Eighteen-year-old Johnny Moore was an energetic, self-confident private first class when he entered combat with a heavy-weapons platoon in Korea. Four and a half months later, after surviving heavy attacks on the Pusan Perimeter and in one of the forward units of the western column advancing on the Yalu River, he was captured by the Chinese infantry. Moore and other American POWs suffered from starvation rations, bitter cold, and mental torment. Although the intense Chinese efforts to change the prisoners’ ideologies were largely unsuccessful, they were very effective in engendering distrust among the prisoners and abandonment of duty by the officers. Encouraged by an American sergeant, Moore worked with his captors to obtain better sanitation, a fairer distribution of food, and, on two occasions, medicine for the sick. Twice he tried to escape from imprisonment. Just four days after his twenty-first birthday, in 1953, the Chinese released him. Moore cooperated fully with US military interrogators, giving as much information as he could on the prison camp and the methods his captors had used. But two years later, army officers arrested him at his home and charged him with treason. Although the charge was dropped and a Field Board of Inquiry returned him to regular duty, the army’s treatment of him left Moore further traumatized. He eventually went AWOL and turned to drinking, gambling, and other self-destructive behaviors. Military historian Judith Fenner Gentry has worked with Moore’s memoirs of his experiences during and after the war to corroborate, clarify, elaborate, and situate his story within the larger events in Korea and in the Cold War. She has consulted records from courts-martial, newspaper interviews with returning POWs, and Freedom of Information Act documents on the Army Criminal Investigation Division and the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps.

New research data gathered through the Freedom of Information Act and the first use of the Grow files provide the framework for this absorbing account of the general court-martial of one of General George S. Patton's famous armored division commanders of World War II. The 1952 court-martial of Major General Robert W. Grow, senior U.S. military attach� in Moscow during the Korean War era, involved a general officer who had used questionable judgment in securing a personal diary that contained impolitic statements portions of which had been photocopies by an alleged Soviet agent in Frankfurt, West Germany. This era of Cold War tensions and McCarthyism, Western media sensationalism, and communist propaganda created a cause c�l�bre and influenced the Army Staff in the Pentagon, led by Lieutenant General Maxwell D. Taylor, to exercise controversial command influence under the aegis of the new Uniform Code of Military Justice. White the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency recommended refuting the implications of the published diary, the Army Staff decided to prosecute the unfortunate attach�. Grow, a career soldier, welcomed a formal hearing in order to clear his name. The result became an exercise in Army politics and an example of the corruption of the military justice system through managerial careerism and unlawful command influence. Through his analysis of the Grow incident, Hofmann traces the actual operation of military judicial process under the Uniform Code and examines the bureaucratic intrigues, influence of the media, Cold War propaganda, and resulting conflict between service and self-interest.

Examines the economic, political, and military events that shaped legal administration in the United States Navy from colonial times and led to the establishment of the Navy Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps in 1967. Traces the legislative and executive processes which influenced Navy legal affairs. Provides a unique perspective into the workings of American government from the time of its founding to the present.