- Jun 19, 2020
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My grandfather Frank Gustaferro got the word at his uncle Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey. His orders said that he was to report to the SS John Barry departing in a few days. The ship, secretly carrying millions of silver coins to support wartime operations in Saudi Arabia, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-859 on August 28, 1944. Two crewmen died in the blast. The rest, including my grandfather, ended up in the water — temporarily blinded from oil, injured, terrified, clinging to whatever wreckage they could find. They heard Japanese aircraft overhead as they floated in the Indian Ocean. My grandfather braced for the strafing run he assumed was coming. It never came. Even in the brutal logic of total war, there were limits. A line existed — a line older than the Geneva Conventions, older than the United Nations, older even than the modern idea of “war crimes” itself. You did not kill shipwrecked men in the water. You did not kill survivors who were out of the fight. You did not shoot the wounded clinging to debris. My grandfather survived because even America’s enemies in 1944 understood that basic rule of humanity.....
...The Imperial Japanese military, for all its many and well-documented atrocities, still had pilots and sailors who chose not to fire on American sailors who posed no threat. There are cases of American Navy sailors being spared by Japanese pilots and ship crews, as documented in James D. Hornfischer’s The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.
The international conflict law prohibiting such attacks, known as hors de combat, doesn’t care whether the people in the water were alleged drug smugglers, enemy fighters, or simply unlucky. America is built on the premise that “all men are created equal” — even those we fight. Humanity is the line that prevents war from collapsing into a massacre.....ROLLING STONE
We as the United States of America can do better. We need to do better.
