February 27

On this date in 1864 Union prisoners of war began arriving at Camp Sumter, Georgia, otherwise known as Andersonville Prison. Over the next year, over 45,000 prisoners would be received at Andersonville. Due to unspeakably filthy conditions and inadequate supplies of food and clean water, more than 13,000 of those soldiers -- as well as numerous Confederate guards -- would perish of malnutrition and disease before the camp was liberated at the end of the war. Most would succumb between August and December 1864, a period that saw an average of 100 deaths per day.

By any account, Andersonville offered a squalid glimpse into hell. Sgt. David Kennedy, 9th Ohio Cavalry, wrote in his journal on 9 July 1964'

Wuld that I was an artist & had the material to paint this camp & all its horors or the tounge of some eloquent Statesman and had the privleage of expresing my mind to our hon. rulers at Washington, I should gloery to describe this hell on earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants to make a shadow.

Clara Barton, visiting the grounds of Andersonville a year later after the camp had closed, wrote with horror of what she had seen there:

Think of thirty thousand men penned by close stockade upon twenty-six acres of ground, from which every tree and shrub had been uprooted for fuel to cook their scanty food, huddled like cattle, without shelter or blanket, half-clad and hungry, with the dreary night setting in, after a day of autumn rain. The hill-tops would not hold them all, the valley was filled with the swollen brook; seventeen feet from the stockade ran the fatal dead-line, beyond which no man might step and live. What did they do? I need not ask where did they go, for on the face of the whole green earth there was no place but this for them; but where did they place themselves? How did they live? Ay! How did they die? But this is only one feature of their suffering ; and perhaps the lightest. Of the long dazzling months when gaunt famine stalked at noon-day, and pestilence walked by night; and upon the seamed and parching earth the cooling rains fell not, I will not rust me to speak. I scarce dare think. If my heart were strong enough to draw the picture, there are thousands upon thousands all through our land too crushed and sore to look upon it. But after this, whenever any man who has lain a prisoner within the stockade of Andersonville, would tell you of his sufferings, how he fainted, scorched, drenched, hungered, sickened, was scoffled, scorged, hunted and persecuted, though the tale be long and twice told, as you would have your own wrongs appreciated, your own woes pitied, your own cries for mercy heard, I charge you, listen and believe him. However definitely he may have spoken, know that he has not told you all.

Henry Wirz, a Swiss doctor from Louisiana, served as prison commandant during that year. For his efforts, such as they were, Wirtz was hanged in November 1865. His last fourteen minutes of life were spent at the end of a rope that was too short, listening to Union soldiers taunt him with cries of “Andersonville! Andersonville!” as he slowly choked to death. Remarkably, he was the only Confederate official to be executed for war crimes.

September 12

On this date in 1942, the RMS Laconia took a pair of German torpedoes off the coast of West Africa. Within hours, the ship -- which had been carrying civilians, British sailors and Italian war prisoners -- drifted to the bottom of the sea along with hundreds of passengers who were either already dead or who soon would be. Meantime, roughly two thousand survivors struggled to reach the lifeboats that had not been destroyed by the torpedo blasts; others swam helplessly or clung to floating debris, hoping not to be gobbled by the sharks that lived nearby.

As it turns out, the German U-boat that scuttled the Laconia soon picked up most of the survivors, assisted by several other submarines that were ordered to join the effort by Kreigsmarine commander Karl Donitz. After a two-day rescue operation, the Germans had managed to pack hundreds of survivors into the ships -- above deck as well as below -- while roping lifeboats behind them to tow hundreds more. The German submarines then headed slowly toward the African coast, draped in flags of the International Red Cross. Although the U-boat commanders alerted other forces in the region that they were carrying survivors from the Laconia, the fleet was struck by bombs and depth charges from an American B-24 several days later on September 16. Hundreds of survivors perished as the U-boats submerged and US bombs obliterated several lifeboats. None of the U-boats was destroyed, and roughly 1500 passengers of the doomed Laconia survived the ordeal.

Although it could be -- and has been -- argued that the US attack on the German boats constituted a war crime, there is little legal ambiguity about the German response. In the wake of the attacks, Commander Donitz issued a notorious order that would later help to secure his conviction during the Nuremberg trials. The Laconia Order, as it became known, insisted that German U-boats -- which were already carrying out unrestricted naval warfare -- were no longer to assist survivors of their attacks:

All efforts to save survivors of sunken ships, such as the fishing out of swimming men and putting them on board lifeboats, the righting of overturned lifeboats, or the handing over of food and water, must stop. Rescue contradicts the most basic demands of the war: the destruction of hostile ships and their crews.

. . . . Stay firm. Remember that the enemy has no regard for women and children when bombing German cities!

