The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  The police car drove up to the highway and turned right. That route led northwest. American lines were due southeast. Instead of taking the GIs to the safety of the U.S. Army, the policemen were driving them straight into German-occupied Valence.

  NINETEEN

  A dim outline of a better world to be achieved by supreme effort has the power to call forth the last resources of the fighting man.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 312

  AS THE BLACK POLICE Traction Avant drove through the German defenses that the 143rd Regiment had failed to penetrate during the night, Steve Weiss wondered why the Frenchmen were not taking him to the American lines. From his backseat perch on Sheldon Wohlwerth’s lap, he observed a formidable array of trenches, barricades, barbed-wire barriers, pillboxes and armored cars. The Citroën was waved through a checkpoint by German sentries and rattled over cobblestones toward the ancient town center. German soldiers, armed with machine guns, patrolled in pairs amid resentful French civilians. The Americans had no weapons. “Passing slowly through the town, Germans peered into the car, close enough for me to touch them,” Weiss remembered. Despite their disguise as French gendarmes, the GIs would not have survived a moment’s scrutiny from an inquisitive German.

  The Germans were understandably wary. Valence had suffered massive Allied air bombardment and artillery shelling for days. Only a few hours earlier, at 1:15 p.m., a nitroglycerine-filled goods van blew up on the track near the main railway station. The resulting fires and explosions destroyed 280 train wagons. Saboteurs also wrecked eight steam locomotives, denying their use to the German army. This caused panic among the occupiers, who worried more about sabotage than treachery from their supposed collaborators in the police.

  The car passed American prisoners, some standing with hands behind their heads and others sitting dejectedly on the ground. Weiss watched the Germans push the POWs through the portal of a ten-foot wall into an old barracks. Farther along the street, German officers with binoculars and sidearms were so intent on studying their maps that they ignored the Citroën.

  The Traction Avant dropped intelligence officer Ferdinand Lévy near a café. Weiss was so grateful to the Frenchman for saving his life that he reached out of the window to press a pack of American cigarettes into his hand. The Camel label, however, was visible. Lévy stuffed the cigarettes into his pocket and melded with the crowd. Wohlwerth cursed Weiss for risking their lives by exposing an American cigarette brand that was not available in occupied France. Dressed in police tunics rather than American uniforms, they could be executed as spies. “Fortunately,” Weiss wrote, “there were no Germans passing by.” Nor, apparently, were any French collaborators. Weiss, regretting his impulse, recalled, “I felt like an amateur.” The eighteen-year-old, who had been trained as a soldier rather than a spy, was entering “a world of signs and counter-signs, of cover stories and cover names, of agents and stratagems.”

  The four Americans were soon on a road out of Valence, following the river Rhône south into the countryside. Weiss looked out at rolling vineyards and isolated farmhouses, which seemed strangely tranquil in the midst of a great war. He did not know where they were going. The car slowed for a flock of sheep grazing beside the road near a place called Maubole. Marcel Volle hooted the car’s horn in order, Weiss thought, to clear the sheep out of the way. An old shepherd appeared, took out a red handkerchief and made a display of blowing his nose. Weiss guessed the shepherd was signaling that the route ahead was safe. The police car turned onto a dirt track toward an abandoned house.

  Sergeant Scruby and the three other GIs were waiting inside. Their own journey, they told Weiss, nearly ended in disaster when German soldiers stopped the Citroën and demanded the policemen’s documents. The real policemen bluffed, saving the Americans from questions that would expose their ignorance of French. The encounter had been so tense that one of the gendarmes went home rather than return to collect Weiss’s group. The new arrivals removed their blue uniforms, and the policemen gave each American a Beretta 7.65-millimeter automatic pistol. Fifteen minutes after their arrival, a Resistance lookout ran in and shouted, “Gestapo!”

