The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  The Germans retreated as quickly as their transport and the road system allowed. The Americans followed, unable to prevent the Germans from launching counteroffensives where the terrain favored them. Ascending the heights of the Vosges Mountains, the German defenders gained the advantages they enjoyed in Italy: rugged summits from which to fire on the pursuing forces, good cover and weather that often neutralized the Americans’ air superiority. Longtime veterans of the 36th Division with memories of the hated Italian theater found it hard to endure again.

  The U.S. Army was losing more men in northeastern France than it could replace. The official U.S. Army casualty figures for the European Theater of Operations in 1944 were 47,423 in July, 59,196 in August and 30,937 in September. More than 70 percent of the casualties came from the infantry. Weiss blamed General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, who “froze the Army at 7.7 million men, and allocated 3.2 million of the ‘best and brightest’ to the Air Force. By reducing the Army from two hundred divisions to eighty, he placed the responsibility of success on the 750,000 frontline soldiers worldwide, and I was one of them, as part of a chain gang.” Without rear echelon units being rotated into combat, giving the regular infantry divisions time off, the bulk of the fighting fell to fewer than 10 percent of the men. Respite would come only with death, injury, capture or desertion.

  Senior officers were aware of the system’s shortcomings, both on the GIs and the Allied campaign. The commander of the 80th Infantry Division, Major General Horace Logan McBride, discussed the dearth of troops in late 1944 with the assistant chief of staff for G-1 (personnel), Colonel Joseph James O’Hare, of the 12th Army Group. Between the West Pointers from the class of 1916, O’Hare was “Red” and McBride was “Mac.” Mac wrote:

  To me the personnel system of the Army during the war has functioned abominably. It has been the greatest single obstacle in the training and fighting of a combat division.

  Until the replacements are considered a class of supply, just like ammunition, gasoline or rations, and a reserve built up in the units prior to entry into combat, the problem will never be satisfactorily solved. The first day of combat brings its casualties and replacements for these casualties, under the present system, do not become available to the unit until 3 or 4 days later. Consequently, the unit’s effective strength decreases during the first, second and third day to a point where the fighting strength of the rifle units approaches zero. Furthermore, in order to keep these units going it is necessary to feed replacements in during actual combat with a resultant injustice to the individual concerned and a failure to raise the combat efficiency of the unit corresponding to the number of replacements absorbed. We have had occasions where squad and platoon leaders received replacements after dark and had to move forward in the attack before daylight, not even getting a chance to see their men to be able to recognize them.

  McBride’s letter underscored an aspect of the replacement strategy that militated against Weiss’s transfer to the OSS: “The return to the Division of previous members of the Division is of vital importance,” General O’Hare replied to Mac a few days later. Conceding that troop resupply remained inefficient, Red cautioned,

  However, we now find ourselves totally out of infantry rifle replacements because of the War Department’s inability to ship the numbers that are necessary and were requisitioned. For example, 25,000 infantrymen were requisitioned for November, but at the present date only 13,000 have arrived, and the remaining 12,000 of the November requisition will arrive some time in December. Further, the requisition of this category for December was for 67,000, but the War Department has stated that it will be able to furnish only 30,750, so you can see that when the supply is so small and the demand is as great as it is, we are forced to have necessary control measures.

  While the army had sound reasons for returning Steve Weiss to the infantry, he sensed it was treating him “just like ammunition, gasoline or rations” to be fed into the front line. The OSS needed the skills of a now-experienced Resistance and special forces operative just as much as Charlie Company required a first scout, but bureaucratic inflexibility gave precedence to the demands of a soldier’s original unit. When Weiss was ordered back to the 36th, Lieutenant Rickerson and his men said they were sorry to lose him. On 3 October, he turned nineteen and soon left Grenoble doubting he would live to see twenty.

  • • •

  An OSS sergeant drove him from Grenoble to Lyons, the best place to catch a ride on a supply truck heading east. The noncom suggested Weiss take a short rest in Lyons before returning to the front. Friends of his, he said, could offer him a room for a few days. “I was slow to answer,” Weiss wrote, “but in the end I reluctantly agreed.”

