Fort Lawton doesn't exist anymore – not as an Army base and not in historic memory, unless you come across “On American Soil” by Jack Hamann (University of Washington Press, 2007).
In 1944, 43 Black soldiers were court-martialed there – 40 charged with rioting and three with first-degree murder. It was the biggest court martial of World War II. The lead prosecutor was an ambitious lawyer from Texas, Lt Col Leon Jaworski, who in '64 investigated the assassination of JFK for the Warren Commission and in 1974 became the special prosecutor of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.
The Army ceded Fort Lawton – almost 700 acres on Puget Sound – to Seattle in 1965 and the city made it into Discovery Park. When Native Americans invoked an 1865 treaty promising “the reversion of surplus military land to their original landowners,” Seattle ceded 20 acres to the United Indians of All Tribes.
In 1986, Jack Hamann, a law school grad who had become a reporter for KING TV in Seattle, heard about an unusual headstone at the Fort Lawton cemetery that bore the (misspelled) name Gugliemo Olivotto and the date 14 Agosto 1944. The date led him to a front-page story in the Post-Intelligencer that he summarizes thus: “An Italian prisoner of war had been lynched at Fort Lawton, and the prime suspects were members of a 'mob' of African-American soldiers.” To his surprise, Hamann then had to “look long and hard to find anyone who had ever heard about this incredible event,” which was “conspicuously absent from history books and even from the collective memories of lawyers, soldiers, and journalists.”
Back in 1944, when the Army was hurriedly shifting personnel and equipment to the Pacific, Fort Lawton had become a major embarkation point. About 10,000 soldiers were housed there that summer, including a 200-man “Italian Service Unit” made up of POWs who had been interviewed by US Military Intelligence and deemed apolitical. Mussolini had been killed and the US State Department, anticipating the Cold War, was courting the new government. ISU members lived in barracks, did menial jobs, and wore the same olive drab fatigues as GIs, with a white shoulder patch that said “Italy.” (Signifiantly, Hamann notes, some ardent fascists avoided prison by bluffing their way through MI screenings and getting assigned to ISUs.)
The “Italian Area” at Fort Lawton was adjacent to the “Negro Area.” More than a million African-Americans served in the Army during World War II, but units were segregated and Black soldiers were disproportionately assigned supportive roles. “When roughly 10% of the soldiers were Black,” Hamann notes, “34% of quartermaster units and 42% of engineering units were Black. In the Transportation Corps… port companies, were almost 80% Black.” (After ranks were depleted by the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, commanders were ordered to accept Black volunteers. ”General Dwight Eisenhower resisted the order,” the US Army website now acknowledges, “but formed black volunteer platoons that could be attached to combat units.”)
There were three “Negro port companies” assembled at Fort Lawn in August '44 –Invisible Men trained to load troops, food, supplies, ordinance, and equipment onto trucks, ships, and planes. Their work called for skill and coordination. “A hatch tender signals a winch operator as slings of cargo are loaded…” The inherent dangers had been demonstrated only a month earlier when an explosion of two ships at the Navy munitions depot in Port Chicago killed 320 sailors, two-thirds of them Black, and seriously wounded 300. (The 50 survivors who refused to resume handling munitions were then convicted of mutiny. The Port Chicago sailors were Invisible Men until Robert Allen's fine book about their court martial came out in 1990.)
