The US Army and Male Rape during the Second World War

A little after 10 o’clock on the night of 21 March 1944, Ken Paterson,* a British teenager, said goodbye to his friends outside the cinema at Honiton in southwestern England where he had seen the evening feature. ¹ Arriving at the railway station for the last service home, he was just in time to watch the train drawing away from the platform. As a resident of a rural district in wartime, he was accustomed to having to make his own way about, and resignedly set off on the five-mile walk to Sidmouth Junction where he lived with his parents and elder brother. On the way, he heard the shouts and whoops of a group of American servicemen who had chosen a spot alongside the line for their evening carouse. They sounded like trouble, so Paterson crossed the road and tried to slip by in the darkness without being observed. One of the soldiers caught sight of him, however, and stood in his way, calling jovially, ‘Hello, my old darling!’ Paterson made to pass, but the American and two companions seized him and dragged him to a darkened area. Although he shouted for help, the road was a lonely one, and the only witness to the abduction – an elderly man on a bicycle – continued without stopping. The soldiers threw him bodily over the roadside hedge into an adjacent field, two of them immediately clambering across to join him. The third remained in the road on the other side of the hedge, ready to give the alarm.

Winded by his fall, Paterson was pinned on his back by one of the soldiers while the other wrestled off his trousers and underwear, leaving him naked below the waist. Both men then unbuttoned their own pants. The soldier who had first spoken to Paterson, a private first class from Pennsylvania, tried to force his penis into the boy’s mouth. Paterson resisted, so the PFC struck him violently in the face, drawing blood, and forced his mouth open, cutting his gums with a fingernail and loosening a tooth. The man then orally raped his captive. When he had finished, the second abductor, a corporal, said: ‘I want a go, Smiley.’ The two exchanged positions. After the corporal completed his assault, Paterson was turned over onto his hands and knees. He was now compelled to fellate ‘Smiley’ while the corporal penetrated him anally. ‘This went on for a long time,’ Paterson later testified. ‘They kept resting in between and taking rubber things off their cocks. Sometimes jeeps passed by along the road but as soon as they heard one coming they clapped their hands over my mouth so that I couldn’t shout out for help.’ ² Once, as the men momentarily relaxed their grip on him, Paterson grabbed his trousers and ‘took to my heels and ran across the field’. After hurdling a wire fence, however, he fell heavily in the dark and was caught by the corporal who this time compelled Paterson to masturbate him. The teenager nonetheless remained alert for another opportunity to escape. When the soldiers’ attention was again briefly distracted, he stayed low to the ground and crawled into the hedge. He remained there, motionless, while his assailants searched for him. Eventually they gave up and returned to their camp.

By this time Tess Paterson,* Ken’s mother, had reported him missing. His lateness was uncharacteristic, and at a quarter to two in the morning she called the police. Forty-five minutes later he returned on foot. His face was covered in blood, and he was holding his trousers up by the broken braces slung over his shoulder. ‘I asked him where he had been and if he had met with an accident. He started to cry and said “No, mum, worse than that”.’ ³ Over the next hour Tess Paterson coaxed the story out of him. Taking her son to the bathroom to bathe his injuries, she found a quantity of semen between his buttocks. She sent her older son to the police station for help.

The investigation proceeded quickly when inquiries at the nearby US camp revealed that Private First Class Louis Arthur Smiley had gone out drinking during the night in question, accompanied by his friends Corporal Cecil J. Hamilton and Technician Fourth Grade Ray S. Scott, the lookout man. All three belonged to the 42nd Field Artillery Battalion, a unit that had arrived in England two months previously. A medical examination by US Army doctors found fresh scratches and abrasions on Smiley’s penis. Inspection of his and Hamilton’s clothing showed bloodstains belonging to Paterson’s blood group, which differed from theirs. The Honiton constabulary had little difficulty in identifying the scene of the crime, which was marked by newly broken twigs, fresh footprints, and a flattened area of grass at which seven used condoms and a glove belonging to one of the abductors were retrieved. ⁴ Interrogated, Smiley claimed to be too intoxicated to remember anything that had occurred the previous night. ⁵ His accomplice, Corporal Hamilton, was more forthcoming. While his supposed alcohol-induced amnesia likewise extended to the moments before he found himself in a field with the victim, he definitely recollected how ‘the British boy said something to the effect of “Let me give this other fellow some” and when he made this remark he came over and took my penis in his hand and played with it.’ Never, Hamilton went on, did ‘the British boy … make any complaint about the way he was being treated and the only reason I had anything to do with him at all was because he had asked to “give me some”’. ⁶ T/4 Scott, for his part, claimed that throughout Paterson’s hours-long ordeal he was entirely unaware of anything that was taking place just yards behind him in the field. He had, he acknowledged, heard Paterson shout ‘Let me go!’ but professed to have thought nothing in particular of it. ⁷

The outcome of the case was as favourable to the victim as such processes ever were. Although Paterson was unaware of it, by making his complaint he was exposing himself to significant legal hazard. If his claim to have acted under duress was not accepted, he rendered himself liable under English and Welsh law to prosecution for gross indecency, an offence that carried substantial penalties. Such a possibility was by no means theoretical; other male rape victims in the 1940s had ended up with criminal records in this way. ⁸ Notwithstanding his obvious injuries, then, Paterson was required to state on oath that ‘[a]t no time did I agree to what happened and they never asked me if I would do it willingly’. His mother was also called upon to attest that her son had ‘never shown any abnormal sexual tendencies’, and a US Army psychiatrist was assigned to interview him so as to determine the extent of his sexual knowledge and experience. Those enquiries having proved satisfactory, however, prosecution of Smiley and Hamilton proceeded rapidly. Both were court-martialled for sodomy and assault with intent to commit sodomy; dishonourably discharged the service; and sentenced to 12 and 10 years’ imprisonment, respectively, in a Federal penitentiary. Most fortunate of all, though, was Sergeant Scott. Although US military law specified that a person ‘who is present and aids in the commission of sodomy, though he does not personally commit the offense, is guilty as a principal’, no charges were brought against him. ⁹ The sole sanction he incurred for his part in Paterson’s gang rape was an administrative reduction to the rank of private, following which he resumed his military career.