  The sergeant’s friends were a married couple in their early thirties named Ronnie and Olga Dahan. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment with their nine-year-old son, Gerri, who was away at a school in the countryside. After introductions and a few drinks, the Dahans lent Weiss the boy’s room. As Weiss came to know the couple, they confided details of their life. They had fled their home in Paris when the Germans occupied the city on 14 June 1940. Olga was British and faced internment as an enemy alien with the other British women at Frontstalag 194 in the Vosges resort of Vittel. Ronnie had an even more pressing reason for flight: he was Jewish. After France and Germany signed the armistice of 22 June 1940 dividing France into occupied and unoccupied zones, the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Pétain assumed control of Lyons. Jews felt marginally safer under Vichy rule than in the German-occupied north. On 11 November 1942, in response to the Allied invasion of French North Africa, Germany occupied Lyons along with most of the other areas under Vichy jurisdiction. Mussolini’s Italy was allowed to seize a small part along its border with France. When the Nazis arrived in Lyons, the Dahans had no escape route. Ronnie Dahan paid the Spanish consul a vast sum to declare his apartment a neutral Spanish residence that could not be violated. (The American embassy in Paris in 1940 had issued similar documents to American citizens in France to prevent the Germans from requisitioning their properties. The Germans for the most part honored them until Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941.)

  Lyons fell under the terror of Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. A zealous SS functionary since 1935, Barbie detained Jews, Roma, Communists, homosexuals, Freemasons and suspected résistants. His ferocity, which included torturing to death the Resistance leader Jean Moulin in 1943, made life for Jews hiding in Lyons more precarious than in almost any other part of France. Barbie, who did much of the torturing himself, boasted in a letter to his superiors of rounding up forty-one children from a Jewish care home and sending them to their deaths. Despite the Spanish consular certificate on the Dahans’ door, the Germans raided the flat one day only hours after Ronnie had gone out. A suspicious Gestapo official took an interest in their son, Gerri. Setting the boy on his lap, he casually asked when he had last seen his father. Gerri replied, “About a week ago.”

  Ronnie Dahan spent some nights at home during the German occupation, but he disappeared early each morning. While Steve Weiss was his guest, he took him to his place of refuge. It was a short walk from his and Olga’s flat through streets “crowded with push carts, itinerant peddlers, and shabbily dressed apartment dwellers.” Before they arrived, Ronnie asked Weiss not to reveal to Olga anything he saw. Weiss wondered why, especially since the Germans had left. Dahan explained that his safe house belonged to a young woman named Laure. “You can’t hide in a sewer twenty-four hours a day,” Ronnie told him. “If the dogs don’t find you, the rats will. See what I mean? What’s required is a safe house, unknown to your family, an ordinary place that you can enter and leave without raising a neighbor’s suspicions. Laure offered that chance to me.” Laure was Ronnie’s mistress. “She was slender, dark-haired, and of medium height with angular Mediterranean features,” Weiss remembered. It was a short visit, during which Ronnie gave her some money. Seeing ho
w close the two were, Weiss refrained from moralizing. “Whatever their level of intimacy,” he wrote, “stranger things had happened during the Occupation than one woman hiding another woman’s husband.”

  After Klaus Barbie left Lyons with the rest of the German forces, the city was the scene of savage battles between the Milice and the maquis that the French regular army was barely able to control. When fighting ended, Jews and other targets of Nazi persecution came out of hiding. The city was in no state—bridges destroyed, industries bombed, buildings demolished and food scarce—to offer the whole population the sustenance it needed. Lyons that October was as cold as winter, and most houses lacked coal for heating.

  Ronnie and Olga introduced Weiss to a woman traumatized by having witnessed the Gestapo beat her father to death in a public street. She was in her thirties, and the murder had happened a few months earlier. Ronnie asked Steve to appear at her hospital bed, an American soldier in uniform, to assure her that the liberation was real and the Germans would not return. Her own family, the Dahans and a few other friends gathered around her and introduced Private Stephen J. Weiss of the United States Army. She and her children, they said, were safe at last. Her husband sat beside her. Weiss wrote, “She looked straight through me without a flicker of recognition, nor did she understand what her friends were saying.” When Ronnie told Steve later that her husband had found another woman, Weiss reflected, “I felt aggrieved and out of my depth.”

