Dear Pete Hegseth, I'm grateful the Japanese Navy spared my grandfather's life
Opinion by Michael Embrich
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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.
If Donald Trump's administration had been in charge that day, I'm not sure my family would exist.
The Department of Defense is facing intense scrutiny this week following a Washington Post report that the military - allegedly under orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth - conducted a second strike on a wrecked vessel in the Caribbean on September 2, killing defenseless survivors who had already been hit once. According to the Post, Hegseth's initial directive was that all 11 people aboard the suspected drug-smuggling boat should be killed. Hegseth has denied he ordered everyone dead, and The New York Times has since reported Hegseth did not state what action to take if the first strike did not kill everyone on board. Admiral Mitch Bradley reportedly ordered the follow-up strike after the first strike left survivors clinging to the wreckage.
The Pentagon at first denied the Post's story entirely, but the White House confirmed on Tuesday that a second strike did take place. Hegseth says he did not personally see any survivors after the first strike, or stick around to watch the second one. Trump and his administration have tried to justify the string of boat strikes that began on Sept. 2 by claiming that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with the drug cartels, and Hegseth has cited the "fog of war" to defend the second strike on Sept. 2, but the idea that America is currently at war with the drug runners is dubious, to say the least.
Lawmakers of both parties have raised alarm about the Post's report last week, and Admiral Bradley briefed Congress behind closed doors on Thursday about what happened on Sept. 2. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said after the briefing that Bradley was "very clear" that there was no order to "kill them all." Democrats, however, still expressed alarm. "What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I've seen in my time in public service," said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), referring to the full video of the strikes against the boat. "You have two individuals and clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States."
"Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors," Himes added.
If the military did deliberately kill the strike's survivors, it is not a close call, a new legal theory, or a murky extension of post-9/11 counterterrorism doctrine. It's a war crime, if not outright murder. This is bad for America, and bad for our troops.
It is a strange and shameful feeling to realize that the novice and low-ranking Japanese pilots my grandfather feared in 1944 may have shown more restraint, more discipline, and more humanity in those crucial minutes over the Indian Ocean than the man currently sitting at the top of the Pentagon.
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.
The Senate and House Armed Services Committees will need to determine whether Hegseth gave an unlawful order - and whether Admiral Bradley carried it out. But the moral dimension doesn't require a classified annex. If the United States military killed shipwrecked survivors because the secretary of Defense allegedly ordered "no survivors," that is not a new frontier. It's a step backward into barbarism.
It is up to both parties to do the right thing, especially the party in power. Only by holding ourselves accountable can we restore the dignity and agency that men and women who lived and died at sea, defending America, earned through their sacrifice. |
