The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  The 143rd Regiment’s officers installed themselves at the Hôtel Napoléon, where Colonel Adams made his headquarters. The GIs were billeted behind the walls of an old French army barracks. The noise of celebration tempted some of the soldiers outside. Weiss wrote, “[Jim] Dickson and I found an old, possibly forgotten, rusty iron door, falling off its hinges, embedded in the stone wall that gave way to our touch.” Leaving the barracks, they walked past a bakery where women waiting for bread applauded them. Another woman leaned out of a window and invited the two soldiers upstairs. Assuming she wanted to demonstrate her gratitude in the most basic manner, the boys ran to her door. The scene was not what they expected. An exhausted, sickly man was standing beside an old cupboard, almost the only furniture in the room. Weiss’s high school French and the woman’s few words of English helped them to communicate. Pouring out her only bottle of cognac, she said her husband had waited four years for this moment. Her husband wept, raised his glass and said he had never doubted that the Americans would come. Weiss and Dickson drank the cognac and went out to find the festivities.

  The two young Americans tried to buy bicycles from a shop, whose owner insisted they borrow them free of charge. After all, the man said, the Germans took bikes without paying or returning them. The GIs cycled from café to café, where people gave them wine and thanks. At sunset, they dropped off the bicycles and walked through a city alight with bonfires and fireworks. “Hordes of men and women strode arm in arm singing La Marseillaise and drinking champagne,” Weiss recalled. He and Dickson drank wine and they exchanged kisses with exuberant and not always young women. Their new French friends kept them up until dawn, when the two liberators fell asleep on the ground beside a petrol station.

  SIXTEEN

  There are a few men in every army who know no fear—just a few. But these men are not normal.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 304

  A YOUNG REPLACEMENT LIEUTENANT in Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, had a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of the battle for Hill 192. Alfred T. Whitehead, now promoted to corporal, had no sympathy. Taking the trembling officer, a high school teacher in civilian life, to the company commander, he said, “I’ve been doing this man’s job all day, and here he is crying and carrying on like a baby. I’m scared too, but I’m still fighting.” The lieutenant was reassigned, undoubtedly to a psychiatric center behind the lines. Already tough when he entered the army, Whitehead was becoming merciless.

  The conquest of Hill 192 left the just-promoted corporal with two wounds, one in his left thigh, the other in his left hand. Although he stated in his memoir that the injury to his hand was from a German bayonet, medical records indicated that he sought treatment for both at an aid station. The medical tent was filled with casualties that made his shrapnel wounds look slight, and seeing limbless soldiers made him decide to rub sulpha powder on his cuts and leave. His hand sometimes bled through the bandages, and he changed the dressing daily. For the next few days, during the battle that destroyed the ancient Norman town of Saint-Lô, his unit was in reserve. This gave him time to recuperate physically, if not mentally.

  The 38th Regiment’s next objective was the village of Saint-Jean-des-Baisants. This meant more fighting through hedgerows and across pastures defended by German machine guns. One night on guard duty, Whitehead admitted, he fell asleep. This was a serious offense, punishable under military law by death but usually by long imprisonment. Sentries who fell asleep could easily be killed by German patrols. More than that, they endangered all the men of the unit. Whitehead’s squad leader woke him, but did not report him. Whitehead claimed he later chanced upon a sleeping German sentry and severed his throat with a wire garrote.

  Whitehead’s memoir described his squad’s existence at this time: foraging, occasionally shooting cattle for food, stealing eggs from farmers and picking apples. Some unripe apples upset his stomach. He recalled the smell of “dead bodies lying along the sunken roads—bloated, blackened, rotting bodies of Americans and Germans, with maggots working through them.” While he occasionally exaggerated his martial feats, his was anything but a heroic war. There was no mention of patriotism, of struggling against Nazi tyranny or of the unit cohesion that made men risk their lives for one another. Whitehead’s war was a steady slog through minefields, up and down hills and over fields littered with the human and mechanical debris of war.

