The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Weiss did not give up. He went to Naples, about fifty miles up the coast, on leave. A long line of troops “that seemed to include everyone serving in the Mediterranean” had beaten him to one backstreet bordello. Waiting his turn, he asked the soldier in front of him, “What’s the babe like?”

  “Never seen her. S’posed to be a beaut though.”

  When Weiss went in, the girl behind the door was no beaut, but “a skinny urchin, as Mediterranean as a flannel cake, wearing a faded cotton dress.” He could not go through with it.

  The Psychological Warfare Branch, which Weiss longed to join, was operating out of an office in Naples on the Via Roma. A billboard advertised Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—“freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear”—in Italian. Vincent Sheean, a prominent author and journalist in Italy as an Army Air Forces lieutenant colonel, commented, “The sheer irony of the display can seldom have been equaled in recent times, for none of the four—except the freedom of religion, which is the least difficult and least valued in this era—existed in our part of Italy.” By this time, Weiss was siding with his frontline comrades against the “pencil pushers,” including the bureaucrats in Psychological Warfare. Like most of the other guys in his squad, he was becoming too cynical to sell the Italians ideals in which his faith was diminishing.

  • • •

  General Mark Clark relieved General Fred Walker, whom he blamed for the 36th Division’s bad luck, of command at the end of June. Walker’s soldiers believed their misfortunes were Clark’s fault for consistently assigning them impossible missions like the river Rapido crossing. Walker reluctantly accepted the post of camp commandant of Fort Benning, Georgia. The men requested a division parade to honor the old man. Weiss recalled watching General Walker from the ranks on 7 July:

  His face was furrowed, his expression, grim, sad. He loved the 36th. Fifteen thousand men stood in the bright sunshine and listened to the general’s closing remarks; quoting from a letter he had received from the widow of a captain killed on the Rapido River, he read, “The next time you meet the Germans, give it to them.”

  The new divisional commander was Major General John Ernest Dahlquist, a forty-eight-year-old son of Swedish immigrants from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The career officer had served in the occupation of Germany after the First World War. His previous posts during the Second World War had been as Eisenhower’s deputy chief of staff and commander of the 70th Infantry Division in the United States. He had never commanded troops in combat, and his appointment was unwelcome to the troops who admired General Walker.

  • • •

  Whenever Weiss was on liberty, he pursued his quest for erotic consummation. In Naples, he and a buddy picked up two prostitutes and took them to a squalid hotel. The women were neither young nor pretty. The encounter, although technically successful, was anything but satisfactory. In the morning, Weiss went to a bar near the port for a coffee. The barmaid flirted with him. As he recalled it later, she asked, “Would you like to go upstairs?” The girl was kind and warm, and she treated him with as much tenderness as lust. Despite the temptation to remain with her, he went back to the base before his twenty-four-hour pass expired.

  At this time in Naples, many troops did not go back. Reynolds Packard, the United Press correspondent who had saved one soldier from deserting, wrote:

  Desertions became wholesale: U.S. soldiers would shack up with Italian girls and not return to their regiments. Groups of these soldiers banded together and became dangerous outlaws. Scores of amphibious ducks [cargo vehicles], laden with flour, sugar, and coffee, just disappeared into the underground.

  Back at the Paestum base, the troops were put on alert. All leaves were canceled. Amphibious training took on greater urgency. The Americans went through intensive British battle drills. Weiss endured

  twenty-five mile hikes, the usual close order drill and calisthenics, bayonet and rifle practice, and map reading. Rumor had it that we would participate in an invasion somewhere in the Mediterranean. For the next four weeks, during night and day exercises, some lasting up to forty-eight hours, we trained in every type of landing craft.

