The Fort Lawton riot

On the night of 14–15 August 1944, at Fort Lawton, a US Army post on the edge of Seattle, several dozen Black soldiers burst into the barracks housing Italian prisoners of war who were working for the army. Dozens of people were injured, and towards dawn military policemen found the body of a prisoner, Guglielmo Olivotto, hanging from a rope on the obstacle course. The affair ended in what researchers describe as the largest court martial held in the United States during the Second World War: 43 soldiers, all of them Black, were charged, and 28 were convicted. More than sixty years later the army found the trial “fundamentally unfair” and set aside the convictions.

The brief formula under which the event has survived in war chronologies – “a clash between Italian prisoners and American soldiers” – oversimplifies it. It was rather a brawl between a few drunken men that turned into an attack on the Italians’ quarters, together with a killing whose perpetrators were never reliably identified.

Prisoners who became helpers

Fort Lawton, on Magnolia Bluff overlooking Puget Sound, was in 1944 one of the main points of embarkation for men and equipment bound for the Pacific. In the summer of 1944 some 10,000 soldiers were stationed there, and alongside them a company of Italian prisoners of war.

The United States held about 51,000 Italian prisoners, most of them captured in North Africa – many had arrived in the camps after the surrender of the Axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943. When the government of Marshal Pietro Badoglio declared war on Germany and Italy became a “co-belligerent”, these men’s position became ambiguous: formally they were still prisoners, politically they were citizens of a state fighting on the Allied side. The US Army resolved this in the spring of 1944 by creating Italian Service Units. Prisoners who signed a declaration of cooperation worked in depots, ports, hospitals and bases in the United States; they did not fight, wore Italian uniforms with service-unit insignia, were paid and could – under supervision – go outside the camp. According to various estimates, the great majority of the prisoners volunteered; those who refused, regarded as fascists, were held in separate camps. The formation in April 1944 of Badoglio’s second government, with the participation of the anti-fascist parties, and the Allied entry into Rome in June persuaded many of the waverers.

The Italians at Fort Lawton were volunteers of this kind. In line with army policy at the time, they had been carefully selected from among men judged to be politically uncommitted: most were conscripts who had fought without enthusiasm. Under supervision they visited the homes of Seattle residents, taverns and cinemas, and attended dances organised for servicemen; Italian-American families welcomed them like relatives. Some local people and soldiers saw this as excessive leniency towards men who had been shooting at Americans a year and a half earlier.

An army divided

On the other side of the same post lived soldiers who enjoyed fewer freedoms than the prisoners. During the war the US Army was a racially segregated institution: African Americans served in separate units, usually under white officers, in separate barracks, with separate day rooms and post exchanges. When the draft began in the autumn of 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s White House stated plainly that the army would maintain segregation and that Black men would serve in separate units, in numbers proportionate to their share of the population. The formation in 1941 of the first Black flying unit changed nothing in this principle. Most Black soldiers were assigned to service units: construction, transport and port companies.

It was port companies of this kind, belonging to the Transportation Corps and being trained to unload ships in combat zones, that were stationed at Fort Lawton. Their men were barred from some of the establishments in town that the Italians visited under escort – such complaints were repeated in the press in the days after the riot. Newspapers wrote of jealousy over the girls who surrounded the “romantic” Italians at dances. Later research suggests that resentment of the prisoners was also strong among the white military policemen, and their conduct during the critical hours still raises questions today.

The night of 14–15 August

On 14 August two Black port companies were ordered to ship out overseas the next day. In the evening there was a farewell party. Around 11 p.m. three Italians returning from town ran into several Black soldiers; both groups had been drinking that evening. Words were exchanged and a fight broke out in which one of the Americans, a private, was knocked out cold. The Italians fled to their barracks.

News of the beating spread like wildfire, embellished by a rumour that the American was dead. Several dozen Black soldiers, armed with boards from a dismantled fence, stones and in some cases knives, made for the Italians’ quarters. Windows were smashed and the barracks and the company orderly room wrecked; the prisoners, woken from sleep, hid under their beds, jumped out of windows and ran into the woods. American interpreters were beaten as well. Thirty-two people were taken to hospital, more than a dozen of them with serious injuries – fractured skulls, stab wounds, crushed bones. The Italians were the worst hurt; one of them spent sixteen months in treatment.

A white military policeman, Private Clyde Lomax, who was patrolling the so-called coloured area, was on the scene almost from the start. He put the unconscious soldier into a jeep, but did not call for reinforcements or notify his superiors; moreover, he drove not to the nearest hospital but to a distant one. Despite telephone calls from the Italian quarters, a military police patrol arrived only after 30–45 minutes. Order was restored without anyone being detained – the MPs later claimed that in the dark they had not recognised any of the attackers.