  Another black Citroën, this one containing Gestapo officers, drove up the dirt road. As its headlights illuminated the house, the Resistance men rushed the Americans out the back toward the river. Sliding down the sheer bank, they ran to two old, wooden boats. One of the boatmen, Augustin Bouvier, nicknamed Tin Tin, looked like the archetypal résistant. Sporting a black beret and buff-colored duffel coat, Tin Tin held an unfiltered cigarette in one hand and a vintage barrel-magazine submachine gun in the other. As the Frenchmen and the Americans crowded into the primitive vessels, the two river rats rowed for their lives against a strong current. The boats passed a bridge that had recently been destroyed by the U.S. Army Air Forces, “twisted and broken in the water, starkly framed by its concrete pillars standing in mute testimony on either shore.” They needed to reach the west bank, three-quarters of a mile distant, and the fast-flowing Rhône was not helping. The Germans’ headlights appeared at the river’s edge. Gestapo men ran to the shore and shot at the boats. Bullets peppered the water. The boatmen rowed faster, pulling with all their strength to get out of range. When the boats at last reached the other side, the Germans walked back to their car.

  The Americans followed their French guides up the bank onto level ground and ran across a road. One of the Frenchmen broke the lock on a metal gate outside a three-story house. They went inside, and each of the Americans was assigned to a room. Steve Weiss, too tired to remove his uniform and mud-caked boots, lay on a red brocade bedspread and tried to sleep.

  • • •

  That morning at Les Martins, farmer Gaston Reynaud received a visit from SS troops. Having unearthed American weapons and equipment from an irrigation canal on his land, they searched his house and barn. Although they found nothing suspicious, one soldier pressed a rifle to Reynaud’s head. What did he know about the weapons? Where were the Americans? The rigorous interrogation included threats to burn Reynaud’s farm. The SS had already torched the farms of the neighboring Vernet and Chovet families. Despite that and a threat to arrest his wife and daughter, Reynaud did not give away the Americans or their Resistance rescuers. To his surprise, the Germans departed without doing any damage.

  Weiss, although thick curtains kept sunlight out of his room, could not sleep all that day. His adrenaline was up from the hours of tension and danger. At dusk, a Resistance guide took the Americans outdoors. They marched through the night, along country paths into the village of Soyons. Dogs barked, but the people seemed to be asleep. Leaving Soyons, the men went through fields and vineyards for about three miles. The next place they came to was Saint-Péray. Its two thousand inhabitants must have been sleeping, because the streets were deserted. In the central square, Weiss saw a stone monument to the dead of the 1914–18 war, his father’s war.

  The men filed into the Hôtel du Nord, opposite the memorial. The Frenchmen took them to a dingy back room barely furnished with a wooden table, a few chairs and a wall map of the region. Five men with British Lee-Enfield rifles filed into the room, and one of them addressed the Americans in French. Weiss, who assumed they had come to welcome the Allies whose lives their organization had just saved, found himself subjected to fierce questioning. Where had they come from? What unit were they with? Why had they left their division? In the limited French he remembered from high school, Weiss struggled to defend himself. He pointed at the map to show where the squad had been cut off from the 143rd Regiment on Highway D-68 during the battle for Valence. His “short, hesitant answers” to their questions seemed to leave the résistants dissatisfied. “The French were surly,” Weiss wrote. “I despaired.” If the Resistance concluded they were Germans disguised as Americans, they were dead. The interrogation went on for forty-five minutes. Then, for no reason Weiss could detect, the Frenchmen relaxed. They set glasses before the GIs and fi
lled them with the local Côtes du Rhône red wine. The French and the Americans, comrades in arms, drank toasts to one another.

  French scouts reported that elements of the German Nineteenth Army probing for routes of retreat across the Rhône were approaching Saint-Péray. Local commanders assembled a convoy of trucks and cars in the town square to drive the eight Americans and the résistants north to safety in the higher mountains. Because of petrol shortages, the vehicles ran on gazogène—charcoal made from wood chips that smelled to Weiss like a warm fireplace. For thirteen miles, underpowered engines struggled up steep roads to an elevation of 1,800 feet.

  The convoy stopped in the barely lit streets of an Alpine village called Alboussière. Weiss retained a clear memory of that night: “Standing next to a side door of a country hotel, illuminated by a raw electric bulb, a man dressed in jodhpurs and black riding boots, wearing an open shirt, awaits our arrival.” The Frenchman threw down his cigarette. Extending his left hand for the Americans to shake, he introduced himself, “I am Auger.”

