A US war crime in the Caribbean

Recent reporting has revealed that on September 2, 2025, the US Navy launched a missile strike against an alleged drug-smuggling vessel in the Caribbean, killing all but two of the 11 crew members.

- Allan J Lichtman

A second strike then killed the survivors, who were clinging to the overturned wreckage. Do those who authorized and carried out the second strike bear responsibility for a war crime? A legal precedent from World War II says they do.

On March 13, 1944, the German submarine U-852 torpedoed the Peleus, a Greek freighter chartered by the British Ministry of War Transport, sinking the vessel. Although most of the 35-man crew initially survived on rafts and debris, members of the submarine subsequently attacked them with machine-gun fire and hand grenades. Only three crewmen lived to recount their harrowing experience.

In the wake of this atrocity, the British captured and prosecuted U-852’s commander and four crew members, not for sinking the Peleus, which was a legitimate military target, but for killing the survivors. A military court found all five guilty of a war crime. In rejecting every defense offered by the accused, the court established a firm legal and moral precedent that attacking shipwrecked survivors is a war crime, and that belligerents are obligated to protect those rendered helpless in armed conflict.