The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  One night, Barkley and two other soldiers crept into the railway yard. They searched out a goods van filled with looted fur pelts left behind by the Germans. Barkley convinced himself that, because they belonged to no one, the pelts would not be missed. The three GIs grabbed bundles of fur and fled. Barkley delivered his to two young women, Paulette and Elaine, he had befriended a few weeks before. They kissed him again and again in thanks. This was the extent of his black market career, for which other train guards might have shot him dead.

  Al Whitehead rotated between protecting supply stores and guarding trains. On one train that stopped somewhere outside Paris, he noticed two black GIs approaching. One of them stopped and said, “Hey, look, they got a guard on this train.” That was enough for Whitehead to level his Thompson submachine gun at them and say, “Yes, and all I want you to do is lay your hands on this train. That’s all I want you to do. By God, I’m just itching to fill you full of lead.”

  Paris was becoming lawless, as goods stolen from the army flooded the city’s black market. Joyriders used contraband petrol to prowl the capital in cars that they had not been allowed to drive under the Germans. American cigarettes were so abundant that they were selling for $1.60 a pack, about a third less than the usually cheap French cigarettes. On 13 October, two American deserters, Privates Morris Fredericks and Turner Harris, robbed a café in Montmartre and made off with $42,000 in jewelry, bonds and cash from the owner and his customers. The two soldiers, one white and one black, had been living for the previous two months in a hotel on sales of stolen army petrol. Three other deserters were apprehended in another Paris hotel with eleven thousand packs of cigarettes. Deserters fought gun battles in the streets with MPs and Parisian gendarmes.

  The 2nd Battalion’s efforts were, Wade Werner reported from Paris in the Washington Post, “cutting thefts down to manageable proportions.” He explained, “It has been found that men who themselves suffered shortages at the front as the result of pilfering now are the best watchdogs for the supply trains.” Commanders praised the men for “a job superbly done in efficiently organizing and accomplishing the duties of guarding the thousands of tons of supplies.” By early November, the Paris idyll was drawing to a close. The men mustered in a Paris auditorium to receive new orders. A colonel took the stage and declared, “Half of you sitting here today will probably not make it back. We’re going to crack the Siegfried Line!” The men were stunned. Harold Barkley whispered to a friend, “I wonder which half he was talking about.”

  Al Whitehead sent a telegram to his wife, Selma, in Wisconsin. It amused him that the cable’s arrival would make her fear for a moment that he had been killed in action. He imagined her relief, when she read, “You are more than ever in my thoughts at this time. All my love, Al.” He had pictures taken at a photographer’s studio to send to her. As he left the studio, he noticed a crowd in which two Frenchmen were about to shave the heads of young women for having slept with Germans. “It made me mad anyway,” he wrote, “and in a flash I waded in and pistol whipped the two Frenchmen, ran them both off, and left the crowd standing there with mouths agape.”

  On 10 November, Whitehead’s battalion boarded a train at the Gare Montparnasse. The next morning at 11:00, as the train moved slowly east, 2nd Division artillery unleashed all its guns on the German lines. Along with mortar and small-arms fire, the volley commemorated the Armistice of 1918. This time, there would be no armistice. The Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender. Whitehead, Barkley and the rest of the men heading toward the Siegfried Line sensed they would fight until the war or their own lives came to an end.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Most serious of all the causes for an epidemic of dissension is the bad leader.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, pp. 326–27

  THE MEN OF THE U.S. 36TH INFANTRY DIVISION had fought a hard, relentless war in the six weeks since their retreat from Valence and the disappearance of Steve Weiss’s squad. Their next engagement began a day after Valence and lasted a terrifying week. The struggle for what became known as the Montélimar Battle Square ended without a victor, as the battered German Nineteenth Army escaped the Seventh Army’s trap on 30 August. Then, because of a shortage of artillery shells, the 36th failed to stop the Germans on Route 7. Pursuing the enemy at midnight on the thirtieth, General Dahlquist hoped to engage the Germans before they regrouped. The next day, the 36th Division reversed its setback of 24 August by liberating Valence. On 2 September, the Free French army captured Lyons with vital assistance from the 36th. France’s third largest city, which was 260 miles north of the August invasion beaches, had fallen to the Allies two months ahead of Operation Dragoon’s original schedule. Troop morale soared.

