The ANNOTICO Report
"On American Soil" (Algonquin Books, 305 pages, $24.95)
by Jack Hamann, is
a DISTORTED REVISIONIST that looks at the night of
Aug. 14, 1944, and the
riot of scores of Black Soldiers at Fort Lawton in Seattle,
that led to the
Lynching of Italian POW Pvt. Guglielmo Olivotto,
the serious injury of
more than a dozen Italian POW's, and the court-martial
of 43 black US
Soldiers.
A fist fight had occurred between a black US Soldier and
an Italian POW,
that left the black soldier lying on the ground,
leading his fellow
transportation troops to AVENGE their fallen comrade.
"Fallen Comrade" ????? Why Not Brave, Courageous, Chemically
Impaired, and
Seriously Wounded in Battle Fallen Comrade????
Mr Hamann attempts to excuse the "mobs" behavior on the
basis that this is
how they had been instructed to act in training films
preparing them for
their imminent departure to the South Pacific war zone.
Mr. Hamann does not
explain how engaging in mob action to retaliate for a
drunken buddy who
lost a fist fight on an evening pass from base was Military
protocol
appearing in a training film to prepare them to fight
the Japanese on
atolls in the Pacific.
Hamann in "pretzel like" analysis further says, the decision
of blacks to
RETALIATE was a function of their intensive training
over the last two
weeks that had called upon them to respond to attacks....
P-l-e-a-s-e !!!!!
Hamanns whole case to exculpate the Lynch Mob is some
stretched
speculation, and his attempt to pin the murder on a white
Military Police
man who found the body, is based on his "belief" with
NO facts to back up
the belief, and a "perhaps".
Two of the three were found guilty of manslaughter, with
their lengthy
sentences of years at "hard time" later commuted by a
now-unknown party. 28
men were convicted of various charges.
NEW BOOK REVISITS A RIOT AND LYNCHING AT SEATTLE' FORT LAWSON
Seattle Post- Intelligencier
By John Marshall
Book Critic
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. And Fort Lawton in Seattle.
Abuse of prisoners of war in American custody at all three
locations
produced outrage with international implications.
One died at Fort Lawton.
There in the nighttime darkness of Aug. 14, 1944, scores
of rioting black
soldiers attacked the nearby barracks of Italian POWs,
leaving more than a
dozen seriously injured. And the next morning, a two-man
military police
patrol discovered the body of Italian Pvt. Guglielmo
Olivotto hanging from
a rope attached to a G.I. obstacle-course wire strung
between two maple
trees.
(Note: At least one Iraqi prisoner is said to have died
from American abuse
at Abu Ghraib. The original version of this article did
not reflect that.)
What followed the riot and the hanging was the largest
Army court-martial
in World War II, with 43 black soldiers tried on a variety
of charges,
including three charged with the murder of Olivotto.
What followed was also
an important boost in the meteoric career of the Army's
prosecutor, Lt.
Col. Leon Jaworski, who later would become a legendary
figure in many
prominent American cases, including his role as the special
prosecutor
investigating President Richard Nixon and Watergate.
The riot and hanging at Fort Lawton were a front-page
embarrassment for
Seattle at the time, but they have faded into obscurity
in the passing
decades after the closure of Fort Lawton and its conversion
into Discovery
Park. But a new book published in the time of other American
POW abuse
scandals is bringing new attention to what went terribly
wrong that hot
August night at the Army base in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood.
"On American Soil" (Algonquin Books, 305 pages, $24.95)
is a riveting,
revisionist look at the riot, the hanging and the court-martial
written by
one of the Northwest's most respected television journalists.
Jack Hamann,
a onetime attorney who went from reporting on Seattle's
KING/5 to producing
globe-trotting documentaries for CNN, has crafted an
impressive debut book
that is painstakingly researched and documented but also
manages to be an
enthralling read.
Hamann's chronological account reflects his roots in objective
journalism,
presenting a scrupulously fair examination of the Fort
Lawton case. In an
interview, he detailed his approach, saying, "As a reader
of a lot of
non-fiction, I find myself most involved in work where
I feel I'm given
enough information to connect the dots. I also really
dislike what TV does
-- telling people this is what you've got to conclude."
But the 50-year-old journalist has drawn his own startling
conclusions
after 17 years of research and reflection on the notorious
events that
occurred just a five-minute drive from his longtime home
on Queen Anne.
Among Hamann's conclusions: What happened at Fort Lawton
was not a "race
riot," as it has always been described. Jaworski's conduct
of the
prosecution was, in the writer's view, "a huge black
mark on his stellar
career." And Olivotto's murder, which has never been
solved, most likely
was committed by a racist member of the military police
(Clyde Lomax, now
deceased) who "happened" to discover the Italian's body
the next morning
far from the riot site.
Hamann's conclusions are based on interviews with more
than 60 people and
voluminous evidence and records uncovered on treks around
the country with
his research partner, Leslie Hamann, his wife of almost
three decades...
The two Seattleites were in the National Archives in College
Park, Md.,
sifting through undisturbed boxes of World War II materials
categorized
only as "Miscellaneous."
