# How Many Americans Were Convicted Of War Crimes in WWII? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 21, 2024, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559 "2024-07-21T22:05:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/1 "2024-07-21T22:05:22Z")
Google doesn’t seem to supply a ready answer, and Wiki seems to supply only an illustrative (rather than comprehensive) list. Further, what I’ve read seems to be about crimes that multiple people could have had to answer for, not just one guy going off-script. Is there a list somewhere of **individual** Americans convicted of war crimes? ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/2 "2024-07-21T22:17:08Z")
There is a list on Wikipedia. Being Wikipedia I cannot say it is authoritative but seems pretty good. The short answer is one person was convicted and one found insane. There were a few more investigations but they did not result in convictions per the OP. - [Crimes perpetrated by the United States in WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_World_War_II#Crimes_perpetrated_by_the_United_States) Of course, it should not be surprising that when they investigate themselves they don’t find problems. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/3 "2024-07-21T22:28:09Z")
Deleted. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/4 "2024-07-21T22:28:47Z")
> [@Chefguy](#): > > There were also a lot of people who were charged/convicted of desertion. Is that a war crime? ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/5 "2024-07-21T22:29:40Z")
Nope. I just thought it was of interest in a thread where the question has been answered. ---
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/6 "2024-07-21T22:32:12Z")
> [@Chefguy](#): > > the question has been answered. I’m not sure it’s been answered. I’m not doubting the authenticity of anyone’s response, I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that, over four years, two theaters, multiple bloody battles, and some rather … fraught … relationships with captured soldiers, with some 17 million Americans participating, exactly one was found guilty of a war crime. What I’m saying is I think the Wiki list is illustrative, not comprehensive. But I could be wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/7 "2024-07-21T22:37:11Z")
I think the “problem” is the US was not interested in showcasing US war crimes so most never saw the light of day and what few managed to get through were minimized. It wasn’t good for morale and the US as a crusader for good. So, while many awful things probably did happen in WWII (it is war after all) almost none of them ever got to the level of a public trial. At best, we hope, there was some administrative justice from local commanders. ---
**Author:** ![HeyHomie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heyhomie/32/207_2.png) [@HeyHomie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HeyHomie)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/8 "2024-07-21T22:38:49Z")
That’s a very informative take on the issue, thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2024, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/9 "2024-07-21T23:52:33Z")
That makes me wonder if the war records of U.S. allies (i.e. the other “good guys”) might also have been similarly sanitized (by neglect of investigation, for example), for precisely the same reasons. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/10 "2024-07-22T02:03:46Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that, over four years, two theaters, multiple bloody battles, and some rather … fraught … relationships with captured soldiers, with some 17 million Americans participating, exactly one was found guilty of a war crime. I have trouble accepting that just one was found guilty, given that during WWII, 29 U.S. troops were _executed_ for rape during the campaign in France alone.\* Those are war crimes by reasonable definition. > **[Rape during the liberation of France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_liberation_of_France)** > > U.S. soldiers committed rape against French women during and after the liberation of France in the later stages of World War II. The sociologist J. Robert Lilly of Northern Kentucky University estimates that U.S. servicemen committed around 4,500 rapes in France between June 1944 and the end of the war in May 1945. > The invasion of Normandy in June and a second invasion in the south in August, put over two million front line and support troops of the Western Allies into France in 1944. > The Liber... \*Those were a fraction of the actual rapes by troops believed to have occurred in France, and the death penalty was assessed disproportionately against black soldiers, which raises other issues. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/11 "2024-07-22T02:12:05Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > I have trouble accepting that just one was found guilty, given that during WWII, 29 U.S. troops were _executed_ for rape during the campaign in France alone.\* Those are war crimes by reasonable definition. France wasn’t the enemy, though, which I think is an important distinction between “war crime” and “regular crime”. It is a little disturbing that the military’s response was to order the regional commanders to _set up brothels_ rather than tell the soldiers to keep it in their pants. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/12 "2024-07-22T03:06:45Z")
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820: “Recognizes sexual violence as a weapon and tactic of war; Notes that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide, stresses the need for the exclusion of sexual violence crimes from amnesty provisions in the context of conflict resolution processes and calls upon the Member States to comply with their obligations for prosecuting persons responsible for such acts, to ensure that all victims of sexual violence, particularly women and girls, have equal protection under the law and equal access to justice, and stresses the importance of ending impunity for such acts as part of a comprehensive approach to seeking sustainable peace, justice, truth, and national reconciliation…” If acts in France are dismissed as not a “tactic of war” that still leaves occupied Italy and Germany (in the latter country, 11,000 serious sexual assault cases by November 1945 were prosecuted by U.S. military courts, according to an American criminologist. No figures available on how many guilty verdicts there were, but I suspect it was a lot more than one. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/13 "2024-07-22T03:27:14Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > That makes me wonder if the war records of U.S. allies (i.e. the other “good guys”) might also have been similarly sanitized (by neglect of investigation, for example), for precisely the same reasons. You shouldn’t have to wonder, “war crimes” are rarely investigated, much less prosecuted by the winning side against its own forces, and certainly not with anything like the zeal against the losing side. That said, the scale of war crimes committed by the Axis powers during WWII were many orders of magnitude greater than those committed by the Allies, war crimes by the Allies fall more into the category of what normally happens in the horrors of war, while Axis crimes are what one might come up with after staring into the pit of hell for a very long time. > [@Jackmannii](#): > > U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820: [UNSC 1820](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1820) was passed in **2008**. That said, rape and/or sexual assault is a crime. The resolution only Notes that rape and other forms of sexual violence **can** constitute a war crime". Sexual slavery such as the Japanese "[comfort women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women)"could constitute a war crime, as could [the mass rapes of German women when the Red Army of Workers and Peasants crossed into German territory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany#Soviet_troops). That doesn’t make every rape during wartime a war crime, just as every murder during wartime isn’t a war crime. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/14 "2024-07-22T04:19:53Z")
If you mean Patton’s disinclination to take action for the actions of his troops while liberating Dachau, or the mistreatment of Waffen SS prisoners after the Malmedy massacre became common knowledge, that’s one thing. If you mean the [abuse of French women](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vN5drZXsDOU&pp=ygUSRnJlbmNoIHdvbWVuIHJhcGVk) (as opposed to the protection shown to British women, whose rapists we turned over to Mr. Pierpoint when caught - because we respected our British allies but not our French), or the events at Biscari, where German soldiers; in open opposition, or in surrender, or wounded in _hors de combat_ (including Jesse Owens buddy Luz Long), were all hosed-down by US troops, that’s another situation. But either way, as demonstrated when an incompetent junior officer like William Calley is in charge, or worse, abiding senior noncommissioned, fail to restrain the men, they will always regrade into savagery. They always will. Every nation, and every mother’s son. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/15 "2024-07-22T13:37:45Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > > [@Jackmannii](#): > > > > U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820: > > [UNSC 1820](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1820) was passed in **2008**. Oh…so rapes committed by military occupiers weren’t war crimes until the U.N. formally said so. By that logic, since the U.N. didn’t define genocide until the General Assembly ratified the Genocide Convention in 1948, genocide didn’t happen before then. That unfortunate Armenian incident in 1917 and the Holocaust were just disagreements between friends. 🤔 ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/16 "2024-07-22T14:23:10Z")
Believe it or not, the most applicable distinction may be that a criminal act inflicted on an ally isn’t a war crime. War crimes are only what you do to the enemy, combatant or civilian, it seems. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/17 "2024-07-22T20:34:17Z")
> [@HeyHomie](#): > > exactly one was found guilty of a war crime. Many others were found guilty of crimes like rape, for example. Or looting. Remember- a crime committed during war is not necessarily a war crime. > [@Jackmannii](#): > > I have trouble accepting that just one was found guilty, given that during WWII, 29 U.S. troops were _executed_ for rape during the campaign in France alone.\* Those are war crimes by reasonable definition. Well, see after WW2 the idea of a “war crime” was a 'crime against humanity" that was not usually otherwise a crime. You can kill enemy soldiers- but not POWs. Rape was a crime, and prosecuted as such. In order for it to be a ‘war crime’- it would have to be mass and ordered by or ignored by higher ups. > [@Jackmannii](#): > > U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820: “ Passed in 2008, had no bearing on what happened in WW2. > [@Dissonance](#): > > Sexual slavery such as the Japanese "[comfort women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women)"could constitute a war crime, as could [the mass rapes of German women when the Red Army of Workers and Peasants crossed into German territory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany#Soviet_troops). That doesn’t make every rape during wartime a war crime, just as every murder during wartime isn’t a war crime. Right. > [@Jackmannii](#): > > Oh…so rapes committed by military occupiers weren’t war crimes until the U.N. formally said so. No, they were _crimes,_ and soldiers were imprisoned or executed for doing them. There werent 'war crimes". ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/18 "2024-07-22T20:36:54Z")
See posts #11 and #14. Comprehension may dawn. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2024, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/19 "2024-07-22T23:19:46Z")
[Moderating] @Jackmannii , this is too confrontational and personal for FQ. If you have a personal issue with another poster, take it to the Pit. In this forum, moderate what you say and how you say it. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559/20 "2024-07-23T00:35:11Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > You shouldn’t have to wonder, “war crimes” are rarely investigated, much less prosecuted by the winning side against its own forces, and certainly not with anything like the zeal against the losing side. That said, the scale of war crimes committed by the Axis powers during WWII were many orders of magnitude greater than those committed by the Allies But how do we know the Axis committed “orders of magnitude” more war crime than the Allies if ‘“war crimes” are rarely investigated, much less prosecuted by the winning side against its own forces’? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-americans-were-convicted-of-war-crimes-in-wwii/1004559.md?page=2)