  Despite formidable Wehrmacht resistance, the Texas Division initially advanced on foot at the astounding rate of ten miles a day. On 7 September, the 36th crossed the river Loue and trudged through mud and forest to the river Doubs. Engineers reconstructed a steel bridge that the Germans had blown, allowing men and tanks to cross to the eastern bank and continue their pursuit of the enemy. On 9 September, the heaviest autumn rains in years burst over France. Two days later, north of the Burgundian market town of Autun, Allied forces from the Riviera linked up with the troops who had landed at Normandy. Operation Dragoon had achieved its primary objective, joining its forces to Eisenhower’s.

  The momentum that had propelled the Seventh Army from the Mediterranean to Lorraine was drowning in the early autumn storms. The Americans suffered shortages of men and supplies. Operation Dragoon’s three advancing American divisions—the 3rd, 36th and 45th—lost 5,200 men in September. Only 1,800 replaced them, a shortfall of 3,400 soldiers. The 36th alone suffered another 1,045 casualties at the beginning of October, reducing its strength from 14,306 to around 10,000. Once again, the army was unable to replace most of them. The survivors, deprived of sleep and under constant threat of death, exhibited signs of severe strain. New men coming into the line at this time were usually killed within five days, and they too had to be replaced. The 36th’s daily advance of ten miles in the first half of September slowed to a few yards in the second half and came to a standstill by the beginning of October.

  “October was upon us,” wrote CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, “the October of eastern France, which is filled with dull cloud masses, the smell of manure in the villages, and the freezing rain which never ceases, so that one exists in a perpetual twilight and moves in a sodden morass of wet clothing and yellow clay.” With the change in weather, Sevareid detected a change in the war:

  The parade and pantry were finished; for the first time the enemy had beaten us to the high ground with time enough to organize a stand. His supplies were rushed to him in a hurry from their near-by stores within the Reich, while ours moved painfully through the mountains from the southern ports hundreds of miles away, the frozen drivers falling asleep at their wheels, frequently to die ignominiously in the mud of the ditches. Tempers grew short, there were long silences in any conversation, the honeymoon with the French civilians ceased by mutual withdrawal, and our men, who had known so much more war than most of those who invaded from England, remembered the Italian winter and began to long again for home.

  Morale collapsed among both replacements and veterans, as units fought below strength because of delays in dispatching replacements to the front. Until then, the 36th led the army’s infantry divisions in the number of decorations it received: 266 to its officers and 963 to the enlisted men. Major General John E. Dahlquist, the 36th Division’s commander, observed in September 1944 that his troops were losing both efficiency and aggressiveness. He also detected a steep decline in morale, which he measured in a manner familiar to military commanders throughout history: the percentage of men who avoided battle. Some soldiers were deliberately wounding themselves, and many did their best to contract trench foot and other illnesses. Some troops held back when ordered forward. Dahlquist wrote of “desertions a
mong the line infantry companies in combat (50–60 per division) and the ever-present straggler phenomenon.” Courts-martial convicted 1,963 soldiers in the European Theater of Operations of outright desertion and another 494 for “Misbehavior before the enemy” (which often included desertion in battle). Most received sentences of about twenty years at hard labor, and all but one of 139 death sentences for desertion were commuted. Special and summary courts-martial convicted more than 60,000 troops of being AWOL, and a further 5,834 cases of AWOL were serious enough to be tried by the more formal general courts-martial, which handed out sentences averaging fifteen years at hard labor. Dahlquist attributed some of the desertions to the heavy loss of officers and noncoms and their replacement by those lacking both field experience and acquaintance with the men they commanded. Desertion was an indication of poor leadership. Earlier in the war, Major General J. A. Ulio, the army’s advocate general, had written, “All officers, particularly those of company grade, and all non-commissioned officers, must understand that absenteeism is a serious reflection on leadership. They must develop that spirit of comradeship and responsibility among the men which is the best deterrent to absenteeism.”