  Weiss stayed with Ronnie and Olga for nine days, during which he recovered from his dysentery, flu and nervous disorder. He now had to return to duty. The Dahans were disappointed and made him promise to return at the end of the war. With the Germans withdrawing from France at speed, they believed their reunion was not far off. Steve had grown close to Ronnie, a fellow secular Jew and wise older-brother figure, and to Olga, one of the few civilians he met whose first language was English. They made him feel part of their family. Reflecting years later on his time in France, Weiss said, “The relationship I did make, which was for life, was with the family in Lyons.”

  Nineteen-year-old Steve Weiss left Lyons alone, hitching rides with any Allied driver who would give him a lift while incessant rain drenched him and his duffel bag. A morbid fear of serving again under Captain Simmons and reliving the inhuman life of a combat infantryman overwhelmed him. He went anyway.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Army is organized throughout for one single purpose—fighting.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 325

  BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1944, the U.S. military in the European Theater of Operations found itself waging war on an unexpected front. While its divisions battled the Wehrmacht in eastern France, American service personnel, in league with French criminals, were plundering Allied supplies. This too was a shooting war, in which Americans fought one another. Victory over the Nazis depended on defeating the criminals. Soldiers at the front could not fight without weapons, ammunition, rations, petrol, boots and blankets. Some couldn’t survive without cigarettes. A front-page story in the Washington Post reported, “This was demonstrated most forcibly last September when Patton’s tanks reached the Siegfried Line and ran dry, while ‘Army trucks were backed up the whole length of the Champs Elysees with GIs selling gas by the canful and cigarettes by the carton.’” An army study of the problem admitted,

  The organization of the Military Railway Service in Northern France did not provide for adequate protection of freight in transit. In Southern France, Military Police units were assigned to the Military Railway Service for this purpose. Almost from the beginning of operations on the Continent, the problem of protecting supplies in transit was of major magnitude, particularly in Northern France during the first five months of operation.

  Allied use of the railways expanded as troops pushed back the German lines. By 15 August, one functioning line carried supplies from the port of Cherbourg to Le Mans. By 1 September, Allied rail services reached Paris and its network of lines to most of the country. From July’s daily total of only 1,520 tons of freight, shipments increased to 11,834 tons a day by September. All that bounty in war-starved France, unguarded by military police, tempted black market merchants who had flourished under the German occupation. Allied deserters, as well as serving officers and men, cooperated with the criminal underworld to drain the lifeblood of the frontline soldier. Many of the thieves were former infantrymen, as the army weekly magazine, Yank, noted.

  They went AWOL from their units, which were mostly moving on beyond Paris, and stayed behind where the market and the money were. They moved into the upper brackets and became racketeers. Some of these men had minor criminal records in civilian life. When the opportunity for profitable crime came into their Army life they seized it. The biggest profits were in gasoline and trucking rather than rations, so most GI gangsters switched to these rackets.

  Yank added that some combat soldiers were “temporarily AWOL from the front, who came back to Paris looking for a brief fling at the bright lights, liquor and women, and found things so pleasant they forgot about going back to their units.” In late September 1944, the U.S. Army Provost Marshal’s Office arrested twenty-seven American deserters working on the black market in Paris. One of them, who had been a truck driver, had 51,000 francs (about $1,000) from illegal sales of petrol.

  Lacking enough military policemen to prevent large-scale pilfering, the army withdrew troops from combat to protect trains, convoys and supply dumps. Soldiers rode in goods vans, patrolled railway yards and stood guard at depots. For any combat soldier, guard duty in Paris was a welcome respite from battle. In late September, as the menace grew, the army looked for guards among the troops who had just won the forty-day battle for Brest.

