The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

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The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Page 13

by Glass, Charles


  Weiss crouched in the dirt with his M1 rifle and awaited orders. Charlie Company’s commanding officer, Captain Allan Simmons, came up to the line. Simmons, a native of Belfast, Maine, did not acknowledge the replacements. Nor did he greet the veterans, signaling an absence of rapport with the men. The captain, aged about thirty, looked to Weiss like an old man. Weiss thought that, with his soiled fatigues and three-day beard, he was “locked within himself, his own emotional executioner,” not unlike Weiss’s father.

  The platoon sergeant, a tough but friendly Texan named Lawrence Kuhn, sent Weiss on his first mission with a corporal named Robert Reigle. They were ordered to find Company A (Able Company) somewhere forward out of radio contact. Bob Reigle was a five-foot-seven noncom from Hershey, Pennsylvania, who had fought with the division throughout the Italian campaign, at Salerno, the river Rapido and Monte Cassino. Reigle took Weiss in hand. The younger soldier immediately sensed in the corporal competence and solicitude he could trust. “The two of us headed out,” he wrote, “hacking our way noisily through a jungle of heavy underbrush. Skirting the side of a hill toward the canal, we walked in single file.” As they neared the edge of the natural cover, Reigle motioned to Weiss to stop. The two went dead quiet. Reigle listened carefully. Someone was coming their way. A lone German soldier with a sniper’s rifle called, “Kamerad.” He was trying to surrender.

  “Damn!” Reigle whispered to Weiss. “We’re as exposed as hell, and it could be a trap. Might be more Krauts around.” Reigle patted Weiss’s arm to reassure him. The German could come to them. When he did, they shoved him against a tree. Reigle searched him and told Weiss to check his papers. These showed that he was a Nazi Party member and part of the Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1, the elite Hermann Goering 1st Paratroop Panzer Division. Reigle knew the division by reputation. After the Allies invaded Sicily, it had escaped intact across the Strait of Messina to mainland Italy. At the end of the previous January, two U.S. Ranger battalions had fought a pitched battle with it in the village of Cisterna. As the Rangers ran out of ammunition, some of them were captured. The Germans threatened to murder the prisoners if the rest of the Rangers did not surrender—a blatant violation of the laws of war.

  “Let’s shoot the sonofabitch,” Reigle said. Weiss said that was illegal. Reigle conceded, “I’d do it, but his pals are bound to hear the shot.” They brought the prisoner to 1st Battalion intelligence, which assigned his interrogation to a Jewish corporal who had immigrated to the United States from Germany. The corporal thanked Reigle for delivering the prisoner, whom he planned to question for many hours, “before I throw him in the cage.” Weiss, recounting his first patrol, noted, “We never found Able Company.” But he had found someone in his new division to rely on, Corporal Bob Reigle.

  • • •

  The 36th Division advanced north, methodically pushing the Germans up the Italian Peninsula. The Germans were retreating, but they were not running. They regrouped, established defenses and launched counterattacks against their pursuers. The steep and rocky terrain was a godsend to the defenders, hell to an attacking army. Allied troops in Italy paid a high price in lives for every acre they took. Shortages of trucks and jeeps meant the Americans had to walk and climb most of the way, although they occasionally hitched rides on the sides of tanks.

  On the way to Grosseto, a coastal town in southern Tuscany, a staff sergeant ordered first scout Weiss to cross a field alone in heavy rain. “The Germans are out there somewhere,” he said. Weiss realized he was a “clay-pigeon, a fall guy,” set up to make the Germans expose their position by firing at him. He marched through the mud, afraid but determined to make it across. Rain hit him in the face and dripped inside his shirt. He did not let his fear show. He wrote later, “I discover that the battlefield is a lonely place, increasing fear to a higher, unexpected level, and alienating soldiers rather than bringing them together.” The rain increased its tempo the rest of the day, pouring mud into the squad’s hillside foxholes. For a moment, Weiss could not take any more. “Feeling wet, cold, and depressed, my eyes fill with tears. Cradling my head in my arms, I cry. My tears merge with the rain. I think of my mother. I call out to her, in need of her comfort and protection.” Weiss did not understand why he broke down, unaware that many other soldiers had the same experience.