  There was an added consideration, of which Dahlquist was aware: men who had survived the previous winter in Italy’s Apennines “had little stomach for another winter’s operations in French mountains.” Even soldiers who had not fought in Italy felt they had endured enough by late 1944. An army investigation noted, “The troops who had been fighting continuously all the way across France developed the feeling that they had done their part and should be afforded some relief.” The Seventh Army’s other two divisions, the 3rd and the 45th, had the same problems that the 36th did with officer casualties, morale loss and desertions. The 3rd Division commander, Major General John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, complained that his troops had lost the fighting spirit they brought with them to the beaches in August. One regiment of the 45th Infantry Division suffered forty-five troops coming off the line with “combat fatigue” in one week. Matters were exacerbated by the rain and mud, which caused skin infections and trench foot in conditions that did not allow soldiers to wash. Trapped in foxholes under enemy fire, the troops fought knee-deep in their own excrement. Furthermore, chronic shortages of ammunition due to the long supply route from Marseilles to the Alps meant that when the Americans caught up with the Germans, they were not always able to attack. The GIs called the failure to support them with sufficient ammunition a typical SNAFU, “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”

  The commander of Weiss’s 143rd Regiment, Colonel Paul D. Adams, reported to General Dahlquist that his men were experiencing physical and mental breakdowns that had dramatically increased desertions, self-inflicted wounds and combat exhaustion. Officers feared that the remaining troops would not stand up to German counterattacks. General Dahlquist saw that the men of the 36th Division, even when they were willing to fight, were too exhausted to do it properly. The official army history recorded, “Colonel Paul D. Adams, commanding the 143rd Infantry of the 36th Division, reported [to Dahlquist] an almost alarming physical and mental lethargy among the troops of his regiment, and General Dahlquist, the division commander, had to tell [VI Corps commander] General [Lucian] Truscott that the 36th had little punch left.” Adams’s 143rd Regiment was, in Dahlquist’s view, his best. If its men were suffering, morale was probably lower in the 141st and 142nd. Most of the riflemen in all three regiments had been given no respite from combat since they hit the beach near Saint-Raphaël two months earlier on 15 August.

  Colonel Adams told Dahlquist the men needed time off: “You give them three days and they’ll be back in shape without any trouble. Just leave them alone, let them eat and sleep for the first day, make them clean up the second day, and do whatever they want the rest of the time, and they’ll be ready to go.” The 36th had no choice but to raise the men’s spirits. Otherwise, unnecessary deaths and desertions would doom the assault on the High Vosges.

  Enlisted men were not the only victims of battle fatigue. When the Germans attacked Colonel Adams’s 1st Battalion forward of Remiremont in early October, he and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Frazior, led a reserve company into the battle to repel them. After reinforcing the line, Adams and Frazior drove back to base in an open jeep. Frazior fell asleep in mid-conversation, and Adams pretended not to notice. He regarded Frazior as “one of the finest men and one of the best battalion commanders anybody could ever have.” In the morning, Frazior announced, “It’s time for me to quit, because I’m in no shape to command this battalion.” Adams advised him to get more sleep, but Frazior was adamant that his exhaustion rendered him incapable of battlefield command. Adams knew that Frazior did not lack courage. In Italy, he had lost part of his hand fighting the Germans. Recuperating in a hospital in North Africa, he deserted to rejoin the battalion in time to lead it in the invasion of France. Frazior’s determination and integrity were never in doubt. Adams relieved him of command, but kept him in the regiment as his executive officer.

