The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Homcy, formerly a lieutenant but now a private, was sent to the Disciplinary Training Barracks in Green Haven, New York, to begin fifty years at hard labor.

  • • •

  On 22 October, Weiss woke up again in the barn. Coming outside, he spoke to the North African tank crews and discovered his slumber had lasted six days. He thanked his hosts and retraced his steps through the forest. A few hours later, he snapped to attention in front of Captain Allan Simmons at Charlie Company’s new forward command post. Simmons was calm, more disappointed than vengeful. “You could have told me,” he said, in an unprecedented expression of sympathy. “Don’t you remember that, when we first met in Italy, I offered to be your priest, rabbi, friend and confidant, that you could come to me with your troubles?” Weiss did not recall Simmons speaking to him at all when he joined the 36th Division the previous June in Italy. Unable to speak, he wanted to say, “You never gave a damn. Aloof as always! You played it safe and never led from the front. Where the hell were you, when the fighting started, when the rest of us got knocked about? How come our casualty rate is consistently over one hundred percent a month and you, your second in command, Lieutenant Russell Darkes, and the company first sergeant are still around?”

  Simmons had, however, been wounded by shrapnel during the river Rapido crossing in Italy. When Simmons was taken to an aid station, his executive officer, Lieutenant Russell Darkes, crossed the river under fire. In an unpublished memoir, Darkes wrote that he and other Company C survivors “ended up in a shell hole on the German side of the River and were absolutely pinned down. . . . We finally made our way across the foot bridge in spite of the precarious condition, to the American side of the River. Upon our return, we discovered that the Battalion Commander and several of his staff members were either killed or wounded during the night.” The army awarded the then twenty-four-year-old Darkes the Silver Star for his actions that day. Weiss was unaware of the risks his company officers had taken, because he had not seen them leading from the front since he joined the division.

  Weiss kept silent, which may have spared him a court-martial for desertion or going absent without leave. Simmons did not press charges. All Weiss had to do was return to his squad. Weiss, though, did not move. He felt incapable of going back into the line. Would the captain let him unload rations and equipment for a few days, at least until he was fit to fight without endangering anyone else? He knew that other company commanders had assigned traumatized soldiers to noncombat duty to give them time to readjust. For officers, reassignment appeared to be automatic. When Lieutenant Colonel David Frazior was too exhausted to lead the 1st Battalion, Colonel Adams had simply made him his executive officer. Simmons declined Weiss’s request with one word: “Dismissed.”

  • • •

  Captain Simmons’s handling of Steve Weiss was a distinct contrast to the way another officer, Lieutenant Audie Murphy of the 3rd Division, treated a distressed man in his unit. Murphy, who had landed in the south of France at the same time as the 36th Division and had fought his way north across the same country, had been promoted from staff sergeant to lieutenant because he was an excellent soldier. When ordered to push through German lines and hold a position for another unit to cross through, he ordered his men to move out. One of the men, however, was sitting under a tree crying and shaking. Murphy gently shook him by the shoulder. This exchange followed:

  “I can’t take it any more, lieutenant.”

  “What’s come over you?”

  “I don’t know. I got the shakes.”

  “You can’t make it.”

  “If I could, I would. I’m not fooling.”

  “Stick around the C.P. The krauts may hit this spot.”

  “Yes sir. I’m ashamed, but I can’t help it.”

  “Have you got something on your mind?”

  “No sir. I just started shaking.”

  “Can you sleep?”

  “I haven’t slept in a week.”

  “You better report to the medics.”

  His head goes back to his knees, and the sobbing starts again.

  “What’s wrong with that joe? Battle-happy?” asks Candler.

  “Looks like he’s taken all he can.”

  “I know how he feels. Many’s the time I’ve just wanted to sit down and cry about the whole damned mess.”

