The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Alboussière’s turn came one day, when two maquisards led a young man into the village. Weiss, standing outside a café with some of his Resistance comrades, observed the prisoner: “Of medium height and build, he wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt, open at the throat, khaki shorts with large military pockets, a black belt, white socks and black shoes. His hands and legs were bound in chains.” An old résistant invited Weiss to join him on the firing squad that would take the boy’s life. “What’s the fella done?” Weiss asked. The old man said that he was a traitor.

  Weiss wanted to explain his American faith in “trial by jury, justice for all, due process and equality before the law.” Unfortunately, his French vocabulary was inadequate. He asked whether there had been a real trial. The aged Resistance fighter believed miliciens did not deserve trials, and he repeated more forcefully his invitation for the American to participate in the execution. “If Binoche wants me on the firing squad,” Weiss said, “he can ask me himself.” He walked away, but he did not seek out Binoche to plead for a fair trial. He regretted this lapse, writing, “I rationalized that, as [I was] an American, the man’s fate was none of my concern.”

  The townspeople and résistants waited outside the café in the main square for the ritual to begin at 2:00. Captain Binoche, who blew up bridges and fought Germans with gusto, did not appear in the square. Ferdinand Mathey, a major in the national gendarmerie, assumed command of the firing squad. “Stocky, with square features, a Belgian .45-caliber pistol strapped to the side of his blue gendarme uniform, he reminded me of the French movie idol, Jean Gabin,” Weiss wrote. Mathey called out the firing squad’s members, who “disengaged from the crowd and shuffled into line, but not before placing their glasses, some half-filled with wine, into the hands of eager spectators.” Like the rest of the mob, the executioners had drunk too much.

  The square went abruptly still, the only sound that of the milicien’s shoes shuffling over cobblestones beside the boots of two guards. The guards left him standing alone with his back to a high stone wall. Major Mathey offered the condemned prisoner a blindfold, which he declined with a contemptuous gesture. When Mathey asked for his final words, the youth flicked his head to indicate he had nothing to say to people he despised. Mathey marched back to the executioners and ordered them to prepare their rifles. The crowd watched intently from behind the riflemen. The death detail raised their weapons, took aim and, when Mathey gave the command, fired. Some of the bullets found the boy’s chest, and others ricocheted off the wall behind him. The boy collapsed, knelt for a few seconds and fell to his side. As he writhed on the ground, it was obvious the fusillade had not killed him. Mathey rushed over, looked down at the bleeding form and unholstered his .45-caliber. Weiss described the scene: “He stood over the man, aimed at his head and pulled the trigger. No explosion followed, only a click; he aimed again and pulled the trigger, another click, one surely heard for miles around.” The boy was still breathing. The old man who had invited Weiss to take part ran from his place in the firing squad, stuck his rifle into the milicien’s ear and shot. Bits of skull spattered the ground, and the body went still.

  Early that evening, Weiss walked alone through Alboussière. He suddenly came upon the condemned man’s corpse, twisted and blood-drenched on an old wagon of hay. His shoes had been stolen. The execution, thought Weiss, had been a “bungled and repugnant affair.” He hoped never to see another.

  • • •

  Weiss did not come across Captain Binoche until the next morning, when the officer asked the eight Americans to teach his men to use the new weapons dropped by U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces planes. Binoche took the Americans and ten French trainees to an abandoned farm outside the village for a short course on bazookas, heavy machine guns and other specimens of the growing maquis armory. The first weapon was the bazooka, a shoulder-mounted tube that fired three-and-a-half-pound rockets to a distance of about three hundred feet. Weiss recalled, “Scruby described it as a simple if inefficient anti-tank weapon, bordering on the useless.”

  Private Settimo Gualandi lifted the bazooka onto his shoulder to demonstrate the correct way to hold it. Corporal Reigle loaded a rocket into the back. Gualandi fired at the target, an empty farmhouse sixty feet away. The French students were astounded to see the projectile miss the house, soar over its roof and explode a few seconds later in a meadow. The commotion brought out a frantic shepherd, who shouted at the GIs not to murder his flock. Chagrined, the American experts gave a French peasant fighter a chance at the weapon. His first shot went straight into the house and blew up inside, as it was designed to do.