From a scholarly perspective, the Paterson case is deserving of detailed attention. In an area of the history of interpersonal violence in which documentary evidence is exceptionally sparse, it is a rare example of a crime that can be reconstructed in detail from the commission of the offence to the conviction of the perpetrators, and from a variety of perspectives. Beyond that, it serves as an illustration of the highly unrepresentative set of circumstances that were required to obtain a guilty verdict in a case of male-victim sexual violence by US servicemen. Many factors working in Paterson’s favour came together to secure for him a measure of justice; in the absence of any one of them, the outcome would almost certainly have been considerably less positive.

The first of these factors was that he reported the crime at all. Most victims of sexual violence, then as now, did not. That was the more important inasmuch as it is highly unlikely that this was the trio’s first offence. The speed, determination, and co-ordination of their assault, each man performing his assigned rôle without, according to Paterson, a word being exchanged between them, gave evidence of prior experience in the commission of such crimes. On this occasion, most unusually, the police had been notified even before the victim returned home, and the entire story was obtained very soon thereafter, before the rapists had had an opportunity to cover their tracks.

Paterson was also fortunate in being the citizen of an ally with whose government and people US military leaders were anxious to maintain good relations, and to have reported the crime to the civil authorities of his own country rather than US military police. ¹⁰ He was an excellent witness, recalling the unusual name of one of his assailants and even correctly identifying their military ranks. This made a swift identification of the perpetrators easy with the employment of a minimum of resources. As a rule, cases that were not cleared up almost immediately and that required more than cursory investigation were never cleared up at all. ¹¹ Lastly, the soldiers remained in the local area after the attack. Even for the gravest offences, including murder, US authorities habitually prioritized military necessity or convenience over the requirements of justice. It was virtually unknown for a suspect who had been deployed to another area to be recalled for questioning, far less prosecution. ¹²

A contrasting multiple-perpetrator rape offers an illustration of the typical outcome where these factors were not present. Late in April 1945, Detlef Fischerbauer,* a six-year-old boy, was playing outside his house at Oberkassel in the Rhineland, which had recently fallen to units of the US First Army. The previous day, two soldiers in Airborne uniform had befriended him and given him chewing gum. On this afternoon they returned, seizing him and taking him to the cellar of an adjoining house. ‘I tried to yell but he put his hand over my mouth. He showed me a package of cigarettes and told me he would give them to me after he had done it.’ In the cellar, Detlef was orally and anally raped at knife-point. He was then released and ran back home, his 32-year-old aunt, Ingrid Katz,* later testified, ‘crying very bitterly’. Finding bite-marks on the boy’s body, Katz took him to the Düsseldorf-Heerdt hospital. Medical examination confirmed the attack, revealing anal trauma and other injuries. A next-door neighbour, Emmy Heinemann,* later the same afternoon interrupted a pair of Airborne servicemen attempting to lure another little boy away. Both were drunk; one matched the description of one of Detlef’s assailants. ¹³

Once again, investigators were dealing with an unusually competent victim. The boy was intelligent and mature beyond his years; his answers to questions were clear and consistent. He and his relatives had come forward with such promptitude that their neighbour had been able to frustrate another abduction in progress by what were almost certainly the same perpetrators. She expressed confidence in her ability to recognize them if she saw them again. Given the victim’s age, no question of consent arose. Notwithstanding all this, the US military police’s response was perfunctory in the extreme. A line-up of the members of the Anti-Tank Company, 302nd Infantry Regiment, was held, at which Detlef Fischerbauer was unable to identify his rapists. Its selection for this purpose seems to have been made as much on the basis of geographical propinquity as for any reason to suppose that the perpetrators belonged to that unit. This action represented the first and last effort on the part of the authorities to identify the attackers. Shortly afterwards, the 302nd Infantry was transferred to Czechoslovakia, and the investigation came to an end.

In recent years, scholars have begun to address as a historical problem the many different forms of conflict-related sexual violence. ¹⁴ Offending by US servicemen has received particular attention, the sociologist J. Robert Lilly’s initial work in the field being followed by Lou Roberts’ prize-winning analysis of rape and sexual assault by GIs in France and, more recently still, by Miriam Gebhardt’s treatment of the subject in Germany. ¹⁵ As is typical, however, of historical writing on sexual violence in general, none of these works contains any information on male-victim offences perpetrated by the Western Allies. While most authors concede that these very likely took place, it is assumed that, due to men’s supposed reticence over their experiences of sexual victimisation, they have been lost to history. ¹⁶

Such a conclusion is altogether too pessimistic. While it is true that at the time in question, rape was defined as an offence that could only be committed by a man against a woman, cases that satisfy the current gender-neutral criteria adopted by the International Criminal Court at the Hague can readily be found, albeit in most cases under the heading of ‘sodomy’, ‘indecency’ or ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’. ¹⁷ More recently, sexual violence by and against servicemen in present-day armies around the world has generated a small but steadily growing literature, against which historical examples can be compared. ¹⁸ In this article, I examine 75 cases of male rape and sexual assault in which investigations of US servicemen were initiated by the Office of the Provost Marshal General between December 1941 and August 1945. The offences in question cover the entire spectrum of sexual violence, from groping over clothes to multiple-perpetrator and multiple-victim rapes involving extreme or homicidal levels of force. Reflecting the Army’s greater solicitude for the legal rights of offenders holding commissions – resulting in a longer archival paper-trail – officers are over-represented in the case histories. Nonetheless, it appears that the patterns revealed here are in many respects representative of military-perpetrated male-victim sex crimes as a whole.

Examination of these cases leads to several findings that have the potential to expand our understanding both of conflict-related sexual violence and of sexual offending more generally. Firstly, a striking degree of overlap can be observed between the experiences of male and female victims, as well as the manner in which the investigation and prosecution of offences was conducted. While significant differences remained – for example, less emphasis on the presence or absence of consent, inasmuch as even consensual same-sex acts remained offences under military law – the overall character of the crimes committed by members of the Army and of the official response to them was relatively uninfluenced by the victim’s sex. Secondly, military authorities manifested a definite ‘preferential option for the perpetrator’, often intervening even after conviction to exempt felons from the full consequences of their wrongdoing. The reasons for this appear to be a combination of a desire to ‘salvage’ the perpetrator for future military service; a marked bias in favour of offenders who were members of the officer corps; and an assumption that the victim often shared culpability for his experience of sexual violence. Lastly, a focus on offenders’ motivations provides evidence for the conclusion that, contrary to recent monocausal interpretations of sexual crime in general and sexual crime against men and boys in particular, the impulses behind this specific kind of offending were as varied as those underlying any other form of interpersonal violence.