  Weiss had taken all he could, but no one sent him to a medic. Instead, Captain Simmons returned him to the line in the hillside forests beyond the village of Bruyères. Since his departure, the 36th Division had captured Bruyères in a costly five-day battle that ended on 20 October. The final phase of the conquest was house-to-house fighting on 18 and 19 October. “No quarter was given and none was asked,” wrote one platoon commander. “The Germans fought desperately and would not even permit aid men to care for or evacuate the wounded.” The American forces in that struggle were Weiss’s 1st Battalion of the 143rd Regiment and the Japanese-American 442nd. So many of the Japanese-Americans had been killed and wounded that their rifle companies were down to about thirty soldiers each.

  Shortly after his return to duty, Weiss climbed into a trench with two other sergeants. A frontline stalemate was settling in. Ordinary soldiers on both sides seemed to avoid pointless battles and artillery exchanges. The unspoken understanding collapsed that evening, when a newly minted second lieutenant came up to the line. The twenty-year-old junior officer, with puppy-like curiosity, patrolled the squad’s positions and inspected the men’s equipment. The veterans, knowing his actions were unnecessary, observed him cynically and prayed the enemy would ignore his frenetic activity. As the lieutenant was leaving, he tripped on a flare that shot into the sky and showered light on both sides of the line. The Germans, who must have taken the illumination for the prelude to an attack, unleashed their artillery on the American foxholes. Weiss and the other men crouched deeper into the earth, wishing the inexperienced officer dead. When it was over, Captain Simmons sent the lieutenant to another outfit—sparing either the lives of the men in Charlie Company or the lieutenant’s own.

  Everyone was jumpy during the lull in the Allied offensive. Dug in along the front line near the hamlet of Brechifosse the next night, Weiss heard a noise that he mistook for a German patrol and grabbed one of the many grenades he had stacked in his foxhole. He pulled the pin and was about to hurl the grenade when his foxhole buddy told him the only sound was the wind. No Germans were coming their way. Weiss tried to force the pin back in. His hands shook and sweat seeped from his forehead, the seconds passing. If the grenade exploded, he and the other soldier would be killed. If he threw it, the Germans would unleash another cascade of artillery. Controlling his panic, he disarmed the grenade. Weiss was now certain that he had become a danger not only to himself but to the other men.

  When morning broke cold and wet, the company’s first sergeant relayed a message to Weiss from Captain Simmons. As punishment for his six days’ absence, Weiss was ordered to dig a latrine in rocky, nearly frozen ground. No one was permitted to help him, and he had only a small entrenching tool to scrape a hole to the regulation six feet long by a foot deep. This was army “chickenshit” at its worst, especially with Weiss in constant danger and reaching his psychological limit. As he bent his back to the task, the rain soaked his flimsy uniform and his squad gathered around in sympathy. One of them implored, “Don’t let him do this to you.” Only years later would Weiss admit, “I never confronted Simmons or disobeyed his order to dig, because I was too young, naïve and intimidated by rank.”

  • • •

  On the night of 26 October, Private First Class Frank Turek’s squad leader ordered him to find a Company B patrol in the woods. Turek, who had not been on patrol before, was terrified. His nerves were so jittery that he fired two rounds into a dead German. He found Company B, but he got lost on the way back to his foxhole. “I was jumpy,” he remembered, “and I just couldn’t stand lo
oking at the trees fearing that there was a Jerry behind them and every move out there in front affected me.” Turek met Steve Weiss on the line. Weiss remembered the new replacement’s anxiety. “I also remember how clean his uniform was,” he said. “It was pristine.” Having arrived only two weeks earlier, Turek was new to combat. The Polish-American youngster told Weiss, “No way am I staying here.” Weiss noticed his anxiety, as much the consequence of prewar trauma as of fear of battle.

  On completing high school, Turek had gone to work at the Royal Typewriter Company factory in Hartford. A severe case of miliaria, popularly known as prickly heat, forced him to quit after three months. The rash covered his upper body, which was as embarrassing as it was painful. He said later, “I felt that I was being strangled, so I decided to visit my physician and he said that I give the job up [sic], give my nerves a rest.” Turek, who was unemployed and lived at home with his mother and father, became fretful when gangrene infected his father’s leg. On 24 March 1943, about the time the leg was amputated, the army drafted him. During basic training, Turek’s miliaria rash returned. Medical officers attributed the outbreak, resembling shingles, to nervousness. One army physician prescribed medication, but it had no effect. Another diagnosed his condition as psychosomatic.

