Fiction allows a writer to mine deeper truths. As it turns out, my fictional story takes a different path. The man I interviewed would have never considered deserting, and Wendell Lett is a much different character who did worse deeds. Nevertheless, the wanton recklessness of such missions made me wonder what could drive a man to his limit.
The answers lay in the combat experience. The true horrors of front-line duty—and S-boat warfare, to be sure—are difficult to express and convey, even though I based mine on actual conditions, operations and mental states. Truly, one can’t make up such degrees of organized savagery without sounding far-fetched. As for the combat GIs, a small segment of the US Army did almost all the fighting without break and died for it in droves. They had signed up “for the duration,” an open-ended if not hopelessly endless stretch before tours of duty became common. Some could only perform so much duty for a big picture war effort they rarely saw or appreciated. By 1945, the number of AWOL and deserted soldiers in war-torn Europe had reached tens of thousands. Only some were considered active criminals. Others certainly chose to quit fighting in a war that they knew didn’t match the publicity back home, a war that only they could know intimately in its horror and unique capability to consume lives and souls in increasing numbers. That war has been mythologized ever since, providing the ideal alternative for the United States’ involvement in more recent campaigns. By its nature, myth lies far from reality. In the words of one who was there: “The Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty,” wrote historian, professor and World War II frontline combat veteran Paul Fussell in Wartime (1989).
The surprise German counteroffensive of December 1944 fooled American intelligence and ignited the Battle of the Bulge—a grim wintry bloodbath that could have been avoided. In the notorious operation mentioned above, Germans infiltrated American lines in US jeeps and wearing US uniforms. The Allies prosecuted their commander, SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny, in the Dachau trials of 1947, but key defense testimony from Allied officers revealed that such tricks had been attempted since the beginning of war (and certainly continue today). Indeed, it’s been suggested that Hitler got the idea for the operation after hearing that American Rangers pulled off a similar ruse to help capture the German city of Aachen in September 1944.
For me, preserving the sanctity of uniforms fit for killing exposes the absurdity of war. I’m not placing blame here, not saying World War II should not have been fought, but rather I hope to remind. Morality does not endure in actual war, during close combat, so let’s quit claiming that it does. Let’s honor a man or woman who was there, but never a war itself and those who start it. Those who lead us to war continue to perpetrate a profound failure of humanity, and all too often a heartless crime against all of us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to: Matt Love; Peter Kreisman; Karl Scheuch, retired German Navy Commander (Fregattenkapitän a. D.) and S-boat expert; the helpful staffs of the Cologne City Museum (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum) and the Dover Museum and Library; my trusted readers and friends for feedback on early versions of this story; Peter Riva, for inspiring me to expand the story; and my wife and reader-editor René again and as always.
Under False Flags Page 25
