Army & Navy – Crime & Punishment

The ugly red brick buildings, begrimed by industrial smoke, sat on a treeless, limestone hogback. Most of the barracks windows were broken. There were no lawns or plantings around the camp. Worse than the looks of the place were the ugly reports that came from there:

The newcomer saw a line of men double-timing along the walks. Even men who could barely walk, because of leg wounds received in combat, were forced to double-time to their cold, bleak barracks. Those who faltered were clubbed across the shins by guards.

The newcomer said he saw other things: men put through calisthenics which lasted three hours in the morning, three and a half in the afternoon; men found with cigarets, forced to eat them; men asking to goto the latrine, dosed with castor oil. Another allegation: Negroes in the mess hall were forced to crawl and bark like dogs before they were fed.

In spite of its similarities, this was no Nazi concentration camp, but the prison stockade of the U.S. Army’s 10th Reinforcement Depot at Lichfield, in England’s Midlands. The victims of these brutalities were U.S. soldiers—most of them AWOL (often by the technicality of having overstayed a pass by a few hours); only a small proportion of them were guilty of more serious crimes.

“One of the Best.” Last week, in a bare-boarded, dirty-windowed courtroom in London’s Grosvenor Square, before a U.S. Army general court-martial, the ugly story began to unfold. The first defendant was slight, mild-looking Sergeant Judson H. Smith, a guard at the camp, who got an 8th-grade education in bloody Harlan County, Ky. In the words of Colonel James A. Kilian, camp commandant, Smith was “one of the best non-commissioned officers I’ve ever seen.” In four perspiring hours on the stand, Smith denied all charges of mistreating prisoners. Outside the court, the disarmingly forthright Kilian supported these denials.

A procession of witnesses testified that the brutalities had indeed occurred; further, that the guards were under orders to act as they did, under threats of punishment if they did otherwise.

Orders Is Orders. In the background

of the whole trial was a fact which everyone recognized. During the invasion of Europe, General “Ike” Eisenhower’s combat divisions had been hampered by the shortage of replacements. Goldbricking was a threat to victory. Some of the G.I.s who landed in Lichfield as prisoners were suspected of trying to dodge combat. There was some reason for the Army to make Lichfield so tough that goldbrickers would prefer the front lines. Did that justify the kind of brutality that prosecution witnesses described?

There were others besides Judson Smith facing trial—other enlisted men, some junior officers. The trail of trials might not stop there. The U.S. Army was on trial.