Four Men and a Girl

A confused and furtive encounter between four men and a girl, which took place about a year ago in faraway New Caledonia, had U.S. Army officials squirming in embarrassment last week.

On a night in May, 1943, three Negro soldiers, driving in a reconnaissance car through Noumea, French capital of the South Pacific outpost, came upon a white U.S. lieutenant and a French girl standing near a jeep. According to the lieutenant's testimony, the three soldiers threatened him, took the girl into the bushes and raped her.

Despite charges of immoral behavior among U.S. soldiers in New Caledonia made by one French official (TIME, Jan. 3), observers have seen little actual evidence of it. Army officials, anxious to avoid any incident with the island's French, moved fast in the case of the Negroes. One soldier was never identified. But the other two, Edward R. Loury and Frank Fisher Jr., were quickly court-martialed and sent to prison for life.

The case might have ended there, if Loury from his cell had not appealed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Negro Judge William H. Hastie, onetime aid to War Secretary Stimson and dean of the Howard University School of Law, and New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, took up the case. Evidence which had been presented in Noumea courts and affidavits showed, they said, that Loury and Fisher had been railroaded:

The girl was a well-known prostitute; the acts had been committed with her consent, she had been paid for her compliance. They identified the lieutenant as Robert L. Engels and said that the testimony as to whether the soldiers had threatened him or not "was in dispute." In an affidavit Loury declared that Engels had simply bowed out.

Last week the Army staged a strategic retreat. The Army clung to its major position: that Loury and Fisher had had a fair trial. But because of "facts and circumstances surrounding" the case, Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson announced that Fisher's sentence was reduced to ten years, Loury's to eight. The lieutenant, said Patterson's report, had been discharged from the service "under conditions other than honorable."

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