David M. Shribman
MONTREAL — We know their names. Some of them are Margaret “Pearl” Fraser of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia; Mary Agnes McKenzie and Carola Douglas of Toronto; Alexina Dussault of Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec; and Margaret Fortescue of York Factory, Manitoba. Among them was Minnie Follette, whose portrait hangs in the Age of Sail Heritage Centre and Museum in Port Greville, Nova Scotia.
Follette also is remembered with a monument in the Anglican cemetery in Fox River, Nova Scotia — and in the historical memory of Canadians who to this day mourn the deaths of 14 nursing sisters, all but two of them Canadians, who survived a submarine attack on the British hospital ship Llandovery Castle, only to perish when a German U-boat circled back to sink their lifeboat. History being ironic as well as instructive, a look into Follette’s life provides a jarring marriage of mathematics and mortality: Her 34th birthday would have been on Nov. 11, 1918, the day of the armistice.
We don’t know the names of the two men at the center of a 2025 controversy that has prompted outrage around the globe. They clung to the wrecked refuse of a doomed boat in the Caribbean when American personnel, engaged in battle against people considered drug traffickers, followed instructions — and no one knows for sure how high up those orders originated — to kill them.
The justification of this action comes principally from a government agency still known formally as the Defense Department. In its defense of the decision, it has reopened a debate that dates directly to the Llandovery Castle and that has been considered settled since the Nuremberg Trials following the Holocaust and the end of World War II.
That issue: whether military personnel are required to carry out orders to perform duties that are illegal.
The Pentagon’s law-of-war manual prohibits “hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors.” The United Nations Charter states that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”
This issue may seem simple, morally and legally. This episode underlines how nothing in military confrontations is simple.
The moral implications here are clear. The legal ones are a little murky on account of a subtlety that does not exonerate those who issued the command, but which may insulate them from the specific charge — being tossed around Washington today, irrelevantly, like unpinned grenades — of having issued orders that come under the category of a war crime.
From the seed of that nuance sprouts a weeping willow of contention.
It grows out of a conflict between the rhetoric of the Trump administration’s attack on drug trafficking and the reality of the definition of war. In this case, with no formal declaration of war against Venezuela or Venezuelan drug traffickers having been voted by both houses of Congress, the military effort sometimes described by the administration as a war on drugs is a metaphor, not a legal reality.
Metaphor, shmetaphor, you may say. But this is a real question, and the action the American military personnel carried out may be a crime, but it is not a war crime.
“The material conditions for an armed conflict between the United States and these drug traffickers simply does not exist,” Robert Goldman, director of the War Crimes Research Office at American University’s Washington College of Law, said in an interview. “There are no combatants where there is no armed conflict. They are attacking and summarily executing civilians, and that is prohibited by human-rights law.”
Goldman and Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a Marine Corps combat veteran of four tours in Iraq, both told me the action in the Caribbean wasn’t war but was — their word, not prompted by me — “murder.” Many Democrats and some Republicans, calling for congressional investigations, seem to lean to agreeing. What remains to be determined, and what has been unresolved since the 1973 approval of the War Powers Act over President Richard Nixon’s veto, is how much reasonable leeway a president has in engaging military force.
That debate won’t be settled in this case, or perhaps ever. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, no nest of leftists, put the matter succinctly: “Our view is that the Commander in Chief deserves legal latitude as part of his constitutional war powers. But that doesn’t extend to shooting the wounded in violation of U.S. and international rules of war.” The Journal editorialists then expressed worry that “such excesses will also turn the public against allowing a President the power he may someday need to defend the country’s interests quickly.”
The debate over this incident will not die quickly, especially since a group of Democrats warned military personnel not to carry out illegal orders. Trump accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR,” wrote that “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” and added that their action was “punishable by DEATH!” The Pentagon is threatening to recall to active duty Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona to have him tried in a military court.
Unknown right now: whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued the order to fire on the survivors or whether it came directly from Adm. Frank Bradley of Special Operations Command.
The Llandovery Castle episode so outraged Canadians that Brig. Gen. George Tuxford, a former homesteader from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, cited two Moose Jaw nurses in his instructions that his men’s battle cry should be “Llandovery Castle” — words that “should be the last to ring in the ears of the Hun as the bayonet was driven home.”
In its ruling at the Leipzig war crimes Llandovery Castle trial, the German Supreme Court said the firing on the lifeboats was an “offense against the law of nations,” arguing that “in war at sea, the killing of shipwrecked people who have taken refuge in lifeboats is forbidden,” and adding, in a sentiment that would have important implications after the Holocaust, “A subordinate obeying [an] order is liable to punishment if it was known to him that the order of the superior involved the infringement of civil or military law.”
None of this is simple. But this argument from the German court echoes through the years: “The killing of defenseless shipwrecked people is an act in the highest degree contrary to ethical principles.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