  The 36th Division practiced for fifteen hours a day between 8 and 22 July. The 141st Regiment climbed steep rock faces, while Weiss’s 143rd worked on assault tactics. British ships took them to Mondragone to rehearse amphibious landings. A Royal Navy crew dropped Weiss’s squad in the water, drenching them to their bellies, on every practice run. “Don’t worry, mate,” one of the British sailors said. “When we do this for real, you won’t even get your feet wet.” The training seemed inadequate to Weiss, with vessels crashing into one another in the surf, chaos on the beach as troops herded together when they should have spread out to avoid being targeted in clusters and a colonel shouting, “You’ll never get off the beach alive. This is an absolute disaster.” Weiss’s new squad leader, Sergeant Harry Shanklin, requested a transfer to the paratroops. When the army approved it, Weiss feared going into combat with a replacement sergeant he had never met. The army gave the men no briefings on the mission, no maps and no instructions on what they were to achieve. They did not know where they might lose their lives. Northern Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and southern France were all possibilities.

  During a break in the rigorous training, Weiss went over to Company B (Baker Company) of his 143rd Regiment, to visit a friend. “I immediately sensed a change in morale and mood between Charlie and Baker’s officers and enlisted men,” he wrote. Troops spoke naturally with officers, something that he could not imagine with Captain Simmons. The soldiers of Baker Company remembered with affection the commanding officer they had lost the previous January, Captain Henry T. Waskow. Weiss did not know about Waskow, although most of America, thanks to Ernie Pyle, did. Pyle had written, “In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.” Pyle was with Baker Company when its soldiers retrieved the bodies of five fallen comrades, including Captain Waskow, from the mountains on muleback. Pyle’s dispatch appeared in almost every newspaper and magazine in America, one of the finest reports of a peerless journalist:

  One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.” That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.” He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

  Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

  Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:

  “I sure am sorry, sir.”

  Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

  One sergeant told Pyle, “After my own father, he came next.” Henry Waskow was twenty-five years old. Weiss, who had never met an officer like Waskow, decided that “this was the kind of team I wanted to be part of.”

  On 12 August, with the rest of Charlie Company, he set sail from Pozzuoli in a British landing craft. On the journey over, Captain Simmons did not address a word to him.

  FOURTEEN

  You have to kill the enemy or make him surrender. There isn’t any other kind of victory.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 17

  EARLY SUMMER NIGHTS IN NORTHERN FRANCE were so cold that Private Alfred T. Whitehead had to strip a bloody blanket from a dead GI to keep warm. As well as the chill, nights
harbored dangers as varied as artillery barrages, German patrols and, for any soldier leaving his foxhole to relieve himself, land mines and snipers. Another hazard had not been anticipated. Near the Forêt de Cerisy, Whitehead was told, two men left their bivouac for a rendezvous with French girls. The romantic encounter turned out to be fatal: the next morning, the soldiers were found decapitated. Whitehead’s commanders then issued an unenforceable order prohibiting fraternization with French women.

  Allied units advancing through France captured more and more prisoners. Whitehead distinguished two types of captives: “One was a group of strange, dejected men, speaking weird dialects and groveling before our soldiers. They were Turks, Poles, Russians and Georgians.” They contrasted with “the finest spit-and-polish soldiers of the Wehrmacht: German paratroopers. . . . These Germans were elite, arrogant, highly trained tough fighters, and their morale was high.” The laws of war demanded that troops protect and feed captured enemies until they turned them over to MPs. Whitehead wrote that this was standard practice, until his platoon entered a town where American paratroopers lay barefoot and dead in the town square. The Germans had made the Americans dance on the hard ground “until their feet bled, then they shot them down like dogs.” Although he did not provide details, Whitehead wrote that from then on his division “made it rough on the enemy.” He did not admit killing prisoners, as American troops had in Sicily, but the implication was clear. Another private in the same battalion, Harold G. Barkley, later said that German snipers in Normandy were killed “without mercy.” His son, Cleve C. Barkley, wrote in his book In Death’s Dark Shadow: A Soldier’s Story, “Snipers were seldom taken prisoner.”