  For the next twenty-four hours, the 36th Infantry Division marched through brush, pastures, olive groves and swamps toward Grosseto. Sparsely inhabited because of malarial mosquitoes in its marshes, the Maremma region, with its butteri, cowboys and long-horned chianina cattle, resembled the ranges of Texas. Trudging through mud, up and down hills, the only opposition Charlie Company met that day came from the harsh landscape and miserable weather. Slipping in mud, Weiss grabbed a branch that turned out to be a dead German’s hand. The company reached the periphery of Grosseto, where the troops took a cigarette break. Using helmets for pillows, they slept beside the road. When Weiss woke up, the rest of the company was gone.

  Alone and lost, he went into the seaside town to search for his comrades. Two armies were battling for control of Grosseto, while Weiss rushed from street to street. In urban fighting, soldiers had to be wary of rooftops, windows, doorways and piles of rubble concealing snipers and booby traps. Dodging through the city, Weiss sought a moment’s shelter in the basement of an abandoned house. It turned out to be the temporary command post of another American unit. An officer cast a suspicious eye at Weiss, who stammered that he was lost. “Lost?” the officer shouted. “Cut the crap. You probably took off like a jack rabbit.” Weiss insisted he had not run away, but was merely cut off from his company. The officer told him, “I ought to have you court-martialed for desertion.” Not wanting to end up caged in the stockade back at Anzio, Weiss took advantage of gunfire that distracted the officer to run outside. Searching for Charlie Company in Grosseto’s whitewashed streets and alleys, he crossed from one side of town to the other. Bob Reigle spotted him approaching and said nonchalantly, “I thought you were either killed or captured.”

  Grosseto fell to the 36th Division on the evening of 15 June. The old hands donned Stetsons and played guitars for a Texas-style jamboree. Replacements from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and the rest of America joined them in singing “The Rose of Ole San Antone.” The T-Patchers had become a Texas division in name only, most of the original volunteers having been killed, wounded or captured. Weiss, listening to Texan ballads in every sort of American accent, thought that “most divisions took on the same coloration, regardless of attempted mythology.” Myth was strong in the 36th, whose origins stretched back indirectly to the Alamo. The division carried a Lone Star flag to hoist over Germany, if it ever got there.

  From Grosseto, the 36th advanced north, again on foot, and crossed the river Ombrone that night. They marched toward Siena through foothills of the wine country around Monte Amiata and Montalcino. If the Americans were short of modern transport, so were the retreating Germans. When Charlie Company spotted them, horses were pulling the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery up rugged Tuscan hillsides. American artillery opened with a barrage of 105-millimeter howitzer shells, and panzers returned fire. Shells from both sides flew over Charlie Company’s freshly dug foxholes. When the Germans extricated themselves and escaped north, Charlie Company moved toward their position. Weiss came face-to-face with a German soldier. He aimed his rifle, but the German, sitting upright on a tree stump, did not react. He was dead. The ground was an undug graveyard of men and horses, their flesh shredded and bleeding. Weiss recalled, “The stench of decomposition pervaded the air.”

  • • •

  Although the army sometimes failed to send food and ammunition to men at the front, the army post office delivered their mail. Weiss received a letter that night from a friend in the Office of War Information, where he had worked in New York. He read it by candlelight in an abandoned house. The roof let in the rain, and stucco walls provided scant protection from German artillery
. His friend had written that, despite her efforts, his request for a transfer to Psychological Warfare had been rejected again. This was the last time they would consider it. Listening to the mingling of thunder and 155-millimeter Long Tom artillery, he knew he was stuck in the infantry for the rest of the war. How much longer would that be? At the rate the Allies were moving through Italy, it might take years. He wrote, “I was nothing more than a dog-face slogging infantry soldier.” For troops who were not killed or injured, the only way out was surrender, a self-inflicted wound, insanity or desertion. Weiss stuck with it.

