Scapegoats: Thirteen Victims of Military Injustice

Scott, a former commander of the British Army in Scotland, does an excellent job of conveying the details of a variety of military campaigns, spanning several centuries and continents, in an accessible way, in his accounts of men unjustly blamed, and punished, by their country’s military. With the exception of Alfred Dreyfus, the victims selected will mostly be unfamiliar to a general audience, making it all the more important that the salient facts of, for example, the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (where CPT Jahleel Brenton Carey was charged with “misbehavior before the enemy”), are concisely recounted. Scott selects examples from the American Civil War (Confederate general James Longstreet), WWII (Charles B. McVay III, commander of the doomed U.S.S. Indianapolis), and the Yom Kippur War (Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff David Elazar), among others, spanning the sad history of military injustice from 1754 to 1994, ending with the genocide in Rwanda. Each chapter makes the case that the punishments imposed, which included death sentences, were excessive, and the product of a desire by those in power to cast blame on an individual, rather than on system failures. (Dec.)