Saturday,
April 26, 2008
Lynching of Italian POWs at Ft Lawson, in
The
ANNOTICO Report
In
August of 1944, at Fort Lawton, Seattle WA, an entire unit of drunk
armed Black soldiers, rioted and stormed the barracks of unarmed defenseless
Italian POWs, and beat them merciless, landing many Italians in the
hospital, and lynched one, Private Guglielmo Olivotto,
More
than 40 black soldiers were subsequently tried in the war's largest
court-martial, prosecuted by a very capable young Leon Jaworski, who went on to prosecute at Nuremberg and
Watergate. Twenty-eight of the
Seattle
journalist Jack Hamann's, who had no legal experience,
and in a search for "perfect" justice, rather than "fair"
justice, was able to build a grandiose appeal out of a molehill of distorted
trivialities that he documented in his book ,On
American Soil, which raised a chorus of anguish (and sold a lot of
books) that in this PC society prompted the exoneration of all convictions and
the bestowing of Honorable dIscharges. I'm sure the
Black soldiers must have enjoyed a proud moment that they were
heralded for beating defenseless men.
Now,
A witness steps forward to validate the original
convictions. Someone, among others, that was Threatened with Court Martial if
they ever spoke to anyone about anything
they saw that night that would implicate the Black soldiers.
He
held his tongue and carried the burden for 64 years until he was incensed by
the "apology for the mistake of the convictions".
A
A violent tale of justice and
injustice from
Village Voice
by Tony Ortega
April 22nd, 2008
As Barack Obama pointed out, matters of race in
First, the easy version, the
post-MLK, new-day-in-America version: A couple of years ago, a Seattle TV
journalist noticed an odd monument at a place called
More than 40 black soldiers were subsequently
tried in the war's largest court-martial, prosecuted by a young Leon Jaworski, who went on to prosecute at
What was never in much dispute was that some of the black soldiers stationed at the fort, drinking heavily the night before being shipped out to a possibly very dangerous Pacific location, reacted to a fistfight between one of their own and one of the Italian POWs by swarming the Italians' barracks and beating the living hell out of many of the Italians as well as some white American MPs. Also not in dispute was that the rioters had stabbed unarmed victims with knives and used wooden clubs to break limbs, and that one black soldier drove a Jeep repeatedly over a tent that had men in it. It was probably something of a miracle that more people weren't killed. The dead man, Private Guglielmo Olivotto, was found in another part of the camp at dawn the next morning, hanging from a noose that had been tied to a wire at an obstacle course.
What Hamann
uncovered, however, was that right from the start, the MPs and the officers in
charge at Fort Lawton handled the case by doing just about everything wrong.
Evidence was destroyed, statements weren't taken when they should have been,
and soon it was almost impossible to figure out which of the black soldiers at
Hamann discovered that those were the conclusions of
Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke, who was called in after the riot to conduct
a thorough (but secret) investigation of the incident. General Cooke found, to
his disgust, that the white men in charge at
Hamann's subsequent book about the affair, On American Soil, thoroughly condemns Jaworski for his actions: The prosecutor knowingly ignored exculpatory evidence in the secret investigation and relied instead on questionable snitches to convict men whom he should have had reason to believe were innocent.
On American Soil demonstrates that not only was the investigation of the riot botched, but that there was also good reason to suspect that a white MP "an unreliable man that Jaworski used as a prosecution witness" had the motive, means, and opportunity to commit the murder of Olivotto. There was no physical evidence, and almost no circumstantial evidence, to tie the two black soldiers convicted of manslaughter to Olivotto's murder.
Now, here's the feel-good payoff: Hamann's book was such a thorough debunking of Jaworski and the court-martial that the military, reacting to howls of protest from family members of the convicted soldiers (nearly all of whom are now dead), ordered last October that the convictions be overturned, and that all of the soldiers receive (mostly posthumous) honorable discharges.
The military reversing itself after more than 60 years. Amazing.
In late January, there was a touching
ceremony at the
An Associated Press story about Townsell's ceremony, which included a mention of Hamann's book, was carried by newspapers around the
country. One of them was the Staten Island Advance, a copy of which made
its way to a modest home on
And that's when the feel-good story gets a little more complicated.
When Anthony DeCesare saw the story in the Advance, he says, he nearly became sick to his stomach.
DeCesare says he was at
DeCesare had kept that memory mostly to himself for 64 years. But then there was the story in the Advance, and he says he couldn't believe what he was reading.
DeCesare, you see, is seriously pissed off.
"It's crooked. It's not the story. It's not the truth," he says. "The whole thing stinks."
Next month, Tony DeCesare will turn 93 years old. He lives in a small bedroom that's been turned into both a sickroom and a shrine. For years, he was confined to the second floor of the house, until he finally convinced the VA to install an elevator so he could visit his sister, who lived downstairs - both were too frail to use the stairs and could only shout to each other.
That sister is no longer living, but another,
Mary Cadier, 85, has come over as DeCesare
receives a visitor. He's sitting in a chair next to his bed, wearing a blue
robe over pajamas. In front of him is a folding tray piled with documents of
his military career. On the walls of the room are other artifacts of his
military experience: the Croix de Guerre citation from a grateful
DeCesare's first love was music, and it was part of the reason
he joined the military to begin with: to play in a military band. He was born
on Staten Island but spent much of his youth in
There, he likes to point out,
he played for the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,
who received an official military welcome to the
After two years in
After Pearl Harbor, DeCesare
was part of the first major American military offensive of the war, the
invasion of
The reflections on their goggles, he says,
were providing something for the enemy "both German and
"I didn't move, or I'd go to kingdom come," he says.
