The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  A letter from Brigadier General M. G. White, the army’s assistant chief of staff, informed army chief of staff General George C. Marshall that “in May, 1942, there were 2,822 desertions.” The overall number of deserters grew as the army expanded, but the percentage remained low at less than 1 percent of the total number of personnel in uniform. However, most of the desertions were coming from the small percentage of soldiers serving or about to serve as combat infantry troops.

  General Marshall established a committee to study desertions and their relationship to nervous disorders. Among those he appointed to the committee was a First World War veteran, Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke. Cooke assumed he was selected because “if a guy like me could understand such a subject, anybody could.” Cooke had no fixed view of the problem, its causes or its solution. He noted in early 1943 that “nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations.” This was before most of them had been shipped overseas. General Cooke, a bluff and self-effacing soldier, wrote that he had not heard the word “psychoneurosis” before this time and had no idea how to spell it. He also admitted to sharing a common military suspicion of “psychiatricks.”

  Cooke visited Fort Blanding during Weiss’s training period. The camp commandant gave him access to one “locked” and three “open” wards for psychoneurosis patients. In an open ward, not all of the patients seemed genuine.

  A hundred or more patients were loafing around in hospital suits, talking, reading, or playing games. They didn’t act any sicker than I did. As a group, they seemed just about like any other collection of soldiers. I spoke to one of the more intelligent looking ones.

  “What’s wrong with you, soldier?”

  He stared at me defiantly.

  “I’m queer,” he stated flatly, meaning he was homosexual.

  Another patient complained of back pain, and a black soldier said simply, “I’se got the misery.”

  At the officers’ club, Cooke had a drink with the camp psychiatrist to discuss the malingerers he had met. The psychiatrist told him,

  Whether you believe it or not, I can assure you those men suffer with the pains they complain about. You say they are malingerers and merely pretend to be sick. But, after ten years of practicing psychiatry, I am confident I can tell the difference between a person who is suffering from pain and one who isn’t.

  Pain with a psychological cause was still pain. Cooke said he did not understand, but he resolved to continue his investigation with an open mind.

  • • •

  At Fort Blanding, Steve Weiss gravitated to older soldiers, as if seeking a reliable father or older brother. Sheldon Wohlwerth, a twenty-eight-year-old trainee from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, became a friend. Wohlwerth was “ungainly, artistic and bright” and had “sound common sense.” Weiss said, “I liked him a lot.” On completion of their seventeen weeks’ basic training, Weiss and Wohlwerth went to Fort Meade, Maryland, for rifle training. To his surprise, Weiss qualified as a marksman. At Fort Meade, a recruit named Hal Sedloff befriended him. In civilian life, Sedloff had been a butcher. Weiss looked up to Sedloff, who like Wohlwerth was ten years his senior. The older man’s extreme yearning for his wife and baby daughter, however, left him miserable. In April 1944, the army shipped Sedloff overseas from Newport News, Virginia. A week later, it was Steve Weiss’s turn.

  Not every soldier assigned to overseas duty made it as far as the ships. General Cooke interviewed doctors and recruits at induction stations, hospitals and army stockades to discover why so many were refusing to serve. Some of his discoveries undermined his faith in the young generation’s patriotism. Special treatment by civilian Selective Service Boards had created resentment among draftees. “When, in 1943, it was found that fourteen members of the Rice University football team had been rejected for military service, the public was somewhat surprised,” he wrote. They were not the only athletes whose talents spared them military service early in the war, and General Cooke sympathized with those who believed that local Selective Service Boards were unfair.

  So urgent had the problem of desertion within the United States become that the Adjutant General’s Office circulated a memo on 3 February 1943 to “Commanding Generals, Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, Services of Supply, the commanders of all ports of embarkation, all officers exercising general court martial jurisdiction in the United States” and commanders of most continental bases. The memo began, “Absences without leave and desertion, especially from units which have been alerted for movement overseas, have reached serious proportions.” So many men had deserted that it was impossible to put them on trial, “except in aggravated circumstances.” Because many deserters preferred prison to overseas duty, the Adjutant General’s Office wrote, “The intent of the new regulations is that the shirker’s purpose will be frustrated instead of assisted. . . . He must find that after early apprehension, a vigorous administration expedites his return to duty with his unit if it is still in the United States, or to an active overseas theater if his unit has gone.”

  The memo painted a gloomy picture of draftees’ willingness to take part in the war. Because the stockades were overflowing with captured deserters and others absent without leave (AWOL), “it has been necessary to encroach upon the barracks area for staging in order to house, feed and detain deserters and AWOL’s [sic] apprehended.” The adjutant general advised commanders to beware of the “various tricks and ruses used to avoid being assigned to a task force or placed in a group for overseas shipment.” The deserters’ “tricks” were:

  a. They maim themselves, necessitating hospitalization.

  b. They feign physical and mental illness.

  c. They hide out for days to avoid being placed on an overseas shipment list.

  d. They go AWOL in order to stand trial and be confined.

  e. They dispose of clothing and equipment.

  f. They throw away their identification tags.

  g. They answer for absentees on roll call.

  h. When an officer approaches the area, the word is passed along and they dash for the woods through windows and doors, even jumping from upstairs screened windows, taking the screens with them.