  It fell to Private Weiss to demonstrate the Browning M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun. Like Gualandi, he missed his target. When a young résistant took three turns, he hit the house every time. Weiss, who “had been outdone by a wily Frenchman,” was no longer sure who was teaching and who learning. The two sides laughed about the role reversal, and Weiss reflected that the maquisards probably “knew more about fighting than we did.”

  In his room at the Hôtel Serre, M. Haas, the banker, recorded steady Allied gains on his wall map. The Germans officially surrendered Marseilles and Toulon to the Free French on 28 August. Once engineers had repaired the two harbors, supplies would flow to the Seventh Army in the south and help it connect to General Eisenhower’s armies in the north. Weiss watched M. Haas’s strings stretch to take in more and more Allied territory. On 31 August, when Valence finally fell to the Americans and Free French, M. Haas adjusted the map. Weiss did not know that Ferdinand Lévy, the intelligence officer to whom he had given a pack of Camels for saving him, had lost his own life liberating the town.

  In between missions for the Resistance that included guarding the ground for Allied airdrops, Weiss gathered his nerve to invite the hotel’s “theatrical” redheaded girl for an afternoon stroll. Walking into the countryside, they struggled to communicate in broken French and English. Giving up on conversation, they fell onto the grass. Weiss remembered, “She dug her heels into the ground for leverage and pressed hard against me, whispering, ‘Prenez-moi, cheri, prenez-moi.’” The French girl waited for the eighteen-year-old American to take the initiative, but Weiss lost courage. As they were about to quit in frustration, Royal Air Force planes streaked overhead and strafed German positions in the Rhône valley. The interruption gave them the excuse to return to the hotel, where they went to their separate rooms.

  • • •

  The American GIs, the résistants and the Parisian refugees shared convivial dinners under the Serres’ impeccable supervision at the hotel. Weiss enjoyed evenings with Binoche and his deputy, Lieutenant Paul Goichot, who chided him about his American naïveté. The two French officers felt the teenager had much to learn about wine, women and war. One evening, Binoche, in a playful mood, asked Weiss if he liked to shoot rabbits. Weiss, whose Brooklyn boyhood had afforded no such opportunity, said he didn’t know. Binoche invited him “rabbit hunting” the next morning, and Weiss was too timid to refuse. He went to bed wondering why Binoche had not asked one of the country-bred Americans like Scruby or Garland.

  In the morning, Weiss turned up outside the village ready for rabbits. Two things surprised him. Binoche was not among the group of about twenty hunters, and the weapons were 9-millimeter Sten submachine guns and Lee-Enfield rifles. Weiss asked, “Why do we need all this heavy artillery for hunting rabbits?”

  Ferdinand Mathey, the gendarme major who had commanded the firing squad in Alboussière, laughed. “Rabbits? Cher Stéphane, the only rabbits we are hunting today are Germans.”

  Weiss already had doubts about Mathey, and the policeman’s joke at his expense did nothing to remove them. Mathey’s handling of the milicien’s execution had left a bad taste, and a day hunting Germans with him was something Weiss would rather have avoided. Mathey, outfitted in his gendarme tunic with kepi and cavalry boots, announced that their objective was a farm in the valley below. Infor
mants had told him German troops were hiding there. Without explanation, Mathey and the other résistants began the operation by firing their weapons into the air as if in celebration. “What a fuck-up,” thought Weiss. Any Germans in the farmhouse would be alerted. If this was how Mathey fought a guerrilla war, Weiss did not like it. While the men marched down the hillside in a column behind Mathey, Weiss imagined the forewarned Germans preparing their defenses. Silently, Weiss conceived his sharpest criticism of Mathey’s strategy, “It smacks of a Simmons-planned operation.”