  Whitehead became more superstitious the longer he was in combat. He thought a “voice” or “presence” told him how to stay safe on several occasions. A squad mate, Private Paul S. Turner, gave him a “cold feeling” by saying, “Yeah, Whitehead, you’ll make it to Paris, but I’ll never live to see it.” Turner was a fellow Tennessean, from Roach Creek, and went by the nickname “Timmiehaw.” Whitehead feared that Turner, one of the few soldiers he regarded as a friend, was invoking an early death.

  Whitehead never lost a chance to get drunk. When ordered to destroy a cache of wine and hard cider to prevent the men from drinking on duty, Whitehead consumed all he could before completing the task. On another occasion, bottles of wine hidden under a fence caught his eye. “I sat right down and proceeded to get drunk,” he wrote. “In fact—higher than a Georgia pine.” He grabbed as many bottles as he could carry, so the rest of the squad could get drunk too.

  • • •

  The division met more German opposition on its march to the river Elle. Of the terrain, Whitehead wrote:

  This was hedgerow country, and the going was slow and rough. No matter where you were, it was an isolated, miniature battlefield measuring no more than a few hundred yards in all directions. The enemy positions were well camouflaged, and they made few mistakes. Even aerial photographs scarcely showed any signs of where their guns were dug in. They had their 88’s and heavy machine guns placed in boxed-in apertures in the hedgerows at ground level. They could also flood rivers in their favor, and they had ceaseless, tireless patrols and numerous snipers.

  From the air, Normandy looked like a crazy quilt of patches held together by long seams that turned out, on the ground, to be ancient earth walls up to six feet thick and ten feet high. Some sprouted trees that added another thirty feet. The bocages, hedgerows, enclosed orchards, fields and pastures of varying sizes and shapes. “The hedgerows themselves provided an excellent natural advantage which the Germans were quick to seize in building their fortifications,” wrote Major General Walter Melville Robertson, commander of the 2nd Division. When troops managed to penetrate a hedgerow, they had to face interlocking German machine-gun positions that often covered the entire enclosure.

  The 2nd Division’s troops dug in wherever they stopped. “It seemed like I was forever digging,” Whitehead wrote. “Foxholes and slit trenches, foxholes and slit trenches.” The German and Allied armies fought at such close quarters, sometimes only a hedgerow apart, that they could eavesdrop on one another.

  A replacement from the 5th Division, the 2nd’s hated rivals in Northern Ireland, was assigned to the 2nd. The man was afraid and made loud complaints about his transfer. Whitehead had no patience with a whiner, and he assigned him to guard duty. A shot rang out. Assuming the man had been killed by a German, he thought, “Problem solved.” Then the man called out, “Medic! Med-ic! I’m hit!” He had shot himself in the foot.

  Whitehead’s 2nd Squad, under Staff Sergeant Kenny Koonz, reconnoitered enemy positions at night, while division artillery kept the Germans in their trenches. The patrols bagged German prisoners for interrogation. “I’d get an enemy soldier by the collar, stick my trench knife in his back, and if he let out a yell, I had to kill him,” he wrote. “It was a terrible feeling.”

  German snipers, some of whom stayed behind in trees or other hidden positions when their units withdrew, took a daily toll of American lives. Whitehead remembered, “They used every pile of debris, hedge corner, and bush to hide in, under, or in back of.” He wrote that Sergeant “Hardtack,” who had trained him at Camp McCoy, killed twenty-one snipers before being killed himself. “I still miss that old man,” he lamented. This was undoubtedly Staff Sergeant Frank Kviatek, at age forty-seven the oldest enlisted man in the division. Two of Kviatek’s brothers had died in Italy, and he had sworn to kill twenty-five Germans for each one. Up to this date, his bolt-action Springfield rifle had taken out twenty-one snipers. Despite Whitehead’s impression that Kviatek died in Normandy, the division’s official history recorded that he was wounded and survived this encounter to fight again.

