“Rebuffed and angry, I packed my meager belongings, thanked the colonel and Santorini for their efforts on my behalf and left in search of the 36th,” Weiss wrote. Division headquarters was fifty miles east of Vittel in the town of Remiremont, about a day’s drive on France’s narrow and crowded rural highways. Weiss walked to the road and put out his thumb.
The 36th Division had captured Remiremont on 23 September. On 24 September, it moved its command post forward to Éloyes and on 1 October to an old house in the town of Docelles beside a bombed-out bridge over the river Moselle. In Docelles, their advance stalled. The division’s command post was stuck in Docelles for twenty-one days, its longest time in a single location since the August invasion. “The 36th was back to the old Italian situation of mud, mountains and mules,” one officer wrote, “but we had very few mules.” The next main objective, Bruyères, was only seven and a half miles away. However, against entrenched German positions, high mountains, dense forests, rain and mud, it might have been a hundred.
• • •
On 8 October, a new replacement joined the ranks of Weiss’s Company C, 1st Battalion, 143rd Regiment, at Docelles. He was Private First Class Frank Turek, a good-looking twenty-two-year-old Polish-American draftee from Hartford, Connecticut. His arrival, however, did little to fill the void left by the many men who had disappeared from the ranks. Four days later, Columbus Day, Thursday, 12 October, Steve Weiss walked into 36th Division headquarters. The 143rd Regiment’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Frazior, recalled his relief on learning that Weiss, following the other seven men from the missing squad, had returned: “I remember it distinctly, because we were so glad to get them back!” Unfortunately for Weiss, Frazior was not at divisional headquarters to express his relief. Instead, a “bored headquarters clerk” ignored him for a few minutes before asking what he wanted. Weiss gave his name and unit. Looking at his file, the clerk told him his family had been informed he was missing in action. Weiss thought of his mother, father and sister in Brooklyn. “I was sure they were overwhelmed with anxiety,” he wrote. The clerk showed no interest in Weiss’s problems and failed to offer him coffee from a pot brewing nearby. An officer came in and asked Weiss if he would consider working in his headquarters office. He would, but their superiors quickly rejected the request. That afternoon, Weiss got a lift four miles forward of Docelles to Charlie Company’s command post in a forest halfway to Bruyères.
Captain Simmons had yet to return from the aid station, where he had gone for treatment of a sniper’s bullet in his neck. Commanding Company C in his absence was the executive officer, Lieutenant Russell Darkes. Darkes, a twenty-four-year-old officer candidate school (OCS) graduate from Mount Zion, Pennsylvania, did not acknowledge Private Weiss’s return. While not expecting a warm homecoming, Weiss resented being treated “just like ammunition, petrol or rations.” It bothered him that no officers shook his hand, despite needing him so much that they rejected his transfer to the OSS and several other units. No soldier, according to a survey of GI opinion called “What the Soldier Thinks,” welcomed such impersonal treatment. “Men resent being treated as ‘manpower’ in the abstract,” the report on troops who fought between December 1942 and September 1945 stated. “They want to retain their essential dignity as human beings.” One soldier wrote on his survey form, “Treat them as men not dogs.”
Officially, army policy was for officers to put their men first. “The good leader had faith in human nature,” Colonel L. Holmes Ginn, Jr., of the army medical section, wrote in his report on combat exhaustion. “He knew his men, he was their friend, he insisted they be treated as human beings, he looked after their wants, and he was firm but just in his dealings with them.”
While Weiss stood in a cavernous farmhouse command post that had no furniture or other sign of human habitation, only one person spoke to him. It was his old platoon sergeant, a tall and amiable Texan named Lawrence Kuhn. Kuhn smiled and said, “Reigle told me you were alive.”
Weiss, grateful for the only greeting on offer, asked Kuhn about his squad leader, Sergeant Harry Shanklin. Kuhn hesitated, then said, “Shanklin’s dead.” A German patrol had killed him in a firefight near the river Moselle a few weeks before. Weiss felt sick, remembering Shanklin’s friendly grin and “boyish good looks.” The twenty-two-year-old Shanklin had led him from the beach at Saint-Raphaël all the way to Valence, sustaining the squad’s morale and protecting them from unnecessary danger. “When Harry Shanklin was killed,” Weiss said, “I was devastated.” A few hours later, as the sun was setting, Weiss moved up to a woodland clearing where the men of Charlie Company were coming off the line for the night.
