The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  I don’t believe I ever felt as bad in my life as I did just then. . . . There was an old abandoned barn near the road, and I carried Timmiehaw into it where I broke down and wept bitterly. Death closed the door on our friendship, and it was hard to accept the sudden shock that my closest friend was gone forever. Tears were running down my face as I said a short prayer, then took all his ammunition and his map, covered him with a blanket, and as I ran out of there, I swore, “Those sons of bitches are going to pay for this today!”

  The mine that killed Turner took two other lives and left three wounded. The other dead were Privates Roy L. Schwerdfeger and Pedro S. Sanchez. Sanchez had turned eighteen that day. Among the wounded was Sergeant Hawks, which left Whitehead as acting platoon leader in his place. The squad rushed up Hill 192. Whitehead saw a German and was ready to take revenge, but the man was already dead. Another “Kraut” lying wounded on the slope motioned to Whitehead to stay back. It took Whitehead a moment to understand the man was warning him he had been booby-trapped. An American medic went to the German’s aid, leaving Whitehead no time to shout. The booby trap killed both the medic and the German.

  By the time Whitehead reached the summit, he had yet to keep his promise to avenge Turner. A German shell exploding in the treetops sent Whitehead flying. When he hit the ground, he thought he had lost a leg. The leg was bleeding, but intact. He scrambled for safety under a large cooking pot. Soon a bayonet propped up the pot, and a voice said, “Oh, it’s you, Whitehead.” Both GIs ran to a farmhouse, where a German soldier coming down the stairs put his hands up. Whitehead shot him dead. Another German, Whitehead wrote, lunged at him from the corridor and tried to stab him with his bayonet. The blade cut Whitehead’s hand, and he shot the German with his Thompson submachine gun. He claimed that he grabbed a German .30-caliber machine gun and ran outside, firing blind as he went. When Germans attempted to surrender, “I mowed them down and didn’t stop until I reached the third hedgerow, where I sat down.”

  The 38th Infantry Regiment captured Hill 192 later that day, with Whitehead’s 2nd Battalion losing 22 killed and 158 wounded. One of the eighty-three German prisoners told interrogators that he had been told the division’s Indianhead patch signified that the soldiers were American Indians intent on taking German scalps. Whitehead claimed the army awarded him both a Silver Star and a Purple Heart for his actions on Hill 192. His service record confirmed that he earned one Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, the Combat Infantry Badge and the Presidential Unit Citation award, but no Purple Heart. Many 2nd Division veterans later doubted Whitehead’s heroism, despite his awards and the fact that he was promoted to corporal. On Hill 192, however, he lost more than he gained:

  I went a little crazy with the rest of the world that day. . . . I know that I left a part of me back there on Hill 192. Part of me died along with my friend Timmiehaw, and my comrades Sanchez, Schwerdfeger, and others. Just as surely as they had died, part of my being died with them, and a cold, merciless killer emerged.

  FIFTEEN

  As a unit gets nearer to combat new worries develop. Actual battle is likely to increase them.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 347

  ON 13 AUGUST 1944, a cryptic message went to the USS Bayfield, a troop transport that had served at Utah Beach in June and was now carrying the 36th Infantry Division’s new commander, Major General John E. Dahlquist. The decoded transmission informed the general: “D-day, 15 August 1944, H-hour, 0800 hours.” With barely forty hours to go, the men were informed their mission was to invade France via its southern beaches. All that most of them knew about the French Riviera was what they had seen in movies or read in F. Scott Fitzgerald. Soon, provided they drove the German army back, they would see the famed resorts of Saint-Tropez, Cannes and Nice.

  At almost the same time, the BBC broadcast a message to France, “Nancy has a stiff neck.” This was the signal for the French Resistance to mobilize and hit the Germans in the rear. A few hundred American, British and Free French paratroopers had already landed in France to support the local résistants.

