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Kilian v. Doubleday & Co., Inc. | 79 A.2d 657 (1951)
During World War II, the US Army used the replacement depot in Lichfield, England, as a hospital for wounded soldiers. The Lichfield Depot also served as a notoriously brutal prison overseen by fearsome camp commander Colonel James Kilian. Kilian versus Doubleday is the story of a veteran’s supposedly true description of conditions at Lichfield and Kilian’s claim that it was all lies.
US soldier Joseph O’Connell was injured during the invasion of Normandy. He spent three months in a hospital in England, but never went to Lichfield.
Back home, O’Connell joined a literature class for disabled veterans at American University in Washington, D.C. The professor, Don Wolfe, had the students write stories about their personal experiences during the war.
O’Connell wrote an account of incidents that occurred at the Lichfield camp. He initially wrote a third-person report of stories he’d heard from other men who’d allegedly witnessed them. Wolfe encouraged O’Connell to make the story more vivid by adding descriptive details of horrific abuses and switching his narration to the first person, which gave the impression that he himself had observed the events he described.
The villain of O’Connell’s piece was the Colonel, described as a man with mean eyes who looked like he enjoyed seeing men suffer. Though O’Connell didn’t use Kilian’s name, this character was clearly James Kilian. O’Connell concluded the essay by remarking that the Colonel would be protected by the big brass and get off light.
Wolfe compiled these stories into a volume that Doubleday published as The Purple Testament. Doubleday advertised the book as a collection of true stories of absolute honesty recounting the writers’ own intimate experiences.
At the end of O’Connell’s piece, Wolfe appended a note that Colonel James Kilian had been convicted of permitting cruel and unusual punishment of American soldiers and had been punished with a reprimand and a five hundred dollar fine.
In fact, Kilian had been tried before a military court and had been acquitted of most charges.
Kilian sued Doubleday for libel. Doubleday pleaded the defense of justification, arguing that the story was an accurate account of events observed by the author. Three soldiers who’d been at Lichfield testified that they’d witnessed Kilian engaged in various abuses, though not the abuses O’Connell described. The judge instructed the jury that it could find for Doubleday if the publication were substantially true. The trial jury found for Doubleday. After the court refused Kilian’s request for a new trial, he appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
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