The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  In eleven months of Italian fighting, the division lost 11,000 men. Only 4,000 of the original cadre remained, the rest having been replaced by inexperienced young recruits like Steve Weiss. When Weiss arrived in Italy in May 1944, there were few less hospitable divisions than the war-drained 36th and no more dangerous place than the Anzio beachhead. In his memoirs, General Clark called Anzio a “flat and barren little strip of Hell.” British platoon commander Trevelyan wrote that “nowhere in the Beachhead was safe from bombs or shells.” Even the naval shore craft, the only means of supplying the troops from the rear area at Naples, were subject to German fire.

  Only thirty miles from Rome, the beaches had been peacetime resorts with first-class hotels, restaurants, cafés and ice-cream shops. Allied bombardment of Anzio and Nettuno before the landing, intended as an end run north of Salerno that would ease the advance to Rome, emptied both towns of most of their inhabitants. The Anzio invasion began at 2:00 on the morning of 22 January 1944, when the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division hit the undefended beach and British Commandos and American Ranger units took control of the surrounding area. As with the landing at Salerno, early success was undermined by the Allies’ failure to take advantage of weak German defenses by pushing quickly inland. The Germans thus had time to regroup and counterattack. By May 1944, when Private Steve Weiss and the other replacements arrived to fill the ranks of the badly depleted 36th Division, the Allies were still dug in on the exposed beachhead.

  The first soldiers Weiss encountered were barricaded in a makeshift stockade of wood and barbed wire. The fifty disheveled troops were not German prisoners of war, but, to Weiss’s astonishment, Americans. “Under armed military police guard, some of the prisoners seemed very weary and disoriented, like vagrants down on their heels and luck,” Weiss wrote. “Others, more aggressive than the others, threatened and hurled obscenities at us, warning, with pointed finger or clenched fist, we’d end up like them, misunderstood and deserted by the army.” The army, though, had not deserted these men. They had deserted the army.

  Raleigh Trevelyan, the British platoon commander who spent months at Anzio, wrote that not all deserters were in the stockade: “There were said to be three hundred deserters, both British and American, at large on the Beachhead. At first nobody made out where they could hide themselves in such a small area.” Another British officer, Lord John Hope of the Scots Guards, was bird-watching in some deserted gardens east of Nettuno when he uncovered a cache of canned food under a pile of wood. He told Trevelyan:

  I turned a corner and was confronted by two unshaven GIs, one with a red beard, with rifles. I knew it was touch and go. “What are you doing here?” one of them asked. I showed him my British badges, and when I said I was bird-watching they burst out laughing. They pretended they were just back from the front.

  Hope reported the deserters to the American provost marshal, who sent MPs in a jeep with Hope on the hood to show the way. They found the deserters, who, in Hope’s words, “jumped up and ran like hell into a tobacco field; the men in the jeep belted off into the crops. . . . No expedition was organized to go into the bushes to find out who was there. Men just couldn’t be spared.”

  United Press correspondent Reynolds Packard came across another deserter near Anzio. The American soldier had no rifle, a court- martial offense. Packard asked where it was. “Fuck it,” the GI said. “I threw it away. I’ve quit fighting this goddamn war.” Packard told his jeep driver to hold the deserter while he searched for the missing weapon. He found it and gave it to the soldier, who threw it away again. “Fuck this war,” he said. “I’m not fighting anymore.” Packard decided to take him to division headquarters:

  Just before we got there, I hauled off and hit him, knocking him unconscious.

  “What the hell are you doing?” my driver, Sergeant Delmar Richardson, asked. “Gone nuts?”

  “I don’t want to take him into a hospital while he’s talking about not fighting this fucking war anymore. That’s all.”

  The deserters in the Anzio beach stockade, like sentries at the inferno’s gates, persisted in their warnings to Weiss and the other arrivals. The replacements endured the abuse, until trucks pulled up to take them away. They drove through Anzio town, most of it destroyed by Allied and then German bombardment, to a hill above the beach. There they made camp for the night.

