The Interpreter – Alice Kaplan, 2005 ★★½

Separate and Unequal

Two different American armies marched through France in World War II, united only in name. One was all-white, the other black troops led by mostly white officers. An injustice in itself, the practice led to other kinds of injustice that is the subject of this book.

The Interpreter presents two cases in which a Frenchman was shot to death by an American soldier. One killer was African-American, the other white. The black killer was hung for his crime. The white killer went free.

This was statistically no anomaly. According to Alice Kaplan, 70 American soldiers were convicted of capital crimes in the European Theater of Operations between 1943-46; 55 of them black. “That’s 79 percent in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black,” Kaplan notes.

The discrepancy also struck one French onlooker, novelist Louis Guilloux:

“The guilty were always black, so much so that even the stupidest of men would have ended up asking himself how it was possible that there be so much crime on one side, and so much virtue on the other.”

Recruited as an interpreter for the U. S. Army, Guilloux found himself assigned to both murder cases. In the 1960s, Guilloux drew on his experiences to write a novel, OK, Joe. It retold the cases as stark examples of American racism and injustice in action.

The reality was more nuanced, if just as tragic. Kaplan’s account endeavors to fill out the picture, offering overall a decent example of “just-the-facts” true-crime journalism. Yet she is compromised by her decision to lean on Guilloux as much as she does to provide commentary and fill out her sketchy narrative. It is clear her admiration for Guilloux drove her passion for this book, though not to its benefit.

James E. Hendricks was part of the black Army, called “service troops” as their duties were not those of front-line soldiers but rather combat support. Sometimes, service troops contributed in a noteworthy way, like the legendary trucking unit called “The Red Ball Express” which raced needed supplies across Hitler’s former Reich. Mostly, black-troop work was menial in nature. Hendricks himself was assigned to a quartermaster battalion in eastern Brittany. His service time there lasted less than two weeks.

On the night of August 21, 1944, Hendricks and some comrades were drinking high-proof calvados when Hendricks abruptly got up and left, saying: “I’m going out to get some.”

He soon appeared outside the locked door of a nearby farmhouse. After banging on the door with his rifle butt, he fired a shot through the door that struck a farmer in the head, killing him instantly. Hendricks then chased the farmer’s widow into the house, pushing her on a bed at gunpoint and exposing her genitalia as well as his own, though the sexual assault didn’t go any farther and Hendricks left her otherwise unharmed. Hendricks was eventually captured by his unit, and gave multiple, contradictory stories of what occurred.

Members of the 4185th Quartermaster Service Company load a supply truck in Liege, Belgium. Such "service troops," overwhelmingly black, worked hard and risked much while enduring second-class treatment as soldiers. Image from http://archive.defense.gov/News/NewsArticle.aspx?ID=43934

Alcohol, and possibly interest in a woman, was also at the root of the other murder examined here, that of Francis Morand, which took place the following night on the opposite, western end of Brittany. His killer was U. S. Ranger Captain George P. Whittington.

While engaged in conversation with a barmaid in the town of Lesneven, Morand and Whittington argued about the direction Morand’s carbine pointed. For a time, Morand refused to move his gun. Once he did, tensions cooled, but a question lingered over Morand speaking French with a foreign accent. Was he a German agent?

No, he wasn’t, but drink flowed freely and Whittington was already AWOL from his unit. He decided to confront Morand outside the bar. A man in a washroom heard the pair speaking cordially in a courtyard, eventually exchanging adieux. Then came multiple gunshots. Morand, a veteran Resistance fighter, lay dead, at least one bullet hole in his back. Whittington stood over him.

“When any son of a bitch points a gun in my face, I’m going to kill him,” Whittington told an MP.

The two cases aren’t exactly alike. There was no sexual assault in Whittington’s case, while Hendricks’ victim was shot unseen by his killer. Kaplan’s thesis is that there was enough common ground to expect a more similar outcome:

Beyond what they shared in the way of trouble, the difference between the two defendants was enormous. Their rank and race put them in two categories, not merely of privilege but of personhood.

