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Lichfield

The University of Akron Press

Prologue

A young replacement officer in the Army's 78th Division in Bremerhaven, Germany, I had been granted a ten-day leave to London, where, on this, my second day in the city, I planned to spend the morning attending a public session of an American court-martial being held in the British capital. But I needed help getting there amid the labyrinth of streets in that part of London.

"Excuse me, sir, can you direct me to Grosvenor Square?" I asked the man walking toward me.

"Well, it might be a bit hard to find," the Englishman said. "I'd better walk you there." And he did, reversing his course, leading me through Berkeley Square, turning left on Mount Street while asking friendlyquestions about where I'd served during the war.

The gentleman's response was typical of the British attitude toward Americans at the time. It wasn't the first time I had been personally escorted to my destination by a stranger. Here in England, my U.S. Army uniform conferred a privileged status-an honor that was being publicly called into question at the tribunal I was headed for. It was a military trial that all of us in the Army of Occupation had read about in The Stars and Stripes, the army's outspoken GI newspaper.

Written by army enlisted men, some of whose names subsequently became familiar by-lines in Time, Newsweek, and AP dispatches, The Stars and Stripes kept the rumor mill grinding-albeit discreetly, on the paper's last page. The front page of the daily was devoted to the Nurnberg (or Nuremberg) trials, which had recently begun amid the rubble in that German city.

War-weary soldiers waiting to be shipped home derived real satisfaction from reading the detailed accounts of surviving "Nazi war criminals," charged with murder, enslavement, looting, and other felonies, being faced with their crimes and getting what they deserved. The articles had almost as wide a readership as Milt Caniff's daily cartoon strip, "Male Call," featuring the fantastic Miss Lace.

But when GI readers turned to the back page of the same paper to read the conclusion of the front page Nurnberg articles, many were disturbed by the irony of small, juxtaposed items which mentioned other hearings by the Army's Judge Advocate General into allegations of physical brutality and even murder-atrocities said to have been committed by Americans against Americans who were prisoners in the guardhouses of the army's 10th Reinforcement Depot near Lichfield, in the county of Staffordshire, in England's Midlands north of Birmingham. Some who had spent time on the post vented their anger in letters to the "B-Bag" column (a reference to the cleaned-up version of standard barracks advice to a complaining GI: "Blow it out your B-Bag!"). Several letters included references to an unidentified "Beast of Lichfield" at whose hands at least one death was said to have occurred.

The story finally broke into the open on the front page of the December 5th, 1945, issue of the paper, when readers learned that "Each of nine prisoner guards, formerly stationed at the Lichfield (England) depot, are facing separate trials on charges of 'cruel and inhuman disciplinary treatment of stockade prisoners during the winter of 1944-45.'" The article went on to detail allegations which suggested practices that went well beyond the usual tough disciplinary regimes for which army guardhouses were well known.

The world had just been through a trial of another kind. It had been a war unique in American history. Unlike those which succeeded it (with the questionable exception of the 1991 Persian Gulf War), World War II was characterized by a unanimity of national spirit-an absence of polarization, once the war had begun. It has been called "the last good war," one in which it was easy to tell the good guys from a classically execrable enemy. The Germans had overrun and subjugated most of Europe and systematically exterminated millions of Jews. The Japanese, without warning or declaration of war, had inflicted thousands of casualties and epic devastation in their surprise bombing of Honolulu's Pearl Harbor-newsreel scenes we have all witnessed many times since on television. Responding with a moral outrage unknown decades later, hundreds of thousands of teenagers volunteered before they were drafted. Many of us in college signed up for Advanced ROTC courses in our junior year in the hope that, instead of being deferred as engineering students, we would be called up before we graduated. And almost all of us were. While we impatiently waited for our orders, grades in our other courses sagged. I remember our Field Artillery gunnery instructor at Iowa State, a Regular Army first lieutenant, lecturing us one day in 1942. "The trouble with you guys," he scolded, "is that you're afraid the war will be over before you get in. Well, I can assure you there'll be plenty of war left when you get there." He was right on both counts. Many of us were idealistic innocents. And a number of my classmates would have their names carved in the marble walls of Memorial Union's Gold Star Hall.

