On a day in early September, Pete Hegseth – the US Secretary of State for War (no longer for “Defence”) – ordered the firing of a precision-guided missile at a wooden boat offshore from Venezuela. This strike killed nine of its crew and left two injured and struggling to cling to the wreckage. Whether or not (as The Washington Post alleges) Hegseth said, “Kill them all,” the operational commander, Admiral Frank Bradley, admits to ordering a second strike intended to exterminate the two survivors. This, as all the legal textbooks make clear, is a war crime – the murder of a combatant who is hors de combat – unable to fight back.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed to be acting in the “fog of war”. Credit: AP

Second strikes on shipwrecked mariners are among the most contemptible of war crimes and are universally recognised as such. The most influential precedent came in 1918 with the sinking of a Canadian hospital ship, the HMHS Llandovery Castle, by a German submarine, which then surfaced and machine-gunned the nurses and sailors as they scrambled for the lifeboats. A Leipzig court – although notorious for pro-German bias – nonetheless convicted and condemned the gunners, who must have known the order to fire was unlawful. There were several cases during World War II when Nazi submarine commanders and crew were hanged for killing........

© The Sydney Morning Herald