The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Lieutenants Rickerson and McKenzie had an impeccable record of achievement since parachuting into France six weeks earlier. After liaising with the local Resistance and taking Sergeant Biledeau to a hospital to set his fractured leg, Rickerson and McKenzie established their operating base. Five days later, they went into action blowing up two bridges. French engineers with Rickerson cut the cable at one end of a suspension bridge fifty miles north of Avignon at Viviers before destroying its foundations with eight 20-pound charges on the bridge’s suspension cables. The technique knocked out the bridge so that it fell intact to block the river, forcing a barge laden with petrol for German forces to turn back. McKenzie meanwhile demolished a railway bridge near Viviers. Six days later, on 29 July, OG Louise launched an assault that was nothing less than astounding for a small group of a dozen Americans with fewer than a hundred maquis allies. They attacked a German garrison of ten thousand men northwest of Lyons in the town of Vallon, destroying a fuel depot, heavy artillery and most of the Germans’ vehicles. They also left about two hundred German troops dead. Then, using air-dropped 37-millimeter antitank guns, they attacked a German column as it retreated north.

  On 25 August, the battalion suffered a setback when a failed ambush of German troops forced the maquis to withdraw and the Americans to fight their way to safety. Rickerson suffered “superficial if bloody wounds” that he did not mention to the Charlie Company recruits. At Chomerac on 31 August, Lieutenant Rickerson and two Free French officers convinced the German commander that an Allied army surrounded his forces. Three thousand eight hundred Germans surrendered to the tiny band.

  Weiss had become part of one of the most successful guerrilla operations of the war in Europe, and the more he learned about Rickerson, whom the men called “Rick,” the more he admired him. The lieutenant’s professionalism persuaded Weiss that joining the American unit was right after all. He thought that “unlike Simmons, Rick’s feats of arms proved him to be an officer worthy of command. I needed that.” Rickerson assigned Weiss to guard the radio operator, Sergeant Frank Laureta of Denver, Colorado, while he made his transmissions to Algiers. German radio-detection vans operated throughout the area. If one tuned into Laureta’s frequency and Germans broke into the house, Weiss would be Laureta’s last line of defense.

  Rickerson outlined the unit’s next mission: to attack the German 11th Panzer Division, one of the Wehrmacht’s toughest in France, near Lyons. France’s third most populous city had been liberated on 2 September, but the German Nineteenth Army was using routes around it on their retreat to Germany. The 11th Panzers was the Nineteenth’s rear guard. Rickerson estimated the panzer division’s strength at fifty Panther heavy tanks, a dozen Mark IV medium tanks, four mechanized infantry battalions and an armored artillery regiment.

  Weiss was astonished that Rickerson would send a dozen OSS paratroopers, eight Charlie Company riflemen and about a hundred French part-time guerrillas against a German armored division. “It can’t be done. We’ll be wiped out,” he muttered. Rickerson, who either ignored or didn’t hear the teenage private, discussed with McKenzie the weapons and equipment the operation required. They gave a shopping list to radio operator Frank Laureta, who went upstairs with Weiss to transmit to OSS Algiers. Laureta pulled his communications equipment out of a cubbyhole in the attic, fixed an antenna to the roof, wired it to his radio set, put on the headphones and encoded the message. Weiss asked him if he believed the army would actually deliver the men and equipment Rickerson was asking for.

  “Yes, why not?”

  Weiss told him the 36th Infantry Division’s supply sergeants were reluctant to hand out so much as “a chalky D-ration chocolate bar.” Laureta advised the young soldier to wait and see.

  Three nights later, on schedule, a black B-24 Liberator bomber flew through the dark sky over a drop zone guarded by Rickerson’s team, the eight Charlie Company troops and some maquisards with horses, carts and trucks. Dozens of crates and a few men fell to earth. A few parachutes failed to open, smashing cargo onto the ground. The team took the new men and supplies for the Lyons operation back to the safe house. They ate dinner, during which Weiss appreciated the friendliness between officers and men, the banter and the professionalism. It was at least as good as it had been with Captain Binoche, perhaps better owing to the easy access to supplies. “This is the kind of war I want to fight,” he thought, “with guys you can rely on.”

  In the Ardèche with OG Louise, Steve Weiss was constantly on the move. He went with the team to cut telephone and telegraph lines, and he accompanied Lieutenant Rickerson on a mission to destroy the last bridge over the Rhône. As radio operator Frank Laureta’s guard, he kept an eye out for German radio detectors. One van approached the house, its antenna scanning the airwaves from the road. Laureta was not transmitting at the time, and the van drove on. The Germans were withdrawing from the Ardèche, and Rickerson prepared his unit to move north to face the 11th Panzer Division near Lyons.