In principle, the bringing of military sex offenders to justice ought to have been facilitated by the uniformity of the legal code to which they were subject. All servicemen, whether at home or abroad, were bound by the Articles of War and their associated corpus of jurisprudence. Within the United States, this greatly simplified the prosecutorial process. Whereas sexual offences in civilian life were – and to the present day remain – the province of each individual state, resulting in a bewilderingly complex mélange of definitions, penalties and criminal procedures, the Articles of War constituted the functional equivalent of a single Federal statute. ¹⁹ Some shortcomings did nonetheless exist. The Articles provided significantly less protection to male victims of sexual violence than female ones. Only two sentences were possible for the rape of a woman or girl: death, or imprisonment at hard labour for life. In contrast, no sexual offence, including penetrative ones, against men or boys carried such stringent penalties. Sodomy, defined by Article 93 as anal or oral penetration, incurred a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment; ²⁰ other sexual offences against men or boys could be proceeded against only under the catch-all Article 96, which forbade behaviour ‘to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’, or, in the case of a commissioned offender, Article 95, which penalized ‘conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman’. Neither, however, provided a wholly satisfactory basis for proceeding against sex offenders. The only sanction applicable to violators of Article 95, itself a regulation whose relevance was confined to holders of commissions, was dismissal from the service, a punishment that in most cases did little to fit the crime. Courts-martial were also constrained when awarding sentences for Article 96 offences by the Table of Maximum Punishments contained in the US Army’s Manual for Courts-Martial, which set out sentencing scales for the most common offences. ²¹ Because the penalty for sodomy was so low, prosecutors and courts-martial sometimes relied in the most egregious cases on the provision in Article 93 authorising a maximum ten-year sentence for an assault with intent to commit a felony other than murder or rape. This too was an unsatisfactory expedient, inasmuch as reviewing bodies typically refused to uphold sentences that penalized the violence used to accomplish a sexual crime more severely than the headline offence itself. ²²

If the statutory framework was in many respects inadequate, the same could be said of investigative procedures. During the Second World War, the US Army made use of a haphazard admixture of resources and techniques to inquire into reported crimes, with little or no attempt at uniformity or, until the very end of the conflict, the establishment of defined protocols. In the United States and on the territories of allied countries, military authorities might rely upon the civil police to carry out inquiries, if necessary calling upon members of local constabularies to give evidence at any court martial that might be convened thereafter. When the offence took place against military personnel and in an area, like a camp or barracks, that was exclusively under the army’s jurisdiction, military police would normally assume the lead rôle in investigations. Few MPs, however, had expertise in or experience with the prosecution of sex crimes, and the quality of the inquiries they conducted was sometimes startlingly deficient. ²³

Realising its inability to come to grips with increasingly serious and sophisticated crimes of all kinds being committed by servicemen, in January 1944 the Office of the Provost Marshal General belatedly established dedicated Criminal Investigation Divisions, often staffed by agents who had had police experience in civilian life as detectives or FBI personnel. But there were always far too few of these; their resources, especially with regard to forensic techniques, were scant in the extreme; many received no training of any kind in military law or procedure before being assigned to duty; and their almost unmanageable caseload typically precluded all but the most superficial investigations even of particularly aggravated offences. ²⁴ In the field, therefore, the most common procedure was for a commander notified of a crime to designate an Investigating Officer, normally of junior rank, to look into the matter and prepare the case against any offender who could be identified. The most important criterion by far for the selection of such an officer was his availability. ²⁵ Thus in innumerable circumstances, grave crimes were investigated by amateurs lacking the most cursory training in criminal procedures or even a proper understanding of the legal definitions of the offences into which they were inquiring. ²⁶ It is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that only particularly reckless and incompetent offenders, especially in sexual cases, ever had reason to fear being called to account for their crimes.

The cases examined in this article fall into three broad categories. The single largest group, constituting some 52 per cent of the total, consisted of offences against other servicemen. More than three-quarters of these cases involved persons of higher rank victimising their subordinates, though there was a single example of a private attacking an officer. The second-greatest category, at 36 per cent, was crimes against minors. The remainder encompassed a variety of victims, ranging from prisoners of war to adult civilians, whose common denominator was their position of relative vulnerability vis-à-vis the perpetrators. In terms of the crimes for which offenders were charged, three in four were arraigned for sodomy or attempted sodomy. ²⁷ Where the requirements for a conviction under this heading could not be satisfied – in part because of the lack of a legal definition as to what constituted ‘penetration’ in male-victim cases – the more usual procedure was to charge the defendant with the commission of non-specific acts, varying from ‘carnal connection’ to ‘indecency’, that could be represented as inconsistent with the requirements of Articles 95 or 96. ²⁸

Cases of rape or sexual assault by servicemen against their comrades more often than not revealed a long-standing pattern of offending behaviour. In some instances victims delayed reporting until learning that friends had also suffered at the perpetrator’s hands. In others, similar offences came to light only as a result of army interrogators directly questioning those with whom the defendant was known to have been in contact. In none of the cases examined in this article, however, did investigators extend their inquiries to previous locations at which the offender had been deployed, far less his activities in civilian life. Thus it is probable that the eventual conviction of the individual concerned often represented the termination, or interruption, of a criminal career that had continued for years or even decades. It cannot be determined on the evidence provided here, though, whether the proportion of repeat offenders in the sample is representative of the perpetrator cohort as a whole.

