The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys: Courage Tragedy and Justice in World War II

About this book

Before the famed Nuremberg Tribunal there was Rsselsheim a small German town where ordinary civilians were tried in the first War Crimes Trial of World War II.As the tide of World War II turned a hitherto unknown incident set a precedent for how we would bring wartime crimes to justice: In August 1944 the 9- man crew of an American bomber was forced to bail out over Germany. As their captors marched them into Rsselsheim a small town recently bombed to smithereens by Allies they were attacked by an angry mob of civilians -- farmers shopkeepers railroad workers women and children. With a local Nazi chief at the helm they assaulted the young Americans with stones bricks and wooden clubs. They beat them viciously and left them for dead at the nearby cemetery.It could have been another forgotten tragedy of the war. But when the lynching was briefly mentioned in a London paper a few months later it caught the eye of two Army majors Lu