The first friends he saw were Bob Reigle and Settimo Gualandi, who had been with him in the Resistance and the OSS. Reigle and Gualandi, now a sergeant, were happy to see him. The three GIs rested on the soft earth, and Weiss asked about Sergeant William Scruby. Reigle had bad news. Scruby, whose ingenuity had saved them from death or capture in the irrigation canal near Valence, was gone. A mortar shell blew his leg off two weeks before, and he was unlikely to survive. Sheldon Wohlwerth had taken German machine-gun rounds in his chest, and he too had been evacuated with little hope of making it. Weiss noticed that the other three guys from their Resistance service, Fawcett, Garland and Caesar, were also absent. Of the eight, only Reigle, Gualandi and now Weiss himself were in the line. The other men in their old squad were replacements. This was bad enough, but Weiss was assigned to another squad where he knew no one.
“I was just nineteen,” Weiss recalled. “When I got back, half of the others were dead. I felt so alienated, so nonexistent.” Every man there had troubles, and Weiss’s were no worse than anyone else’s. However, returning from the land of the living, he detected changes in the others that they did not see in themselves. The men around him, especially Reigle and Gualandi, were not as he remembered. Combat exhaustion was etched into each face as sharp as a bullet hole.
Weiss recognized an ex-trainee from Fort Blanding, thirty-year-old Private Clarence Weidaw, quietly eating his rations. Weiss walked over and said, “Weidaw, it’s me, Steve.” Weidaw went on eating. “Weidaw’s gone mute on us,” another soldier said. “The Krauts had him trapped in a hayloft. He wouldn’t surrender, so after they pulverized the hayloft and set it alight, Weidaw jumped and escaped under a hail of fire.” Since then, the private had not said a word.
“Why did you come back?” Weiss’s friends asked. Reigle said he should have stayed away. All that he and Gualandi had known since their return were “S-mines, booby-traps, mortars, machine guns and heavy-duty artillery,” but not sleep or a few hours out of danger. “Why did you come back?” Weiss wasn’t sure. He said maybe it was because he was loyal. “Loyal,” his comrades laughed. “Are you kidding? You’ll be dead in a month.” As if confirming their prediction, a German reconnaissance plane soared overhead and, undoubtedly, reported their position to its artillery batteries. This was war, the real war, the infantry war, and Weiss was back in it.
Weiss’s first night on the line turned freezing, unbearable for soldiers in summer uniforms. Lieutenant John D. Porter, a platoon commander in the Vosges, wrote, “Poor supply of a critical Class II item, winter clothing, was responsible for much of the trench-foot and respiratory diseases.” Some of the men sought warmth in a farmhouse. Weiss joined them inside. Suddenly, German artillery peppered the ground around the house. Outside, men asleep in tents, “vulnerable and unprotected, were pulverized. . . . Screams and shouts mingled with the whine and crump of shells.” Weiss and the others ran out of the house to assist the wounded, but the shelling cut them off from one another. Weiss took shelter in a covered pen, where two goats trembled in fear. More shells shattered the pen’s door and roof. Weiss wrote that, when the barrage stopped,
I ran into the woods. Thirty men had been killed and wounded, their thin canvas tents had been torn to shreds. Tent poles were splintered; blood-stained blank
ets and combat packs were strewn all over the tangled earth. . . . More medics and stretcher bearers arrived from Docelles by ambulance to care for the wounded and to collect the dead.
“No foxholes had been dug,” Weiss observed, one of many signs that the men were too exhausted to take the basic precautions they had taken earlier in the war.