  Proceeding on foot the next day, Weiss’s rifle squad came to a farm. Its two-story casa colonica (peasant house) might have been empty. Or Germans may have been waiting inside to attack the squad after it passed. The sergeant ordered Weiss, as first scout, to check. Weiss went cautiously to the door and kicked it open, ready to fire at any Germans inside. The only inhabitants were a peasant family, all four of them terrified at the intrusion of an American warrior. Weiss held the life of the farmer, his wife and two teenage children in his almighty hands, and he felt a surge of power that he immediately despised in himself. The father, shielding his family, spoke to him in Italian. Weiss, who did not understand, used one of the few Italian words he knew, “Tedeschi?” (Germans?) The man indicated there were none in the house, but Weiss made a fruitless search anyway. The absurdity of the scene weighed on him as he went back to the squad. It did not seem right that, owing to his armed presence, “the son had displaced the father.”

  First scout Weiss marched uphill ahead of the squad through heavy brush. Two soldiers in German uniforms suddenly stopped him. Rather than shoot, they put their hands up and spoke to him in what sounded like gibberish. Their Oriental features marked them out as Turcoman tribesmen, recruited by the Wehrmacht as a partial solution to its manpower shortages. Behind the Asians, Weiss saw five more enemy troops with a light machine gun. He knew they could easily kill him and eliminate the rest of the rifle squad, but they too surrendered. To Turcoman conscripts, a U.S. Army prison camp was preferable to a German graveyard.

  Charlie Company’s commander, Captain Simmons, arrived and ordered the men to fix bayonets. Company A, the same Able Company that had gone missing south of Grosseto, was under German attack on the high ground to Charlie Company’s left. Simmons wanted Charlie Company to charge the hill. “Lying in a fold in the ground, I fixed my bayonet and noticed my hands were shaking,” Weiss wrote. The troops had trained with bayonets on straw-stuffed dummies, but they had yet to rip a man’s guts open in face-to-face combat. Weiss waited for Simmons to order the attack, but no order came. Company A beat back the German force—without bayonets.

  The squad went ahead to reconnoiter the woods up to the nearest hilltop. First scout Weiss led the way. An American Piper Cub overhead was spotting artillery targets. As it circled, one of the more experienced veterans said the pilot probably took them for Germans and would direct artillery to their position. The platoon sergeant picked up a walkie-talkie to ask Captain Simmons to call off the barrage, but the walkie-talkie wasn’t working. “Of all the lousy fuckin’ luck,” the sergeant said. “All right, let’s get off this hill right now and fast!” The squad ran down at top speed. Shells exploded behind them, spreading shrapnel and earth in their wake. A minute longer, and their war would have been over.

  The next few days saw a tedious slog north toward Siena through what Weiss called “Italy’s interminable hills.” Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead described the Italian campaign’s frustrations: “All advanced—a thousand, two thousand miles—there was always the enemy in front, always another thousand miles to go.” Weiss and Sheldon Wohlwerth dug a foxhole in a valley, where the Germans lobbed an artillery shell each time either of them moved. Weiss feared the Germans were targeting them, but Wohlwerth was pleased to see Germans wasting precious ammunition on two infantrymen. “If they keep this up,” he said, “there will be an earlier end to the war.”

  In the field, the squad’s most dependable member was Corporal Bob Reigle. Weiss recalled, “He was in every major operation the 36th was in, and the only thing that I remember was that eventually he didn’t want to share a hole with anybody. It was, why get to know somebody when they are going to get killed soon?” Although kept out of Reigle’s foxhole, Weiss stayed close to him.

  Charlie Company fought more skirmishes, took more prisoners and conquered more territory. In three weeks, they moved 240 miles from their launch point near Rome. The 36th Division’s three regiments—the 141st, 142nd and Weiss’s 143rd—slowly converged on the walls of Siena, when orders came to pull back. On 29 June, nine months after the 36th Division landed in Italy and twenty-three days after Steve Weiss became one of them, the Texans were relieved at Piombino by the 34th Iowa Division. The Italian campaign had cost the 36th about 75 percent of its men and officers dead, wounded, captured or missing. It had earned some time off.

  • • •

  Deloused in showers of DDT and dressed in fresh uniforms, Weiss, Wohlwerth and some of the Charlie Company GIs headed into Rome on a one-day pass. Their mission: to eat and drink well.