  TWENTY

  There is also the civilian’s natural horror of the unaccustomed sight and smell of death and bloodshed.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 348

  ON THE MORNING OF 27 AUGUST at the Hôtel Serre in Alboussière, the eight Americans from Charlie Company feasted on a warming breakfast of milky coffee in china bowls with hot bread, fresh butter and jams. The other guests in the hotel’s cozy dining room welcomed the GIs to the communal table. Most of them, including French Jews who had escaped Paris and deportation to the death camps in Poland, were themselves hiding from the Nazis. The hotel’s owners, Maurice and Odette Serre, went to great lengths to provide for their guests, combing the countryside for vegetables and chickens, overseeing the preparation of food in the kitchen and extending credit to those whose bank accounts in Paris had been frozen. The staff included two chambermaids, Élise and Simone, girls not much older than Steve Weiss. From that first morning in the hotel, Weiss appreciated the risks the Serre family took for everyone in the hotel: “The Serres are protective and considerate of their charges, who, thus far, have been fortunate to avoid capture and death.”

  The guests at the remote inn, as dotty as the cast of an Agatha Christie mystery, fascinated the young Weiss. One was a Frenchwoman in her late thirties, who knitted quietly in a corner and reminded Weiss of Dickens’s Madame Defarge. He took a more personal interest in a girl in her early twenties, who was “slim with red-dyed hair and rarely speaks.” He found her “theatrical” and appealing, but he was slow to find the pluck to approach her. An impeccably dressed older gentleman, Monsieur Haas, like Weiss’s father, had fought for the Allied cause in the First World War. When the German occupiers sequestered Jewish property and forced Jews out of the professions in 1940, he lost his job in Paris as a merchant banker. Weiss also met M. Haas’s two sisters, “tall, slender figures,” who had escaped with him from Paris, and the son of one of them, a fellow eighteen-year-old named Jean-Claude. M. Haas had pasted a Michelin touring map of France on his bedroom wall. A maze of pins and strings marked Allied progress against the Germans, based on reports from the BBC’s French-language broadcasts. Valence was still held by the Wehrmacht. Farther south, the Americans and Germans were engaged in fierce combat for the road and river junction at Montélimar. Weiss guessed that this was where the rest of his 36th Division had gone.

  • • •

  At Montélimar on 27 August, while Weiss became acquainted with Auger and the other maquisards in the Hôtel Serre, the 36th was fighting a life and death battle. Division losses were so high that a battalion commander of the 141st Regiment ordered Lieutenant Albert C. Homcy to lead a hastily assembled squad of cooks, bakers and orderlies to find a German position that was thought to conceal tanks, tank destroyers or machine guns. Homcy was a career soldier, who had enlisted in 1938, earned his commission in November 1942 and been awarded a commendation for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” under sustained enemy artillery fire in Italy. This time, though, he disobeyed orders. His objection to taking the inexperienced rear echelon troops into battle was that they would all be killed without achieving their objective. He stated later, “I didn’t think those men could do any good on that patrol and if I took them out they would get killed doing something they knew nothing about.” Two of the cooks had already run back to Homcy’s command post after coming under German shells. One said, “Lieutenant, we can’t go on patrol. We don’t know anything about firing bazookas or anything like that.” At the time, the Germans were taking a toll of the most experienced riflemen. Although Homcy’s refusal probably saved the men’s lives, the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Bird, immediately relieved him of command and arrested him under Article of War 75 for “Misbehavior before the enemy.” The charge, a term applied to both insubordination in combat and desertion, carried a penalty of death by firing squad.

  • • •

  Weiss was far from the 36th and its problems of command, supply and discipline. His life had taken a new turn. The GI was now a résistant with dozens of French hill fighters under the command of the mysterious, one-armed Auger. “Auger,” a word meaning “drill bit” for boring into wood or earth, was the code name of Captain François Binoche. The thirty-three-year-old Binoche was a legendary figure in the French war against German occupation. The Germans had captured the then lieutenant Binoche of the French Foreign Legion in June 1940, when France fell. Escaping from a prisoner of war camp near Nancy at the end of July, he reached French Morocco a month later and was assigned to the Foreign Legion at Casablanca. His Gaullist sympathies earned him arrest by Vichy officers, who imprisoned him first in North Africa and then at Clermont-Ferrand in France’s Vichy zone. A court-martial exonerated him of charges of conspiring with the enemy, Great Britain, for lack of evidence. He then joined the Gaullist underground. On 5 July 1944, almost two months before he welcomed the Americans to Alboussière, Binoche lost his right arm in a battle near the village of Désaignes. The nom de guerre “Auger” did little to conceal the unmistakable identity of the handsome regular officer with a missing right arm.