  In the morning, Steve Weiss attended the Catholic chaplain’s outdoor Mass. He then went to find his friend from Fort Meade, Hal Sedloff. Sedloff had been posted to the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, composed of National Guard units from Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. The 45th had fought as part of General George Patton’s Seventh Army in Sicily the previous July, took the beach at Salerno in September and landed at Anzio in January 1944. Although Sedloff went into the line with the 45th as it fought its way north to Rome, Weiss discovered he was still near Anzio in a field hospital. A nurse there told Weiss that Sedloff had taken part in two battles, but he had been incapable of fighting because of “night blindness.” His wounds were not physical. Weiss did not understand. The nurse explained that he had “battle fatigue,” a term Weiss heard for the first time. In his father’s war in 1918, they called it “shell shock.” Army psychiatrists had begun using the term “psychoneurosis,” while the British preferred “battle exhaustion,” with its implication that rest could cure it. The nurse whispered to Weiss, “No one is immune.” Weiss was unaware that, by this stage of the war, a quarter of all combat casualties were psychiatric.

  Deciding that Sedloff’s trauma made him a risk to a combat unit, medical staff recommended him for rear-echelon duty. This was a discreet and humane way to retain the services of men rendered unfit for combat. One battalion officer, after relieving a veteran from further frontline duty, explained, “It is my opinion, through observation, that he has reached the end of endurance as a combat soldier. Therefore, in recognition of a job well done I recommend that this soldier be released from combat duty and be reclassified in another capacity.” Weiss, who guessed that Hal Sedloff cracked because he still missed his wife and daughter, left the hospital without being allowed to see his friend.

  “I thought Hal, at twenty-eight, was someone to depend on, because of his age and experience,” Weiss wrote. “I was chilled by the prospect of carrying on, alone, without the support of and belief in some kind of father figure.”

  Weiss’s initiation into the war zone had been a beach stockade filled with men who ran from battle and an older friend comatose with fear. Neither increased his confidence in himself or the army. Aged eighteen and without someone to trust, he questioned his capacity to measure up under fire. A study of American combatants had found that 36 percent of men facing battle for the first time were more afraid of “being a coward” than of being wounded. Weiss needed an experienced commander to show the way, but officers and noncommissioned officers did not survive much longer on the line than enlisted men. Many were replacements themselves, without time to become acquainted with soldiers under their command. The replacement system, as the army was beginning to realize, undermined morale. Weiss did not know that, not yet.

  The system in earlier conflicts withdrew whole regiments or divisions from battle to absorb replacements during retraining. This permitted new soldiers to know their officers and their squad mates. General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, had initiated a policy of replacing individual soldiers within each division without pulling them back from the front. Marshall explained, “In past wars it had been the accepted practice to organize as many divisions as manpower resources would permit, fight those divisions until casualties had reduced them to bare skeletons, then withdraw them from the line and rebuild them in a rear area. . . . The system we adopted for this war involved a flow of individual replacements from training centers to the divisions so they would be constantly at full strength.” The First World War’s thirty-thousand-man divisions had been cut in half f
or the Second, and divisional losses in combat left many with a majority of troops who did not know one another. Marshall concluded, “If his [an army commander’s] divisions are fewer in number but maintained at full strength, the power for attack continues while the logistical problems are greatly simplified.” Logistics were simpler, but group loyalty evaporated.

  In the evening after Weiss’s attempt to visit Hal Sedloff, Luftwaffe planes breached the Anzio defenses and bombed the beachhead. Steve Weiss watched five German HE-111 medium bombers soar only five hundred feet above him. Ground fire, he wrote, was “erratic, no spirited defense here.” Why weren’t the antiaircraft batteries doing their job? The planes hit several targets, including an American ammunition depot, and flew away untouched. Weiss felt that American soldiers were unsafe everywhere, even on a beachhead that had been established four months before. How much worse would it be in the hills where the 36th Division was face-to-face with the Germans? Ordnance from the ammo dump exploded and burned all night, its unnatural light reminding Weiss of the war his father never told him about.

