Atrocities

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Atrocities are acts of wartime violence whose cruelty or brutality exceeds martial necessity. Such acts include looting, torture, rape, and massacre—the killing of captive troops or civilians. The contentious issue of atrocity has arisen in all American wars, typically as a rallying cry against enemies, but also when American troops have committed unmerciful acts.

Beginning with the 1637 Pequot War, conflicts with eastern Native Americans were bloody. Punishing the Pequots for the death of an English trader, Massachusetts militia attacked men, women, and children at the stockaded Mystic village, setting it ablaze and shooting escapees. Celebrating their rivals' destruction, the victors set an enduring pattern in Indian‐white relations. Anglo‐Americans decried Mohawk, Miami, Seminole, or Creek attacks on their settlements or troops as massacres, but praised no less brutal strikes against Indian villages as just.

Distrust of English rule grew after the Boston Massacre, in which royal soldiers fatally shot five members of a protest mob in 1770. During the Revolutionary War, when bayonet‐wielding British troops ambushed and routed sleeping colonial militia at Paoli in 1777, some Americans retaliated by denying quarter to their foe at Germantown. Frontier fighting between patriots and loyalists, especially in the South, was particularly ruthless.

Mid‐nineteenth‐century wars saw efforts to curb atrocity. But in 1836, Mexican troops killed all 187 defenders in the Battle of the Alamo and executed 330 prisoners at Goliad. Thus, when vengeful Texans under Sam Houston overran the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto, they shot, clubbed, and stabbed to death enemy soldiers (some wounded) begging for mercy. During the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico, newspapers reported pillage, rape, and murder of civilians by Gen. Zachary Taylor's soldiers. Consequently, Gen. Winfield Scott set a code of conduct enforceable by military courts.

In the Civil War, the federal government issued General Order 100 to limit battlefield excesses. The first man executed under it was Confederate Henry C. Wirz, commandant of the most infamous of Civil War prisoner‐of‐war camps—Andersonville. Public outrage over the deaths of thousands of Union soldiers by starvation, exposure, and disease overrode evidence that Wirz did everything in his power to improve conditions. In another controversial case, a Confederate brigade under Nathan Bedford Forrest overwhelmed a Union garrison in the Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864, slaying 60 percent of the defenders. Sparing one‐half of the white Federals but killing over four‐fifths of the black soldiers, Forrest's men seemingly committed a calculated racist massacre. Congressional hearings yielded contradictory testimony, but prompted no trials.

Late nineteenth‐century authorities contended that laws governing combat between “civilized” powers did not apply to irregular warfare and “uncivilized” foes. The Colorado volunteer militia's 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of 105 Cheyenne women and children inspired Indian depredations against settlers and the dismemberment of 81 U.S. soldiers in the 1866 Fetterman Massacre. In Gen. George Armstrong Custer's 1868 Washita raid, only 13 of 103 Cheyenne killed were warriors. Thwarting a U.S. raid at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne braves took no prisoners, killing Custer and 265 of his men. At the Battle of Wounded Knee, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry ended the cycle of retribution by slaughtering 200 Sioux refugees.

During the 1899–1902 Philippine War, some American commanders allegedly condoned atrocities, including denying quarter, indiscriminate burnings, and torture of prisoners and civilians. Reacting to the 1901 Balangiga massacre, in which Filipino guerrillas hacked to death thirty‐nine U.S. soldiers, Gen. Jacob Smith told officers to make the island of Samar a “howling wilderness” and kill any males over the age of ten. Though not implemented as policy, his directive exonerated one subordinate who illegally executed civilians.

Reaction to atrocity contributed to U.S. involvement in both world wars and in war crimes tribunals. In 1915, Americans shuddered at reports of Germany's ruthless Belgian occupation (made even more lurid by British reportage) and Berlin's use of submarines—most notably the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger liner, in which 1,200 passengers (128 of them Americans) died. The 1937 “Rape of Nanjing” (260,000 Chinese civilians and POWs were killed and as many as 30,000 women sexually assaulted) helped fix the Japanese government in the American mind as a rogue regime. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the April 1942 Bataan Death March, in which 15,000 American and Filipino prisoners died from abuse and starvation in the Philippines, seemed to confirm the perception of Japanese barbarity. Even more horrific was the genocidal policy of Nazi Germany, whose systematic liquidation of millions of civilians, including two‐thirds of European Jews, shocked global opinion into united action. After 1945, international courts convicted and executed many Axis officials for war crimes against humanity.

In the Vietnam War, U.S. officials emphasized the Communist insurgents' campaigns of kidnapping and assassination, but downplayed atrocities of their Saigon allies. U.S. Army suppression of reports of American participation in the My Lai Massacre inflamed national anger at the 1968 slaughter of 200 unarmed villagers, damaging public confidence in the war effort. A 1971 court‐martial condemned Lt. William L. Calley to life in prison for the crime, a sentence later commuted.

Charges of atrocity justified U.S. military involvement in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as the Persian Gulf War. Reported abuse of civilians during Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait galvanized an international coalition to reverse the invasion and attempt to supervise the elimination of Saddam Hussein's offensive arsenals. Seeking to end the deplorable famine and factional violence in Somalia, U.S. troops safeguarded relief efforts in 1992–93, but could not stop the vicious fighting. Outrages in the Bosnian Crisis (“ethnic cleansing” and the use of land mines, artillery, and snipers against civilians) eventually led to 20,000 U.S. troops joining NATO forces to police that area of the former Yugoslavia. The same occurred in the Kosovo Crisis (1999).
[See also Geneva Conventions; Genocide; Holocaust, U.S. War Effort and the; Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans.]

