Reasons Why American soldiers were hanged in France during WWII
Reasons Why American soldiers were hanged in France during WWII
I was reading about John C. Woods' life as the only executioner in the American army in France during WWII and at some point it is mentioned that John C. Woods took part in 11 failed hangings of U.S. soldiers between 1944 and 1946.
What did these soldiers do in order to receive the capital punishment by their own Army? Scroll down and continue reading
Borrowing from some earlier writing I've done on US military executions:
Although an executable offense, only a single soldier, Pvt. Eddie Slovik, was executed for the crime of desertion during World War II, with the remainder of military executions conducted during the conflict being for mostly the crimes of rape and/or murder. Looking specifically at the period of training in England, from 1942 to 1944, 18 soldiers were executed, eight having committed murder, 6 committing rape, and 4 guilt of both.
The exact number of executions carried out on US soldiers is somewhat in dispute. It is interesting that you bring up Wood as he is a core factor in this, having claimed to have hanged some 300 soldiers since the 1930s, which is far in excess of the official numbers given by the military in total, let alone by hanging. In the European theater, only 70 executions were recorded as having taken place through Nov. 1945, including the 18 in England carried out at the US military prison at Shepton Mallet. Some 38 executions were still scheduled to take place, but not all did, which complicates an exact number as a few are in dispute.
Something which must be put front and center here is the racial component in play. Despite making up only about 10 percent of the US armed forces, African-American soldiers were 56 percent of those executed. Including Latinos, a minority group which was nevertheless not institutionally segregated within the armed forced, it rises to 72 percent of the executions being minorities. Most strikingly is that *100 percent* of those executions for rape were carried out against minorities. This is not to say that white soldiers weren't committing that heinous crime - 2 *were* executed for rape-murder, and in the ETO as a whole, black soldiers were "only" 139 of the 152 rape cases prosecuted - but it does illustrate the extreme racial bias in how the crimes was punished, with regressive, bigoted views about race and sexuality placing more emphasis on minority offenders, something which is well illustrated by the death sentences handed out for desertion (of which only one was carried out), where black offenders were only 14.4 percent of the total sentenced to death.
This of course echoes the application of the death penalty in the US justice system in general which has been well demonstrated to have an historical racial bias, as well as speaks to the echoes of the Jim Crow system which was in some ways recreated within the US military sphere in England at the time, where harsher sentencing of black offenders was quite clearly intended to be a message of deterrent for the "relatively unintelligent soldiers" who made up that racial cohort. In France, this pattern continued, with many hangings even being carried out publicly, not only to demonstrate to the French (no public hangings were done in Germany) that the Americans took the issue seriously, but much more sinister, to create a scapegoat for *American* ill-behavior in the *black* soldiers, or as Roberts' summarizes a SHAEF report, to "make rape a 'negro' problem not an 'American' problem". Of the 29 public hangings held, 25 were black soldiers.
On that topic of method, executions were carried out either by hanging or by firing squad, although hanging was generally preferred, although not required, in the case of 'regular' crimes. The Manual for Courts-Martial spelled out the dark logic behind this:
>Hanging is considered more ignominious than shooting and is the usual method, for example, in the case of a person sentenced to death for spying, for murder in connection with mutiny, or for a violation of the [Articles of War] 92. Shooting is the usual method in the case of a person sentenced to death for a purely military offense, as sleeping on post.
Of the 18 executions in England, only two were by firing squad, while the rest by hanging, a pattern that continued with Continental executions, despite the associated complications of constructing gallows and conducting the entire thing.
So all in all, the executions carried out were almost entirely for rapes and murders. Not all sentences were carried out, and this was particularly true with desertion, all but one being reprieved, but they still numbered somewhere around 100 total executions. That being said, the racism and bigotry of the military establishment meant that, in practice and doubly so with sexual offenses, executions were nearly as much for the "crime" of being black as they were for the actual offense carried out.
**Sources**
Lilly, J. Robert., "Dirty Details: Executing U.S. Soldiers During World War II" *Crime and Delinquency*. Vol. 42 (4), 1996 491-516
-- and J. Michael Thomson. "Executing US soldiers in England, World War II: Command Influence and Sexual Racism". *British Journal of Criminology* Vol. 37 (2) 1997. 262-288
Roberts, Mary Louise. *What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France* U of Chicago Press, 2013.
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