Alcohol was sometimes employed as a means of overcoming victims’ powers of resistance. An example is the modus operandi of First Lieutenant Malcolm E. Jenna, who served in the 247th Field Artillery Battalion at Nouméa in the South Pacific. On 30 August 1942, Jenna invited his subordinate, Master Sergeant Michael Duplessis,* to a drinking session in which the two men consumed a full bottle of gin, another of vermouth, and an unspecified quantity of beer. Jenna then removed Duplessis’ trousers, the sergeant by then being incapable through intoxication of moving his limbs, and performed oral sex on him while Duplessis verbally protested to the best of his limited abilities. Three weeks later, Jenna treated Corporal Eric Simmons* to dinner and drinks and, having once again reduced his victim to alcoholic incapacity, repeated the procedure. The following month, he instructed PFC Fred Rickman* to cease the guard duty on which the latter was engaged and join him in his house. There Jenna tried, with limited success, to induce Rickman to drink to excess before instructing him to go to bed. When Rickman obeyed, Jenna grabbed his penis, eventually stopping when the private turned over on his stomach. A similar incident occurred in mid-October when Jenna molested his personal driver, again after drinks had been consumed. On this occasion the victim was sufficiently compos mentis to be able to flee to an adjoining room, where he spent the rest of the night. Jenna eventually received a five-year sentence. ²⁹

Other alcohol-related cases were of a darker nature. At Chinglow (Chinglo Hill) in northern Burma, friends of PFC Harlan Rothman* noticed a trio of their comrades in the 849th Engineer Aviation Battalion ‘pouring liquor into him’ at a drink-fuelled birthday party in October 1944. ³⁰ The last thing Rothman remembered was two of the men doing so, Privates Joseph Madise and Wallace Nory, taking him out of the tent in which the celebration was being held, ostensibly for some air. Instead, assisted by Private Aaron Morrison, they dragged Rothman to the latrines, shooing away revellers who sought to render assistance to the intoxicated man and preventing them from coming inside. Suspecting that all was not well, some of the partygoers sent for an NCO who, with the aid of others, forced his way into the latrine in spite of physical resistance, to find a fourth member of the battalion, Private Lloyd Hickey, raping an unconscious Rothman. Being unable physically to stop Hickey and fearing that Rothman was in imminent danger of death, the NCO withdrew to summon reinforcements. When the rescue party returned, they found the victim dumped face-down in the roadway, still naked below the waist. A subsequent medical examination revealed anal lacerations on Rothman’s body; drops of his blood were present at the scene of the crime. Although it was impossible to tell whether Hickey had been the only man physically to violate Rothman or whether all four had done so, each was found guilty of sodomy under the doctrine of common purpose and sentenced to the maximum of five years. ³¹

In general, though, intoxicants played a smaller part in cases of male rape by servicemen than might be supposed. The records of nearly three-quarters of the offences in question contain no mention of the consumption of alcohol by either the perpetrator or the victim. Of those that do, there is reason to believe that in several instances offenders deliberately exaggerated their state of insobriety as a means of persuading their victims not to press charges, or to provide a defence in court. ³² Nor was this tactic misplaced. Although military law explicitly ruled out pleas of intoxication as a mitigating factor, members of the Judge Advocate General’s Department often treated them as such in the case of offenders with whom they sympathised. ³³ Even in those situations in which perpetrators were genuinely under the influence, however, the assessment of Lieutenant Colonel F.B. Wiener, one of the Army’s most senior lawyers and author of a much-used manual of military justice, is generally applicable. In most circumstances, he wrote, ‘the accused’s drunkenness did not prevent him from knowing what he was doing, but only prevented him from caring whether he did it or not. He knew perfectly well what he was doing; he just didn’t give a damn.’ ³⁴

Most assailants, then, made no use of intoxicants, preferring instead to employ whatever level of coercion, intimidation or violence might be necessary to attain their goal. First Lieutenant George Earle got into the bed of T/4 Kyle Warren* after a late-night poker session broke up; placed a hunting knife against the sergeant’s skin; and forced him to fellate Earle before switching the position to soixante-neuf. Warren eventually tried to make a break for it and was pursued by Earle who stabbed and slashed him in the groin, both arms, left thigh and left foot. Alerted by Warren’s cries for help, officers found him ‘covered with blood from head to foot’; the victim spent the next two months recovering from his injuries in hospital. ³⁵ No less sudden and shocking was the assault perpetrated by a mechanic, Private Clemente Reynolds, against his 41-year-old comrade and co-worker, David Magill,* at Gioia del Colle in southern Italy in January 1943. The pair, who normally got on well, had spent the day eating and drinking together at the house of a local family. While taking a short cut through a wooded area back to camp that evening, Reynolds abruptly announced, as Magill later testified, that ‘he was going to knock the shit out of me and fuck me in the ass’. ³⁶ Magill started to run, but was overtaken, knocked down and beaten by Reynolds, who proceeded anally to rape him and resume the beating until he was unconscious. The victim, seriously injured, was later picked up by a passing soldier in a jeep. Reynolds was arrested and found to have skinned knuckles, bloodied trousers, and a recent abrasion on his penis. Earle and Reynolds were sentenced to prison terms of five and 10 years respectively, the difference no doubt being accounted for by the gap in their ranks.

Like offences against servicemen, successfully prosecuted cases of the rape of minors revealed a high level of serial predation. Private Paul Montoya, a member of the 407th Infantry Division stationed in the small town of Hugo, OK, evolved a polished technique for isolating and subduing his victims, committing four violent rapes in the single month of January, 1943. On each occasion he approached young boys at nightfall and offered them 50 cents to help him carry boxes to the bus station. Owen Wheeler,* 12 years of age, was the first known victim to accept. When the pair reached the precincts of an abandoned Works Progress Administration building at which the boxes were supposedly to be found, Montoya forced him at knifepoint to undress and anally raped him in an attack lasting 30 minutes. Two weeks later, Montoya identically repeated the procedure with Thomas Draper.* Questioned by defence counsel at the subsequent court-martial as to why he had co-operated in taking off his own clothes, the boy sardonically responded, ‘You would have done it too, if he had a knife in your back.’ ³⁷ No weapon was used against the third victim, 10-year-old Ralph Redmond;* instead, Montoya twisted the child’s arm so sharply that Redmond feared it would break. Nor did he produce the knife when attacking Bob Brewster,* but threatened to stab the 13-year-old if he didn’t comply. The boys’ experience when attempting to report the crimes they had suffered bore out many of the complaints made about the shortcomings of the Army’s law-enforcement apparatus. After his assault, Draper immediately complained to military police about what had occurred. The MPs, he later testified, merely ‘laughed’ at him and took no further action. Only when the victims discussed their experiences among themselves, realized that they shared a common assailant, and returned to the MPs en bloc was their complaint taken seriously. Even then, Montoya would almost certainly have escaped justice had he not attempted to lure away one of his victims a second time, apparently failing to recognize the boy as one he had raped after dark a fortnight previously. All of them identified him in individual line-ups; anal lesions were discovered on three of the victims; and Brewster was found on medical examination to be suffering from a possible venereal disease, as was Montoya. ³⁸ The 30-year sentence the defendant received on his conviction of four counts of sodomy and four of assault with intent to commit sodomy was by far the heaviest penalty for a sexual offence inflicted upon any of the perpetrators examined in this article. ³⁹

