Bouncing off this thread, were there a case of any Allied millitary personnel being tried for war crimes?
There were the Nuremburg trials for the Germans and a similar trial for the Japanese, but what about the British, American and other allied forces? I’m not inclined to think that the entire Allied forces came out smelling like roses, and the old addage that “Winners get to write the history books” comes to mind.
I’m not a history buff, and only have a passing interest, so excuse my ignorance if theres an extremely famous case I haven’t heard .
I have no doubt that allied troops did commit atrocities but suspect that these were in response to sights seen when the German/Japanese camps were liberated…let’s face it what would you have felt seeing the poor sod in those camps…pure unadultered hatred and anger is my bet.
One practice which was widely touted as a war crime before the trials, unrestricted submarine warfare, wound up involving a consideration of American and British submarine tactics, which were essentially the same as that of the Germans. Karl Doenitz produced an affidavit signed by Chester Nimitz and, while Doenitz was still found guilty, no punishment was assessed (he went up the river for ten years on other charges, anyway).
As far as I know, that’s as close as any war crimes tribunal came to assessing blame on the allies.
Allied leaders may not have been tried for war crimes like the Axis leaders, but they probably didn’t commit the attrocities. American troops have been tried for war crimes, and Western military personnel are held accountable for their actions.
IIRC, Canadian soldiers were charged with war crimes relating to activities in Somalia. Don’t have a cite handy
But as for “let’s put on a big show and hang 'em right after”, that’s one of the perks of losing the war.
Here’s a list of articles from the CBC archive (TV, radio, print) about the Canadian “peacemakers” in Somalia. As a Canadian I certainly feel this was a horrible black mark on an otherwise proud military tradition. It’s one that the Canadian military is still trying to recover from.
So far as the question in the OP it seems that they were not tried specifically for war crimes. Of the two involved directly with the torture and death of Somali Shidane Arone (16 years old) one attempted suicide in his cell (Clayton Matchee) and suffered brain damage. The other, Kyle Brown was found guilty and sentenced to five years in a military prison followed up by a disgraced discharge from the airborn. I can’t find specifically what they were charged with, but I get the impression it was a straight forward murder charge.
The entire regiment involved (Canadian Airborn Regiment) was disbanded and all branches of the military went through a large shakedown in which many top brass’s heads rolled.
Anyway, this is rambling on but the point is that even in a situation like that the matter was delt with internally. This was, of course, before the formation of the international court. I would assume that now that court would deal with something like this. It’s important to note that the US refused to ratify that court and so any misconduct by US troops would be handled internally and not on an international level.
Despite some claims that everything is subjective and relative, the facts are that the Axis was guiltier than the Allies. It was Germany, Italy, and Japan that started the wars not the UK, USSR, or USA. And there was no Allied equivalent to the German and Japanese massacres of millions of civilians in occupied territories (with the limited exception of the Soviet campaigns in Eastern Europe in the last months of the war).
According to this decision by the Federal Court - Trial Division in a related matter, Brown was charged with second degree murder and torture. On March 18, 1994, the Court martial found him guilty of manslaughter and torture, and sentenced to 5 years in prison and dismissal with disgrace from Her Majesty’s Service.
If it happened today, they would still be tried in the Canadian courts. The ICC does not have jurisdiction if the individual’s own country investigates the matter proprely, as summarised by this ICC fact sheet:
The allies were certainly guilty of war crimes throughout the war, esp. the USSR. Despite the fact that the trials and the law governing them were set-up to try avoid ‘victor’s justice’ that’s what they essientially were (though the prospect of the war criminals avoiding any form of justice was certainly a worse one).
The victor writes the history books for sure! The U.S. has never been above targeting civilian populations to demoralize or traumatize an enemy - or deter a new enemy. There are certainly ‘war crimes’ which the Allies should have been tried, but were not.
Examples:
Destroying Heroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese were already negotiating to surrender. We just wanted to make a point.
http://www.themilitant.com/1995/5929/5929_20.html
Indeed, some top U.S. military men - including Eisenhower and the chief of staff of the U.S. armed forces at the time, Adm. William D. Leahy - declined to support use of the bomb. In his book, I Was There (1950), Leahy says: "it is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
Same link above also described firebombing of Tokyo:
Quote: By August 1945, 58 Japanese cities had been firebombed and the bomber commander, General Curtis LeMay, had to curtail his raids because he had run out of incendiary bombs. After the war, Le May remarked “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
The Soviets had already committed horrible massacres of Poles before the U.S. got involved in WW2, most notibly at Katyn. These crimes were known to the U.S., but since Stalin was an ally, he was referred to as ‘Uncle Joe’, and not the murderer he was.
Even if the number is 25 to 30,000 deaths it is still a horrible crime against humanity. Dresden was an acknowledged military-free city. Firebombing is a specific type of attack designed to create one large inferno that will spare nothing and no one in the city.
I forgot to include in my above post the ‘crime’ of the repatiriation, or rather ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Germans from post-WWII europe. This of course, was ‘approved’ of by the Allies.
Quote:
One of the great unwritten narratives of the second world war concerns the ejection immediately after the war of between 13 and 14 million ethnic Germans from their ancient homelands in Pomerania, East Prussia and Silesia, as the borders of Poland and the Soviet Union were shifted westward. The “ethnic cleansing” of these displaced Germans, as well as those from the Sudetenland, resulted in more than two million deaths and what is still the largest single refugee movement in European history.
There was a case in the Pacific where a US submarine captain attacked and sank a Japanese hospital ship. It was properly marked, and lit up, and on a course that had been published to all warring parties by the International Red Cross. The captain was courtmartialled and dismissed from the Navy, IIRC. I no longer have the copy, but I recall reference to this in Ed Beach’s history of the US submarine force.
OTOH, in what later became known as the Battle of the Bismark Sea, US amy and navy aircraft sunk 12 Japanese troop transports at sea. For several days afterward, the planes were sent out to kill the survivors in the water. I think the Australian AF also had a piece of this action. They strafed lifeboats and any other signs of life on the water, and killed several thousand helpless survivors in the water.
No one was ever charged. The rationale is that many of the survivors would have drifted onto nearby islands and become active combatants again.
As LITTLE NEMO puts it it was the Axis powers that started the war. They did so with the express purpose of world domination.
In my opinion whatever the Allies did, A bombing, fire bombing or whatever to prevent a totalitarian rule of the world by an altogether nasty bunch was justified.
Furthermore the use of the A bombs was also to demonstrate to the USSR that if they had any similar ideas about ruling the world they could forget it.
The bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden were all legitimate acts of war. Nobody “acknowleged” any of these cities as non-military. Aerial bombardment of cities was an accepted practice originally developed by the Italians and originally put into action by the Germans and Japanese.
It is true that the Soviets killed Polish prisoners during their brief war with Poland in 1939. But this information came from the Germans a few years later during the height of the war. It’s not too surprising it wasn’t given too much credence at the time.
Repatriation and ethnic cleansing are too different things. The reason the German refugee numbers were so high is because relatively few of the refugees were killed. If the Germans had received the same treatment they had just given the Jews and the Gypsies, rest assured the number of refugees would have been much smaller. By the way, the German refugee movement didn’t start in 1945. There were substantial numbers of Germans living in Italy who were forced to move to Austria before 1939.