Whittington was not only white and an officer, but a war hero. He was pretty much the character Tom Hanks would later play in Saving Private Ryan, leading his Rangers off Omaha Beach on D-Day by breaching German defenses with Bangalore torpedoes. After his release from the Rangers, Whittington’s only punishment for the Morand killing, he would go on to serve with distinction in the regular infantry, being wounded in action while saving many comrades in the Battle of the Bulge.

Whittington had the advantage of being tried by his peers. Even his brother, an Army lawyer, lent a hand in his defense. Lt. Joseph Greene, who ran Whittington’s defense (and also prosecuted Hendricks), successfully sold the dubious notion Whittington had reason to suspect Morand was a German spy.

Similar angles could have been played in Hendricks’ case, but weren’t. Though his presence at the farmhouse was clear, no witness positively identified him as the assailant in either the killing or the sexual assault. Hendricks, unlike Whittington, did not speak at his trial. Kaplan suggests the proceeding itself was tailored to a desired end:

The Hendricks court-martial, like the U. S. Army, was a melting pot. The men on the court were from Illinois, from Wisconsin, from Georgia, from New Mexico; they were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish; they were of Spanish, German, English, and Russian descent. But it was a white melting pot. Guilloux, remembering the scene, described the accused, terrified, “the only black man in this assembly of whites.”

Alice Kaplan in a recent photograph. A professor of French and Francophone Studies at Duke University, she studied Louis Guilloux as a leading existentialist author before coming to discover his role as a U. S. Army interpreter and subject of this book. Image from https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/alice-kaplan-albert-camus-and-stranger.

As useful as that particular comment is, I can’t say how annoyed I was by the constant reappearance of Guilloux in Kaplan’s narrative. He’s one of those snarky relativists without much of anything worthwhile to offer about the cases in his contemporaneous journals, at least from what Kaplan quotes. What he did write then were often single-line statements of fact, which Kaplan then extrapolates into something broader.

For Guilloux’s specific take on what it all meant, Kaplan relies on the fictional recreation work he did on OK, Joe some 20 years later. By then, fashionably anti-American views colored his perspective so much he scrubbed out Hendricks’ sexual assault and added several more homicides to Whittington’s ledger.

Kaplan really didn’t need Guilloux’s voice to tell the story. Her footnotes alone are more interesting than anything he says. Nor does she need Guilloux to present her core thesis, that military justice was a blunt instrument in World War II’s U. S. Army, yielding unfair results.

The U. S. Army had reason to make an example of Hendricks. Rape is a historical byproduct of war, something one needs to discourage for strategic as well as ethical reasons. Gen. George S. Patton was concerned with maintaining the good will of the French as his Third Army stormed across the country’s interior toward the Rhine.

“It is not to be tolerated that a comparative few shall, by their criminal conduct, bring discredit upon us,” he wrote in an August 20, 1944 memo. “The continued prevalence of these offenses cannot fail measurably to affect the manner in which our forces are now regarded.”

A would-be rapist who did not actually rape his victim, Hendricks served the purpose of a cautionary example. Kaplan notes that the incidence of civilian rape by U. S. soldiers was lower than that of other armies; it made broad sense to keep it that way.

For Kaplan, though, the idea that Hendricks was executed not for what he did but what he perhaps intended to do is a marked injustice in itself, symbolic of the special negative treatment accorded to black Americans. “Does bragging about ‘getting some’ show intent to rape?” she asks. “Does wanting to kiss a Frenchwoman show intent to rape? If so, most of the U. S. Army would have been guilty.”

Kaplan keeps on much firmer ground most of the time. The Interpreter suffers from its overinclusion of the title subject, but when she dives into the specific cases she manages a much stronger argument. Hendricks was a victim, she writes, not just of legal railroading but of a system that treated him as second-class from the moment he reported for duty:

There remains a final factor, crucial yet intangible: the effect of conditions in the Jim Crow Army on black service troops and the unknowable extent to which these men sought refuge in alcohol and acts of violence.

Kaplan brings into focus the injustice, even if the story is less compelling as a whole than in its particulars. Too often, I felt there was a much better book, with a stronger message, that got away from her.