  A fabulous armada of 885 ships, with more than a thousand smaller landing vessels stowed on deck, steamed along the Mediterranean past the islands of Sardinia and Corsica toward the French coast. Looking at the ships from the deck of a Royal Navy Landing Craft Infantry (LCI), Private Steve Weiss “experienced the magnitude of American power.” His worry, in common with most of the other 151,000 American and Free French soldiers, was more personal than military. While generals needed beachheads to push men and equipment deep into enemy-held territory, a mere private like Steve Weiss wondered whether he would shoot straight without breaking down or running away. More than that, he wanted to stay alive. Many of the troops carried lucky charms or wrote letters home that they suspected might be their last. Weiss did neither. His world revolved around “a persistent ache in my stomach,” a common sensation in anticipation of danger.

  A British sailor, who had put Americans ashore at Normandy two months before, told Weiss what had gone wrong during the 6 June invasion: tanks dropped in deep water sank to the bottom, men drowned, others ended up on the wrong beaches and more were cut down before they reached the shoreline. Weiss asked Bob Reigle if he thought they would survive. Reigle kept his thoughts to himself. He may have worried for his own life, but the twenty-eight-year-old veteran bore an added responsibility for teenage privates to whom he was the old man, the corporal of the squad, the guy they would look to when they didn’t know what to do. He had no answer to Weiss’s question. No one did. The answer was on the beach.

  Weiss and the other two hundred American infantrymen aboard the LCI did not know, because military secrecy did not permit them to, that Winston Churchill was watching them from the bridge of the British destroyer HMS Kimberley. The U.S. Army’s official war history said the British prime minister enjoyed “a ringside seat at what many believed was one of the gravest Allied strategic mistakes of the war.” As the most fervent opponent of the southern French invasion, Churchill had employed his usually effective powers of persuasion on both President Roosevelt and General Dwight Eisenhower to thwart Operation Dragoon. The Allies, he argued, should have concentrated their Mediterranean forces in Italy and, possibly, the Balkans to expel Hitler’s legions before the Soviets did. Only ten days before this D-Day, Churchill had urged Eisenhower to divert the Seventh Army from the Riviera to Brittany. Vindication of his strategy would come only if the Germans drove the 36th Division, along with the rest of Seventh Army, back into the sea. If Weiss had known how Churchill felt, his stomach might have ached more than it did.

  Weiss had reasons to be hopeful about the landing. He had been with the division long enough to have friends, including Pennsylvanian Bob Reigle, Sheldon Wohlwerth of Ohio and James Dickson from Watertown, New York. He had combat experience, and the other guys in the squad respected him as a good first scout. His squad’s sergeant, Harry Shanklin, whose transfer to the paratroops had been delayed, was with them after all. And the summer weather was ideal for an invasion.

  • • •

  Dawn broke dry but hazy at 6:38 A.M. on 15 August, the Catholic Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On this holy day in France, businesses and schools were closed. As the natural mist lifted, a darker cloud blotted the horizon. Naval Western Task Force, with the battleship USS Texas firing two-thousand-pound shells, slammed German defenses on the ridges above the shoreline. Light naval craft went in close to take out the coastal batteries and clear underwater mines. Allied bombers from Corsica dropped tons of explosives. Smoke and dust made the first American troops on the beaches at 8:00 nearly invisible to the Germans. Many of the men were, as Private Don Nelson of the 36th Division admitted, “absolutely petrified” at the sight of the “dizzy heights of the vertical walls that were coming closer to us and looked as if they went on for miles.” The U.S. 3rd Infantry Division went ashore first, taking what the Allies called the Alpha Beache
s at the left of the invasion zone. The chic resort of Saint-Tropez became a battlefield, where Staff Sergeant Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of the war, took a German strongpoint and captured forty prisoners. For this feat, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross.

  The 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, which had participated in assaults on Sicily, Salerno and Anzio, made its fourth D-Day amphibious landing in the center, along the Delta Beaches. Resistance was as light as it had been for the 3rd Division, because German defenses were concentrated farther up the coast, near the town of Saint-Raphaël. These “Camel” Beaches—Green, Red and Blue—were assigned to the “hard luck” 36th.

  Observing the invasion from HMS Kimberley, Churchill noted, “Here we saw the long rows of boats filled with American storm troopers steaming in continuously to the Bay of St. Tropez.”

