22nd April, 2024 in Military, Society & Culture

A tale of two court cases

By Kate Werran

The thought arrived as I was hovering inside a crowded coffee shop directly opposite the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand. Tables and bars pulsed with suited, brief cased, device-bashing professionals; the buzz from conversation being shouted and spoken into phones and faces was all pervading as I continued to wait. And worry.

I was expecting four more people to join me — my husband, our son’s SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), the advocate and a teacher — before we took our fight up the steps over the road. This was a final attempt to secure a specialist school more suitable for our vulnerable son; the one and only chance to argue and articulate for our most precious person, someone unable to do so for himself. To lose was unthinkable. But it was us versus an institution; amateurs against experts at the nation’s most famous law courts and it was frightening. Isolating.

London’s slate sky matched my mood. I discovered that steaming, scalding coffee did nothing to warm bones chilled by night after night of sleeplessness. So, I did what I do when I need to escape. I pulled out the book I was writing and read the last chapter. Months earlier, I had pitched to multiple literary agencies. It was not interesting enough; I was told by one. It might make a feature in a Sunday magazine if I was lucky, said another. This non-fiction book that I was writing then, was for me and my children alone. We talked about it most days, amidst practising times table and spellings, on our walk across Barnes Common to school.

I hadn’t got far into the page when it hit me. Whatever way I cut, pasted, deleted or reworded it, the parallel was suddenly stark and undeniable. It occurred to me that the Second World War story I had been researching and writing resembled the very experience I was about to go through. My righteous indignation about what happened nearly 80 years before was the same as my personal feelings in a London coffee shop the very hour before my court proceeding. Perhaps, sub-consciously, it had always fuelled my interest in the story, or vice versa.

It was not surprising that it had taken me so long to draw the line between two seemingly disparate events not even from the same century. My research centred on a unit of African American soldiers who mutinied on the streets of a Cornish market town in 1943 – and how it had been covered up by the authorities and why. Drawing on a forgotten court martial transcript and archival material in Great Britain and the United States, I pieced together an account of divide, prejudice and second-hand treatment that had somehow been hidden. I had been able to trace the story of the unit from its beginnings to the dramatic shoot-out in Launceston town square that still bears the bullet holes.

But what brought the story together; what truly exposed the egregiousness of segregation in the US Army was the transcript from the subsequent court martial. There, in black and white, over hundreds of pages were cases for the prosecution and defence, verdict and sentence. It read like a drama script, but what it really laid bare was the defencelessness of the accused. The 14 defendants never stood a chance against the might of an institution wanting to suppress and silence them.

The evidence was all there. The manuscript typed meticulously by a young woman from Devon (unusually seconded to the US Army) revealed statements that were tampered with, coerced witnesses, even words in mouths of illiterate soldiers (who heard their falsified accounts for the first time in court). Investigators could not recognise those they interrogated; statements were not sworn properly (grounds alone for being thrown out) and there was huge confusion as to how most of the 14 defendants even ended up on trial. Not one of the white soldiers under attack could identify anyone in court. Witnesses were over-ruled and mis-directed and ultimately the case hinged on contradictory accounts given by four soldiers who were themselves involved. But I found the most troubling aspect of all was that only a minority of defendants spoke for themselves in court. Not one of the three so-called ringleaders, nor six fellow soldiers said anything in the legal proceedings that would change their lives — other, of course, than to submit a plea.

And it fuelled my outrage in that coffee shop on the Strand as I waited for my own moment in court. I felt my writing was giving voice to those who had been gagged all those years ago; allowing them to speak for the first time in the way I was about to for my son. And it made me determined to keep on doing it wherever I could – to keep shining a light on courts-martial like this; on narratives that should be told and voices that should be heard.

So it was only natural that I became fascinated in the extraordinary case of Leroy Henry the moment I heard about it. Once my family moved to within a couple of miles of the crime scene, I could not stop. Here was an African American GI, sentenced to death for a rape he did not commit. The evidence for his alleged attack in Bath, Somerset, was spurious – there were no physical signs of rape on victim or the accused, no witnesses heard anything untoward (despite it occurring on a green surrounded by houses), alibis didn’t add up and no weapon was ever found. In this case Leroy Henry did speak up in court and stuck to his story despite intense interrogation and cross examination by the prosecution and the trial president. It did not mean that the US Army was listening however, and Leroy Henry was found guilty and sentenced to death.

That might well have been the end of Leroy Henry, had it not been for an extraordinary turn of events. The moment news of the death sentence became common knowledge, the Bath community started an almighty grass roots campaign for clemency that resulted in a 33,000-strong petition being handed to General Eisenhower just after D-Day. Curiouser still, my family’s relocation to Bath meant I was lucky enough to track down and speak to a surviving few who remembered the case, whose relatives had fought for Leroy Henry. One had even met and known him. Just as with my first book, which eventually found its publisher, I needed to make sure Leroy Henry’s voice could he heard — and that of the community in Bath and beyond that battled for his clemency.

After my experience on the Strand five years ago and the publication of my first and now second book, I have subsequently come to a conclusion. I realise that the significance of these stories from a time when the US Army was ‘over here’ and training for D-Day is even greater than merely hearing voices that have been silenced. It is about learning from them and informing ourselves of an alternative view of different societies at a pivot point in our past; and linking those voices to today, from then until now. In doing so we can see a previous generation in new light and gain better understanding of a moment in history – and ourselves. And there is still so much work to do.