This book relates a chapter of American military history which many people would rather forget. When the United States came to the aid of Britain in 1942, the arrival of American troops was greeted with unreserved enthusiasm, but unfortunately, wartime sometimes brings out the worst, as well as the best, in people. A small number of the soldiers abused the hospitality they received by committing murders and rapes against British civilians. Some of these men were hanged or shot at Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset, which had been handed over for the use of the American armed forces. Due to a treaty between Britain and America, those accused of such offences faced an American court martial, rather than a British civilian court, which gave rise to some curious anomalies. Although rape had not been a capital crime in Britain for over a century, it still carried the death penalty under American military law and so the last executions for rape in Britain were carried out at this time in Shepton Mallet. Fighting For the United States, Executed in Britain tells the story of every American soldier executed in Britain during the Second World War. The majority of the executed soldiers were either black or Hispanic, reflecting the situation in the United States itself, where the ethnicity of the accused person often played a key role in both convictions and the chances of subsequently being executed.
Furthermore, physical death has relational consequences for others. My death, for example, would mean that my wife would undergo a relational/narrative change: that is, my wife would become a widow. Social death concerns our ipse ...
"The Fifth Field reveals one of the final secrets of the war: how 96 American soldiers in Europe and North Africa were tried by American General Courts-Martial, convicted by military juries, sentenced to death, executed and buried in an ...
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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations.
Historian John Buckley offers a radical reappraisal of Great Britain’s fighting forces during World War Two, challenging the common belief that the British Army was no match for the forces of Hitler’s Germany.
"Defending a New Nation, 1783 1811," the first volume of the "U.S. Army Campaigns of the War of 1812" series, tells the story of several military campaigns against Indians in the Northwest Territory, the Army's role in suppressing the ...
This volume contains much on Nightingale’s efforts to achieve real reforms.
Mark Clark was the Londonbased deputy of Dwight Eisenhower, the lieutenant general who had been made the supreme commander ofthe 112,000 American and Britishtroops involved in Operation Torch.A tall man,Clark wastheproduct of ...
On the eve of World War II, the British army was more an international police force than a true combat-ready fighting machine. Raymond Callahan chronicles its trial-by-fire transformation in a...
Babits put the events at Cowpens into a sequence that makes sense given the landscape, the drill manual, the time frame, and participants' accounts. He presents an accurate accounting of the numbers involved and the battle's length.