More devious offenders against minors preferred to groom their victims. First Lieutenant Alan Austen’s conduct around very young boys in the public parks of Clarksville, TN during the summer of 1943 had already become so alarming to townspeople that the foreman of a local company reported him to the civil police. ⁴⁰ Austen was in the habit of giving the children money and toys; playing ball games with them; and, with the permission of their parents, bringing them to the cinema and taking them away in his car on overnight trips. Three of the boys, aged between 10 and 13, reported to military police that they had been sexually assaulted by him, sometimes repeatedly. The sole offence for which Austen was convicted, however, was a case of attempted sodomy of an 11-year-old in which, as Robert Patterson, Under-Secretary of War, later correctly noted, ‘the evidence show[ed] that not only was the sodomy attempted but that sodomy was accomplished’. ⁴¹

In the third category of offence, crimes against adult civilians were often particularly violent or aggravated. A month after landing at Omaha Beach, two soldiers of the 5th Ranger Infantry Battalion, a unit that had particularly distinguished itself under murderous German fire on D-Day, broke into a house in the tiny hamlet of Gréville near Cherbourg where seven male residents were eating their evening supper. The servicemen, T/4 Harold Roehrborn and Private Joseph Smith, ordered the civilians to turn over their money and watches, while a third man guarded the door. After robbing the men and beating some of them, Roehrborn and Smith marched them across the street to an adjacent house where they were again beaten in the courtyard; taken back inside; and ordered to strip. Three were forced to perform oral sex on Roehrborn while Smith held a gun on them; one of the men was made to fellate another for the entertainment of the perpetrators; and a victim was bitten on the neck by Roehrborn during his rape. At a moment when the two soldiers were distracted, a victim fled naked from the house and ran down the street, attracting the attention of a pair of NCOs from the same company who entered and told the men still there to put on their clothes. ⁴² The stolen money and valuables were recovered from the perpetrators by the Army investigating officer the following day.

An even more serious case was perpetrated against a pair of Indian civilian workers at the US military airfield in Mohanbari, Assam, in November 1944. Seemingly inspired by the unpunished rape by one of his comrades of a male Indian labourer three months previously, Private Andrew White, Jr., stopped two brickyard workers as they walked home after dusk past his tented guard post. After bringing them inside, he made the men strip naked and inspected their bodies with an electric torch. Dismissing the older of the two, Rupak Ajmal,* White turned to his 26-year-old companion, Javesh Anand,* anally raping and beating him. When White was finished, he ordered Anand to dress and, marching him down the path at gunpoint, fired four shots at him from behind at short range. Due to his poor marksmanship, only a single round hit the victim, who fell to the ground unconscious. Seemingly unaware that he had done anything wrong, White made a full statement the following day to investigators. This proved to be his undoing, because Anand, ‘out of shame’, did not disclose the rape until directly questioned about it by the Garawar police in his hospital bed a week later. Only after being convicted did White offer another version, saying that ‘the native attacked him and that he shot in self-defense’ – a claim that, had he offered it at the outset, would likely have enabled him to evade any consequences for his crimes. ⁴³

The victim in a similar case in Ahvâz in southwestern Iran was not so fortunate. While stationed at the US oil-pumping station outside the city in March 1945, Sergeant Henry S. Tracey killed for sport an elderly villager drawing water from a stream, using the man as a target for rifle practice. ⁴⁴ Three days later when on guard duty, Tracey suggested to his fellow sentry, PFC Eddie L. Hopkins, that they abduct a passing teenager and make him ‘suck us off’. His companion demurred, but Tracey seized the victim, a 16-year-old named ‘Hassan, son of Yoosif’, and dragged him into the latrines. What transpired there is unclear, but Hopkins; an Iranian farmer working in his fields; and a shepherd tending his flocks told substantially the same story thereafter. All three saw Hassan, shouting and struggling, break free from Tracey’s grasp and begin running. Tracey then drew careful aim with his rifle and shot Hassan in the back. He picked the boy up and set him down at the foot of a ladder beneath a fuel tank, telling Hopkins to support his story that Hassan had been fired upon as he climbed the ladder and disobeyed an order to stop. Unfortunately for Tracey, Hassan was still alive when he was taken to the nearby hospital. He made a full statement to a nurse, telling her that both soldiers had done a ‘bad thing with me’ before shooting him down as he fled. Hassan died later that evening. ⁴⁵

Because US military authorities tended to convene general courts martial for sexual offences only when compelling, if not overwhelming, evidence existed against the perpetrators, the conviction rate was high. Of the 74 cases in which a named defendant was brought to trial, all but two resulted in a finding of guilty. Nonetheless, even for those convicted of grave crimes, the scales of justice were tilted heavily in their favour, so that few ultimately paid a serious price for their wrongdoing.

Military trials were usually swift. In uncomplicated cases, especially those in which the defendant pleaded guilty, a court martial might be held as soon as three days after the alleged offence, although three or four weeks was more typical. ⁴⁶ Few hearings lasted longer than a single day. A minimum of five commissioned officers, aided by a Legal Member who served as expert adviser, were required to constitute a valid court. ⁴⁷ Defendants were entitled to counsel and, if tried in the United States, to have a civilian advocate if they chose. Nonetheless, errors of procedure were not uncommon. The massive expansion of the Army after 1940 was not matched by a concomitant growth in the number of military lawyers, with the result that in a given case neither the prosecuting officer, the defence counsel, nor even the Legal Member might possess qualifications in law. ⁴⁸ To avoid possible miscarriages of justice, so-called Reviewing Authorities – usually the defendant’s commanding general, advised by his Staff Judge Advocate – and a three-member Board of Review, made up of military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Department, were each empowered to reduce sentences at their own discretion or, if they saw fit, altogether to vacate a conviction they considered unsafe or unsatisfactory. ⁴⁹ Lastly, offenders were automatically considered for clemency – a reduction or total remission of their sentence – within six months of their conviction, and might also be released on parole after serving one-third of their term. ⁵⁰