  Germans often surrendered by raising their hands and calling out, “Kamerad.” Whitehead’s response was, “Kom-a-rod, hell! After all you put me through, and then you come out with your hands up. Shame-on-you.” Acknowledging his duty to turn prisoners over to MPs, Whitehead added, “A combat soldier is a lot different from anyone else: he’s not eager to live-and-let-live or forgive-and-forget. He’ll shoot the hell out of you, damn quick, and he won’t bat an eye when he does it.” When two Germans surrendered to him near a bombed-out bridge, he gave each of them a cigarette. This turned out to Whitehead’s advantage. He released them to persuade the rest of their company to surrender. They returned with forty more soldiers.

  Germans were not the only ones ready to surrender. Whitehead carried a clean, white handkerchief to wave at the enemy if his time came.

  • • •

  At 9:00 in the morning on 15 August, the 2nd Division moved on the town of Tinchebray. Whitehead had his first encounter with Free French partisans, who provided his unit with intelligence on German positions. The destructive battle for Tinchebray lasted most of the day. Many civilians were sheltering in their houses. Whitehead recalled,

  We sometimes accidentally killed whole families while clearing out buildings: you didn’t have time to ask who was in the cellars when you tossed hand grenades in them. It was a terrible experience. Sometimes, too, a little girl or boy would come running out with one or both arms blown off, crying hysterically and wild with fear.

  The German defense of Tinchebray had been, in the estimation of 2nd Division commander Major General Walter M. Robertson, “half-hearted and ragged.” The Germans surrendered at 4:30 that afternoon. The 2nd Battalion quickly secured Hill 248, above the town, where they heard on their radio that Allied forces had invaded southern France earlier that day. The men were grateful that the Germans would be forced to divert resources from them to another front. A British battalion soon arrived to relieve them. General Robertson wrote, “The last objective of the 2nd Division in Normandy was secure.”

  The next morning, the 2nd Division was given two days off the line. It was their first break from combat for seventy days, a respite that should have been welcome. However, because their rest area was beside the division’s heavy artillery, they did not get much sleep.

  The 2nd Division moved on 18 August by truck from Normandy to Brittany. Driving through the Breton countryside, Corporal Whitehead admired the way General George S. Patton’s armored columns had conquered the terrain: “bomb damage had been limited to small patches around key road junctions and railroad stations, hardly disturbing anything else.” At a crossroads, Corporal Whitehead saw the general himself. He remembered his rousing speech to the 2nd Division in Northern Ireland. The general was standing up in his jeep and shouting at an American tank commander.

  “What are you coming back for?” Patton demanded.

  “We’re out of ammo, sir,” the tanker answered.

  “God damn it,” the general bellowed. “Get the hell back up there and run over the sonsabitches. They don’t know you’re out of ammunition.”

  As the trucks carried the 2nd Division west across Brittany toward the Atlantic port of Brest, citizens of towns and villages along the way surged outside to thank their liberators. Whitehead recalled that “the French people swarmed over our jeeps, trucks, and tanks, embracing us with much shouting, tears, and kisses, while showering us with gifts of wine, fruit, and eggs.” He went into a farmhouse, where its peasant owners wore wooden shoes that reminded him
of his own barefoot childhood. They accepted his offer of K rations, which they fashioned into an edible cooked dinner with cider. When he left, he thought that “here among strangers in a foreign land, I was more welcome than in my own home back in the South.”

  On 21 August, the 2nd Division moved to an assembly area on the Daoulas Peninsula, résistants from the French Forces of the Interior joining them to provide intelligence on enemy positions. The 2nd Division assaulted Hill 154, southeast of Brest on the Daoulas Peninsula, the next day. The division history recorded, “The tactic was to creep Indian-fashion through low-lying bushes which the enemy had failed to cut down around the hill, to encircle and surprise.” To avoid alerting the Germans, no artillery or mortars prepared the way. The 3rd Battalion assaulted defenses on the lower hill, forcing the enemy into the waiting fire of Whitehead’s 2nd Battalion. Whitehead, who despised rather than feared junior officers, claimed that one replacement lieutenant aimed at a fleeing German but forgot to take the safety off his M1 carbine. The German was killed anyway by Whitehead’s .45 pistol, one among many unlikely feats of arms trumpeted in his memoir. He said he and his “gun crew” then fastened a captured German 88 mm field gun to a tree and fired it at German pillboxes. “Afterward, I was severely called down by our company commander and almost got court-martialed for it, but I gave the Germans a hell of a time before I was discovered,” he wrote. Normally, a field gun anchored to a tree would recoil and kill the men using it.