"We were sitting side-by-side," Jack Hamann recalls, "and
Leslie grabbed my
arm and said, 'Jack, look at this!' "
She had come upon the first of three boxes containing
the scathing,
once-classified report of the Fort Lawton incidents and
thousands of pages
of interviews compiled by Brig. Gen. Elliot D. Cooke,
chief of the Overseas
Inspection Division in the Army's investigative agency,
the Office of the
Inspector General.
Cooke's report castigated the lax conditions, inept leadership
and botched
crime-scene investigation at Fort Lawton. The general's
report, based on
the sworn testimony of 164 witnesses, set forth a detailed
account of the
tragic events that contradicted much of what was reported
by the newspapers
then and what was revealed during the court-martial later
-- a mistaken
story line that has persisted in historical accounts
for almost six decades.
Cooke traced the riot to an evening of too much beer drinking
at the fort
and a brief scuffle between a black soldier and one of
three Italian POWs
returning on a pass from a night in downtown Seattle.
The 11 p.m. fistfight
left the black soldier lying on the ground, leading his
fellow
transportation troops to avenge their fallen comrade,
much as they had been
instructed to do in recent training films preparing them
for their imminent
departure to the South Pacific war zone.
As Hamann summarizes, "It was not a 'race riot.' It was
two things. It
started between two intoxicated soldiers, one African
American, one
Italian, who called out to each other. There was nothing
pre-planned. And
the decision of blacks to retaliate was a function of
their intensive
training over the last two weeks that had called upon
them to respond to
attacks.
"The blacks had no particular hatred of the Italians.
There is no evidence
of that, although white soldiers at the fort did have
animosity toward the
Italians because of their privileges; they had been in
arguments and fights
with them. The black soldiers had hardly ever been together
with the
Italians. The blacks just saw one of their own bloody
and lying on the
ground and they reacted with 'let's defend ourselves.'
The Italians to them
were just a faceless enemy."
Cooke also compiled evidence showing it was unlikely that
blacks hanged
Olivotto in the frenzy of rioting. There were no scars
or bruises on his
body, as there were on the bodies of all the Italians
who had fled from
their barracks into the prickly underbrush. And the hanging
scene at the
base of Magnolia bluff was so distant from the rioting
above that it was
unlikely to have been traversed in the darkness on foot.
It seemed far more
likely the shy, deeply religious soldier was strangled
elsewhere, then
transported to the obstacle course where his death was
made to look like a
lynching.
Lastly, as Hamann writes, "Did it make sense that black
men -- the
traditional victims of vigilante hangings -- would, for
the first time in
American history, be the perpetrators of a mob lynching?"
None of Cooke's findings deterred prosecutor Jaworski.
The Army had
suffered an international black eye at Fort Lawton and
bringing
perpetrators to "justice" was imperative as quickly as
possible. Nor did
Jaworski allow the two defense attorneys representing
the accused black
soldiers to have access to Cooke's classified report,
in effect crippling
their harried efforts to understand what had happened
and defend their
clients.
The court-martial became even more of a miscarriage of
justice since the
case was being decided by a panel of nine white officers
who had the right
to ask important questions throughout the proceedings,
but seldom did.
Under such circumstances, the defense attorneys considered
it a victory of
sorts that none of three murder defendants was given
the death penalty. Two
of the three were found guilty of manslaughter, with
their lengthy
sentences of years at "hard time" later commuted by a
now-unknown party.
Hamann's own review of the evidence led him to believe
that the three
charged with murder should all have been acquitted since
there was
absolutely no testimony or physical evidence linking
them to Olivotto's
hanging (the murder scene had been trampled and the rope
itself had been
lost). And Hamann became convinced that, of the 28 men
convicted of various
charges in the case, at least 12 should not have been
convicted at all.
"It was a scapegoat verdict made easier by the fact that
the scapegoats
didn't have a constituency to back them," Hamann says.
"The Army was really
desperate to show the world it could get a verdict and
it was easier when
the defendants were black. These guys could not fight
back."
Hamann's diligent research had its obsessive moments,
perhaps in part
because he came to realize his award-winning, one-hour
documentary on the
case for KING in 1987 had hewed to the official story
line, despite
convincing face-to-face interviews with some of the black
defendants that
left him troubled.
For the book, the journalist was not able to prove who
killed Olivotto, as
he had hoped to do, but his strong belief is that the
racist Lomax killed
the POW, perhaps after offering him refuge from the rioting
in his Jeep.
Lomax, Hamann believes, correctly figured that the rioting
blacks would be
blamed for the murder.
Solving Olivotto's murder appears to be one of the few
research goals that
eluded Hamann and his wife.
Hamann even spent the entire nighttime hours on two successive
Aug. 14th's
at the site of now-removed Italian barracks, just to
be absolutely certain
that he captured the look and feel of the place, from
the flora and fauna
to the interplay of the darkness and the moonlight.
"It was very creepy," Hamann remembers. "When I was out
there, I tried to
imagine falling asleep on that night in August and being
awakened by all
the noise. So I tried to do that, too, imagined being
an Italian falling
asleep there amid the weird sounds of the night.
"And the next morning, at 4 a.m. when you can hear every
footstep, when
there is a deep silence, I could feel something whoosh
right past my head
within arm's length. It was an owl and every hair on
my neck rose.
Everything came alive then, just as it must have for
those Italians."