  Steve Weiss, whose unconscious need for a surrogate father had not been met by Captain Simmons or any of the other American officers in his battalion, fell under the spell of Captain Binoche. Binoche confided in him more than in the other Americans, and he invited Weiss to sit at his table for meals. Weiss learned about France from the veteran officer, and the two trusted each other. “I really admired Binoche,” Weiss said. “Making a connection with a father figure, although at the time I couldn’t have put it into words [meant] I wanted to stay with him.” Weiss had little choice. He and the seven other Americans could not reach their division sixty miles away. By default, they joined the French Resistance.

  A maquis patrol brought intelligence to Binoche that German troops nearby were scouting for escape routes over the river Rhône. Binoche decided to impede the German retreat by destroying a bridge two miles from Alboussière, and he asked the Americans to help. A truck loaded with the eight GIs and a dozen résistants set out after dark for the river crossing. At the bridge, Sergeant Scruby and Corporal Reigle guarded the French sappers as they dug explosives deep under the foundations. Weiss and the rest of the squad, armed with old bolt-action Lee-Enfields, took a position south of the bridge to prevent German infiltration.

  When the sappers had buried the charges, the men regrouped a safe distance away. The detonator was prepared, and Captain Binoche had the honor of pushing the handle with his only hand. “The explosion shattered the still August night and reverberated against the steeply sloped mountains and across the valley,” Weiss wrote. “Pieces of the concrete bridge, ripped from its moorings, rose then fell into the chasm below with a whooshing sound.” Another route of German retreat had been severed.

  Steve Weiss embraced clandestine warfare more than he had the life of an infantryman. Resistance fighting allowed
him his independence, and it usually let him sleep in a bed at night. Such luxuries were denied the ordinary infantryman, who obeyed orders and spent nights outdoors under enemy fire. Weiss trusted his commanding officer, Binoche, as he had never relied on Captain Simmons. Binoche knew all of his men, their names and their families. Their lives were never put at risk needlessly, and he was usually beside them on operations.

  • • •

  On one occasion, though, Binoche was conspicuously absent. Alboussière was one of the villages liberated by the Resistance. With libération came épuration, the purging of French people believed to have collaborated with the Nazis. These included young women, so-called collabos horizontales, accused of having had sexual relations with Germans. The ritual humiliation of these girls took the same form throughout liberated France, much to the country’s shame: their heads were shaved, they were stripped naked, whipped in public and paraded through the streets by members of their own communities. An accusation, even from a thwarted suitor, was usually enough to merit mob justice. Many of those taking part in these near lynchings had themselves collaborated to varying degrees. (Under the German occupation, some Frenchmen had denounced their countrymen to the Nazis for supposed Resistance activity, being Jewish or Roma, belonging to the Freemasons or trading on the black market. When liberation came, some of the denouncers claimed to have been with the Resistance all along.) There were few trials worthy of the appellation.

  The épuration was an aspect of newly reacquired French liberty that Steve Weiss had yet to experience, because the 36th Infantry Division had passed through the towns it liberated so quickly that it missed the kangaroo courts. A few days after Weiss left Grenoble, CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid witnessed the execution of six French members of Vichy’s version of the Gestapo, the Milice. The Milice had earned a reputation for ruthlessness that outdid its German model, and many French men and women died in its torture chambers. Hundreds of Grenoble’s citizens, who turned up for the execution of several miliciens, screamed for the youngsters’ blood. When the firing squad had done its duty, boys spat on the corpses and adults laughed. “A mob?” Sevareid wrote. “The people were citizens of Grenoble, who had always raised families, gone to church, taken pride in their excellent university of higher culture and done no general hurt to humanity before. Was the important thing the way they had behaved or why they had so behaved?” Sevareid did not provide an answer to his question, and many American commanders looked the other way when French mobs meted out instant justice.