  When the Americans seized Hill 154 late that night, the Germans counterattacked and nearly took the regimental command post. The regiment’s three battalions pushed them back. Possession of Hill 154 gave the Americans a commanding position above their next major objective, the ancient fortress of Brest.

  Brest, where William Weiss had embarked with the 77th Division in 1919 for New York City, was home to German submarine pens and a naval squadron. The Allies needed the port to offload troops and equipment. On 23 August, the Germans destroyed their only exit route from Brest to the Daoulas Peninsula. As Adolf Hitler had ordered, fifty thousand German soldiers girded themselves to defend Fortress Brest to the last man.

  BOOK II

  Of Soldiers to Deserters

  SEVENTEEN

  It is one of the first duties of a company officer to make clear to his men that he knows each of them.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, pp. 376–77

  LATE ON THE MORNING OF 24 AUGUST, Steve Weiss and Jim Dickson woke up near the petrol station where they had fallen asleep after the night’s revelry in Grenoble. They decided to eat breakfast in town and sneak back into the barracks before anyone noticed they were missing. Some GIs gave Weiss and Dickson a lift in their jeep to the town center.

  Bob Reigle and two other soldiers, who had also slipped out of the barracks, were sitting with three girls at a pavement café. Weiss and Dickson joined their breakfast, an appropriate postscript to the night’s carousing. Souring the mood, one of the soldiers with Reigle mentioned that had he heard their regiment had left Grenoble early that morning—about twelve hours later than the time that it had actually pulled out. (The 143rd had been ordered to leave Grenoble at 5:30 the previous day. Colonel Paul D. Adams, the regiment’s commanding officer, had objected to the abrupt departure. “We captured the town,” he said, “and we ought to be able to enjoy it!” Overruled, he reluctantly took his regiment south. The division’s newspaper, T-Patch, noted that “the 36th Division left Grenoble as rapidly as it had come” with no time to search for absentees.) Weiss and the other four troops were now absent without leave (AWOL), liable to court-martial for that offense and for leaving their weapons in the barracks along with their ammunition, packs, sleeping bags and rations.

  One of the five AWOLs in the café proposed leaving immediately to catch up with the regiment. Weiss, with unconvincing bravado, said, “Sure, but let’s finish our coffee and pastry first. It might be a long time before we eat this well again and in such company.” Jim Dickson took the girls’ addresses, and the five soldiers left to face the wrath of Captain Simmons.

  Luckily for the young GIs, a half-track driver from Alabama stopped to let them jump aboard. The GIs held tight, Weiss hugging a .50-caliber machine gun fixed to the truck bed, as the Alabaman drove like a moonshiner through Grenoble down toward the Rhône valley. Sharp curves and steep climbs had the passengers fearing for their lives. About forty-five miles down the road, the five hitchhikers took advantage of a momentary stop to jump out and look for Charlie Company.

  Two young Frenchwomen in light summer frocks bicycled up the road. Weiss, who since Naples had become more confident with the opposite sex, asked if they had seen any other American soldiers. One girl answered that les américains had come through her village, Romans, during the night. They caused such a stir that she went out and kissed all of them. (Weiss was unaware that the regiment that liberated Romans without a fight was his own.) “I’m a day late,” Weiss said, “but I’m here to collect my kiss.” Leaning over the handlebars, she kissed him on both cheeks. “That did it!” Weiss wrote. “For me the war was over. I wanted this woman.” Forgetting about Charlie Company, he invited the girls to a picnic. They accepted and cycled into town to bring back bread, sausages and cheese. Reigle called after them, “Don’t forget the wine.” While the five soldiers lounged on the grass awaiting their idyll in the woods, a column of six U.S. Army jeeps broke the magic. At the head of the convoy was their regimental commanding officer, Colonel Paul Adams. The AWOLs had nowhere to hide. Adams went on without stopping. He had a more pressing concern: a rendezvous with the regional chief of the French Resistance, Colonel Jean-Pierre de Lassus Saint-Geniès, to plan joint operations.

