The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  A Free French intelligence officer who had surveyed German defenses in Valence, Lieutenant Armand, argued that available forces were insufficient to take the town. He sent a message to Resistance commandant Paul Pons: “I do not understand why, with the Intelligence I have given, one is going to attempt such an attack, for no artillery piece which I have identified and marked on the map has been moved. I am sure we won’t succeed, but I am going with the American tanks.” Dahlquist’s order to Adams confirmed the attack for that evening: “Seize Valence today. Seek assistance from Maquis.” Dahlquist further ordered Adams to bring his regiment to Crest by dawn the next morning. Crest, a small town already in American control about twenty miles south of Valence, was on the road to Montélimar. An impending operation to destroy the German Nineteenth Army there meant Colonel Adams had only a few hours to seize and pacify Valence.

  Charlie Company made ready to fight its way into Valence from the southeast along the Route de Chabeuil. Just before dark, four M10 tank destroyers (TDs) came forward to transport Charlie Company. The M10s, although they resembled tanks, were defensive weapons. The 143rd was using them instead for offensive operations and as troop carriers. (The M10 TD was mounted on a tank chassis with an open, pulpit-like turret, a converted naval 3-inch gun and a .50-caliber machine gun. Like America’s Shermans, the M10 was no match for German Panther and Tiger tanks.) Weiss found a spot on the left side of the lead TD. While they waited to depart, the company runner ordered Weiss’s squad onto another TD. Weiss moved onto the second TD, and another squad climbed onto the first. Charlie Company rode out in the fading summer sun. When the TDs squeezed through concrete posts on either side of the narrow mountain highway, one unlucky GI’s foot was crushed. A moment later, German machine guns, rifles and grenades opened up.

  Bullets tore into the soldier who had taken Weiss’s spot on the lead TD, propelling him headlong onto the earth below, dead. The other men took cover in ditches beside the road. They shot at German-held buildings that caught fire, forcing three German soldiers to run for cover. Weiss leapt back onto the TD to stop them with its .50-caliber machine gun, raking the ground with rapid bursts. The Germans’ luck held, and they made it to nearby farmland. The squad regrouped and pushed again toward Valence. This time, they walked while the TDs rumbled along their flanks. Their advance had not proceeded far when Germans on Valence’s outer defenses opened fire, killing two more Americans, Privates Longo and Taylor. Both had trained with Weiss at Fort Blanding. Weiss led the squad’s survivors through the darkness. A German shouted, “Halt!” and fired twice. Weiss threw himself onto the soft earth. He remembered the scene vividly:

  Lying there, I waited for the men behind me to fan out to form a skirmish line, but no one came. Alone and exposed, I decided to make a break for it; as I got up to run, the German tossed a grenade. Fortunately, my timing was excellent. . . . [The German threw three grenades at him.] Each grenade disintegrated beside me, as I hit the ground; otherwise, I would have taken the full force of any one of the explosions in an upright position. After the last grenade exploded, its fragments showering over me, I landed safely in a ditch beside my company commander, Captain Allan E. Simmons.

  The thirty-year-old captain looked sixty in the middle of battle that night. He said nothing to Weiss about his dance with death. “As the C.O., he’s not fatherly or protective,” Weiss wrote. “At eighteen, I need all the understanding and guidance I can get, but none is forthcoming.” Simmons seemed “dazed, lacking in will power and self-confidence.” Considering what to do next, the captain looked at Weiss and ordered, “Take your squad back out to that field. Keep moving toward Valence.” Captain Simmons did not move forward with the squad. If no man could be a hero to his valet, no officer could hide his character from his men. Weiss grew more resentful of Simmons’s leadership. However, Simmons was no martinet. He could be fair, as Weiss admitted when he did not punish him for going AWOL in Grenoble. His main flaws for Weiss, and undoubtedly for some of the other men, were his aloofness and his frequent absences from the front lines. Watching the captain lean against a tree with his back to the enemy, Weiss thought bitterly, “What the hell can he see that way, except to take it in the ass?”