I had arrived in London the first week in February, 1946, staying in a room arranged by the Red Cross at a hotel on Duke Street, not far from Piccadilly Circus. On my second morning in the city, thanks to my British guide, I eventually found Grosvenor Square-a quadrangle of buildings enclosing an area of motley foliage that might once have resembled a village green. But after years of German bombing, it looked nothing like the handsome site of today's U.S. Embassy. In a dingy two-story structure of smoke-stained brick facing the square, I found the temporary courtroom.

In a room with dirty windows and a bare wooden floor, the members of the court sat behind a long table on a dais, facing the spectators' gallery. A full colonel, the president of the court, sat in the middle of the group, at the peak of the rank pyramid, with the grades of the remaining members tapering off in descending order to two captains, one at each end. The officers wore customized "Eisenhower jackets," regulation green "blouses" that had been cut off below the waist by local tailors. These helped a little against the chill in the barely heated building, a carryover from London's wartime fuel shortage.

At a smaller table, next to a first lieutenant who was his defense counsel, sat the defendant, Sergeant Judson H. Smith. He had been a provost sergeant in charge of the guardhouses at the army's Lichfield replacement depot. He was personally charged with mistreatment of American soldiers who were serving time in the Lichfield stockade, many of them combat-wounded returnees recently discharged from Army hospitals.

At another small table sat a major who was the "trial judge advocate" (TJA), or chief prosecutor. His assistant, a captain, was questioning a witness when I slipped in and took my seat. The assistant prosecutor wore Army Air Corps insignia and pilot wings. He looked a little old for an Air Corps pilot, I thought. He was at least forty years old.

The captain seemed to be investigating whether some two thousand troops received at the 10th Reinforcement Depot had been treated differently from other transients being shipped from Lichfield as replacements into combat units on the European Continent. Some of these soldiers, it developed, had been transferred from guardhouses in the United States, their sentences having been automatically commuted when they sailed for England. But when they arrived at the Lichfield depot, they had been billeted in its guardhouses.

The witness, a full colonel in his fifties, squinted (scowled is more like it) at his questioner through the round, steel-rimmed lenses of his government-issue glasses.

"Were they to be treated the same as other prisoners or differently from other prisoners?" the assistant TJA asked him.

"There was no distinction made," the witness answered petulantly. "When they were assigned, they were assigned as replacements. They were no longer prisoners."

"Weren't they kept in the stockade?" The captain sounded surprised.

"There was no stockade at Lichfield," the colonel snapped. It was a highly technical quibble. That the facility had three guardhouses behind barbed wire was a matter of record.

"They were in the status of prisoners when they were with you?"

"No! They were only in custody."

"You distinguish custody from other forms of imprisonment? In what manner? How do you distinguish between being in custody and being a prisoner?"

"They were turned over to the detachment commanders for safe delivery to their destinations."

This was a considerable euphemism, I thought. The Stars and Stripes had reported that they had been "put on board ship under gun."

"They were kept under guard, weren't they?" the assistant prosecutor persisted.

"I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them were." The colonel's scowl turned to a sly grin as he sneaked a quick glance toward the spectators to gauge his audience's reaction.

"I move that the answer be stricken," the assistant TJA said in even tones. The president of the court, a full colonel himself, was not quite so calm.

"I am going to ask you to answer the questions of the prosecution and not wander off on any side remarks," he told the witness. "You have come into this court and displayed a very hostile and belligerent attitude, which is certainly not in keeping with the attitude expected of a colonel in the United States Army. You have embarrassed the court. We have a sergeant on trial here and we are trying to get this case over. Please assist the court in expediting the case."

"I am asking you what you did with them as commanding officer of the depot," the assistant prosecutor resumed. "You placed them under guard. Is that correct?"