  The next four jeeps sped along the highway in Colonel Adams’s wake. The AWOLs thought they were safe, until the last jeep stopped. Without leaving the passenger seat, a young second lieutenant barked, “Who’s in charge here?” Corporal Reigle got up and brushed himself off. “Hell, soldier,” the junior officer said. “Move when I say so.” The lieutenant asked what outfit they belonged to. Seeing they had no rifles and no helmets, he accused them of desertion and ordered them into the back of his jeep. Reigle asked where he was taking them, and the lieutenant snapped, “Smarten up, soldier, or I’ll have you charged with insubordination and court martialed.” Weiss wondered where this hard-ass came from. They drove to the 143rd’s regimental command post, where the lieutenant put in a call to Captain Simmons.

  A Charlie Company jeep arrived to collect the five offenders. Reigle asked the driver, “How’s the captain today?” The answer boded ill: “Hard to know, really. He holds his cards pretty close to his vest.” They went to Charlie Company’s command post in a farmhouse between Chabeuil and Valence. The soldiers saluted Captain Simmons, who did not salute back. He said, “Gather around, guys.” Weiss, hearing what he took to be a “non-threatening voice,” thought the captain was not angry after all. Then Simmons let rip, “If one of my men had been killed while you were playing heroes with all those French babes, I’d have you up before General Court Martial and charged with Article of War 107, desertion before the enemy. Get it right and get it straight, desertion is punishable by death by firing squad.” Weiss and the others did not realize that Simmons was giving them a break. Article of War 107 called for soldiers who had deserted merely “to make good time lost.” The death penalty for desertion fell under Articles of War 58 (Desertion) and 75 (Misbehavior before the enemy). Simmons kept up the bluff. “No half measures, see,” he said. “To hell with a dishonorable discharge and a long prison sentence. It’s nothing but the best for screw-ups like you. You’re in contempt. You’ve lowered the morale of my company, failed the other men and in your absence put them under additional pressure.” He docked their pay for the cost of the equipment left in the Grenoble barracks. Although Weiss had yet to learn which article of war was which, he accepted that “Simmons had saved face and let us off the hook.”

  Weiss re
ported to his squad leader, Sergeant Harry Shanklin, who was hunkered down in a ditch with his men. While American artillery pummelled the town of Valence, Shanklin declared, “The lover boys return. Damn! Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to take off?” The sergeant called them “dumb shits,” but he did not mete out any punishment. Despite their teenage prank, they had been good soldiers until now. The army still needed good soldiers.

  • • •

  While the 143rd Regiment awaited orders, its commander was having dinner at the headquarters of French colonel Jean-Pierre de Lassus Saint-Geniès. Colonel Adams and the Free French were planning the liberation of Valence, where a strong German garrison was holding American and French prisoners. With the approval of 36th Division commander General Dahlquist, Adams assumed command of a joint Franco-American force to take Valence and continue south to the main front at Montélimar. Adams and Lassus Saint-Geniés set the time of the attack, H-Hour, for 10:00 that night, to be preceded by an artillery barrage. After dinner, Adams returned to his regimental command post on the newly captured airfield at Chabeuil–La Trésorerie to begin operations.

  Valence was a diversion from the Seventh Army’s main objective, which was to block the German Nineteenth Army’s retreat via Montélimar. Disagreement among American commanders over Valence, even after they had promised to assist their French allies in the town’s conquest, portended a halfhearted effort. The official war history noted, “[General] Dahlquist dispatched no less than four contradictory directives—three by radio, one by liaison officer—to the 143rd Infantry still above Valence. The regiment started to receive them at 1600 in the wrong sequence. Not until 1900 did the regiment, reinforced by FFI units, get underway toward Valence.” This was three hours before Colonel Adams and French colonel de Lassus Saint-Geniés had planned to attack.