The next day, the squad waited in a barn to collect bullets and grenades, knowing that fresh supplies meant more combat. With so many dead and so few to replace them, Platoon Sergeant Kuhn asked Weiss to take over as squad leader with the rank of staff sergeant. He refused. “I didn’t want the responsibility for eleven other guys,” he said. Instead, he settled for assistant squad leader as a buck sergeant. A lieutenant he had never met came out of a bunker a night later to issue orders. Weiss was to lead the eleven men of his new squad through a dense mass of trees into no-man’s-land. Weiss’s first scout was trembling, and the second scout stared toward an infinite horizon. The men were not in any shape to face the enemy, but they marched behind Weiss through the moonless night forward of the American lines. Waist-high bushes wet with autumn rain drenched the troops’ summer uniforms. None of the landmarks that the lieutenant had described was there. In the dense woods, the men sensed Germans behind every rock, a booby trap in every tree and a land mine under every step. When the second scout starting quivering, Weiss assured him he would be fine. He felt that the GI was reacting like “a sane young man to insane circumstances.”
The squad came back without finding any Germans. The lieutenant upbraided Weiss for failing to achieve the objective. “Easy for him to complain,” Weiss wrote, “from his large protected dugout wrapped around him like a full length fur coat.”
Weiss overheard a southern soldier in a foxhole nearby. “You never see any Jews up on the front,” he drawled. “They’re always behind the lines working as doctors or dentists.” It was bad enough returning to the infantry and fighting in freezing mountains, but he resented this reminder that the Nazis were not the only racists in the war. For the first time, “The thought of clearing out entered my mind.”
• • •
This was day one of the offensive to capture Bruyères. To reinforce the village’s natural protections, which included the Vologne River to the south and tank-resistant marshlands on two sides, German engineers had felled and booby-trapped large pine trees to block the roads. Interlocking machine-gun positions surrounded the village, and strongpoints in sturdy stone houses guarded the passes. One American platoon commander wrote, “The discovery of a machine gun battalion in the defense of Bruyères alerted U.S. Intelligence that the Kraut intended to make a permanent stand in this sector. Machine gun battalions were never used unless the enemy was attempting to hold the position permanently.”
At 8:00 that morning of 15 October, elements of the 36th Division moved through the Forêt-de-Faite to take the first objective, called Hill A. The Germans responded with small-arms and automatic-weapons fire, but the T-Patchers pushed about four hundred yards forward to another hill overlooking the village. Renewed mortar and artillery fire stalled the American advance at the summit.
The squad dug in for protection against the night’s German artillery and mortars. Between impacts, they discussed their reasons for staying in the army. An older veteran told Weiss he would have left the outfit but for one reason: “Blackmail.” Weiss did not understand. “Married with a kid,” he said. A German shell exploded near their foxhole. “I’d leave in a flash, but for the wife and kid.” Another artillery round rattled the earth, and the soldier raised his voice: “No government allotment check means no support for the wife and no milk for the baby.” A new replacement, aged thirty-eight and with a wife and baby back in Brooklyn, sought counsel from Weiss the veteran. “What can I do to stay alive?” he asked. Suddenly, the teenaged soldier was playing “old man” to someone twice his age. He had no answer, but he tried: “Watch me, and do as I do. Don’t be too cautious, and don’t be too aggressive. Choose somewhere in between.” It was pure Hollywood, and Weiss felt like a fraud. Nothing guaranteed survival.
When the sun rose on 16 October, the Japanese-American, or “Nisei,” 442nd Regimental Combat Team, recently incorporated into the 36th following its unparalleled achievements on the Italian front, advanced through German roadblocks toward Hill B. American engineering units tried to clear the roads of the fallen trees and ordnance that the Nisei regiment had penetrated, until the Germans fired and drove them back. All morning, the Germans deployed fresh artillery shells from their home bases to devastate the Americans between Laval and Bruyères. More GIs were dying, and there were no troops to replace most of them.
At 7:30 that morning, German artillery pounded the American positions to an intensity that no human psyche was constituted to withstand. Private Stephen James Weiss of Company C, 1st Battalion, 143rd Regimental Combat Team, 36th U.S. Infantry Division, shook with each tremor of the earth. His foxhole was no protection from the assault of steel and fire. Men around him were dying. It was more than he could take. He went over the hill.