  The 141st Regiment of the 36th Division led the assault on Camel Green, engaging German machine gunners and the four strongpoints of Stützpunkt Gruppe Saint-Raphaël. Weiss’s 143rd Regiment came ashore behind them. Private Sam Kibbey of the 143rd recalled that, although he had not yet learned to swear properly, he would have to “prove myself a man.” “The LCI’s hull grated on the rocky beach between St. Raphaël and Agay, at 09:45,” Steve Weiss recalled of his landing near Le Dramont. “As soon as the craft’s two parallel ramps tilted toward the surf, we moved along their length and onto the beach.” The British mariner who promised they would not get their feet wet had been as good as his word.

  Heading toward the town of Saint-Raphaël, Charlie Company met heavy fire from entrenched German machine guns and artillery. Weiss maneuvered up the beach, carrying the infantryman’s standard load of “webbing and leather straps supporting bandoliers of thirty caliber ammunition, a canteen, medical kit, and two hand grenades, all of which clinked, rocked, and bumped against me in the increasing sunlight.” Everyone carried extra weight: A Pocket Guide to France, five days’ rations, two packs of cigarettes and an American flag brassard. One GI, who complained of a bad back, persuaded Weiss to lug his flamethrower ashore. The weapon added seventy-eight pounds to an already heavy load. It also threatened Weiss’s immolation if a German bullet hit either of its napalm tanks. Weiss, who had not been trained to use a flamethrower, stumbled up the beach with the useless equipment. The soldier who lumbered him with it was, in Weiss’s irritated view, a shirker. (The army soon discovered the boy with the bad back was too young for combat and shipped him home.) Weiss left the flamethrower on the beach.

  German light bombers strafed the landing zone and the ships delivering troops to the shore. Weiss saw a guided bomb hit one Landing Ship, Tank (LST), detonating its store of ammunition. Although the LST floundered in the water, forty sailors on board died. The beachhead became a scene of as much confusion as valor. The crew of a Sherman tank lost control and crashed on a road above the beach. Weiss’s squad rushed to provide first aid. Nearby, a truck carrying a light howitzer turned over and blocked the road off the beach. An African soldier, somehow separated from Free French units to the right of the 36th, turned up in Charlie Company’s ranks. Brandishing a curved dagger, he joined the company as it moved up the ridge.

  The 143rd Regiment raced through a fierce battle between the 141st Regiment and the German 765th Grenadier Regiment en route to its primary objective, the town of Saint-Raphaël. The 36th Division’s war history recorded, “The 143rd Infantry ran into more opposition in the west. After assembling at Camel Green, its 1st [Weiss’s] and 3rd Battalions advanced west and northwest to secure the high ground along the slopes of the Esterel and a mile or two inland.” They soon eliminated the German garrison in Saint-Raphaël, affording the 143rd a commanding position to protect Camel Red Beach for the landing of the 142nd Regiment. In Saint-Raphaël, Shanklin’s squad rested near a pillbox at one end of an old iron bridge. As Weiss sipped from his canteen, a German shell crashed into the pillbox. Burning shrapnel and shards of concrete hit eighteen-year-old Private Truman Ropos in his right leg. The bleeding was severe, and medics wrapped the boy in blankets against shock. Two of them carried him away on a stretcher, while a third ran alongside with a plasma bottle connected to his vein. Doctors amputated his leg later in the day.

  Reigle, Wohlwerth, Dickson, Weiss and the rest of the squad joined the fight to take the airstrip west of Saint-Raphaël. They blew up grounded German planes and cut a railway line. Along the way, dozens of German prisoners, many from the unenthusiastic Ost units recruited in German-occupied eastern Europe, surrendered to the Americans. Weiss’s squad moved north from Saint-Raphaël toward Fréjus. The squad heard that their two-man bazooka team was surrounded in a ravine, and they raced there to rescue them. The two soldiers had vanished, either killed or captured, to be reported as missing in action.

  Ten hours after the first wave of American attackers hit the beaches, more than 20,000 troops were ashore. The Allies lost 95 men killed and 385 wounded, but had captured 2,300 Germans. Most of the prisoners were old men or from Ost units. Elite Wehrmacht and SS forces might not have surrendered as easily. The Seventh Army had taken the area between Toulon and Saint-Raphaël, securing the beachhead from German counterattack and preparing the way for advances north up the Rhône valley and west to the vital ports of Marseilles and Toulon. Operation Dragoon was anything but the disaster Churchill predicted. The official U.S. Navy historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, called it “an example of an almost perfect amphibious operation from the point of view of training, timing, Army–Navy–Air Force coöperation, performance and results.”

