Word: lichfield
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...long-drawn-out, embarrassed "Lichfield trials" at last produced the conviction of an officer. Before the court at Bad Nauheim, Lieut. Granville Cubage of Oklahoma City, accused of ordering "cruel and unusual" punishments on G.I. prisoners at the Lichneld Reinforcement Depot, had pleaded that higher officers were to blame. The court-martial fined him $250 and issued a reprimand. The wrist-slapping indicated that the heat was to be turned on the higher...
Colonel James A. Kilian, former Lichfield commandant and the first higher-up arraigned, threw the court into uproar with contentious motions. He had appealed to President Truman for an inquiry into the trials. He called General Joseph T. McNarney, the Army's boss in Europe, to the stand. Higher-ups were going to be hard...
...further combat duty, every hospital on the island would process its rehabilitated charges through the Tenth Depot, a reconverted British post in the Midlands, on their way back to the Continent. Until March, 1945, there were no furloughs offered between hospital and depot-once you arrived at Lichfield, there was a possibility of a 48-hour pass. If you weren't lucky, you crossed the Channel without a pass...
Some soldiers overstayed their leaves, and in the rickety brick barracks that served as Lichfield's guardhouse, they spent anywhere from two weeks to six months as penalty for various periods of AWOL. Behind barred windows, overcrowded to such an extent that some of the inmates slept on top of wall lockers, they served their time, and other transient GIs could observe their incarcerated friends double timing to chow, sneaking in a verboten smoke (prisoners were allotted three cigarettes a day at Lichfield-one after every meal) or standing at attention, in front of the mess hall, waiting...
These things non-prisoners transients saw at Lichfield. What went on behind the barred windows, only the prisoners and the guards knew, and the guards spoke only to one another. The situation, to outsiders, was as full of intrigue as a paper-bound detective novel, and when prisoners left Lichfield, they departed in closely-guarded groups, with no chance to reveal what had happened inside the iron bars...