BOOK III
Military Justice
TWENTY-FIVE
“Giving up” is nature’s way of protecting the organism against too much pain.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 347
STEVE WEISS WANDERED DEEP INTO THE FOREST, each step taking him farther from the artillery that rocked the ground behind him. He stumbled onto a footpath, unconsciously following its course through a thick pine labyrinth. A light rain soaked his shoulders and spread down his body. Shivering with cold and dragging his rifle, Weiss walked for two and a half hours. The trail took him to a clearing near a small village. French 2nd Armored Division tank crews, mostly Arabs and Berbers from North Africa, were roasting fresh lamb over a log fire. They offered Weiss a share of their food, but what he wanted was a place to sleep. They showed him a barn just beyond their circled tanks. At the top of a ladder, he carved a bunk in the hay and lay down beside his rifle. Coma-like unconsciousness overcame him. It was just before noon on 16 October.
A day or two later, Weiss woke up. When he went outside to relieve himself, his Arab hosts gave him something to eat. In a brief conversation, Weiss and the tankers discovered they had all fought in Italy and were first-timers in France. Weiss returned to the loft and fell immediately asleep.
• • •
At the 36th Division headquarters in Docelles on 19 October 1944, a general court-martial convened to consider the case against Lieutenant Albert C. Homcy for violating Article of War 75, “Misbehavior before the enemy.” His alleged offense was refusing to obey an order to lead unqualified service troops, all of them cooks, bakers and orderlies, against German tanks the previous August. Homcy’s counsel, Major Benjamin F. Wilson, Jr., raised a peremptory challenge to one member of the court panel. As a result, the president of the court, Lieutenant Colonel David P. Faulkner, withdrew. Another member, Major Harry B. Kelton, replaced him. Lieutenant Homcy, who had been cited in Italy for “exceptionally meritorious conduct . . . under almost constant enemy artillery and mortar fire,” could not easily be charged with cowardice. Yet he had disobeyed an order. Homcy testified that he could not, in accord with his duties as an officer, lead untrained men to certain death. His admission that he had disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer left the court little option but to convict him, because the officers on the panel would not rule on the legality or wisdom of orders. The court sentenced him to dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and fifty years at hard labor. Five members of the court submitted a clemency petition that recommended suspending his sentence and allowing him to return to duty. The 36th Division judge advocate, however, rejected clemency and confirmed the sentence.
The court, as subsequent disclosures at the appellate level made clear, had been under undue influence from the 36th Division’s commander, General Dahlquist. Lieutenant Colonel David Faulkner had been the main conduit of Dah
lquist’s pressure, which explained why defense counsel Wilson had asked for him to be removed from the panel. The other officers, as they would later testify, knew of Dahlquist’s insistence on convictions “for the good of the service.” Court member Captain Lowell E. Sitton admitted that he felt “intimidated” and “vividly” recalled “that severe pressures were applied to court martial boards in his [Dahlquist’s] division at or about the time of [Homcy’s] trial to make findings of guilty ‘for the good of the service’ without regard to the rights of the individual or the merits of the particular case in question.” The president of the court, Major Kelton, and other officers on the panel remembered being subjected to the same influence. Court member Captain Eldon R. McRobert said Dahlquist came to him personally:
He said that we were not doing our job, as we were being too lenient to the soldiers being tried, that we should find more of them guilty and if they were found guilty then we should assess a stronger sentence than we had been doing. He also gave us a very strong reprimand that we had not been doing our job and made a statement to the effect that if it were not so much trouble he would make this a matter of record and report it on our military records.
McRobert further recalled a meeting between the court-martial board and Dahlquist during Homcy’s trial:
After the Court-Martial Board left General Dahlquist’s headquarters, after he had given the verbal reprimand, we had discussed among all members present and I am sure that I remember without exception that each of us felt that our private rights had been invaded and that General Dahlquist had no authority to do what he had done.
Another panel member, Captain Isidore Charkatz, stated that Dahlquist intervened directly in other cases, including that of a soldier found “not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity.” Dahlquist called Charkatz a few days after the verdict and “gave me a strong verbal reprimand. . . . I was asked to take a letter to each member of the Board to be read and signed and then returned to the General.”
The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Page 24