  Sergeant Harry Shanklin and three others went missing, reducing the squad from twelve to eight—Weiss, his friends Corporal Bob Reigle, Privates Sheldon Wohlwerth and Settimo Gualandi, and four others, Sergeant William Scruby and Privates Caesar, Fawcett and Garland. Weiss knew little about Scruby, a farmer from Chillicothe, Missouri, and Gualandi, who had been a bartender in Peoria, Illinois. Caesar, Fawcett and Garland were completely unknown to him. He doubted he could trust any of them, after their failure to cover him while under fire only a few minutes earlier. Nevertheless, he resumed first scout position ahead of the squad and behind the three TDs. The TDs, though, made so much noise that he was certain the Germans would hear them. He was right. As the squad neared the Berthet quarter at the edge of Valence, antitank guns blasted the TDs. Two TDs and a half-track went up in flames. German 88s pounded the tree line, pelting the Americans with sharp wood fragments and shrapnel. The GIs dived for cover. “Within seconds, men die,” Weiss wrote, “piercing the night, the wounded scream and shout for medics.” German flares lit up the battlefield for their mortar crews, and the Americans fell back.

  Weiss’s squad raced fifty yards to an irrigation canal of the river Bourne. They tried to observe the battlefield beyond the canal banks, but smoke from the burning tank destroyers obscured their vision. Wounded American and German soldiers screamed for help. The rifle fire died down, while the artillery impacts and machine-gun bursts came more rapidly. The eight men crawled from one side of the muddy cover to another, tearing their uniforms at the knees and elbows in their search for a way forward or back to the company. “We stopped and waited, slowly sinking to the ground,” Weiss wrote. “Machine guns blazed at us, pinning us down but hitting no one. We knew we could go no further.”

  While the men waited, the commotion of battle surrendered to an ominous silence. The ground around the ditch was no longer a battlefield. It was German territory. The squad was on the wrong side of the American lines, trapped. Where the hell were Captain Simmons and the rest of Charlie Company?

  EIGHTEEN

  If the war and the safety of the world didn’t demand their services, most American soldiers would rather be home than where they are.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 344

  EARLY ON THE MORNING OF 25 AUGUST 1944, while the Allies were liberating Paris, American and Free French forces in the south of France lost a small piece of ground to the Germans. The offensive to expel the Wehrmacht from Valence, begun by Lieutenant Colonel David M. Frazior’s 1st Battalion of the 143rd Regiment, failed. Under ferocious German fire, medics could not reach the wounded. Valence proved more costly in time and lives than the town was worth to Allied objectives. “Then at about five in the morning,” wrote Colonel Paul Adams, the 143rd’s commander, “I got orders to disengage and bring myself and the rest of the outfit to Crest.” In what would soon be called the “Montélimar Battle Square,” the U.S. Seventh Army was massing to block the German Nineteenth Army’s retreat up the Rhône valley.

  The aborted battle for Valence on the night of 24–25 August, according to the official after-action report, left sixty-eight Americans dead. Steve Weiss’s Charlie Company lost one man killed, twenty wounded and another twenty-eight missing in action (MIA). Two of the MIAs were later confirmed dead. The other missing were assumed captured or killed. At least eight, however, were alive and holding out in a muddy irrigation canal on German-held terrain between Valence and Chabeuil. No one had told Steve Weiss and the seven other men of the squad that the 143rd Regiment had retreated.

  “Morning came, clear and bright,” Steve Weiss recalled, “and we were sure we were surrounded by the Germans.” A German soldier, seated casually on top of a stone wall, watched the Americans without bothering to shoot or
call in machine-gun fire. When he dropped down and walked away, the eight Americans were puzzled but relieved. Other Germans, though, were bound to see them and report their presence. “We knew if we stayed where we were, we would be killed or captured,” Weiss recalled. Morning grew late without any prospect of rescue. “We were angry at Charlie Company for abandoning us,” Weiss wrote. The squad could neither engage the superior German forces nor escape to the American lines.