In the case of officers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it his practice during the war personally to review each recommendation for dismissal, rather than, as previous presidents had done, delegating this power to subordinate commanders. It was not unusual for him to suspend the execution of a court-martial sentence sine die provided the offender conducted himself properly thereafter. ⁵¹ The results of this indulgent policy did not always have the desired effect. Captain Charles Richards, an Army doctor, plied two Boise, ID high schoolers with drink in April 1943, rendering one comatose, before seriously sexually assaulting them in his hotel room. Charged with two counts of assault with intent to commit sodomy, he was convicted only of contributing to the delinquency of minors by providing them with alcohol, and sentenced to be dismissed the service. ⁵² Roosevelt, to whom the case was referred, suspended the captain’s sentence on condition of future good conduct and restored him to duty. ⁵³ Less than three months later Richards, who had been transferred to San Antonio, TX, accosted a 17-year-old civilian worker late at night; dragged him down to an underpass; and performed fellatio on him before trying to force his victim to reciprocate. On this occasion he was convicted of sodomy and given a term of imprisonment of two and a half years. Once again, however, the Board of Review intervened on his behalf, considering that Richards’ victim shared the blame for not having defended himself more vigorously, and quashed the prison sentence. The captain’s dismissal on this occasion, however, stood. ⁵⁴

Such remarkable leniency was more the norm than the exception for male-victim offenders during and immediately after the Second World War. A third of convicts saw their prison terms slashed or eliminated altogether by the Board of Review alone. PFC John J. O’Connell, sentenced to four years’ hard labour for attempted sodomy of an intoxicated comrade in Normandy in August 1944, obtained on reconsideration a mere dishonourable discharge from the service despite his unenviable disciplinary record. ⁵⁵ The authorities were no less generous to Private Louis C. Simms, a guard at a POW camp on the Cotentin peninsula in which 390 German captives were confined. Four days after Christmas 1944, Simms made a young radio operator, Elias Maier,* go into the forest to gather wood for the guards’ fire. Once there, Maier testified, Simms made him grasp a tree and signalled to him to lower his trousers. When he refused, Simms beat him and tried to undress him forcibly. Maier resisted and shouted for help, causing Simms to give up and, after kicking him repeatedly, to let him go. ⁵⁶ Having returned Maier to the stockade, Simms selected a younger victim, 18-year-old Rüdiger Richter,* and, taking him to the same clearing, once again forced him to face a tree. On this occasion anal rape at gunpoint was completed. ⁵⁷ Questioned afterwards, Simms signed a sworn statement admitting both offences. The court martial threw out the perpetrator’s confession to raping Richter on the ground of his low IQ, but sentenced him to seven years’ hard labour for attempted sodomy of Maier, a term immediately reduced to five by the Staff Judge Advocate. ⁵⁸ For its part, the Board of Review looked askance at Maier’s story on the paradoxical basis that there was evidence to show that he had been physically assaulted by his guards in the past and thus might hold a particular grudge against them. ⁵⁹ It also maintained that because Maier was German it was ‘not improper to view his testimony with a degree of skepticism’. The Board thus vacated Simms’ conviction on the charge of attempted sodomy of Maier also, substituting a six-month sentence for kicking the prisoner. ⁶⁰ Even this modest penalty was in turn disapproved by the reviewing authority, the Commander-in-Chief of the Normandy Base Section, who considered that stopping $90 from Simms’ pay would suffice to meet the demands of justice. ⁶¹ As a result of these salami-slicing tactics, Simms was promptly returned to active duty.

Those not favoured in this way could still benefit from a liberal programme of sentence remission. Immediately after conviction offenders were assessed, and often individually interviewed, by an assistant Staff Judge Advocate to determine their suitability for clemency. This officer’s recommendations normally carried considerable weight both with the Clemency Advisory Board, created in May 1945 with a retired Supreme Court justice, Owen Roberts, at its head, and with the federal Department of Justice’s Parole Executive that considered applications for early release. Military prisoners were considered automatically for clemency once a year, and most of the sex offenders mentioned in this article could, unless their conduct while in confinement was poor, look forward to a near-annual shortening of their prison terms. ⁶² Private Andrew White’s sentence for sodomy and attempted murder, for example, was initially reduced by the Board of Review from 40 to 20 years, and then again to six years by the Clemency Advisory Board in May 1946. The first of Private Harlan Rothman’s gang rapists was released after serving just 16 months in prison, and the second by the end of 1946; none of the quartet remained in confinement longer than three years. Harold Roehrborn and Joseph Smith, sentenced to 35 and 20 years’ hard labour respectively for raping and robbing the seven civilians at Gréville, spent only six years behind bars in the case of the former, and 16 months in the case of the latter. Remissions on this scale were common for male-victim offences.

Part of the reason, other than the general policy of ‘salvaging’ military offenders whenever possible – slightly more than half of all those sentenced to the combination of imprisonment and dishonourable discharge during the Second World War were ultimately returned to duty ⁶³ – was the evident distaste felt by many law officers for male victims of sexual violence. Investigative and court-martial records are replete with evidence of victim-blaming attitudes, which drew few distinctions, when assigning shared culpability, between adults and even very small children who had been subjected to these ordeals. The Board of Review, for example, accused 12-year-old Antoine Bertrand,* who, along with his 10-year-old brother Christophe,* had been sexually assaulted by and forced to masturbate Private Lawrence Paquette, of having ‘submitted with apparent complacency’ and given ‘tacit consent’ to his own victimisation. ⁶⁴ Paquette saw his prison term slashed by nearly two-thirds as a result. In the Andrew White case at Mohanbari, a member of the court in search of mitigating circumstances tried to find out whether the victim had engaged in anal sex prior to his rape by White, ‘not knowing these natives and the Oriental practices too well’. Similarly, Brigadier General E.C. McNeil, Assistant Judge Advocate General, professed incomprehension as to how PFC O’Connell had ‘succeed[ed] in undressing [his victim] if the latter resisted?’ Sodomy, he pointed out in a paraphrase of the seventeenth-century jurist Matthew Hale, was ‘like rape, “a most detestable crime, but it must be remembered that it is an accusation easy to be made, hard to be proved, but harder to be defended by the party accused, though innocent”’. ⁶⁵