  Months of tension followed by a lull affected Weiss’s health. His stomach ached, and he lost his normally voracious appetite. His malady, with symptoms of influenza and amoebic dysentery, was debilitating. Dr. John Hamblet, OG Louise’s medical officer, prescribed pills that failed to effect a cure and certified the patient unfit for the scheduled attack on the 11th Panzers Division. When Sergeant Scruby and the six other Charlie Company infantrymen left with Lieutenant McKenzie and his OSS group for Lyons, Weiss feared that none of them would come back alive.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Fatigue can quickly reduce a fighting spirit.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 293

  THE LAST GERMAN UNITS WITHDREW from the area around Devesset. Also gone from the region by September 1944 were Lieutenant William H. McKenzie’s OSS team and the seven Charlie Company riflemen, who were pursuing the German 11th Panzer Division near Lyons. With no word from McKenzie for two days, Lieutenant Roy Rickerson closed down the safe house, returned the keys to its French owners and packed his unit’s equipment onto trucks and jeeps. An ailing Steve Weiss sat at Rickerson’s side as the lieutenant drove the lead car through the mountains northeast to Lyons. Rickerson stopped on the way to see an old friend, Lieutenant Paul Boudreau, recuperating in the village of Annonay. Boudreau, commander of Operation Betsy, had taken a .50-caliber round from an American fighter plane. Doctors who removed the bullet from his thigh feared that a postoperative infection would force them to amputate his leg. Penicillin was in short supply in the Ardèche, but Allied ships were delivering medical supplies daily to Marseilles. Rickerson made sure that, with the roads recently secured, his friend was taken there.

  Rickerson’s convoy pushed on to Lyons, on whose periphery the 36th Division had fought when the Free French army liberated the city on 2 September. Operational Group Louise settled into the Grand Nouvel Hôtel, where several other OSS OGs were residing. At last, Rickerson learned what had happened to Lieutenant McKenzie. When his OSS and Charlie Company troops reached Lyons, the 11th Panzer had already retreated. The valorous but suicidal battle that Weiss had dreaded did not take place. His friends from Charlie Company had fought in Lyons, beside the maquis, against Milice snipers on the rooftops. They rejoined the 36th Division in time to take part in the siege of Bourg-en-Bresse. So far, no orders had come for Weiss.

  Dr. John Hamblet asked Weiss to sit with a wounded pilot in their hotel. The airman’s hands were charred with burns from German antiaircraft fire that sent his flaming B-24 Liberator bomber crashing into a French forest. The pilot was crippled with pain that medication did little to alleviate. Weiss stayed in the room for four hours at a time, but the pilot rarely spoke. When he did, he said that he could not remember whether he had given the order for his seven crewmen to bail out. Uncertainty and guilt intensified his depression. The fact that B-24 crews called their aircraft “flying coffins,” because they had only one exit door and often caught fire when hit, did not lessen his sense of culpab
ility. Weiss locked the window to keep him from jumping.

  • • •

  To Weiss’s delight, Captain François Binoche arrived in Lyons and invited him to dinner with his Ardèche maquisards. They ate as lavish a dinner as wartime scarcity allowed in a simple restaurant. Rhône wines enhanced the jubilant mood. Amid the heady conversation, Weiss learned that some of his Resistance comrades belonged to the Communist Party. In Alboussière, he had not given any thought to their politics. Now, their sympathies made him suspicious. He queried Binoche, who answered, “Of course, there are Communists among us. Why shouldn’t there be?” Binoche thought it natural that French fighters, both conservatives and Communists, should band together against the occupier. Weiss advised Binoche, as he had been taught in America, not to trust Communists. Binoche waved aside his concerns: “I didn’t give a damn about a man’s political persuasion during the struggle, as long as he was willing to fight. I don’t give a damn now.” Binoche left Lyons soon afterward to command a unit of the French 5th Armored Division that was fighting its way toward Germany. His maquis comrades who were not regular army lingered in Lyons.

  Social life in Lyons abounded in the weeks following its liberation, as Allied soldiers and résistants discovered more reasons and more ways to enjoy themselves. Weiss attended parties given by the American, British and French military. The Jedburghs, small British-American-French special forces teams, hosted a jamboree in a local hostelry. Weiss was touched that they had set a place at the banquet table for one of their fallen. Toward the end of the evening, a sexily clad young woman caught Weiss’s eye and he spontaneously kissed her on the lips. The other soldiers laughed when he realized “she” was a man in drag.

  It did not take the teenage GI long to redeem his heterosexuality at a house of ill-repute commandeered for the week by his Ardèche maquis friends. While the Frenchmen lounged in the main room among half-dressed courtesans, Weiss paired off with one of the women. A dozen years older and more experienced than Weiss, she provided his most pleasurable night of the war. However, when he encountered her in a Lyons street the next day, he was so embarrassed to be seen in her company that he turned down her invitation to take a friendly promenade. Afterward, he felt ashamed.

  His few days in Lyons ended when Rickerson’s OG, along with the other OSS OGs, rebased to Grenoble. The Alpine capital of the Isère department had resumed a kind of normality since his last visit on 23 August, when he and Jim Dickson went AWOL to revel in the city’s liberation. The OSS requisitioned a girls’ school as a barracks in which each soldier had his own room. Young French women worked as waitresses, while the heavy work fell to German prisoners of war. In Grenoble, the OSS liaised with the Resistance units who would assist it in the battles to come. Weiss looked forward to taking part in the OSS campaign in the Vosges Mountains, the great natural barrier between the lower Alps and the Alsace plain. However, he was not certain of his status. Was he a special forces soldier or a rifleman in the 36th Infantry Division?