  General Cooke extended his mission to Camp Edwards on Cape Cod, where 2,800 soldiers who had deserted in the eastern United States were imprisoned. (Deserters west of the Mississippi went to a similar prison in California.) Cooke asked the camp’s commandant how long the men remained behind bars. “As long as it takes to find out who they are and what outfit they belong to,” he said. “Then we take them under guard and put them on a ship.” When trainees broke their spectacles or false teeth to avoid shipping out, the army changed the regulations so they could be sent to battle without them. Many went into hiding. The commandant said, “We’ve dug them out of bins under the coal and rooted them out of caves and tunnels dug underneath their barracks.” Camp guards resorted to confining deserters in special compounds without explanation a few hours before putting them on trains for embarkation ports. Cooke asked whether any men tried to bolt outside the camp. “Only when they’re being taken to the port. Then they’ll jump out of windows, off of moving trucks and even over the sides of harbor boats.” The army name for it was “gangplank fever.”

  Cooke spoke to the prisoners. Some had family worries that they had to deal with before they could leave the United States. One soldier said he could not abandon his wife, who was pregnant and sick. Others told him: “I can’t fire a gun or go under fire.” “I can’t kill anyone, I don’t believe in killing people.” “I was afraid, I guess, so I went home.” “I wanted to see my girl; I don’t like the Army and I’m scared of water.”

  • • •

  From Fort Meade, Steve Weiss, Sheldon Wohlwerth and the other graduate trainees went to Newport News to board ships. None of them knew their destination or their future divisions and regiments. As infantry �
��replacements,” they would fill positions left in the ranks by men who had been killed, captured, disabled physically or mentally or were missing in action. Some of the battlefield missing, about whom no one spoke, had gone “over the hill,” deserting the army with no intention of returning. As the replacements neared the Straits of Gibraltar aboard troop transports that were prey to German U-boats, a rumor circulated that they were bound for a place they had never heard of, Oran. The French Algerian port town, occupied by the Americans and British since November 1942, had become the U.S. Mediterranean Base Section and theater supply depot. A few of the replacements were so sure Oran was Iran that they lost a month’s pay betting on it.

  Brigadier General Cooke had beaten Weiss to North Africa, where he continued his research into the high rate of desertions and nervous breakdowns. He asked a nineteen-year-old corporal, Robert Green, if he had been afraid when the patrol he was leading ran into the Germans. “Yes, sir, I was scared all right! Anybody tells you he isn’t scared up front is just a plain liar.” Cooke probed the young soldier about men who “cracked up.” He answered, “Some of them do. But you can see it comin’ on, and sometimes the other guys help out.” Cooke asked how he could see it “comin’ on.” Green said they became “trigger happy”:

  They go running all over the place lookin’ for something to shoot at. Then, the next thing you know they got the battle jitters. They jump if you light a match and go diving for cover if someone bounces a tin hat off a rock. Any kind of a sudden noise and you can just about see them let out a mental scream to themselves. When they get that way, you might just as well cross them off the roster because they aren’t going to be any more use to the outfit.

  Cooke wondered how to help such men, and Green answered,

  Aw, you can cover up for a guy like that before he’s completely gone. He can be sent back to get ammo or something. You know and he knows he’s gonna stay out of sight for a while, but you don’t let on, see? Then he can pretend to himself he’s got a reason for being back there and he still has his pride. Maybe he even gets his nerve back for the next time. But if he ever admits openly that he’s runnin’ away, he’s through!

  In Algiers, a senior officer told Cooke, “If a soldier contracts a severe case of dysentery from drinking impure water, his commander feels sorry for him and is glad to see the man sent to a hospital. But if the soldier becomes afflicted with an equivalent ailment from stress and strain, that same commander becomes incensed and wants the soldier court-martialed.”

  General Cooke wryly proposed a cure: “Then the only remedy is to eliminate fear.”

  • • •

  After two weeks in a camp near Oran, Steve Weiss and eighty-nine other replacements from Fort Meade boarded a converted British passenger liner, the Strathnaver, for the four-day cruise to Naples. The Allies had conquered Naples on 1 October 1943. By May 1944, when Weiss arrived, the Allied armies, the Mafia and the Allied deserters who controlled the black market in military supplies jointly ran the city. Thousands of soldiers were enriching themselves at army expense, stealing and selling Allied supplies. Some Italian-Americans had deserted to drive trucks of contraband for American Mafia boss Vito Genovese. Other deserters had joined armed bands in the hills, robbing both the Allies and Italian civilians. Reynolds Packard, the United Press correspondent who had lived in Italy before the war and returned on the first day of the invasion, wrote,

  Within a few weeks Naples became the crime center of liberated Italy. And the word “liberated” became a dirty joke. It meant to both the Italians and the invaders that an Allied military government got something for nothing: such as an Italian’s wife or a bottle of brandy he took from an intimidated bartender without paying for it. Prostitution, black marketing, racketeering, and confidence games were rampant. . . . It was a mixed-up circle. The GIs were selling cigarettes to the Italians, who in turn would sell them back to the Americans who had run out of them. But the main trade was trafficking in women.

