This paper is concerned with the analysis of elasto-plastic stress waves in a mode I semi-infinite cracked solid subjected to Heaviside pulse load. This study adopts a time-discontinuous variational integrator based on Hamiltonian in order to reduce the numerical dispersive and dissipative errors. This also utilizes an integration scheme of the constitutive model with 2nd-order accuracy which is formulated on the strain space for a rate and temperature dependent material model. Finite element analyses of elasto-plastic stress waves are carried out in order to compare the accuracy between a conventional Galerkin method and the time- discontinuous variational integrator.