Test Case

Private Travis Hammond, a good-looking, curly-haired U.S. soldier from Keltys, Tex., was accused of raping a pretty, 16-year-old English shopgirl. This was the first test of the four-day-old U.S.A. Visiting Forces Bill rushed through Parliament under uneasy protest and with grave doubts in both the U.S. and Britain. The bill removed from British courts the power to handle criminal charges against U.S. soldiers. Last week Britons watched to see how a U.S. court would act--and approved in practice what they disliked in theory.

In a north-county rural chamber, amid frowning portraits of side-whiskered yeoman justices, eleven U.S. officers sat in judgment. Private Hammond testified nervously, lolling back cross-legged in an upholstered chair. He and the girl agreed they had picked each other up, had drunk beers and wine in pubs, had sought the privacy of a bomb shelter together, had kissed. The girl insisted she had screamed, slapped, scratched. But she admitted that when it was over she had wiped his face with his handkerchief.

Reporting on the trial, the Daily Telegraph remarked somewhat disappointedly: ''There were none of the highlights which Hollywood had led us to expect." The Daily Mail noted: "The American court . . . was an atmospheric cross between a quiet morning on the Corn Exchange and an orderly company meeting." Biggest surprise to the British was absence of formality. "The Counsel who wishes to raise a point of law does not begin, 'My Lord, would you be so good as to allow me to draw the attention of the court, etc.' He stands up or even leans back in his chair and says, 'I object.' Just like that."

In the courtroom a civilian witness testified he had heard no screams from the shelter. The court pronounced: "Not Guilty."

A guilty verdict, under U.S. military law, would have meant death or life imprisonment. This is more severe than British sentences, generally, which provide for penal servitude for life, or not less than three years, or imprisonment for not more than two years with or without hard labor. A prominent police official said: "I think Hammond would have got the same verdict from an English jury." The girl's mother did not approve. She muttered: "This is what they call justice, but they let him go free and that casts a reflection on my girl."

But as Private Hammond symbolically went free in a jeep, the townspeople cheered. He still awaited the disciplinary verdict of Major General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz.

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