  They reached the valley floor after an hour of hard hiking. About thirty yards from the house, with no trees or other protection ahead of them, they stopped in full view of the occupants. “The farm was well built for defense,” Weiss observed, “and I anticipated a helluva fight. Every window, every door, of which there were many, could be a gunport for the enemy.” Mathey did not position anyone behind the house to prevent a German escape, and Weiss regretted the lack of hand grenades to force the Germans away from the windows. On Mathey’s orders, the résistants dashed forward. Two or three men covered one group, then rushed ahead to stop and cover the next. The first wave ran to the front door and kicked it open, firing as a few résistants propelled their way into the house. The first room was empty, but voices called from the back. Three unarmed Frenchmen with hands high stepped hesitantly forward. Although Weiss thought the three were probably collaborators, he gave the one nearest him a cigarette. The suspect Frenchmen said the Germans had fled a few minutes earlier. Weiss, angry that Mathey had given them warning, was not surprised.

  In a car they requisitioned from a local inhabitant, Mathey, Weiss and a driver scoured the countryside in search of the Germans. Local farmers said the Germans had gone east, toward the river Rhône. They followed that route for hours over rough roads without food or drink. The day was ending when they saw the lights of Soyons, one of the villages Weiss and his squad had passed through after their escape from Gaston Reynaud’s farm. Mathey told Weiss to stay with the car and pump air into its tires, while he and the driver walked into Soyons. Weiss worked the hand pump, until a blast suddenly hurtled him into the car’s fender. Hearing the screams of women and men, Weiss ran about sixty yards toward “a terrible, eerie scene in the fading light of day.”

  A huge tree, its roots ripped from the soil, lay on its side blocking the road. Around it lay corpses, blood and debris. Dazed men and women came out of their houses to help the injured. An old woman in a black peasant smock implored Weiss to come into her blast-damaged cottage. Inside, a young man who may have been her son was kneeling on the dirt floor. By dim candlelight, Weiss saw the boy’s ripped clothing and blood gushing from a wound in his thigh. Her son needed a doctor, morphine and bandages. There was nothing Weiss could do. Helpless, he went outside.

  Ferdinand Mathey staggered toward him, his shoulder bleeding badly. The gendarme major told him that he had been helping a group of French résistants and their German prisoners to move a tree that the Germans had placed across the road to cover their retreat, when a booby trap exploded. The bomb had killed at least twenty-five people, French and German. Many more were wounded. Coming out of shock, Mathey asked where the driver was. Weiss answered, “I thought he was with you.” They realized the man was dead.

  Weiss took the wheel of the car to drive Mathey, the young man with the thigh wound from the cottage and several other victims to a makeshift infirmary. It was the first of many trips ferrying the wounded between the blast site and the clinic. As he drove one badly injured German prisoner, the two enemies struggled to communicate. They arrived at the clinic and waited in the car for a doctor. “We looked at each other,” Weiss wrote, “sitting in the cramped seats of the little car, both shocked at our misfortune.” The German produced snapshots of his wife and child. This was Weiss’s first intimation of humanity in a German uniform. He longed to reciprocate, but he had left his family photographs at Gaston Reynaud’s farm. The German went into the clinic without realizing that the American who helped to save his life was Jewish.

  TWENTY-ONE

  After all, what kind of Army would we have if every man did what he pleased—if soldiers were permitted to throw their clothing in a heap, to spit on the floor, to burn the lights at all hours, or to sleep until noon?

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 346

  AT THE END OF HIS DAY RABBIT HUNTING and ambulance driving in Soyons, Steve Weiss returned exhausted to Alboussière. The seven other GIs had moved out of the Hôtel Serre, and he found them in a chalet that Captain Binoche had borrowed for their use. All of his comrades, except Bob Reigle, were sleeping. Weiss told Reigle about the bungled raid on the farmhouse and the booby-trapped tree. Reigle had news for Weiss. An American paratroop officer from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had come to Alboussière to invite the squad to join the OSS. One of the clandestine service’s operational group (OG) sections needed men to replace its wounded. Weiss said he preferred to remain with the Resistance. Reigle argued that, as Americans, they belonged with the OSS. When the rest of the squad woke up, they took a vote. The tally was seven for the OSS and one for the Resistance. The one was Weiss, who thought his friends were making a mistake. “We were with the French,” Weiss said later, “but we were going to be with the Americans. Otherwise, there was no reason.” To Weiss, returning to U.S. command, when he was already fighting Germans alongside the French, did not justify leaving the only officer he had ever trusted.