  • • •

  Allied commanders made the most of German weakness in the south to drive speedily into France, the momentum affording no rest to the GIs. The German Nineteenth Army retreated more or less intact with the Americans and Free French in hot pursuit. On the second day of the campaign, 16 August, Weiss’s squad continued probing north of Saint-Raphaël and paused near some trees. As Sheldon Wohlwerth put down his rifle, it accidentally launched a grenade that slammed into the mouth of a private named Taylor. The grenade did not explode, but it mangled the boy’s flesh and teeth. Taylor fell in agony, and Weiss, Reigle and Wohlwerth held the young soldier until medics carried him to a field hospital.

  The deputy commander of the 36th Division, General Robert I. Stack, led most of the division ninety miles north over the following fourteen hours. “This was a dangerous, gambling attack,” the 36th Division’s newspaper, T-Patch, wrote. Stack stretched the 36th’s lines of communications to one hundred miles, forcing drivers to work twenty-four hours a day carrying supplies from the beachhead to the front. Town after town fell to the Allied advance, which slowed only to accept the thanks, kisses and wine of the inhabitants. “I was hugged and kissed until my mouth and ribs ached,” Weiss wrote.

  Eric Sevareid, the CBS radio correspondent who accompanied the soldiers, wrote:

  For the first time in the war, the troops themselves, like the optimistic people at home, began to wager on a quick end to the war. And for the first time in my observation of them they began to enjoy the war. The sun was warm and the air like crystal. The fruits were ripening, and the girls were lovely. In every village the welcome was from the heart, and for once civilians were a help instead of a hindrance.

  On 17 August, Weiss took part in liberating the capital of the Var department in Draguignan. The GIs called the town, about fifteen miles inland from their landing beaches, “Dragoon.” Most of its twenty thousand inhabitants came out to submerge the soldiers in gratitude and presents. Men, women and children kissed the American boys and decked them in wildflowers. Weiss thought it was “more like a Broadway musical than war.” The mood changed when the mayor invited the commander of Weiss’s regiment, Colonel Paul D. Adams, through a stone wall into a tranquil garden shaded by tall cypress trees. It was the quietest spot in Draguignan. “All the people of my town have contributed to give you this land,” the mayor said. The land was a cemetery.

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nbsp; Trucks collected Shanklin’s squad the next morning, 18 August, and drove them along Highway N-85, the old Route Napoléon, in an armored convoy. For the first time, Weiss saw the résistants of the FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur), tough fighters who guarded roads and mountain passes for the Allies. They wore “baggy trousers and ill-fitting, mismatched suit jackets” and wielded obsolete but serviceable rifles. Most had cigarettes fixed tight between mustachioed lips. Called maquisards and sometimes simply the maquis, names taken from the Corsican word macchia, which means a type of bush, Resistance members in the south of France numbered about seventy-five thousand. Although roughly two-thirds of them lacked even rifles, they contributed significantly to the Allied advance. Their sabotage destroyed bridges, train tracks and telephone lines, forcing the Germans to divert troops from defense to chase the “terrorists” in the mountains both before and during the invasion. “Many of them carried on the fight for three or four years, operating as individuals or in small bands,” a U.S. Army study noted during the campaign in the south. “They made the occupation of FRANCE a continual hell for the Germans.” The Resistance gave the American boys confidence, and grateful civilians made the war seem worth fighting.

  “If we paused for a moment’s respite, our shirts bathed in sweat and covered with dust, our mouths parched with thirst, they would run to greet us, arms outstretched, with tears of joy streaming down their cheeks,” Weiss wrote of the Provençal population. In four days, the 36th Division liberated Castellane, Digne, Sisteron and Gap. It pushed north of the main German forces in line with Seventh Army commander General Alexander Patch’s strategy to entrap the German Nineteenth Army between Allied forces to the north and south. On 22 August, the 36th drove into Grenoble, an Alpine ski resort and university town. The crowd, the largest the Americans had seen, wielded flags and wine that were by now familiar tributes to the boys who had come far to liberate France from foreign occupation.