Herman Perry (May 16, 1922 – March 15, 1945) was an African-American U.S. Army soldier during World War II, who deserted after fragging an unarmed white lieutenant attempting to arrest him.

He was hanged for murder and desertion, making him the only American soldier executed in the China Burma India Theater during World War II.

[1] On March 3, 1944, Perry's commanding officer, Lieutenant Harold A. Cady, attempted to apprehend him for dereliction of duty and place him in the area's military prison.

Perry fled into the wilderness and lived out a fugitive's life of jungle survival, happenstance finding a morung; a bamboo structure on stilts built over a pig sty, which served as a bachelors' quarter for a tribe of the Naga people of northeastern India and northern Burma.

[4] While pending execution at Ledo Stockade with formalities being dragged on for three months, Perry studied the guard's routines and was able to obtain a pair of wire cutters from a sympathetic visitor.

Following his escape, wanted posters of Herman Perry went up along the roads and fliers in Kachin and Burmese languages were distributed to native people and air-dropped over remote villages.

On New Year's Day 1945, the military policemen reached the timber camp; shots were fired, with one grazing Perry's ankle, but he managed to escape.

In 1990, Cullum would further publicize his first-hand accounts of the chase in his personally-published book, "Manhunt in Burma and Assam: World War II in the China-Burma-India Theater".

In 2007, Edna Wilson, Perry's last surviving sibling, having heard that her late brother was buried in Hawaii, asked the writer Brendan I. Koerner for help to locate and bring him back.

With her own money, Wilson arranged to have her brother's body disinterred, cremated, and buried alongside his family members at a cemetery in Washington, D.C.[8][9] The Herman Perry story would later be republicized by Koerner in 2008 as Now the Hell Will Start: One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II; George Pelecanos called it[10] "A fascinating, untold story of the Second World War, an incendiary social document, and a thrilling, campfire tale adventure."

Other major news outlets would later pick up the story as a greater, complex reflection of race relations between African Americans and commanding white officers in the military, especially during the Jim Crow era.