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4 Atrocities
- The University Press of Kentucky
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4 Atrocities Mush Morton was not the only Allied submarine commander to order the shooting of survivors. Before the Wahoo’s assault on the Buyo Maru, the British submarine Torbay made analogous attacks in the Mediterranean. On its second patrol in the Aegean Sea during July 1941, the Torbay made a series of gun attacks on schooners and caïques carrying German troops, sometimes killing survivors. Paul Chapman, a Torbay officer, later described one of the attacks, tersely noting, “The troops were not allowed to escape: everything and everybody was destroyed by one sort of gunfire or another.”1 The Torbay’s commander, Anthony Cecil Capel “Tony” Miers, resembled Morton in physicality and disposition. In a sense Miers, like Morton, might be characterized as a spiritual descendant of the berserkers—enraged Viking warriors who went too far in the heat of battle.2 Like Morton, Tony Miers made no attempt to conceal the killings and received a hero’s welcome when he returned to port. The recent battle for Crete, in which German aviators were accused of strafing British survivors in the water, created little mood for generosity toward the enemy. Andrew Cunningham, commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, praised the patrol as “brilliantly conducted.”3 The main concern arising from Miers’s shooting of survivors was that the Germans might take reprisals. The Admiralty in London concluded some months later, “Commanding Officers of submarine can be trusted to follow the dictates of humanity and the traditions of service and it is unnecessary to promulgate general rules which may give the impression that they are not in the habit of doing so.”4 Atrocities 51 While there was no official censure, privately Miers received instructions not to repeat the practice.5 The incident did little to hinder Miers’s naval career. Whereas many believed that the attack on the Buyo Maru prevented Mush Morton from being awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, Miers received the British equivalent, the Victoria Cross, for a daring raid on Corfu Harbor in March 1942. Following promotion, Miers embarked on a speaking tour of the United States and served as the Royal Navy submarine liaison officer at San Francisco and Pearl Harbor. When Pete Galantin arrived at Midway with the USS Sculpin in 1943, he found Miers sharing his experiences with the Americans. Powerfully built, Miers sometimes challenged the U.S. officers to wrestling matches and usually won.6 In 1944 Miers took command of the Eighth Submarine Flotilla based at Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and later organized its transfer to Fremantle, Western Australia. The fates of Miers and Morton offer a contrast to the only German U-boat commander accused of perpetrating an atrocity of comparable scale. On the night of 13 March 1944 the U-852 under Heinz Wilhelm Eck torpedoed the 4,700-ton Greek freighter Peleus, under charter by the British Ministry of War Transport from Freetown to Buenos Aires. After sinking the Peleus, the U-852 patrolled the waters for five hours, systematically shooting survivors and destroying any floating debris. From the original complement of thirty-five, including eight British seamen, only three Peleus crewmen survived the ordeal. Whereas Miers and Morton appear to have acted out of a visceral hatred of the enemy, Eck seemed motivated by fear. The waters where he sank the Peleus were notoriously dangerous for U-boats, with four recent losses between Freetown and Ascension; Eck believed that any sign of the sinking would inevitably result in the loss of his own boat. Despite the efforts to cover up the sinking of the Peleus, however, the U-852 came to grief during the same patrol. On 2 May 1944 a British bomber attacked the submarine and forced it to ground on the eastern coast of Africa, resulting in the capture of Eck, his crew, and the submarine’s incriminating log. At the end of [54.173.43.215] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:03 GMT) 52 Surface and Destroy the war, Eck and two other U-852 officers were sentenced to death by a British military court for killing of the Peleus survivors. They were the only submariners executed for war crimes committed during the Second World War.7 The punishment of Eck and his officers to a degree foreshadowed the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In part, Eck’s killing of survivors had been motivated by the very efficiency of Allied countermeasures. At Nuremberg the German Navy mounted a similar defense for unrestricted...