  • • •

  Officially, Weiss was missing in action. On 25 September 1944, the War Department sent a Western Union telegram to William Weiss at 275 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. The message from the army adjutant general, Major General James Alexander Ulio, was identical to seven others sent to the families of the rest of the Charlie Company riflemen who had vanished from the ranks a month earlier:

  The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Private Stephen J. Weiss has been reported missing in action since twenty-fifth August in France. If further details or further information are received you will be promptly notified.

  The telegram did not say that Steve had been killed, but similar notices to other families had been followed by announcements that sons, brothers or fathers were dead. William Weiss regretted that he had allowed his son to talk him into signing his enlistment papers. He went to his room, where he sat alone in silence every Armistice Day, and wrote a letter to the War Department.

  Major General Ulio, a sixty-two-year-old career officer who had become adjutant general in 1942, sent William Weiss a follow-up letter the next day. “I know that added distress is caused by the failure to receive more information or details,” Ulio wrote, as he had written to thousands of other fathers. “Therefore I wish to assure you that at any time additional information is received it will be transmitted to you without delay, and, if in the meantime no additional information is received, I will then communicate with you at the expiration of three months.” He added,

  Experience has shown that many persons reported missing in action are subsequently reported as prisoners of war, but as this information is furnished by countries with which we are at war, the War Department is helpless to expedite such reports. However, in order to relieve financial worry, Congress has enacted legislation which continues in force the pay, allowances and allotments to dependents of personnel being carried in a missing status.

  William Weiss pressed the War Department for more information about his son, adamantly refusing to believe the boy was dead. The Pentagon did not know Steve Weiss was alive and on active service with the OSS. Too many American soldiers had gone missing in Europe for the military to know what had happened to them all, and some did not want to be found.

  • • •

  On 27 September, the day after General Ulio wrote to his father, Private Weiss accompanied an American paratrooper, Abe Rockman, to services for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The venue was a Grenoble synagogue that had miraculously been untouched during the German occupation. (Grenoble had been in the Vichy zone under direct French control until November 1942, when Axis troops occupied the Vichy area in response to the Allied invasion of French North Africa. The Germans took most of the region, but they allocated the areas near the Italian border, including Grenoble, to Italy. Many French Jews fled to Grenoble, where Italian officers refused to turn Jews over to the Germans. When Italy capitulated to the Allies in September 1943, Wehrmacht and SS troops moved in and transported many of Grenoble’s Jews to the death camps in Poland.) The congregation included the remnant of the Jewish community who had managed to evade the German extermination program. At the service, the French Jews welcomed the two Americans in Yiddish and French. Weiss recalled, “One ageing Jew placed his head on my chest and cried with relief and sadness. Suddenly, I was gloating, my eyes full of tears. The Nazis had tried methodically to destroy a race and here was living proof of their failure.” When prayers concluded, Weiss and Rockman stopped to speak to two young Jewish women with scarves wrapped around their hairless heads. They were afraid to ask whether the women had been shaved by Germans or by vengeful Frenchmen who believed they had been lovers of German soldiers. The Americans felt the women had been unjustly treated either way.

  The U.S. Army magazine, Yank, took notice of Lieutenant Rickerson’s operational group in late September. A photographer captured images of the special forces soldiers, including Steve Weiss, while they were waiting in Grenoble for their next assignment. One photograph was of Weiss singing alongside his OSS comrades in a Grenoble church. Someone sent the magazine to Weiss’s family in Brooklyn, which assured them that their son was alive.

  Weiss, determined to play a meaningful part in the war, applied to remain with Rickerson and the OSS as they moved north and east in the wake of the retreating German army. He met Major Alfred T. Cox, a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps–trained officer from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University and OSS commander in southern France. Rickerson had already told Cox he wanted to keep Weiss. Weiss volunteered to parachute with the OSS behind enemy lines, despite having had no paratroop training. Cox admired the youngster’s spirit and officially requested the Seventh Army to reassign Weiss to the OSS. The reply came back from a Seventh Army staff officer: no. The 36th Division needed experienced infantrymen, especially a first scout like Weiss, and it wanted him back in the line immediately. “It never dawned on me,” Weiss refl
ected later, “to have said to Major Cox in Grenoble, ‘No, Major, I’m not going back. You might as well call the MPs.’” Something in the teenager prevented him from challenging authority, just as he had never contradicted his father. It did not occur to him that he could question those above him. He had served under two brilliant and considerate officers, Binoche and Rickerson. Now, despite his dread of placing himself again under Captain Simmons’s command, he did not doubt his duty to obey.

  • • •

  However much Weiss objected to leaving the special forces, the Seventh Army staff officers were correct that the infantry needed riflemen. From the time Weiss and the seven others were separated from the 36th Division near Valence on 25 August, the division had fought almost every day without rest. With the 3rd and 45th Infantry Divisions, it engaged the German Nineteenth Army for a week at Montélimar. The Germans nonetheless escaped, and the three divisions pursued it eastward.