CONTACT
FILM
It was November of 1978 that first time I went to the cemetery where they had buried Major Ronal Alley. In the freezing rain someone from the American Legion hall had come to the cemetery, just outside bar Harbor, to mark the veterans' graves with small American flags, the kind you see children waving at parades. The people who live on Mount Desert Island off the coast of northern Maine are proud, passionately independent, and patriotic without question. Their sense of duty is deeply rooted. They had placed a flag at the grave of Major Alley, even thought the United States Army had once court-martialed him and sent him to prison as a traitor to his country.
Ever since his death, hundreds of people had come from all over Maine, traveling great distances to his grave because they had been struck by the way this one soldier had declared all his life that he loved the Army more than anything in the world and that he had committed no crime. They came because his widow had fulfilled her promise to him and buried him here in his uniform against the regulations of the United States Army.
Major Alley had grown up [poor, in a house without plumbing just a few miles from the cemetery. He was the oldest of eight children and at age seventeen he left home to join the Army and to make something of himself. He fought in two wars and made the Army his life. And, after all of that, he ended up in a dishonored grave.
When I stood at the grave that first time, I had no way of knowing what an incredible story was buried along with this man. But four years later I would know him better than the people he had lived with on this island, than the soldiers he had fought with in France, in Belgium, and then in Korea. I would know him better than the Army lawyers who prosecuted him and the Pentagon intelligence officers and FBI informants who had watched him and opened his mail and searched the most private corners of his life. I would know him better than the newspaper reporters who had written stories about him and then forgotten him. Major Alley had died a mystery to those people.
REVIEWS
BOOKLIST
" Don Snyder began to dig into the assembled evidence pertaining to Alley's case, interviewing war buddies and examining heretofore classified army documents. The case possessed Snyder for four years, and the book he has written about his search for the truth is heartwrenching."
C. MICHAEL CURTIS, SENIOR EDITOR, THE ATLANTIC
" The real disgrace is that this book wasn't published years ago, when it might have brightened the lives of the two people whose search for justice provides its text. It stands now as a tribute to a reporter who stayed with his story for eight long years and as an indictment of the military justice system determined to make an example of one of its own. I hope this book wins a Pulitzer. "
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
"U.S. Army Maj. Ronald Alley survived three years in a North Korean prison camp only to be charged with collaboration on his return to freedom. Found guilty, he was dishonorably discharged and sent to Leavenworth, the only U.S. officer in this century to receive such a sentence. This riveting book reveals what Sen. William Cohen of Maine, a partisan of the late Alley, has called a gross violation of justice. Novelist Snyder (Veterans Park recounts his obsession with the case, his alliance with Alley's widow and Cohen, and their combined efforts to lobby the Army Board of Correction of Military Records to reopen the case. These efforts included locating former POWs, at least one of whom testified against the major in the 1955 trial. After some five months of deliberations, the board ruled that the original verdict had been ``manifestly correct.'' Snyder argues convincingly that Alley was neither a collaborator nor a traitor but a victim of the McCarthy-era witch-hunt."
Yankee Books | 254 Pages | ISBN 978-0899091396 | September 1987
A SOLDIER'S DISGRACE
A Novel
ARTICLES
WAS MAJOR ALLEY A SCAPEGOAT?
by Martin Garbus / LA Times
On Nov. 22, 1955, U.S. Army Maj. Ronald E. Alley was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor for collaborating with the enemy while a prisoner of war in North Korea. Of the thousands of soldiers held captive by the enemy in World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam and of the hundreds known to have collaborated with the enemy and dozens who were court-martialed for this offense, only Alley was convicted and sent to prison.
Alley had risen to the rank of major because of his battlefield conduct in World War II and Korea. Captured during the terrible battle at Chosin in 1950, he took command of the American prisoners at his camp and, he says, tried to get as many men as he could out alive. He spent nearly three years in horrible captivity, returned home a shell of himself, then spent two years in a hospital. Upon his release, he was court-martialed and then spent nearly four years in an Army prison.
Don J. Snyder, first a journalist interested in the story, then an unabashed advocate and total believer in Alley's innocence, spent, along with Alley's wife, eight years trying to get the facts to prove Alley was not a collaborator, but only a soldier selected as the fall guy by the Army in its search for scapegoats for its failure to win the Korean War.
DISCUSSIONS