  Soon after the Americans conquered the port, which fighting and German demolition had rendered unusable to Allied shipping, nineteen-year-old Private First Class Harold G. Barkley of Quincy, Illinois, rejoined the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment. Having suffered a severe shoulder wound from a phosphorus-tipped bullet fired by a tank’s machine gun in Normandy, he had been evacuated to a hospital in England. Speaking to other 2nd Infantry Division soldiers at their bivouac near Brest at Saint-Divy, he learned that most of the men in his squad were dead. The survivors were preparing for transfer east to confront the German border fortifications known as the Siegfried Line. One lucky battalion, though, would go to Paris as train guards. A lottery among VIII Corps regiments awarded the assignment to the 38th Infantry. Commanders of its three battalions drew straws to determine which would go to Paris and which to the German frontier. The winner was Lieutenant Colonel Jack K. Norris, commander of the 2nd Battalion.

  On 26 September, while trucks carried most of the division toward Germany, the 2nd Battalion traveled to Paris. Among them were Private Barkley and Corporal Alfred T. Whitehead. “My thoughts went back to Timmiehaw in Normandy,” Whitehead wrote. “He said I’d make it to Paris, and now I was on my way.” Barkley and Whitehead made no mention of each other in their war recollections, despite the fact that they were in the same battalion. Both remembered Paris duty as their best in France. They reached the darkened city at about midnight on 1 October. Barkley and the rest of Company G settled into the Hôtel Nouveau in the eastern suburb of Vincennes. Whitehead, whose Headquarters Company was billeted near the Eiffel Tower at 1 avenue Charles Floquet, went straight to a bar. He wrote,

  The people there were all friendly and gave me all I wanted to drink, and wouldn’t let me pay for a thing, but I watched them all closely, not trusting any of them—I remembered the two GIs with their heads cut off. I walked back to our vehicles where I spent the night under a truck.

  While guard duty was safer than combat, it was nonetheless an important job. Whitehead, Barkley and their comrades resented the black marketeers, who deprived frontline infantrymen like themselves of necessities for survival. Neither questioned their orders for dealing with looters: shoot to kill. Barkley’s s
on Cleve, based on his father’s reminiscences, wrote, “Thugs and AWOL soldiers working as black marketeers were relieving some supply trains of as much as 95% of their cargoes before they reached the supply dumps at the front.” Whitehead was disgusted that “French renegades were looting supply cars of all descriptions, along with the aid of numerous American GIs who gave a black name to the whole business, while causing shortages of food and fuel on the front lines.” The battalion history recorded, “They knew what it was to go without cigarettes, and a clean change of clothes; now while engaged in guard duty, they did their utmost to prevent wastage or theft of these sorely needed supplies.”

  Both Whitehead and Barkley rode in open trucks on trains that moved slowly to frontline supply depots. Trains made frequent stops, when their armed guards jumped off and patrolled both sides of the tracks to deter thieves. A journey could take a few days, and the men slept in shifts. Whitehead wrote that an officer in the uniform of a full colonel ordered the diversion of several carriages from a station near the Belgian border. Whitehead’s platoon sergeant refused. “Hell,” the “colonel” said, “I outrank you, sergeant, and I am going to switch these cars off.” Whitehead claimed that, as the “colonel” attempted to detach the rolling stock, the sergeant shot him dead.

  The battalion’s unpublished history noted that Headquarters Company “daily staged an informal guard mount under the famed Eiffel Tower. The guard detail, very ‘spoony’ looking in their white gloves, newly painted helmets, and polished boots, was always a source of interest to the French people who crowded around to watch each day’s ceremony.”

  Whitehead got drunk on his time off as often as he had in Texas and Wisconsin. He also frequented Paris’s many whorehouses. Barkley rarely drank and avoided the brothels of Pigalle, the risqué quarter that the GIs called Pig Alley. Yet it was Barkley, an otherwise conscientious soldier, who robbed a train. His escapades with the black market began innocently, while he was guarding a depot in Paris. A Frenchman asked him if he had anything to sell, and Barkley pulled from his pocket a tin of polish for waterproofing boots. Neither spoke the other’s language. Barkley made a gesture as if he were spreading the unguent on bread and said, “Mmm.” This seemed to satisfy the Frenchman, who paid Barkley a hundred francs. Another man offered him a bottle of cognac in exchange for a five-gallon jerrican of petrol. The can Barkley gave him held more water than petrol, but the Frenchman’s bottle turned out to contain more water than cognac.