  Norman Lewis, an Italian-speaking British intelligence officer in Naples, noted the same phenomenon: “Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than the other ranks.” The officers were both American and British, some of whom had sent looted artworks back to England on Royal Navy ships. When Lewis investigated corruption in Naples, the black marketeers’ influential friends blocked him. He wrote,

  One soon finds that however many underlings are arrested—and sent away these days for long terms of imprisonment—those who employ them are beyond the reach of the law. At the head of the AMG [American military government] is Colonel Charles Poletti, and working with him is Vito Genovese, once head of the American Mafia, now become his adviser. Genovese was born in a village near Naples, and has remained in close contact with its underworld, and it is clear that many of the Mafia-Camorra sindacos [mayors] who have been appointed in the surrounding towns are his nominees. . . . Yet nothing is done.

  Army gossip about these activities circulated among the troops, some of whom believed that the officers’ behavior justified their own acts of theft or extortion. Steve Weiss, as yet unaware of the war’s seamier side, saw the Italian campaign in terms of his father’s experiences of the First World War. The cargo wagons on the train he took from Naples to Caserta were just like the “previous war’s forty men and eight horses.”

  At Caserta, the new GIs were stationed at the replacement depot (which they called the “repple depot” or “repple depple”), near the palatial headquarters of the 5th Army Group under British field marshal Sir Harold Alexander. The former royal palace was also home to Allied press correspondents. One of the best, the Australian Alan Moorehead of the British Daily Express, thought the headquarters “a vast and ugly palace,” even if it was more commodious than the GIs’ tents. “Unlike the field marshal,” Weiss wrote, “we at the ‘repple depot’ were herded together like cattle, waiting for assignment to any one of a number of infantry divisions fighting across the Italian peninsula. I was adrift, alone and friendless, as usual, in a sea of olive drab, feeling more like a living spare part.” For two weeks in May, the young soldiers had nothing to do while the army decided where to put them. At the end of the month, a sergeant called out the names of ninety soldiers for posting to the 36th Infantry Division, at Anzio. Among them were two trainees from Fort Blanding, Privates Second Class Sheldon Wohlwerth and Stephen J. Weiss.

  • • •

  The 36th was a Texas National Guard division that had come under federal control in November 1940, whose men wore the Texas T, like a cattle brand, on their left shoulders. The commanding officer of the “T-Patchers” was Major General Fred Livingood Walker, a First World War veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross for exceptional gallantry and a strong supporter of his troops. The Ohio-born Walker had assumed command of the Texas division in 1941.

  War for the 36th began with the first American landing on the European continent at the Bay of Salerno in southern Italy on 9 September 1943. German artillery dug into the Roman ruins at Paestum hit the invaders hard, pinning down one battalion of the 36th Division’s 141st Regiment on the beach for twelve hours. The Texans pushed inland to launch a frontal assault on Wehrmacht units in the village of Altavilla. Misdirected American artillery, however, halted their advance and forced the men to scramble for shelter in the brush. When they eventually conquered the village, a German detachment moved onto a summit above to batter Altavilla with artillery. The 36th withdrew, momentarily exposing its divisional headquarters to a German onslaught. Assisted by hastily armed rear- echelon cooks, typists and orderlies, the 36th retook Altavilla and secured the southern portion of the beachhead. The Salerno invasion cost the 15,000-man division more than 1,900 dead, wounded and missing.

  As murderous as their first few days in Italy proved, the Texans soon suffered worse. When the Wehrmacht poured in reinforcements from the north
, the counteroffensive hit the 36th head-on. The division suffered another 1,400 casualties while taking San Pietro, a key village in the Liri valley on the route to Rome, in December. In January, Fifth Army commander General Mark Clark ordered General Walker to send his division across the Rapido River as part of an operation to break out of the Salerno beachhead. It was nothing less than a suicide mission. The fast flowing river at that time of year measured between twenty-five and fifty feet wide and around twelve feet deep, not an insurmountable obstacle. However, other factors militated against a successful crossing. Winter rain made the current both fast and powerful. The river’s wide, muddy flood-plain was impassable to trucks, forcing the men to carry boats to the bank. The Germans had planted a dense field of land mines, and they positioned heavy artillery on the heights beyond the river’s west bank. General Walker opposed the operation, but he obeyed Clark’s orders. His men, as he feared, were slaughtered during three attempted crossings. Those who made it to the other side fought without air or armor support. Lacking communication with the friendly shore, they ran out of ammunition and were driven back by German artillery. The two-day “battle of guts” ended on 22 January with 2,019 officers and men lost—934 wounded, the rest killed or missing in action. Some of the missing had drowned, and their bodies were swept downstream. General Walker wrote in his diary after the Rapido failure, “My fine division is wrecked.” Raleigh Trevelyan, a twenty-year-old British platoon commander in Italy, summed up the 36th’s resulting reputation: “The 36th had, frankly, come to be looked down on by the other divisions of the Fifth Army. It was considered not only to be a ‘hard luck outfit,’ but trigger happy.”