  Sensitive to the depth of his officers’ and men’s fatigue, Adams lodged a request with General Dahlquist to establish rest camps. Dahlquist approved, and the 36th’s first center for rest and recreation opened in early October ten miles west of Remiremont in the resort of Plombières-les-Bains. The 36th established a second rest camp at Bains-les-Bains a month later. In both, the soldiers were given drugs to let them sleep for at least a day, issued clean uniforms, allowed to shower and given hot food. After three days, which included entertainment and access to physicians and chaplains, the troops returned to duty. While this had a positive effect on the men who made it to the rest centers, there were not enough reserves to spare a majority of them from the front line.

  The 36th Division grew desperate for ammunition, petrol, rations, blankets, winter clothing and, most of all, men. It nonetheless assisted the French in liberating Dijon and reached the river Moselle on 21 September. Its weary men did not go much farther. Their next mission, in the words of Seventh Army’s G-2 (intelligence section), was to “clear approaches to passes of the VOSGES in zone, to seize terrain from which to launch an offensive designed to carry the Seventh Army through the VOSGES defenses to STRASBOURG and over the RHINE.” German units fortified the Vosges natural obstacles with bunkers, land mines, machine-gun emplacements and artillery to bleed the Americans for every yard they took.

  While much of the Seventh Army’s VI Corps dug into the foothills, the Germans were reorganizing their units on the heights and absorbing troop reinforcements from home. American supply lines stretched more than four hundred miles from the Mediterranean, but the Germans had edged closer to their supply bases in Alsace and Germany itself. For the first time, the Germans expended more artillery shells than the Americans. Autumn showers grounded Allied air support, increasing the defenders’ advantage in the mountains. If the American system was breaking down, so were the men. Division historian Colonel Vincent M. Lockhart put it succinctly: “Almost every adverse factor of combat faced the 36th Division in late September and October 1944.” Correspondence among senior officers increasingly referred to shortages of troops, ammunition, rations and winter clothing. The commanders observed it, but the men lived it. As more and more were killed, captured and wounded, and as others ran away, the need for manpower was greater than ever.

  That need, for Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 143rd Regiment, included Private Stephen J. Weiss. Weiss, taking one ride after another toward the 36th Division, passed much of the war-wrecked equipment that both the Allied and German armies had abandoned. Riding beside drivers of jeeps and trucks, he observed thousands of rear echelon troops who had never come near a battle. Every French town seemed to be filled with “pencil pushers” entertaining French women in cafés. Many of these “civilians in uniform,” as Weiss called them, were supplying their girlfriends with food and cigarettes intended for frontline troops. Tales of GIs working with the black ma
rket to steal and sell American petrol and other supplies, mainly from the port at Marseilles, bothered him. So did his conviction that the rear echelon boys were not pulling their weight. Although there were more than three million American troops in Europe, no more than 325,000 were in combat at the same time. The infantry, barely 14 percent of the total American military presence in Europe, suffered 70 percent of the casualties. Weiss’s sense of injustice, compounded by his misgivings about Captain Simmons, gnawed at him all the way to the front.

  Weiss reported to the headquarters of VI Corps, the main component of General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army, in Vittel. The brass had commandeered the 1920s Hôtel de l’Ermitage, one of the Alpine spa’s most luxurious establishments. Weiss met a fellow ex-trainee from Fort Blanding named Santorini in the hotel’s elegant art deco lobby. Santorini, who was working in counterintelligence, mentioned that his colonel needed a photolithographer. Weiss, with his year’s experience in photolithography for the Office of War Information in New York, was an ideal candidate. The colonel interviewed Weiss and requested authorization from the 36th Division for his transfer to counterintelligence. Not many troops were trained in photolithography, encouraging Weiss to believe he would avoid returning to Captain Simmons after all. The next morning, however, division turned the colonel down.