Bibliography

Leon Friedman , The Law and War: A Documentary History, 2 vols., 1972.
Richard R. Lael , The Yamashita Precedent: War Crimes and Command Responsibility, 1982.

James Grant Crawford

atrocities. Accusations of atrocity have long been a norm of warfare. Early in the First World War the British and American press resounded with tales of barbarities committed by invading Germans on civilians in Belgium; many of which turned out to have been mere fabrications, dreamed up by sensation-mongers. Reaction against these horror stories led to a great deal of scepticism next time round, sometimes with unfortunate results.

War is indeed an atrocious business. Admiral Jackie Fisher preached constantly, early in the century, that ‘The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.’ By the 1940s this doctrine had been generally enough accepted for the governments of great powers to agree quite readily to the mass extermination of civilians. In spite of the Hague Convention, both the German Army and RAF Bomber Command consciously made a target of civilian housing, which each repeatedly set on fire; not often making any attempt to make sure the houses were empty of people first (see also scorched earth policy). The Americans joined the British in bombing civilians; the Germans moved on from bombing civilians to systematically exterminating them in concentration camps. Such acts became routine measures of policy.

There is no need to linger on the fact that no written order by Hitler directing the wholesale massacre of Jews has ever emerged (see Final Solution): everybody in the business was aware that es war des Führers Wunsch, that was what the Leader wanted (see also secrecy).

The Germans showed in 1939 with their bombing of Warsaw, and in 1940 with their bombing of Rotterdam, that a nation's will to fight could soon be broken by air attack on civilians. Even though the rumoured 30,000 dead in Rotterdam turned out, on ultimate investigation, to number fewer than a thousand, the rumour did its work, and brought the Dutch to surrender. When in November 1940 the Luftwaffe attacked Coventry, doing severe damage to its aircraft factories as well as killing some 550 civilians, Göring coined a new German verb, coventrieren; so that when the Luftwaffe's attacks were revenged in a still more frightful form by the RAF and the USAAF, German protesters at the onslaught on, say, Dresden could be checked with the remark, Dresden war coventriert: though Dresden was very much harder hit, it was hit by Göring's methods.

When in August 1945 the Americans, with unquestioning British support, dropped two small nuclear weapons on Japan, the results were at once atrocious and satisfactory. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantly became proverbial, but the Japanese at once surrendered, and it has been claimed that as many as a million lives were saved by these two devastating blows (but see atomic bomb, 2).

Yet reflection on what the effects of bombing Barcelona had been during the Spanish Civil War—the attacks only stiffened Catalan resistance—might have led air staffs, and governments, to pause. There was no certainty that atrocity from the air would bring instant surrender: it might only make the opponent more angry. Similarly, the exaction of stiff reprisals for unexpected attacks on troops remote from the fighting front might cow the local population, or might stimulate them to more aggressive resistance. Reactions varied largely with time, place, and historic background.

In the USSR the historic background favoured strong government action. Concentration camps in northern Russia and Siberia (see GUlag) were already a part of the terror regime that ran that unhappy state, before the Nazis came to power; deaths from forced migration and other police perils in Stalin's USSR were probably as numerous as deaths from terror in Hitler's Germany, though exact figures are lacking. Both regimes depended on delation, or sneaking: a social atrocity that could have ghastly results.

In Asia, and in eastern and south-eastern Europe, war was generally more atrocious than in the comparatively sanitized African desert, or in Italy, or in north-west Europe. France still shudders at the memory of Oradour; yet in Poland and western Russia there was hardly an unburned village. In Greece, village-burning was a routine reprisal after any act of sabotage; a villager once remarked to an SOE saboteur that he hoped the damage done to the Germans would this time be serious enough to make the damage done to the village worthwhile.

The Japanese treatment of their prisoners-of-war is too well documented to need dwelling on (see Burma–Thailand railway, for example); that, according to one recent history of the Japanese Army ( M. and S. Harries, Soldiers of the Sun, London, 1991, p. 389), a number of Japanese soldiers, who had surrendered to an Australian unit, were marched into the jungle where they were massacred by revengeful Borneo tribesmen while the Australians looked on, is less well known.

Within this avalanche of nastiness, a few additional sharp fragments were to be found, which later ages recall with especial agony. Some individual, or small-group, activities are held to be extra atrocious: refusal to take prisoner men who have cast away their arms and held up their hands, who are shot instead (see, for example, Biscari andMalmédy); killing of women, children, old men in cold blood; killing of hostages. The Germans found precedent for the killing of hostages from their conduct in France during the war of 1870–1, and repeatedly adopted it as a police measure: they shot 41 Frenchmen at Nantes in October 1941 in reprisal for the killing of a German colonel, more than 300 Italians in 1944 in the Ardeatine Caves massacre; as late as March– April 1945, more than 250 Dutchmen for an unsuccessful (indeed accidental) ambush of a senior SS officer; more than 3,000 Yugoslavs in two days in October 1941 for a run of suburban attacks on their troops.

Sometimes atrocities were forced on the well-meaning: as witness a Yugoslav mother who had to strangle her new-born baby, lest its cries attract some passing Germans into a cave where she and several others were hiding. Much more usually, they derived from original sin. A lively literary sub-industry subsists on recounting atrocity stories, tending to make them more atrocious each time round, and indulging in fanciful explanations. The brute fact is that men tend to be brutes to other men.

M. R. D. Foot