  EIGHT

  They enlisted in a condition almost like drunkenness and some woke up to find themselves under arms and with a headache.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 306

  A CACOPHONY OF TIN WHISTLES and shouts from the prison yard woke SUS John Bain from the refuge of sleep. His eyes adjusted gradually to dawn trickling through three small windows set high in the wall opposite his cell door. On this first morning at the Mustafa Barracks, he experienced a double awakening: to the curses and groans of his eight fellow prisoners and to “a drench of pure horror as the full knowledge of his circumstances drove like a bayonet to the gut.” Sight and sound disturbed him less than the smell of “unclean bodies and bodies’ waste, the reek of disgrace and captivity.”

  Staff Sergeant Pickering unbolted the door. The nine prisoners snapped to attention, grasping their “chocolate pots.” Pickering ordered them to the latrines to “slop out” the pots, back to the cell to fetch their wash bags and double-time outside again. Pressing their faces to a wall, they waited for Pickering to bring a tray of razors. The used blades were so blunt that Bain cut his cheek. A staff sergeant whom Bain had not seen the day before relieved Pickering: “The NCO advancing toward them across the square was short, not a great deal over five and a half feet, but he looked powerful, his shoulders wide and the exposed forearms thick and muscular. He had a neat dark mustache and his eyes were small and very bright, like berries.” He was Staff Sergeant Brown.

  Under the barking of Brown’s commands, the SUSs marched, double-time, to the storehouse for buckets and brushes. For an hour, on hands and knees, they scrubbed the barrack square. With that completed, they carried their mess tins to the cookhouse. Kitchen workers filled half of each tin with congealed porridge and bread, the other half with tea. The SUSs rushed back to their cell, inevitably spilling tea, to eat. Next came physical training, which veteran inmates called physical torture.

  Under a cloudless African sky, Staff Sergeant Henderson directed standard military calisthenics: jumps, bends, push-ups and sit-ups. Wearing full combat uniform, including heavy boots, in heat over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the men tired more rapidly than during the toughest training in Britain.

  Sweat flowed within seconds. In minutes, the men were winded. When one collapsed onto the sand, Henderson kicked his ribs to get him back up. The men were “gasping for air like stranded fish and trying desperately and ineffectually to press their bodies clear of the ground.” Then, along with another two hundred or so inmates in the square, they halted.

  Into the sandy pasquare sauntered Regimental Sergeant Major Grant. Dressed more smartly than the already punctilious staff sergeants, he wore a tailored uniform with a hat and Sam Browne belt normally reserved for officers. A leather band with a shiny RSM insignia was tied around one wrist. Bain saw in Grant’s face “the bitter, clenched and potentially vicious expression that seemed to be part of the uniform of the corps.” His apparent lack of physical strength lent him “a powerful sense of menace.” RSM Grant strolled among the ranks without a word, reeking disdain.

  “You will march at the double,” Grant instructed the six new arrivals. “I give the commands mark time, then halt and then right-turn. You will then be facing Captain Babbage.” Babbage was the camp commandant. “He’ll have your documents in front of him. He’ll read out your sentences, which you already know. Then he’ll read out the official rules and regulations of Number Fifty-Five Military Prison and Detention Barracks. He’ll ask if you’ve got anything to say. My advice is to keep your mouths shut.”

  Bain, a meticulous observer, was harsh in his unspoken assessment of prison staff. It astounded Bain that Babbage, slouched at his desk, was “quite as repulsive as he was”:

  He was very fat and the sparseness of the colourless hair that was spread in ineffectual thin strands across the pale and lumpy baldness of his head made it difficult to guess his age. The open collar of his KD [khaki drill] shirt showed his almost imperceptible chin disappearing into folds of flesh and his mouth was half open and sagged slightly to one side. The rest of his features were smudged and blurred; his eyes were ill-tempered and bilious looking and the pudgy hands on the desk were noticeably tremulous.