  Whitehead wrote of young men losing limbs to land mines and being trapped by artillery fire in no-man’s-land. No medics could reach them, and their comrades listened to their cries without being able to help. Whitehead confessed to thinking, “I wish the hell he’d hurry up and die and get it over with.” One rainy night, his squad tried to end one victim’s suffering by shooting him with light machine guns. They missed, and the man did not die until dawn.

  German artillery in the hedgerow fighting was so relentless that Whitehead would “curl up in a ball like a cat, to avoid getting an outstretched arm or leg blown off.” American shelling of the Germans was just as ferocious. Toward the end of June, he recalled, American artillery “started serenading the enemy with T.O.T.s, or Time-On-Target fire. At times, we used T.O.T. firepower to drive the enemy underground so that our patrols could operate.” Paul Fussell, then a twenty-year-old second lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry Division, described time-on-target as “a showy mathematical technique of firing many guns from various places so that regardless of their varying distances from the target, the shells arrive all at the same time. The surprise is devastating, and the destruction immediate and unimaginable.”

  It was less the artillery than an engineer’s innovation that broke through the hedgerows. “A second division sergeant in the engineers,” Whitehead wrote, “devised ‘bulldozer’ blades salvaged out of the German beach defenses. With those blades, our tanks plowed through instead of over the hedgerows.” Troops called the blades “Rhinos.” A subsequent army study of the improvised device explained, “The ‘Rhino’ was run into the hedgerow by the tank, thus loosening the dirt and roots, and permitting the tank to crash through to the next field with the minimum reduction of speed.”

  Whitehead, who took rough conditions in his stride, detected inequalities between frontline and rear echelon troops: “I ‘lived’ in a hole dug into the side of a hedgerow. I ate cold, packaged rations, and had no change of clothes. . . . To the rear there were Red Cross dugouts with coffee and doughnuts, but I never saw them.” The system that kept a small percentage of troops constantly at the front, while the majority of the men in uniform were out of danger in the rear, did not cause him a
ny further reflection. He was disgruntled rather than rebellious, like the dogface GIs, Willie and Joe, in Bill Mauldin’s cartoons for Stars and Stripes. He killed Germans, without regret, because that was his job. Many men in his unit died in battle, but he was not close enough to most of them to feel any loss. When a young Jewish soldier eating rations beside him was suddenly shot dead, Whitehead’s only impression was, “He was dead—killed by a stray bullet. Another soldier’s life passed—one of the nearly 800 casualties lost by our regiment so far.”

  • • •

  The exception to his indifference was Private Paul Turner, the Tennessee friend whom he called “Timmiehaw.” On the evening of 10 July, Timmiehaw and some of the other men played cards to pass the time. When Turner won, he tried to repay Whitehead some money he owed him. Whitehead told him not to bother. Timmiehaw insisted. “You’ll make it through the war,” he said, “but I haven’t got long left.” Whitehead hated to hear his friend speak that way.

  The next day, the 2nd Division was given the objective of conquering Hill 192, so called because it was 192 meters above sea level, overlooking the town of Saint-Lô. Hill 192 presented a formidable obstacle, ringed with German gun emplacements, strongpoints and deep, reinforced trenches. At 6:00 on the morning of 11 July, the U.S. assault on Hill 192 erupted, as bombs from the 9th Tactical Air Force and thousands of artillery shells decimated the enemy positions. The 9th Regiment made a feint along one side of the hill to distract German attention from the main assault by the 23rd and 38th. Whitehead’s platoon went forward in trucks. When they stopped on the road, his friend Timmiehaw jumped off to piss. A moment later, Whitehead heard the explosion of a “Bouncing Betty” mine, so called because it sprang up to chest height spreading more than a hundred ball bearings over fifty yards in all directions. Suddenly, Turner grabbed his bleeding chest, staggered over to Whitehead and gasped, “Oh my Lordie.” Then he died. As he predicted, he would not see Paris. Whitehead wrote,