ultimate penalty.

U.S. armed forces were engaged in an extraordinary effort to defeat a murderous regime that in 1944 was still executing hundreds of thousands of people because of their race, ethnicity or religion. The shadow of our own racism could not be completely dispelled even when defeating fascism in the name of freedom, but who would have thought otherwise?

Though Kaplan doesn’t provide an answer to Guilloux’s question, “Why only blacks?” she gives the question shape and force by bringing the crime and punishment of a black solder into clear focus. American racism could become deadly for black soldiers on the front. When the threat, fantasy or reality of rape was mixed with race, the combination became explosive, poisonous or both. “The Interpreter” reminds us of this sad component of a heroic chapter in American military history.

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Michael S. Roth is president of California College of the Arts and author of “The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma and the Construction of History.”