Misapprehensions about the character of homo- and heterosexuality factored strongly into the weight given to testimony by victims as well as assessments of the culpability of perpetrators. One of the elements that produced so dramatic a reduction in the sentences awarded to Roehrborn and Smith was the Staff Judge Advocate’s discovery when interviewing them that ‘Both are fine manly looking soldiers’ and his decision in consequence that previous same-sex activity on the part of one should be viewed as indicative of ‘curiosity’ and a momentary ‘sexual need’ rather than a fixed orientation. ⁶⁶ Defence counsel for Lieutenant James Chaves, charged with sexually attacking five enlisted men, maintained in a bravura demonstration of Catch-22 reasoning that if the account of one of his accusers was true, the latter had branded himself ‘a self-confessed sodomist’ by virtue of having been raped by Chaves and that therefore as an ‘accomplice’ his testimony must be set aside. ⁶⁷ Perhaps the most extreme example of victim-blaming, however, was offered in a brief by Vincent C. Giblin, formerly a Florida judge and onetime member of Al Capone’s legal team in the early 1930s. Hired as defence counsel by Major Frank Bane, who was arrested while in the act of anally raping a 15-year-old boy to whom he had offered a lift home, Giblin argued to the Judge Advocate General that he ought to be permitted to offer evidence that the victim was ‘a sexual pervert and homosexualist … Psychiatrists are in accord in the view that youthful sexual perverts are usually pathological liars … like errant young girls (to whom they are closely akin by reason of their homosexual tendencies), their abnormal mentality frequently finds expression in the narration of imaginary sex incidents of which they are the imaginary victims.’ ⁶⁸

The cases examined here, nonetheless, support Allan Bérubé’s assessment that a cautious live-and-let-live attitude was most in evidence when the military command structure dealt with same-sex activity among servicemen. ⁶⁹ If courts-martial and the Judge Advocate General’s Department were generally unimpressed by defendants’ testimonies about heterosexual encounters presented as exculpatory character evidence, neither did they attach much significance, especially during the sentencing phase, to indications that perpetrators had occasionally engaged in consensual homosexual acts in the past. ⁷⁰ Military lawyers were keener to consider what ‘salvage value’ might be found in the men before them than to use a conviction for same-sex offending as a lever to bring about their separation from the service. The only exception to this rule was when it was considered expedient to permit an officer perpetrator to resign rather than subjecting him to the full rigour of military justice.

Dealing leniently with offenders was also facilitated by the authorities’ nearly total freedom from public scrutiny and criticism. Male rape cases attracted no publicity; sometimes the victims themselves were keenest for the prosecution to be dropped. ⁷¹ In particular, the racial tensions that often transformed cases of sexual offending into popular causes célèbres or sparked outbreaks of civil disturbance were largely absent from male-victim Army crimes. ⁷² As was true of civilian sex offences, most of the cases discussed here were intra-racial in nature. Just a tenth of these rapes and sexual assaults involved perpetrators and victims of different races; only four featured what was, from white Americans’ perspective, the most inflammatory racial combination for sex offences: the violation of a white victim by a black perpetrator. In stark – and revealing – contrast to situations in which white women and girls were concerned, white Americans evinced no concern about defending the ‘honour’ of men of the same race from their African-American compatriots. The same indifference reflected itself in sentencing policy, with non-white offenders, and those guilty of inter-racial assaults, faring no worse than others at the hands of general courts-martial, the Judge Advocate General’s Department, and the Clemency Advisory Board upon their conviction.

It is, then, unsurprising that the average sentence for sex offenders should have been so low. Of the 80 perpetrators whose convictions were upheld by the Board of Review, more than one in four received a non-custodial sentence: either dismissal, or being allowed, in the case of some officers, to submit their resignation ‘for the good of the service’. ⁷³ Half of the 58 offenders whose imprisonment was confirmed by the Board were sentenced to periods ranging from three months to four years. Only six received sentences in excess of 10 years, although, as noted above, the operation of clemency meant that most were out of jail long before their allotted time. ⁷⁴ The average pre-clemency sentence passed upon sex offenders was 5.77 years. Even this, though, overstates the severity attached to the specifically sexual component of their crimes. Because courts martial did not disaggregate the prison terms awarded to convicts who were found in violation of several Articles of War, the figures given here are inflated by including the elements of their sentences punishing the serious non-sexual offences, like desertion and attempted murder, of which some were simultaneously found guilty.

The reactions by men and boys who experienced rape and sexual assault at the hands of wartime servicemen are distinctly similar to those of present-day military victims, men and women alike. ⁷⁵ Contrary to what might be supposed of a cohort in which a high proportion were able-bodied servicemen trained in the use of lethal force and having ready access to firearms, physical resistance was unusual, and retaliatory action in the aftermath exceptionally so. The single most common response on the part of male victims was ‘tonic immobility’, or the so-called ‘freeze’ response. ⁷⁶ Others reacted by feigning sleep or turning over in bed in the hope that the perpetrator would take the unspoken hint. Some protested verbally; pushed the wrongdoer away; or fled the scene. Many employed a combination of these strategies, escalating to physical resistance only when less confrontational methods had been tried and failed. Several thought they were not entitled to resist because they were outranked by, or subject to the orders of, the offender.

Of the more than 100 identified victims in this sample, only two attempted any kind of extra-legal action against their assailants. ⁷⁷ Private W.D. McAbee and First Lieutenant Ernest Bartos were among a number of soldiers who, two months after D-Day, became heavily intoxicated at their bivouac close to the front lines outside Avranches. Their comrades carried the pair into a tent to sleep it off. Later that night McAbee emerged in considerable distress with his trousers disarranged, shouting that Bartos had ‘bit his prick and he could prove it’. He grabbed a rifle and fired several shots back into the tent, killing the lieutenant. The court-martial, hearing medical evidence of abrasions to McAbee’s penis, accepted his account, but nonetheless sentenced him to 10 years’ hard labour for voluntary manslaughter. ⁷⁸ The other retaliator, PFC Harry Bigelow* of the Marine Corps, was more fortunate. Invited for drinks to an Orlando, FL hotel room by First Lieutenant Arthur Cunningham and an officer friend of the latter, Bigelow spent the evening being encouraged to drink copious quantities of whiskey. At a certain point Cunningham signalled to his friend to withdraw and, without a word, unbuttoned Bigelow’s trousers and proceeded to perform oral sex upon him. Cunningham had, however, miscalculated the Marine’s state of alcoholic incapacity. Bigelow jumped to his feet; ‘kicked Hell out of’ Cunningham; poured the remnants of the whiskey bottle and the contents of Cunningham’s suitcase over him; departed the room; and, finding the other officer waiting outside, punched him three times for good measure before summoning the military police. Most unusually, Bigelow was not proceeded against for striking an officer, an offence the Army generally considered to be justified by no provocation whatever. ⁷⁹