“Discovery Park Graves,” Hamann's hour-long documentary about the forgotten “riot” and the ensuing court-martial Fort Lawton, was well received when it aired in 1987. His career flourished and he won numerous awards. But over the years he came to have serious misgivings about his original take on the Fort Lawton case, and he decided to investigate further. ”On American Soil” was his take two. After it was published, Hamman explained to archivist David S. Ferriero:
“The documentary had primarily accepted Jaworski’s theory that black soldiers in the segregated 1944 US Army had grown to resent that white commanders treated them little better than the Italian prisoners housed right across the street. Jaworski had convinced the court that simmering resentment boiled over the night of August 14, 1944, fueling a riot and Olivotto’s lynching. Years after the documentary first aired, friends and colleagues often expressed discomfort about its unanswered questions and incongruous assertions. In particular, it was the only case in American history where black men stood trial accused of a mob lynching; didn’t that raise a red flag or two?… In 2001, with many more years of reporting experience under our belts, my wife, Leslie, and I realized that the documentary had relied primarily on secondary sources – 1944 news articles and such – rather than on primary sources. Determined to learn more, we set out on a journey which eventually led us to the National Archives” in College Park, Maryland.”
The Hamanns had hoped to find the court-martial file in a matter of hours. But it would be weeks before Leslie came across something “far more intriguing and powerful” in the 'Miscellaneous' section of the Archives’ World War II collection – a recently-declassified report by Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke, who had investigated the tragic episode for the army Inspector General. From Cooke's report Hamann learned “that the U.S. Army knew – in advance of the trial – that its detectives had thoroughly botched the investigation of Olivotto’s murder, and that the defendants had been fingered by highly-suspect informants.”
“Leon Jaworski himself had a copy of that investigation,” according to Hamann, “yet fought successfully to keep it out of the hands of the defendants’ Army-appointed lawyers.” Jaworski aspired to prosecute war criminals in Europe after the Allied victory and he needed to win convictions at Fort Lawton to get that assignment. The court martial of US soldiers alleged to have attacked Italian POWs and killed one of them was being watched closely in Washington, DC. Italian-American organizations had expressed outrage, editorials demanding punishment were forwarded to the White House, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson had promised that “proper disciplinary action will be taken.”
Gen. Cooke's investigation and report enabled Hamann to construct a coherent account of the assault on ISU members at Fort Lawton. (“Riot” is an inaccurate description of the event.) August 14 had been a payday, and two of the “Negro port companies” – the 650th and 651st – were due to ship out for a combat zone the next day. That night members of the third company had thrown them a big going-away party. Around 11 pm, three ISU members returning from a night on the town in Seattle walked past some Black soldiers socializing in front of their barracks. Willie Montgomery, a small 39-year-old corporal from NYC who was very drunk said something derogatory. According to Giuseppe Belle, Montgomery was cursing and came at him with a knife, so Belle, who was also small, hit him with a left hook that knocked him out. The Italians raced to their barracks while Montgomery's friends attended to him.
An MP patrolling in a jeep soon came by. Although Montgomery had revived, the MP, Clyde Lomax insisted on driving him to the hospital. There were two hospitals on the base, but Lomax drove to the one furthest away. He would stay away for half an hour, although he knew that serious trouble was brewing between the Blacks and the Italians.
According to testimony at the court martial, Montgomery's friends had gone into the barracks yelling “They got one of us, let's go get them” and words to that effect. Fueled by alcohol, groups of Black soldiers headed for the ISU barracks, picking up rocks and fence posts to use in their assault Twenty-four Italians, three black soldiers and three whites who'd been in the ISU orderly room were injured, some seriously (three fractured skulls, two knife wounds). It was not reported that any Italians were missing. The next morning, as dawn was breaking, Pvt Lomax, driving his jeep on the beach, came upon Olivotto's limp body hanging from a rope strung between two steel cables on an obstacle course used by trainees.
Gen. Cooke's assistant, Lt. Col. Curtis L. Williams of the Inspector General Department, arrived at the end of August and learned to his dismay that hardly any evidence had been collected or statements taken from witnesses. None of the attackers had been identified by the MPs who eventually arrived on the scene and ordered them back to their barracks. Even the rope from which Olivotto was found hanging had disappeared. No photographs of his limp body had been taken. No footprints or vehicle tracks had been preserved. (Trainees were allowed to use the obstacle course soon after Olivotto was cut down.)
Jaworski had to find participants willing to name names, honestly or otherwise.
To be continued
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