On March 13, 1944, a German submarine torpedoed a Greek steamer called the Peleus. The ship went down, and some of her crew ended up in the water, holding on to rafts and wreckage.
The submarine was U-852. Her captain was a young officer named Heinz-Wilhelm Eck. He did not want anyone to find that wreckage and come hunting for his boat. So he ordered his men to fire on the survivors in the water, and they did. One of them admitted later that he hadn’t agreed with the order. He fired anyway.
Three men lived through it. They drifted on a raft for twenty-five days before anyone picked them up.
After the war, a British military court in Hamburg put Eck and four of his men on trial. Eck said he had no choice. He had to wipe out every trace of the Peleus to protect his boat and his crew. The others said they had only done what their captain told them.
The court didn’t accept either answer. On November 30, 1945, Eck and two of his officers were shot by a firing squad. The other two went to prison.
That wasn’t the first time the question came up. In 1918, another German submarine sank a Canadian hospital ship, the Llandovery Castle, and fired on the lifeboats. After that war, a German court tried two of the officers. One of them stood up and said, “I obeyed my commander. His orders were law. I am not guilty.” The court told him that killing shipwrecked people in lifeboats was forbidden, and that he should have known it. Twenty-odd years later, an American prosecutor at Nuremberg pointed back to that case to answer the men who said they were only following orders.
It would be easy to say this is something Germans did. It isn’t.
On March 16, 1968, Charlie Company went into a hamlet in South Vietnam called My Lai. By the time they were done, hundreds of unarmed people were dead: old men, women, children, babies. Some were bayoneted. Families were herded into bomb shelters and killed with hand grenades. Lieutenant William Calley led the first platoon in that morning.
At his court-martial, Calley said he was following orders. He said it when he was tried in 1971, and he was still saying it nearly forty years later, when he finally apologized. His captain was acquitted. Calley was convicted of murdering twenty-two people and sentenced to life. President Nixon stepped in, and Calley served about three years under house arrest. The prosecutor at his trial put it plainly: an officer’s duty was not to obey unlawful orders, and the order Calley claimed to have received was illegal.
There was another man at My Lai that day. His name was Hugh Thompson, a warrant officer flying a small scout helicopter. He saw what was happening on the ground, and he landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the villagers. He and his crew helped rescue civilians, including children. Then he reported what he had seen, and later he testified against Calley.
Calley had orders, or said he did. Thompson had the same uniform, the same war, and the same training. One of them obeyed. The other one landed.
So the question is an old one. It has been answered by courts in Germany and by a court-martial in Georgia, and every time the answer was the same.
Now come to September 2, 2025. An American strike hit a boat in the Caribbean. Two men survived and held on to the wreck for about forty minutes. Then a second strike killed them. The reason the government gave was that the boat and its cargo had to be destroyed. Eck gave nearly the same reason.
Here is where I come down. If that order was unlawful, then the admiral who gave it and the men who fired it carry the guilt, if they knew. “I was following orders” will not cover it. It didn’t cover the officer from the Llandovery Castle. It didn’t cover Eck’s crew. It didn’t cover Calley. It shouldn’t cover anyone now.
The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual says, in plain words, that “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” American military law says following orders is a defense, except when the order is one a person of ordinary sense would know was unlawful. Shooting men clinging to a wreck is the example the manual itself uses.
The admiral says the two men were still in the fight. He says a military lawyer told him the strike was lawful. No court has ruled on it, and the public hasn’t seen the video. I’ll grant all of that. But Eck had his reasons too. So did Calley. Every man who has done this has had his reasons.
I took an oath when I put on the uniform. I swore to support and defend the Constitution. I also swore to obey the orders of the officers over me, but that part of the oath has a condition written into it: according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The obedience was never meant to be blind. It was tied to the law from the first day.
Hugh Thompson understood that. He didn’t need a courtroom to teach him. I would like to think the men at the controls on September 2 knew it too, and I’d like to know what they were told.