The Laconia Order -- like so many other aspects of the Second World War -- openly violated the protocols of international law.

Nearly three years after the Laconia episode, Karl Donitz succeeded Adolf Hitler as the German head of state. It was his government, which lasted all of three weeks during May 1945, that ultimately surrendered to the Allies. Following the war, Donitz served a decade in Spandau Prison, the infamous West Berlin facility that also house Albert Speer and neo-nazi icon Rudolph Hess. Donitz’ prosecution was made all the easier because he refused to order that his naval archives be destroyed. As he explained to Guther Hessler -- a U-boat commander who also happened to be his son-in-law -- “we have a clear conscience.”

July 30

In the midst of a devastating month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah, an Israeli airstrike in Qana, Lebanon leveled an apartment building one year ago today. Twenty-eight people died when the building collapsed; sixteen of the dead were children, the youngest of whom was a mere nine months old. Abbas Kassib, a resident of the farming village, helped dig the building’s victims from the rubble.

We heard the screams of one of the boys who was blown out of the building. He was alive but his legs were badly damaged and someone came out of the rubble with the boy's dead sister and laid her next to him. When we saw what had happened to the house we just all started digging with our hands or hoes, whatever we had, until the big machinery arrived.

Although the Israeli Defense Force initially claimed that the Qana bombings -- 80 separate strikes in all -- were a direct response to rocket attacks launched by Hezbollah fighters into northern Israel, conclusive evidence to support the claim was scarce. By the time a ceasefire took hold two weeks later, more than a thousand Lebanese had been killed, 30% of them children. In southern Lebanon, where all of the direct fighting took place, more than a million people had been displaced, while the infrastructure of much of the rest of the nation lay in ruins. Forty-three Israeli civilians, killed by Hezbollah rockets, joined 119 IDF soldiers cut down in the fighting, which ultimately cost the state of Israel $2-3 billion to wage.

Nearly seventy years earlier, on 30 July 1938, auto manufacturer Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle -- the most important Nazi honor that could be bestowed upon a non-German. An admirer of Ford’s, Adolf Hitler passed along the medal with a personal note of gratitude. Stung by criticism of his acceptance of the medal, Ford declared that

[m]y acceptance of a medal from the German people does not, as some people seem to think, involve any sympathy on my part with naziism. Those who have known me for many years realize that anything that breeds hate is repulsive to me.

Ford’s self-acquittals rang false. During the first World War, Ford had financed the distribution of The Protocols of the elders of Zion in the United States. His editorials in The Dearborn Independent, which blamed Jews for an array of global ills -- everything from the Bolshevik revolution to immoral popular films -- were later compiled into a book titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a collection that Hitler used extensively in his own writings.

When Germany launched World War II a little more than a year after Ford’s acceptance of the Grand Cross, it did so with trucks and tanks and planes manufactured in Ford plants.

After the war, according to one acquaintance, Ford suffered a heart attack after being shown images from a German concentration camp.

July 27

On the fourth night of Operation Gomorrah -- the Allies’ July 1943 air assault on the German city of Hamburg -- a tornado of fire immolated tens of thousands of people, nearly all of whom were civilians.

Known by such variously understated terms as “area,” “strategic” or “morale bombing,” massive air campaigns became a general feature of World War II, used by all sides with an increasing lack of restraint or discrimination. Among its many unfortunate legacies, the second world war thus institutionalized a particular species of war crime to which the world has since become accustomed. The Hamburg raids were largely the concoction of Arthur “Bomber” Harris, squadron leader of the British Royal Air Force, who outlined his strategy to his six group commanders in a memo he composed two months prior to the raids:

The total destruction of this city would achieve immeasurable results in reducing the industrial capacity of the enemy's war machine. This, together with the effect on German morale, which would be felt throughout the country, would play a very important part in shortening and in winning the war.

Two decades earlier, Harris had led the destruction of Arab and Kurdish towns in Iraq, which Great Britain was trying to subjugate at the time. He bragged that within 45 minutes, a squadron could destroy an entire village and kill or injure a third of its inhabitants.

On the night of July 27, 1943, more than 700 aircraft heaved 9000 tons of bombs over Hamburg, turning the city into a blast furnace whose flames reached several kilometers into the air. Winds of up to 150 miles an hour, combined with temperatures that reached 1500 degrees, asphyxiated the city, liquefied the asphalt streets, and turned humans into matchsticks. Even air raid shelters provided no refuge, as the vacuum created by the firestorm sucked the oxygen from the tunnels. Many of the victims were coated in a residue of phosphorous, which could not be extinguished with water. Many survivors told stories of people in flames, jumping fruitlessly into the River Elbe, only to reignite when they resurfaced.