  The men packed their gear. In front of the Hôtel Serre, the Serre family, M. Haas and his sisters, the maids Élise and Simone, the redhead with whom Weiss had almost had an affair and the hotel’s chef bid the Americans farewell. When Captain Binoche thanked them for their contribution to French liberation, Weiss said goodbye as if leaving a father.

  • • •

  Weiss thought their driver, a pilot in the Free French air force, drove “as if he were maneuvering a P-40 fighter plane at breakneck speed over narrow, winding roads. I doubted if we would reach our destination alive.” The car braked at a bend to avoid running into three maquisards at a roadblock. One of the résistants, seeing the Americans, asked, “Anyone from Brooklyn?” When Weiss spoke up, the Frenchman called to someone in the bushes. “On cue,” Weiss wrote, “stepping onto the road as if she were a headliner on the Orpheum Theatre Circuit, an attractive woman in her early thirties approached the car and greeted us in an educated Brooklyn accent.” The GIs got out of the car to talk to her. Offering her a cigarette, Weiss asked, “What on earth are you doing here?” A tear tumbled from her eye, and she hugged each GI in turn.

  The woman told her story. She was in France at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, when Americans were neutral and the Germans left them alone. She became an enemy alien after the United States entered the war in December 1941. In September 1942, the Germans responded to the internment of German citizens in the United States by sending Americans between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five to camps. Rather than be confined with the other American women at Vittel, she went into hiding. With the help of French friends, she moved around the country. It had been two hard years, but speaking to someone from Brooklyn was almost as good as being home. She and Weiss reminisced about the old neighborhood and “dem bums,” the Dodgers. Weiss gave her two packs of Camels, and they left her with the maquis.

  Their next stop was nearly thirty miles from Alboussière, a safe house that Company B, 2671st Special Reconnaissance Battalion, had established on a farm outside the village of Devesset. Codenamed Operational Group Louise, the battalion had established its headquarters in a farmhouse on high ground with a clear field of fire. The commanders, Lieutenants Roy Rickerson and William H. McKenzie III, welcomed the eight recruits into their large living room. Weiss thought Rickerson “was framed like a middle weight, and pound for pound every bit as tough.” One team member, Sergeant Adrian Biledeau, lay on a sofa with his leg in a cast, having broken his thigh and ankle parachutin
g into France with the rest of the OG on 18 July. Louise was one of six OGs in the Ardèche, with each OG divided into two sections. The standard OG contingent deployed a captain in command of three lieutenants and thirty NCOs. With attrition, unit size shrank, so downed American aircrews or stragglers like the eight GIs from Charlie Company were recruited. Most of Rickerson’s section came from French-speaking corners of the United States, like those in Louisiana, Maine and upstate New York near the Canadian border. Speaking French with North American accents, most of the team had an easy time communicating with both résistants and civilians. Their names were as French as any in the region: Pelletier, Boucher, Gallant, Biledeau, Gagnon, Collette, Laureta, Dozois and Fontenot. Even Rickerson, despite his English name, came from Bossier City, Louisiana.

  The atmosphere at the OSS headquarters was collegial, almost like a fraternity house. Without realizing it, Steve Weiss had indirectly achieved his goal of transferring to Psychological Warfare. Psychological Warfare, as the overseas branch of the Office of War Information (OWI), where Weiss had worked in New York, had begun its existence as part of the same organization as the OSS. Called the Office for the Coordinator of Information, the agency performed both public and secret information functions at the beginning of the war. It was only in 1942 that President Roosevelt split the organization into the OWI and OSS, with the coordinator, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, taking command of the OSS. One of the OSS’s missions in Europe was the same as Psychological Warfare’s: to inspire people under German occupation to fight for the Allies. Its additional tasks were to harass German forces, cut German communications and provide weapons and logistical support to the Resistance. Weiss had thus been recruited to a former part of the unit he had initially applied for, but all he wanted was to return to Binoche and the Resistance.