The much more typical ‘freeze’ reaction was a source of immense bewilderment to tribunals and victims alike. Questioned by defence counsel as to why he had not resisted more forcefully an attempt at oral rape, one of Lieutenant Chaves’ victims, an Army driver, replied: ‘It may seem funny to say this, but if something like that ever happened to anybody, a person gets stunned. I was particularly stunned.’ ⁸⁰ Both of the sergeants attacked by First Lieutenant Charles Johnson of the Army Corps of Engineers initially turned over in bed in the hope that he would leave them alone; tellingly, neither reported the incidents, which came to light only when another NCO disclosed to higher authority on their behalf. ⁸¹ T/5 Ralph Simmons* did not resist when sexually assaulted by Captain Gordon Rogers of the Medical Corps because ‘the accused was an officer and he was a private … and by himself could prove nothing on the accused’. ⁸² Corporal Leonard Halliday,* one of a number of men who were subjected to a regime of virtual sexual servitude by their direct superior, the exceptionally predatory Major Martin Sebastian, said that he ‘submitted to these ordeals against my wishes in fear of reprisals’. ⁸³ In a similar vein, T/5 Louis Rees,* one of four servicemen who were indecently assaulted by Major Donald Brewer in Algeria in a three-week period, testified that ‘I didn’t believe I had a right to tell an officer what he could or couldn’t do’. ⁸⁴

While information on the long-term sequelae for victims is often lacking, it is clear that servicemen displayed symptoms of what, half a century later, would be defined by the Pentagon as post-traumatic stress disorder induced by military sexual trauma. ⁸⁵ After his rape by the commanding general’s aide-de-camp in the New Caledonia military district, 20-year-old T/5 Ethan Boyd,* a highly religious model soldier, became ‘nervous, irritable and argumentative’, losing interest in his work and being written up for minor infractions. Not until 10 months later did he make a formal complaint. ⁸⁶ Staff Sergeant Lorenzo B. Wilson testified that one of the victims of Captain Gordon Rogers was ‘trembling’ and said he would ‘rather be shot’ than face the perpetrator again. ⁸⁷ Others sought to escape their attackers by applying for transfers to other units. Although no specific examples are to be found in these cases, it is likely that a significant number of the soldiers volunteering for unpopular or hazardous duty, or going absent without leave, did so as the only means available to them of separating themselves from an intolerable situation.

The motivations of the perpetrators, for their part, lend little support to many of the generalisations offered in the more heavily theorized interpretations of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). None of the cases examined here fits easily within the framework of ‘rape as a weapon of war’; nor do the majority provide evidence of a desire on the part of perpetrators to ‘feminize’ or ‘emasculate’ victims. ⁸⁸ While it is true that the cases in question do not constitute a full cross-section of CRSV against men and boys – excluding as they do, for example, instances of instrumental rape, sexual torture, or ethnically-targeted crimes – they nonetheless reveal a broad spectrum of possible motivations. Lieutenant Alan Austen, for example, claimed that his acts had been driven by ‘curiosity’, while Captain Harry Hart frankly intimated that he felt himself ‘entitled’ to commit with impunity an ‘indiscretion’ against an enlisted man in light of his own exemplary military record. ⁸⁹ While a few offences, like the forced fellatio in which the men at Gréville were compelled to engage for the gratification of their assailants, do clearly indicate a desire to humiliate the victims, others, especially those in which alcohol was employed as a rape drug, were carried out in ways that demonstrated the offenders’ evident hope that nobody, including those assaulted, would be aware that a crime had occurred at all. Some, like the attacks launched without warning by Lieutenant George Earle and Private Clemente Reynolds, featured paroxysms of violence that may not have been explicable even by the perpetrators. And others, like the murderous assaults carried out without apparent reflection or remorse by Private Andrew White and Sergeant Henry Tracey against civilians in India and Iran, reveal an attitude concerning the disposability of human life in the Third World that is no less chilling for the fact that the offenders in each of these cases were themselves people of colour.

Lastly, the marked insouciance with which military authorities treated the phenomenon of same-sex rapes and sexual assaults stands in tension with assertions that these offences were symptomatic of a ‘moral panic’ in the 1930s and 1940s over ‘the identification of boys as potential victims of sexual assault and of homosexuality as a dangerous condition’. ⁹⁰ If such a panic ever existed, those charged with the administration of military justice revealed themselves to be largely immune to it. No great concern was ever expressed for the welfare even of very young victims, far less adult soldiers or civilians; perpetrators were assessed largely on the basis of their military record and salvage value rather than the heinousness of their crimes. As with the rape by servicemen of women and girls, sex crimes against men and boys were treated first and foremost as breaches of military discipline. Little anxiety was expressed about the risk of social contagion, nor did commanders and investigators display curiosity about the possibility that the crimes of which they became aware might be indicative of a wider pattern of offending, either by the perpetrator himself or others within his circle. Rather, in the same manner as with heterosexual offences, each case was treated as a discrete episode: a regrettable but unexceptional wartime manifestation of ‘what soldiers do’.

As noted above, virtually no scholarship at present exists on male-victim sexual violence in the armed services of the other belligerents of the Second World War. It is not yet possible, therefore, to say to what extent the US Army’s experience with, and prosecution of, these crimes resembles that of combatants elsewhere. Suggestive hints in David Snyder’s study of the Wehrmacht indicate that similar patterns to those examined here may come to light when the record of the German Army is scrutinized in closer detail. ⁹¹ Only a much more substantial volume of empirical research, however, will enable us to examine the various manifestations of this form of offending in comparative perspective, and to begin to draw reliable evidence-based conclusions from them.