From Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley

American War Crimes and World War II

It's a common misconception that Pvt. Eddie Slovik was the only American soldier executed during World War II. But according to documents in the National Archives, in the European theater alone, the U.S. Army condemned 443 of its own soldiers to death for war zone capital offenses, mostly rape and murder of civilians. Of those soldiers condemned, at least ninety-six were executed from December 7, 1941, to June 1946. Most are buried outside the wall of a U.S. military cemetery in France. Military authorities refused to give these criminals the privilege of being buried with those killed in combat.

That number does not include Army Air Corps troops, the Navy, or any troops in the Pacific. The total number of American servicemen executed in all theaters was approximately three hundred.

Most death penalty cases involved the rape or murder of women, mostly German, but also women in Allied countries. Two typical cases, chosen at random from National Archive files on executions of American GIs in the European theater, involve the rape of noncombatant civilians. (In Vietnam, the equivalent would have been the rape of a South Vietnamese woman.)

Four soldiers, members of a unit that made one of the initial landings in the American invasion of Sicily on July, 9, 1943, wandered into the small village of Marretta, near Gela, Sicily, one afternoon about a week after the invasion. The four men gang-raped an Italian woman. Later apprehended by MPs and identified, their punishment was swift and sure. All four American GIs-David White, Armstead White, Harvey L. Stroud, and Willie A. Pitman - were tried and convicted of rape within days of the attack. A little more than a month later, the four privates were executed by hanging.

A few months after the invasion of Normandy and the fall of the German-occupied French port of Cherbourg to the Americans, Pvt. William P. Pennyfeather and two companions, assigned to the 3868th Quartermaster Truck Company, went looking for a whorehouse on the afternoon of August I, 1944. None of the Cherbourg sporting establishments was open for business.

Pennyfeather had a shave and a haircut, then spent most of the early evening drinking cognac, going from cafe to cafe with his companions until the establishments all had shut their doors for the night. Shortly after midnight, they heard sounds of laughter coming from a rooming house at 1 Rue Emmanuel Liais and muscled their way in, claiming they were looking for "Boche" (Germans). Pennyfeather sexually assaulted a French woman. Tried and convicted of rape on September 2, 1944, Pennyfeather was hanged at Fort Du Roule, France on November 18, 1944, along with another soldier who had been convicted of an assault on a French woman in Octeville.