On a hot August night in 1944, a soldier’s body was
discovered hanging by a rope from a cable spanning an
obstacle course at Seattle’s Fort Lawton. The body was
identified as Private Guglielmo Olivotto, one of the
thousands of Italian prisoners of war captured and brought
to America.
The murder stunned the nation and the international
community. Under pressure to respond quickly, the War
Department convened a criminal trial at the fort, charging
three African American soldiers with the lynching and
firstdegree murder of Private Olivotto. Forty other
soldiers were charged with rioting, accused of storming the
Italian barracks on the night of the murder. All forty-
three soldiers were black. There was no evidence
implicating any of these men. Leon Jaworski, later the lead
prosecuter at the Watergate trial, was appointed to
prosecute the case and seek the death penalty for three men
who were most assuredly innocent.
Through his access to previously classified documents and
the information gained from extensive interviews,
journalist Jack Hamann tells the whole story behind World
War II’s largest army court-martial—a story that raises
important questions about how justice is carried out when a
country is at war.
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