  The night of 27 October was terrifying for Turek, who was on guard duty in a forward foxhole. The sound of every falling leaf made him jump with fright. Needing sleep, he asked other troops nearby to take the watch for him. It was not clear to him in the darkness which side was sending artillery shells overhead. When his foxhole buddy explained that the Germans were shelling two hundred yards away, Turek panicked, beat his head with his fists and collapsed in terror.

  Other soldiers in the outfit were also at the edge of endurance that night. Clarence Weidaw, the soldier who had not spoken a word since the Germans nearly shot and burned him in a hayloft, and Jim Dickson, who had gone AWOL with Weiss in August during Grenoble’s liberation, had had enough. Weiss himself was dangerously overstressed, as his near-fatal episode with the hand grenade proved. Few of Charlie Company’s riflemen on the front lines had faith in Captain Simmons, and they complained that he led from the rear. “You could never find Simmons,” Weiss said, “even behind the lines.” Weiss, Weidaw and Dickson confided their fears to one another, and they reached a unanimous decision. At 4:00 in the morning on 28 October, six days after Weiss had returned to duty, the three GIs climbed out of their hillside foxholes and left the line.

  Private First Class Frank C. Turek deserted early the same morning, although Weiss was not aware of it. Another deserting soldier from Charlie Company encountered Turek in the woods, and together they hitched a ride in a military vehicle whose driver must have known they were running away. He dropped them in a small town. They did not know its name, but it was the only hiding place they could find.

  The 36th Division, as a War Department survey discovered, had the highest rate of desertions in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). “The longer the 36th stayed in the line,” the Observers Board stated, “the greater the incidence of disciplinary problems and psychosis cases, as reflected in the number of court-martials, stragglers, and hospital admissions for exhaustion.” Sixty-three infantrymen from the 36th Division were convicted of violating Article of War 75, “Misbehavior before the enemy,” which usually meant desertion under fire. Even without the deserters who were never apprehended, this was more than in any other division in the ETO.

  On 28 October, at least five men from Charlie Company—Weiss, Weidaw, Dickson, Turek and another soldier whose name does not appear in the records—were no longer on the line. One regimental platoon commander, Lieutenant Robert D. Porter, described the battle they missed that morning: “The enemy fired as rapidly as his guns would permit. Men were blown to bits but others took their places. American dead and wounded lay where they had fallen over enemy trenches they were assaulting, inside enemy dug outs, on top of enemy already dead or dying.” The task of the soldiers who fought was not made easier by the absence of their comrades who had run away.

  While their company was engaged in fierce combat, Weiss, Weidaw and Dickson were heading south away from the Vosges. Truck drivers gave them lifts along roads jammed with military supply convoys and the wreckage of earlier fighting. Reactions to the rogue GIs varied. Soldiers who had been at the front, including the truckers who delivered ammunition to the firing line, were invariably helpful. “Overseas most combat soldiers are sympathetic toward other fellows who go AWOL,” one survey of frontline infantry soldiers noted. However, rear echelon troops, who had yet to hear or see combat, were wary. “Most mess sergeants,” Weiss wrote, “rejected our plea for food and gave us scraps that even a dog would reject.”

  By this time, the U.S. Army provost marshal estimated that thousands of deserters were on the run in France. It would have been impossible for so many to remain at large without other soldiers keeping their secret and French civilians giving them shelter. Some deserters hid with French women, while others found a home among black market criminals. Weiss, Dickson and Weidaw, however, had no plan beyond a vague hope that the military police would not catch them. If they had been more meticulous, they would have chosen a better hiding place than the U.S. Army’s airfield near Lyons.

