The Evening Star (February 7, 1946)
Eliot: Army prison dispute
By Maj. George Fielding Eliot
There must be a thorough and sweeping investigation of the treatment accorded military prisoners during this war.
I don’t mean German or Japanese prisoners of war. I don’t mean American prisoners of war in the hands of the enemy.
I’m referring to American soldiers charged with military offenses, or in some cases criminal offenses, and detained in military prisons, detention centers and guardhouses.
In many cases such men have been subjected to the most brutal mishandling and cruelty by the officers and soldiers in whose charge they have been placed.
In the last war we had the scandal of “Hard-boiled” Smith, a lieutenant who was in charge of the military detention barracks in Paris and was later convicted by a court-martial of sadistic cruelty toward military prisoners and sentenced to imprisonment. His example does not appear to have been taken much to heart by those placed in similar positions in this war. Some pretty grim facts are now coming to light.
So far, they center around the United States Army reinforcement depot at Lichfield, England, where an investigation into the death of a colored prisoner last March has resulted in two officers and eight enlisted men being placed on trial before a general court-martial on charges of brutality to prisoners, covering the period from August 1944 to March 1945. According to Newsweek, the evidence brought out at the trial has caused the court to direct that charges of perjury, subordination, conspiracy, intimidation of witnesses and dereliction of duty be filed against Col. James A. Kilian, former commanding officer at Lichfield.
This is all right as far as it goes. But there is strong reason to believe that Lichfield is only one among many. There are too many other reports of similar tenor from other parts of the world where American soldiers have been serving to make it possible to think that the conditions at Lichfield were exceptional. Bitter stories come back by various means – stories of the “Black Hole” of Le Mans, stories of men staked out naked in the African sun at the detention center at Casablanca, stories of men “on the rock pile” in the Pacific theater, stories of clubbings, stringing up by the thumbs, of worse – and nameless – brutalities practiced by American soldiers on American soldiers.
These stories and all that lies behind them need to be investigated right down to the bottom. If there has been another “Hard-boiled Smith” regime in our military prisons, the facts must be brought to light and the guilty punished.
The Lichfield evidence is a sample of what can happen when low-standard human beings are given full control of the bodies and lives of other human beings. Beatings, castor oil, solitary confinement without trial, scrubbing floors with cold water in icy weather, standing in constrained positions for long periods, being forced to double time until exhausted and then being clubbed on the shins for being unable to continue – these are but a few items in the long list of horrors to which witnesses have testified under oath.
And remember, the victims of this sadistic savagery were, for the most part, not even charged with criminal offenses. The vast majority were confined for military offenses – mostly for absence without leave, being drunk and disorderly, or things of that sort.
There seems to have been a consistent Army policy to make detention so dreaded that men would avoid it like a plague, that combat duty would be infinitely preferred to falling into the hands of the guards at a detention center. That policy is all right, within decent limits. It may well have been necessary. But it is clear that the policy has been carried beyond the limits of decency and plain ordinary humanity. A rigorous discipline is one thing; the deliberate encouragement of cruelty is quite another. And that cruelty was encouraged from above is all too clear. For example, a visiting general is quoted by the newspaper PM as telling a sergeant at Lichfield: “You’re not tough enough here, sergeant, you’re running a hotel.”
There have been a good many demands for an investigation of the Army’s court-martial system. That may be required, from the point of view of excessive sentences, though all such sentences are now under review. But certainly it is far more necessary that there should be an investigation of conditions in every military prison and detention center in every theater of operations, to find out just how far this virus of cruelty has spread and to punish both those who have been guilty of such crimes and the officers who permitted and encouraged them.