  • • •

  In Valence, the population woke to discover that the Free French and the Americans had abandoned them. German units still patrolled the streets, which U.S. artillery had shelled overnight, while American and Free French prisoners were marched into captivity. At 9:00, Valence police began investigating the night’s events. Unlike most other police departments in occupied France, Valence’s force had a hard core of résistants. Chief of Police Gérard called for a volunteer to inspect the scene of the all-night battle and find Allied survivors before the Germans did. Reports of desperate Germans shooting unarmed prisoners added to the urgency of his appeal. A young police officer named Louis Salomon, whose house at 296 avenue de Chabeuil was on the route of the American attack, took the assignment.

  Armed with a police laisser passer to clear the German checkpoints, Salomon set off by bicycle for a farm at Les Martins. The property, which belonged to his friend Gaston Reynaud, offered an unobstructed view of the field of battle. German sentries at two roadblocks examined Salomon’s papers and let him pass. Farther along the road toward Les Martins, Salomon pedaled past the burning American tank destroyers as well as the German artillery that had taken them out. When he came to a third checkpoint, a German soldier ordered him off his bicycle and took him to an officer. Salomon explained that he was under orders to bring the farmer Gaston Reynaud to police headquarters for questioning. Relaxing with a Frenchman he took for an ally, the German officer said, “During the night, those dirty beasts of invaders have tried to enter Valence. Fortunately, thanks to the courage of German soldiers, the attempt failed.” The officer boasted that at least ten Americans had died to the loss of only one German. After this exchange, Salomon was allowed to proceed.

  Back in the irrigation canal, Weiss and the others were waiting to be captured or overrun. Sergeant William Scruby reconnoitered the area and spotted a farmhouse several hundred yards away. Concluding that it would provide more secure shelter than the ditch, he huddled the men together to go over their alternatives. All agreed they could not remain where they were. Sooner rather than later, the Germans would find them. The time was 11:30 A.M.

  “Tell you what,” Scruby said. “I’ll go first. If I make it, look for my signal from that second story window.” If there were no signal, the Germans had killed or captured him. If he made it, the men were to follow his route, one by one, every two minutes. Weiss gained respect for Scruby, whom he barely knew: “I had a lot of admiration for him, in terms of his realism and his bravery. He was able to consider the situation and then take into account what options he had and then made his decision.” Scruby crawled to the edge of the ditch, surveyed the ground ahead and lunged forward. As he made a beeline over an exposed pasture to a peach orchard, Weiss and the others rooted for him in excited whispers: “Come on, Scruby! Come on, Scruby!” A minute later, the sergeant was out of view in the trees. More minutes passed without another sighting. No signal came from the farmhouse. Another minute went by. Was Scruby dead? A prisoner? Suddenly, from a window on the upper floor, the shutters opened. That was the signal.

  Every two minutes, one more man from the squad leapt out of the ditch and ran for his life. When Weiss’s turn came, he rushed over the bare field and crossed a road he had not noticed from the ditch. He sprinted through the trees toward the farm, his backpack feeling heavier than ever. When all eight soldiers had made it to the farmyard, they saw the farm’s owner. Gaston Reynaud, his wife, Madeleine, and their nine-year-old daughter, Claudette, thanked the Americans for liberating them. The GIs responded with the disappointing news that they were seeking rather than offering deliverance. Reynaud immediately took the Americans into his barn, led them upstairs and gave them shelter in the loft. Seven men settled into the sweltering and dusty barn, while first scout Weiss kept watch outside.

  Weiss spotted a bicyclist in a policeman’s blue uniform coming toward the farmhouse. He crouched in the bushes and took aim. All soldiers knew that the French police worked for the Vichy government in collaboration with the German army. In many parts of France, they had arrested Jews for the Germans and tortured résistants. With the policeman’s head in his sights, Weiss prepared to fire. The policeman got off the bike and approached the farmer, all the while under the rifleman’s gaze. Weiss had a second thought. If he killed the policeman, the Germans would hear the shot. “There’s something else,” Weiss wrote. “I can’t kill a man in cold blood.”

  When Gaston Reynaud greeted the gendarme, saying “Bonjour, Louis,” Weiss lowered his rifle.

  “Comment ça va, Gaston?” Louis Salomon asked. The farmer and the policeman held a short discussion that Weiss could barely hear and would not have understood. Speaking softly in French, Reynaud said, “I’ve got a terrible problem that needs to be solved.”

  “What problem?” Salomon asked.