On the morning of 15 August Lomax and another MP found the body of Guglielmo Olivotto at the foot of a bluff on the obstacle course, hanging from a rope. Olivotto, a prisoner in the Italian company, was – as the journalist Jack Hamann later described him – a quiet, devout man who did not drink and had never wanted to be a soldier. He had last been seen jumping in panic out of the window by his bunk. There were no obvious signs of a struggle on the body.

Investigation and trial

The commander of Fort Lawton, Colonel Harry Branson, ordered the area cleaned up that same day. No fingerprints or footprints were secured, the rope and tools were not treated as evidence, and within twenty-four hours the wrecked barracks had been repaired and repainted. All the Black soldiers of both companies, whether they had taken part in the riot or not, were confined under arrest. When Branson tried that same day to send them off to San Francisco, the War Department – alerted by one of the officers – reversed his decision.

The prisoner’s death became an international matter. Washington was mindful that Germany and Japan held tens of thousands of American prisoners and that any breach of the Geneva Convention by the United States might affect their fate; the killing of an Italian, a citizen of a co-belligerent state, was also a political embarrassment in relations with the government in Rome. Two men were sent to Seattle. Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke of the army’s Inspector General’s office was to establish who was to blame for the riot and the killing having happened at all. Lieutenant Colonel Leon Jaworski, a Houston prosecutor in civilian life, was to prepare the prosecution.

Cooke’s report, which was classified, was devastating for the post’s command: Branson had neglected the investigation, Lomax had abandoned his post, and many MPs and officers had lied under oath. Cooke recommended that Branson be reduced in rank or transferred and that Lomax be court-martialled. Jaworski had access to this report but built his case differently. Most of the Italians questioned could not identify anyone in the dark; two, however, confidently picked out dozens of attackers – both, as was shown only years later, had previously been judged unreliable by military intelligence. Five Black soldiers agreed to testify in exchange for immunity.

Jaworski charged 43 soldiers (according to some studies 44, with charges against two dropped) – all of them Black – with rioting, and three of them also with premeditated murder, a capital offence. They were defended by two appointed lawyers, Major William Beeks and Howard Noyd, who were given – depending on the account – between ten days and two weeks to prepare the defence. They therefore concentrated mainly on rebutting the murder charge. The trial, before nine white officers, began on 16 November 1944. When the defence learned of the existence of Cooke’s report, Jaworski refused to disclose it, citing military secrecy, and the court backed him. Lomax testified as a prosecution witness.

After five weeks, in December 1944, the court found 28 of the defendants guilty of rioting, two of them – Luther Larkin and William Jones – also of the manslaughter of Olivotto. Sentences ranged from six months to 25 years’ hard labour; almost all of those convicted were dishonourably discharged after serving their sentences. Olivotto’s killers were never reliably identified; some researchers have suggested that the prisoner may have been dragged away from the scene of the riot by someone outside the group of attackers, but the evidence, destroyed in the first few hours, makes it impossible to settle the question. Olivotto was buried in the post cemetery, in a plot set apart from the American graves.

Significance

The Fort Lawton affair unfolded in an election year, a few weeks after Roosevelt agreed to run for a fourth term, and almost at the same time as another tragedy involving Black servicemen on the West Coast: after the Port Chicago disaster of 17 July 1944, when an ammunition explosion killed more than 300 men, most of them Black sailors loading munitions, 50 of those who refused to return to the dangerous work were convicted of mutiny. Both cases showed how the racial division of the armed forces – into those who fought and those who carried the crates – translated into anger, violence and unequal justice. For the American public in 1944, however, Fort Lawton was above all a story of “Black rioters” and a murdered prisoner; that was how the press, relying on rumour, presented it.

The convicted men did not serve their full sentences. After the war President Harry Truman, in his annual clemency reviews, reduced the sentences of thousands of servicemen, including theirs; the last of them was released from prison in 1949. A year earlier, on 26 July 1948, Truman had ordered the desegregation of the armed forces – in practice it was completed only in the early 1950s. After the war Leon Jaworski prosecuted Germans for war crimes before American courts, and in 1973–1974, as special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, he secured the release of President Richard Nixon’s tapes.

The affair was forgotten for forty years. In 1986 the journalist Jack Hamann came across Olivotto’s grave and began researching his story; with his wife he found the declassified Cooke report in the archives and described the case in his book On American Soil (2005). Under pressure from members of Congress of both parties, the Army Board for Correction of Military Records reviewed the convictions and on 26 October 2007 unanimously found that Jaworski had committed “egregious error” in denying the defence access to the report, and that the trial had been “fundamentally unfair”. The convictions were set aside – first those of four soldiers who had applied (three of them were no longer alive), then those of all 28 men convicted – and they were granted honourable discharges and back pay; in 2008 Congress allowed interest to be added to it. On 26 July 2008 the army publicly apologised in Seattle to the convicted men and their families. Of the two veterans still living, one, Samuel Snow, died in hospital that same day, holding his certificate of honourable discharge. A Mass for Guglielmo Olivotto was also celebrated during the ceremonies.