  Captain Babbage dealt with each man in turn, reading out name, sentence and offense. To Bain, he said, “Three years penal servitude. Desertion in a forward area.” Bain was not expected to respond, and he didn’t. Babbage, whose appearance did little to detract from his pomposity, launched into a speech he must have given before:

  You’re here because you committed crimes. In your case—all of you—it’s the crime of desertion. You’re all cowards. You’re all yellow. You think you’re tough guys and you’re not. You’re soft and you’re yellow. If you weren’t you wouldn’t be here. You’d be with your comrades, soldiering, fighting. Well, you listen to me. You thought you’d leave the dirty work to your comrades. You’d have it nice and easy here. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t wish to God you were back with your units. Wherever they are. We’re going to punish you. Make no mistake about it.

  Babbage continued in this vein, berating them for cowardice and threatening additional punishments. He warned, “You get funny with us and we’ll smash you.” He recited the regulations, which included: no photographs to be kept; no smoking, ever; no speaking except on Communication Parade, which was ten minutes per day, under the eyes of the staff sergeants; one censored letter to be written home every other Sunday; complaints to be made only to the commandant; frivolous complaints to be punished by solitary confinement on Punishment Diet Number One (eight ounces of dry bread twice a day and a bucket of drinking water); and violence or threats of violence to earn constraint in body-belts and straitjackets. “Any questions?”

  There were no questions. RSM Grant returned them to the square and Staff Sergeant Brown. Brown ordered them to the cell and into full Service Marching Order, which meant fastening on large and small packs, (empty) ammunition pouches, gas cape and ground sheet. Brown drilled them for an hour outdoors, marching them forward and back, wheeling and turning. Bain remembered struggling for breath and being unable to see for sweat over his eyes. At drill’s end, they marched back into the cell to clean it. The time was 11:00 in the morning.

  Tiffin, or lunch, was at noon: the same as breakfast, except that jam was added to the bread. The afternoon consisted of pack-drill, during which Bain experienced “a dark numbness” that defused some of his anger. Standing motionless, the SUSs were ordered to talk to one another for ten minutes. This was Communication Parade. The staff sergeants walked up and down the lines, directing men who were not talking to speak to the man opposite, telling those who were speaking to watch what they said. Bain did not know the man he was facing, but, to avoid a reprimand from Staff Sergeant Brown, asked him his civilian job. He had worked at Watney’s Brewery. Brown ordered Bain to conti
nue talking, and he asked, “Read any good books lately?” This made the man smile, prompting a rebuke from Staff Sergeant Brown: “I catch you two grinning again I’ll have your dinners.” At Mustafa Barracks, “Smiling on Parade” was a punishable offense.

  Late afternoon brought the last meal of the day: watery mutton stew with rice. The SUSs ate silently in their cells, and the lights went out on schedule at 9:30 P.M. “John had completed a full day,” Bain wrote, “one which, with perhaps minor changes, would be the model for every other week-day he would spend as a prisoner in this place.” Some days were different in one respect: they were worse.

  Six weeks into Bain’s confinement, the administration introduced a novel punishment: the hill. One afternoon, a truck delivered three loads of sand that the SUSs piled onto a corner of the square. They returned to their cells that night wondering what new torment the sand portended.

  Ray Rigby, a British writer who as a soldier served two spells in a British military prison in North Africa, wrote about another sand pile in his novel The Hill. As at the Mustafa Barracks, his fictionalized prison received truckloads of sand without explanation one day: “All day long trucks roared into the prison grounds and deposited the sand, and slowly the hill began to take shape. The prisoners, bare to the waist and sweating in the intense heat, shovelled away in silent fury.”

  The hill grew, reinforced with large rocks, until the men had built it up to a height of sixty feet. Rigby wrote that “every man-Jack of them hated the sight of it.” They were ordered to scale its summit and race down the far side, again and again, until they could no longer walk, let alone run. A staff sergeant forced one prisoner over the hill so many times that it killed him. The hill of the novel symbolized everything the inmates, and even a few guards, despised about British military justice.