  Rome lay in a shambles from months of German occupation and Allied assault. Many inhabitants had fled to the provinces for safety and food. Most of the city’s businesses, including its restaurants, were closed even a month after liberation. Weiss asked some children in pidgin Italian where they could have lunch. The kids led them to a shuttered trattoria, whose owners opened immediately for the GIs and their youthful followers. The conquering heroes sat down to generous helpings of the first real food they had tasted since they arrived in Italy. Having been reduced to army K rations (Norman Lewis thought K rations were “so despised by the Americans, and so adored by everyone else”), they gorged on pasta, meat, fruit and cheese. They also bought lunch for the children, who were hungrier than the soldiers. The Americans finished five courses at one restaurant and proceeded to repeat the experience in another. “Liter after liter of ordinary vino from the nearby slopes, although red and raw, trickled down our throats,” Weiss recalled. He was in a soldier’s paradise, having survived three weeks of combat against a formidable enemy. A song came to him that Italian-Americans in Greenpoint, near his neighborhood in Brooklyn, used to sing.

  Oh Marie! Oh Marie!

  In your arms I’m longin’ to be

  Uhm, baby

  Tell me you love me

  Kiss me once, while the stars shine above me.

  The children accompanied him in Italian: “Uhe Marie! Uhe Marie! Quanta suonno aggio perzo per te. . . . ” Hearing the familiar tune, the cook rushed from the kitchen to dance with the proprietor’s wife. The Romans, despite shortages, were generous to the young men who had expelled the Germans.

  “Our tastes were basic,” Weiss wrote. “We roamed about on full stomachs and waved at the local girls, who only smiled and playfully thwarted our seductive advances with Roman sophistication, knowing we were harmless as butterflies.” In common with many teenage Americans before they went overseas during the war, Steve Weiss was a sexual innocent. His passionate fumbling with a girlfriend named Jeannie in Brooklyn in the weeks before his induction, despite the earnest intentions of them both, had come to nothing. His twenty-four-hour Roman holiday in June 1944 was so taken up with his stomach that he left himself no time for romance. In this, he was in a minority of the GIs in liberated Rome.

  TWELVE

  Sometimes the soldier’s troubles cannot be attributed to any one person.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 329

  DURING HIS FIRST WEEK with the Gordon Highland Regiment in Normandy, John Bain “felt himself becoming absorbed and obliterated as an individual by the familiar process of combat.” Normandy was another North Africa, apart from the “superficial”: hedgerows rather than sand dunes, orchards in place of palm trees. “The smell of war,” he wrote, “was the same everywhere: that sweet yet pungent odou
r of cordite and fear and putrescence.” Both war theaters engendered

  the sense of being dehumanised, reduced to little more than an extension of your equipment and weaponry, the constant feeling of being used as an object, manipulated by blind, invisible hands, controlled by a force that was either malignant or stupid, the sense of being exhausted in a metaphorical and quite often literal darkness, of being exhausted, frightened, sick, sometimes so weary that you slept while on your feet like a horse. And ignorance, stupefying, brutalising ignorance.

  After their landing on D-Day, the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders moved into a bridgehead that the British 6th Airborne Division had captured. It consisted of the area around two bridges (one dubbed “Pegasus” for the airborne unit’s winged horse insignia) spanning the Caen Canal and river Orne. Bain’s battalion, part of the 153rd Brigade, as it had been in Egypt, moved into the bridgehead on 10 June, four days after its D-Day landing. The brigade crossed to the east bank of the Orne and advanced toward a triangle of rural villages northeast of Caen: Ranville, Touffréville and Bréville. Part of the brigade, the Black Watch, went to Bréville with the 6th Airborne. On the evening of 11 June, Captain Urquhart commanded the 5/7th Gordons in their first large assault of the campaign. The objective was Touffréville, which first received a battering from division artillery. The Germans responded with Nebelwerfers and Spandau MG42 machine guns. While Bain and Hughie Black crouched low with the Bren gun, Sergeant Thom called out, “Right lads! Up you get! We’re moving in!”

  Bain threw the Bren gun over his shoulder and went straight toward the enemy’s Spandau fire. Hundreds of other men were risking their lives with him, but Bain felt a terrifying loneliness. Multiple mortar rockets exploded nearby, followed by the cries of the wounded that had sickened him in North Africa. Yet he went forward, part of the military machine, while Hughie Black uttered endless profanities.

 

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