  “Eight Americans hiding in my hayloft.”

  That was all Salomon needed to know. He picked up the bicycle and rode away at speed. Gaston Reynaud walked over to Weiss and took him inside so the Germans would not see him. Weiss described the scene upstairs: “The hayloft, partially full of hay, is about twenty by forty feet square. Scruby is in shadow, keeping watch near the window, looking through a crack in the shutters onto the field we have just left; the others are resting on the hay, their weapons beside them; the farmer insists that we move as little as possible and remain silent. The loft is old and the floor boards creak.” All they could do was to keep watch and wait.

  In Valence, Louis Salomon told the police chief and the commissioner about the Americans. An emergency Resistance meeting convened in the basement of the Cristal Bar, owned by résistant Georges Valette. Although most of those attending were policemen, a Free French intelligence officer named Ferdinand Lévy, who used the nom de guerre Michel Ferdinand, took charge. Lévy belonged to three different Resistance networks and was the liaison between the local maquis and the newly arrived Free French army. His plan to rescue the Americans required Louis Salomon, Maurice Guyon, Richard Maton and driver Marcel Volle to take him in a black Citroën Traction Avant front-wheel-drive police car over back roads to Les Martins.

  At the farm, Scruby was keeping watch through the shutters. The Reynauds’ laborer, René Crespy, brought the GIs a bucket of water. The men thanked him, but they felt as uncertain of surviving there as they had in the ditch. The farm and the surrounding land were quiet. Boredom increased their apprehension, as the Americans’ imaginations conceived disastrous outcomes to their predicament. The silence broke when farm animals outside made a commotion. Machine-gun fire erupted nearby, and the GIs grabbed their rifles.

  “Automobile tires grate on the gravel below,” Weiss wrote. “Strangers race up the stairs, taking two steps at a time, shouting in French, ‘Allons, allons!’ Standing, we point our rifles at the entrance.” Before the Americans could shoot, they saw that the men were not German. Their blue uniforms were identical to the one worn by the man who had cycled to the farm a few hours earlier. The cyclist himself was with them, urging, “Hurry! You must leave the hayloft! The Germans are coming. They’ve killed many of the wounded and are setting fire to farmhouses nearby. You’ll be trapped.”

  Free French intelligence officer Ferdinand Lévy unwrapped a brown-paper bundle. From it, he took four blue uniforms for the Americans to wear over their fatigues. Disguised as French policemen, the GIs were instructed to leave the farm in two shifts of four. Weiss volunteered to wait and go with the second group. Louis Salomon noticed that the uniforms�
��“the kepi was too large, the helmet too small, the pants too short”—did not fit the well-fed American boys. When Bob Reigle squeezed into the clothes, he complained, “This isn’t going to work. We’re too big.” Private Settimo Gualandi demanded, “Got a better idea?” They could not button the trousers. Arms and legs protruded beyond the cuffs. But they managed. The first four pounded down the stairs.

  When the police car departed, the waiting began for Weiss, Reigle, Gualandi and Wohlwerth. The GIs took turns at the window and listened for the Citroën’s return. Weiss was tense with foreboding. Would the car come back? Were Scruby and the rest on their way to safety or a German prison? If the gendarmes failed to return, his survival was in doubt. Four lightly armed infantrymen could not fight their way out, and the farmer could not hide them forever. Everything depended on the Valence policemen. Could they be trusted?

  About an hour later, the Citroën raced into the farmyard. Ferdinand Lévy came up the stairs with the uniforms the four other Americans had worn. The GIs struggled into the undersized police clothing, then stowed their weapons, equipment and rations out of sight under bundles of hay. The last thing they wanted was for the Germans to find their belongings and punish farmer Reynaud and his family.

  The four Americans hurried into the backseat of the police car with the three Frenchmen in front. The only place for Weiss to sit in the four-door Citroën was on Wohlwerth’s lap. As they pulled out of the farm, Weiss said goodbye to the family who had helped them. It was then that he remembered he had not even asked their names. Gaston Reynaud bid the Americans farewell and went to the barn to remove their weapons from the hay. Trudging to the fields, he buried them in a water conduit in the muddy bank of an irrigation canal.