SEATTLE: It was a crime so improbable that many had trouble believing it could have happened at all: Three black soldiers stood accused of lynching an Italian prisoner of war, found dangling from a wire on an obstacle training course at Fort Lawton in the middle of World War II.

The subsequent trial of the three men, along with 40 other African-American enlistees charged with rioting, became the largest and longest army court martial of the war, and the only recorded instance in US history in which black men stood trial for a mob lynching.

By the time it was over, 28 men had been convicted on rioting charges, two of them also found guilty of manslaughter in connection with the hanging. Despite protesting their innocence and the government’s own secret investigation showing the prosecution’s case was poisonously flawed, the men were sentenced to hard labour and forfeiture of military pay and benefits and given dishonorable discharges.

Many men went to their graves with the stain of wartime dishonor still on their records. It wasn’t until Saturday in a low-key ceremony on a wide lawn at the old army base in Seattle that history switched gears. A senior army official handed out certificates setting aside the convictions and converting the discharges to honourable status, in recognition 64 years after the fact that the prosecutors had committed “egregious error” that resulted in a trial that was “fundamentally unfair”.

“I grieve for an army that failed to honour its own values at Fort Lawton,” Ronald J. James, assistant secretary of the army and the great-grandson of a slave, said as he handed out the certificates to surviving family members.

“The army is genuinely sorry. I am sorry. Sorry for your husbands, loved ones, fathers and grandfathers, for the lost years of their lives,” he said, calling Saturday’s ceremony a “belated, long-overdue vindication”.

Not a single one of the soldiers was on hand to accept the apology. All but two are dead, and the one who tried to attend, 83-year-old Samuel Snow from Leesburg, Florida, had to be hospitalised with heart palpitations in downtown Seattle just hours before the observance.

“My father never held any animosity,” said his son, Ray Snow. “He said: ‘Son, God has been good to me. If I hold this in my heart, then I can’t walk in forgiveness.’ Really, it energised him. It was the fuel that drove him: ‘Bring on all the things that are supposed to stop me from achieving.’ This was all liquid oxygen for him.”

The case of the Fort Lawton 28 has been little known in recent years, though the court martial in 1944 attracted widespread news coverage at the time.

It wasn’t until former television journalist Jack Hamann came upon the Italian soldier’s grave in 1986 and began many years of research into what happened that archival material was uncovered demonstrating the fatal flaws in the government’s case and pointing to the likelihood that the Italian prisoner was in fact killed by a white man.

The army’s inspector-general had conducted an exhaustive investigation at the time that raised major questions about the evidence against the accused. But the army had appointed only two defence lawyers to handle all 43 men, giving them 10 days to prepare their case, and they were not permitted to see the report.

The prosecutor was Col Leon Jaworski, who in 1973 became the special prosecutor in the Watergate case involving the administration of President Nixon.

“Jaworski disingenuously, and it’s clear now, illegally and unethically, said, ‘Sorry, that’s not what you think it is, and you can’t have it.’ He fought and got the court to agree not to let it in,” Hamann said in an interview. Jaworski died in 1982.

Hamann wrote a book about the case, “On American Soil”, which was published in 2005. Based in large part on the evidence disclosed in it, the US Army Board for Correction of Military Records reviewed the case last year and ruled unanimously to overturn the convictions and grant retroactive honorable discharges.

“I don’t think very often they come out and say our largest and longest court martial of this giant war, World War II, was fatally flawed,” Hamann said. “But the army has been a driver of this, by getting out ahead of it and saying, ‘We want to let our constituents know we’re not hiding behind this. We’ve read the evidence, we agree, we checked it out ourselves.’ “

The junior defence counsel in the case, Howard Noyd, now 93, said he and his partner had known from the beginning that “justice was sacrificed” and his clients were wrongly charged. “It’s just a remarkable story. I didn’t expect we would ever come to final justice.”

James, the assistant army secretary, ended his calm but emotional address, with a declaration that he would not end it as most such speeches conclude.

“The usually closing is something like, ‘God bless the army, and God bless the United States of America, but frankly that doesn’t seem right or appropriate for this time I have unpaid debts and unpaid dues,” he said. “Therefore I would like to close by saying God bless Samuel Snow, God bless the Fort Lawton 28, and God bless your family and friends.”—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times