Eventually, they had to retreat to the ship,
landing later at
Without a chief warrant officer in his outfit, DeCesare says, disciplining the men of his unit fell on his shoulders. But the last thing he wanted was to send a soldier to a court-martial. When he had to discipline men, he says, he'd have them run around in a square. He didn't want to be known as a pain in the ass - he didn't brook wrongdoing, but he tried to be lenient.
Later, riding in Jeeps over mountainous
terrain, DeCesare and his men found themselves in an
action that became known as the Battle of Kasserine
Pass. "We cornered the Germans," he says. "We thought we had
them licked. But General Rommel had his tanks dug into
the
"We lost," he says.
He never knew how he was wounded; he just remembers coming to in a British ambulance and being told to relax. "There was a captain with his legs blown off," he says. DeCesare's skull was fractured, and he'd suffered a concussion. He can only speculate what happeneda shell exploded near him, he supposes.
Shipped back to the States for a lengthy
recovery, he was suffering from brain trauma - like many of the soldiers coming back from
But during his short time at
"The men were bleeding badly. I couldn't, you know, tell you exactly what their injuries were. But they were bleeding bad," he says.
Some were POWs, speaking in Italian about what had happened. Others were white American MPs. And some, DeCesare insists, were Japanese.
The Italians, he says, were saying that they had been attacked in their barracks by black soldiers. Others talked about being attacked at the fort's obstacle course.
But what struck him more than anything else, the thing that haunted him for 64 years, was what a medical officer said to the men on the ward: "You patients, you haven't seen anything. Any of you talk, you're going to get court-martialed."
DeCesare repeats it again and again, trying to convey how much it struck him at the time and made him keep quiet about the event for so long.
"I swallowed that for 64 years," he says. "Who's going to listen to what I have to say, especially when I got a head injury?"
Then, after all that time, suddenly a news story appears in the Staten Island paper saying that it was all a mistake, that the men convicted for the crime were being exonerated. That the military apologizes for the results of the court-martial.
And an old man, who still talks about the "colored" section of the fort, who is Italian-American and couldn't help but sympathize with the Italians injured in the riot, says about Booker Townsell, a long-dead soldier whom he never met: "He don't deserve freedom."
Sure, you don't even have to say it: DeCesare is just a classic old-school racist, unhappy that "colored" soldiers are getting away with something. It's an easy diagnosis.
Except that DeCesare's a bit more complicated than that.
There's another yellowed news clipping that Tony DeCesare keeps, this one from 1965.
After he was discharged, DeCesare served as a cop for the VA and was finally declared fully disabled in 1954. He couldn't work in law enforcement anymore, but he could still read and write music, and he was still an avid churchgoer, something he got from his dad.
He wanted, more than anything else, to help young people make music. But he hated how much young people were kept apart by their different affiliations.
In 1965, the Staten Island Advance reported that DeCesare had formed the Summerfield Inter-Faith Orchestra.
"What does music have to do with brotherhood?" the article asked. "Anthony DeCesare says it has a lot to do with bringing people together."
The article describes DeCesare's efforts to bring together young musicians from different faiths: "We Protestants have been holding back . . . . We've been ignoring the ecumenical spirit."
There's a photograph showing DeCesare leading six musicians. A trombone player. A violinist. A percussionist. A sax player. A pianist. A baritone horn.
Three of the musicians are black. In 1965. In Staten
"I started the Inter-Faith Orchestra in 1965 to bust up this racial, religious discrimination," he says. Heatedly, he points out that some Catholic priests prevented their parishioners from taking part.
How does that square with his anger about the
"This is about the incident," he replies, "not the race of who caused it."
To make his point, he compares the
As for the men who were convicted on tainted evidence, he says: "I feel sorry for what happened. If they can prove they didn't take part, that's fine with me. It's not my intention to hurt anybody. It's to tell the truth."
Jack Hamann says that he doesn't doubt DeCesare's
assertion that he was at
DeCesare's memory, those records suggest, is simply faulty about those details. He doesn't take kindly to that suggestion, however.
But even with those discrepancies, Hamann says it's interesting to consider the Italian-American perspective on the Army's about-face, even if some of it is predictable.
"I, too, have run across a couple of pissed off Italian-Americans (none of which, as far as I know, have read the book)," Hamann writes to the Voice in an e-mail. "Their spin: why are these damn blacks getting all the attention, when it was Italians who were beaten and lynched?...
Of course, that perspective misses the point: Despite the convictions, justice was not served in 1944. "The truth is, Jaworski screwed both the black soldiers and the Italians," Hamann says.
He's right. And what his investigation has
achieved is remarkable. The anger of a 92-year-old
But it's also easy to understand DeCesare's frustration. From a 64-year remove, it's not difficult to condemn the flawed justice meted out to black soldiers - men who were already suffering the indignities of a segregated military - for a long-forgotten criminal incident. But for the manperhaps the only person still alive todaywho saw the victims of that crime being treated for their injuries, the military's decision to sweep the whole mess aside by overturning the court-martial verdicts en masse provides little sense of justice having been served either.
After the Voice
first exchanged e-mails with Hamann about DeCesare, the author mentioned the Staten Island man in a
lecture at
In the end, the most striking thing about
talking to DeCesare " even knowing that
he's messing up the program, our necessary national mea culpa after centuries
of being on the wrong side of so many things" is to see how a single
night's episode can be the most passionately remembered thing in a life nearly
a century long. When asked about his experiences in the decades since - what
were the '60s like? The '80s? "DeCesare mostly draws a blank. It has to be drawn out of
him that he was married and divorced, and has a daughter with whom he is now
closer than he was in the past. His sister says Anthony spent much of his time
helping older relatives. And he did continue to write music; he wrote and
arranged a march in 2003 to commemorate the soldiers going to
What a thing to carry around for 64 years.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0817,raw-deal,419583,1.html
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