  The three deserters slept in a hangar, coming out occasionally to watch C-47 cargo planes deliver supplies and troops. The troops were replacements for the dead and injured, but also for those, like Weiss and his companions, who had run away. P-47 Thunderbolts flew out on daylight missions over the German lines northeast of Lyons, and not all of the “Jugs” returned. The three infantrymen wasted time at the base, where sooner or later someone would arrest them. It did not take Weiss long to conclude, “Our venture was doomed from the start.” They were young, unsure of themselves and frightened. They had not discussed their future, Weiss thought, “because we had none.” Their four options, as it was for most other deserters in eastern France, were to hike across the border into Switzerland, where the authorities interned downed airmen from both Axis and Allied armies in tolerable detention camps and regarded those who came on foot without weapons as refugees; make their way across France to Spain; live with sympathetic French families under false identities; or go to Paris and join the black market. They did not consider any of these. Instead, they went into Lyons.

  • • •

  Weiss was riding a bus in the city center when he noticed his former host Ronnie Dahan standing at the back. Dahan ignored him. It must have been obvious from Weiss’s unkempt appearance that he had deserted. Dahan exited without shaking Weiss’s extended hand. Weiss realized that Dahan, who had endured the worst of the German occupation, could not afford difficulties with the United States Army. The Dahans would not be able to hide Weiss, and he had no other friends in Lyons.

  Back at the airfield later that afternoon, the three GIs pondered their predicament. They were not hard-core deserters, like those pilfering Allied supplies in the criminal underworld. If they remained at the base, arrest was certain. Dickson and Weidaw decided to report to a medical station and request treatment for nervous exhaustion. Physicians in the European Theater of Operations treated 102,989 “neuropsychiatric casualties,” and the two soldiers felt they qualified for medical attention. Weiss did not like the idea, saying the doctors would probably call the military police to arrest them. Dickson and Weidaw wanted to try it anyway. What else could they do? Weiss bid them goodbye with foreboding. Two days after leaving the line with his friends, Weiss was on his own. He wrote, “I was overcome with loneliness.”

  The army was swifter to notice his disappearance from the line near Bruyères than it had been at Valence in August, and the War Department dispatched a second telegram to William Weiss. It announced that his son was again missing in action. “My mother and father were very depressed, very wiped out,” Steve Weiss recalled. Somehow, the first time he disappeared they retained hope he would emerge alive.
The second telegram, though, had a shattering effect on the household. “It was like a morgue,” Weiss said. The Weisses received family and friends at home, as if for a funeral. In France, Steve was unaware of the misery the desertion was causing his family.

  Weiss hitchhiked back toward the 36th Division and Captain Simmons. Near the Lower Vosges town of Vesoul, he spent a night in a barn. When he woke up, his desperation was complete. He could not go any farther. If the army had spread the burden of combat more fairly by rotating troops, he thought he could fight again. Troops in the rear had never faced battle, and most men at the front had never had a rest. It seemed unjust. He wrote later, “Fair play was all I demanded, that each man do his duty and take a turn at the front.” That was not going to happen. “If one day, you’re the guy pulling more than the other guys, the next day someone takes your place,” he said. “Not in the army.” Weiss saw only an army that had abandoned him to a commander with no regard for his life or well-being, an army that had refused to allow him to continue fighting with the OSS, an army that denied him every alternative assignment he had been offered and an army that had no more consideration for the ordinary dogface combat soldier than it did for equipment to be replaced when it ceased to function. This army was stronger than he was, and its chain of command retained a hold on his sense of duty. He did not question its legitimacy, even when he believed it unfair. “I was so depressed I didn’t give a shit,” he explained later. “If you want to shoot me, shoot me.”

  On Monday morning, 30 October, two American deserters surrendered to military police in the town of Vesoul. The first was Private First Class Frank Turek, who was soon turned over to MPs from the 36th Division. They drove him to their new headquarters at Bruyères, where First Lieutenant Herman L. Tepp of the military police “ordered him to return to his company and sent him by vehicle to his company kitchen train.” Turek was back in service. The second was temporary sergeant Weiss, who left the barn at about 10:00 that morning and surrendered to an American military police patrol.