"I turned them over under guard, yes."

"Will you tell the court just what difference there is in your mind between a man being under guard and a man being in prison? What is the difference?"

"That would only be an opinion on my part," he said breezily, with just the hint of a grin again. He had not been humbled. The captain ignored it.

"Is there any difference between a man who is restrained in a depot under guard and a man who is imprisoned in a depot? He's a prisoner, isn't he?"

"Yes, he's a prisoner." It was a grumpy answer.

"So, when you told the court a few moments ago that he was not a prisoner that wasn't so, was it?"

The colonel just sat there.

"Will you answer the question?"

The witness flushed.

"I refuse to answer the question. The trial judge advocate is trying to embarrass me-" The law member cut him off.

"The remarks of the witness will be stricken from the record and the witness is directed to answer the question."

Before the morning was out, the witness would rise from his chair, shouting, "I'm not the defendant here!"

As it happened, I had arrived in the midst of an historic confrontation between Captain Earl J. Carroll of the prosecution and Colonel James A. Kilian, former commandant of the 10th Reinforcement Depot at Lichfield. He had originally been called by the defense as a character witness for Sergeant Smith, but he was now recalled to spend seven days on the witness stand under the prosecution's relentless cross-examination.

It was a confrontation that would be sensationalized in The Stars and Stripes. Unheard of in a military court-martial, the assistant prosecutor seemed to be shifting the blame from the defendant to the witness, implying that the sergeant's brutality had been a product of the command policies of the Lichfield depot's administration-an administration headed by Commandant Kilian, whose orders Smith had merely been carrying out. It was the kind of twist that Andy Griffith, as the fictional lawyer Matlock, would resort to almost every week in a television series forty years later, except that this scene was devoid of the lightheartedness that characterized that TV series. These two powerful personalities had, by this point in the trial, become the only gladiators in the arena. The roles of everyone else in the room were reduced to bit parts.

The ensuing courtroom drama proved so addicting that I not only came back after lunch that day, but I also returned the next morning-and the next-until I had used up half my leave glued to a spectator's chair in the court. My rail trip to Scotland, together with the rest of my vacation plans, were abandoned to the spell of the trial and the epic struggle that was taking place in that room.

Each morning, as Captain Carroll, a San Francisco lawyer in civilian life, began spinning his web of carefully crafted questions, I watched the face of the aging cavalry officer gradually turn from a weathered tan to a ruddy pink to beet red as his anger and frustration mounted. By the time the president of the court adjourned the session for lunch, Colonel Kilian would be almost purple.

Lunch, perhaps accompanied by at least one drink, seemed to restore the witness's color and demeanor, but by five o'clock he would, once more, look like a man in danger of a heart attack or stroke. Under Carroll's incessant, seemingly insubordinate interrogation (Carroll was, after all, only a captain while Kilian was a full colonel), the former commandant came off as a stereotype; he seemed an arrogant, hard-nosed field grade officer of limited ability-an overbearing peacetime commander who had been promoted beyond his competence in wartime, and who had, perhaps, been given a noncombatant role to keep him out of trouble. That Colonel Kilian could withstand seven days of such aggressive questioning was, if nothing else, a testament to his stamina.

But it was only the beginning. This trial was to be the first of a series, the frontispiece of an emerging scandal that the press on both sides of the Atlantic would call the "Lichfield trials." Repercussions from Lichfield would be felt all the way to the White House. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army Chief of Staff, would personally order an investigation.

Partly, I think, the chronology that follows is about what war does to people-and what people are obligated to do to win a war in which the survival of the country is at stake (indeed, the survival of western civilization may well have been at stake). The book also explores the classic Nurnberg defense: a soldier's right-or, indeed, his obligation-to refuse to obey an unlawful order.

There are no unblemished heroes in the story of Lichfield.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Lichfield by Jack Gieck Copyright © 2000 by The University of Akron. Excerpted by permission.
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