A German firefighter described the apocalyptic scene:

There was no smoke, only flames and flying sparks like a snowstorm. The heat melted the lens in my protective glasses. I saw a crowd of people lying and sitting on the street, moaning. They had given up. I joined them and lay down, put my steel helmet against the wind, and tried to suck oxygen from the pavement. My clothes kept catching fire and I had to beat the flames out.

The air was so hot it burned my windpipe. Everyone around me died. The clothing on the women was baked off them, leaving their bodies naked. The bodies didn't burn but dried out completely.

Of the more than 40,000 people who perished during Operation Gomorrah, nearly three-quarters were women and children. Their bodies -- at least the estimated 30% that had not been totally reduced to ash -- were bulldozed into a mass grave carved into the shape of a cross.

February 27

On this date in 1864 Union prisoners of war began arriving at Camp Sumter, Georgia, otherwise known as Andersonville Prison. Over the next year, over 45,000 prisoners would be received at Andersonville. Due to unspeakably filthy conditions and inadequate supplies of food and clean water, more than 13,000 of those soldiers -- as well as numerous Confederate guards -- would perish of malnutrition and disease before the camp was liberated at the end of the war. Most would succumb between August and December 1864, a period that saw an average of 100 deaths per day.

By any account, Andersonville offered a squalid glimpse into hell. Sgt. David Kennedy, 9th Ohio Cavalry, wrote in his journal on 9 July 1964'

Wuld that I was an artist & had the material to paint this camp & all its horors or the tounge of some eloquent Statesman and had the privleage of expresing my mind to our hon. rulers at Washington, I should gloery to describe this hell on earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants to make a shadow.

Clara Barton, visiting the grounds of Andersonville a year later after the camp had closed, wrote with horror of what she had seen there:

Think of thirty thousand men penned by close stockade upon twenty-six acres of ground, from which every tree and shrub had been uprooted for fuel to cook their scanty food, huddled like cattle, without shelter or blanket, half-clad and hungry, with the dreary night setting in, after a day of autumn rain. The hill-tops would not hold them all, the valley was filled with the swollen brook; seventeen feet from the stockade ran the fatal dead-line, beyond which no man might step and live. What did they do? I need not ask where did they go, for on the face of the whole green earth there was no place but this for them; but where did they place themselves? How did they live? Ay! How did they die? But this is only one feature of their suffering ; and perhaps the lightest. Of the long dazzling months when gaunt famine stalked at noon-day, and pestilence walked by night; and upon the seamed and parching earth the cooling rains fell not, I will not rust me to speak. I scarce dare think. If my heart were strong enough to draw the picture, there are thousands upon thousands all through our land too crushed and sore to look upon it. But after this, whenever any man who has lain a prisoner within the stockade of Andersonville, would tell you of his sufferings, how he fainted, scorched, drenched, hungered, sickened, was scoffled, scorged, hunted and persecuted, though the tale be long and twice told, as you would have your own wrongs appreciated, your own woes pitied, your own cries for mercy heard, I charge you, listen and believe him. However definitely he may have spoken, know that he has not told you all.

Henry Wirz, a Swiss doctor from Louisiana, served as prison commandant during that year. For his efforts, such as they were, Wirtz was hanged in November 1865. His last fourteen minutes of life were spent at the end of a rope that was too short, listening to Union soldiers taunt him with cries of “Andersonville! Andersonville!” as he slowly choked to death. Remarkably, he was the only Confederate official to be executed for war crimes.

February 1

On 1 February 1968, several days into the Tet Offensive, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese police, shot a captured member of the National Liberation Front in the head at close range. Nguyen Van Lam, also known as Captain Bay Lop, had been captured by South Vietnamese forces after a battle at a Buddhist pagoda in the Chinese section of Saigon. Hands tied behind his back and his face visibly swollen, Lam was marched down the street.

American photographer Eddie Adams and Vietnamese cameraman Vo Su -- who was working for NBC -- had been photographing and filming the battle and watched as two South Vietnamese Marines brought the staggering captive toward them. Adams described the scene years later:

When they were close -- maybe five feet away -- the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture -- the threat, the interrogation. But it didn't happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC's head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time.

The frightful still image of the summary execution quickly became emblematic of the American War in Vietnam, at least to its critics. For the remainder of both of their lives, however, Adams -- whose photo was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 -- defended Loan, whom he believed was destroyed by the image as well.

Several months after the shooting of Nguyen Van Lem, Loan was severely injured in a battle near a Saigon bridge; one of his legs had to be amputated. He fled to the United States after the fall of Saigon and opened a pizza restaurant in Burke, Virginia, which he operated until when his identity was publicized in 1991 and his business suffered. Loan died of cancer seven years later. Adams passed away in 2004 from ALS. As for Nguyen Van Lam, his body disappeared after the shooting thirty-nine years ago today and was never found.

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