The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Steve Weiss resented being forced to return to Charlie Company, but Al Whitehead was enraged that the army was not sending him back to his old outfit. By January 1945, with a desperate need to replace men lost during the Germans’ Ardennes offensive, the policy had changed. The army sent veterans who had recovered from wounds or illness wherever they were needed, not necessarily back to their old divisions. After six days at the depot, Whitehead was fed up and requested a three-day pass. The first sergeant, company commander and chaplain in turn told him to wait, and he cursed them all. As he stormed out the front gate, a sentry called out, “Halt or I’ll shoot.” Whitehead shouted back, “Go to hell.”

  When Whitehead marched out of the depot, he could have done what many soldiers in the rear had done before him: desert to the front. Steve Weiss’s battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Frazior, had done just that in 1943, when he left a military hospital in North Africa to rejoin his men for the invasion of Italy. At about the same time, three nineteen-year-old privates left their unit in Algeria to fight in Tunisia. After hitching rides to reach the front eight hundred miles to the east, they were confronted by Major John T. Corley of the 1st Infantry Division. Corley did not condone their offense, but he put them into battle. “You certainly went AWOL in the right direction,” he said. (Corley was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the 3rd Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, indicating that his superiors at least tacitly accepted his decision to put the AWOLs into combat.)

  A month before Whitehead walked off the base, an American Red Cross volunteer, Virginia von Lampe of Yonkers, New York, deserted her post in Paris. Although under military discipline, Miss von Lampe headed east in search of the “Battered Bastards of Besieged Bastogne,” as newspapers had dubbed the 101st Airborne Division. Surrounded by Germany’s XLVII Panzer Corps while the Battle of the Bulge raged, the men were running out of ammunition and food. Their acting commander, General Anthony McAuliffe, had just made history by rejecting the Germans’ surrender demand with one word: “Nuts!” A week before General Patton’s Third Army broke through as promised to relieve Bastogne, Ginny von Lampe made it into the maelstrom. She explained to a bemused major inside the city, “I’ve got some donuts for the fellows, Sir.” He held her as a spy, until she proved her nationality by naming the winner of the 1943 World Series—no great difficulty for a New Yorker—as the Yankees.

  • • •

  Whitehead, walking through Fontainebleau to an American service club, had not considered deserting to the action. The 2nd Infantry Division, still fighting the Battle of the Bulge that January, was in such desperate need of veteran fighters that it would in all likelihood have taken him back. Instead, Whitehead went looking for a drink. MPs at the American service club refused him admittance, because he had no pass. As he left in search of a bed in a brothel, he thought, “Well, it’s death either way you look at it. If I go back up front with that damned peashooter I’ll be killed, and if I go AWOL I’ll be shot. I might just as well go to Paris and live it up.” That is exactly what he did.

  In Paris the next day, 19 January, he checked into the hotel at 1 avenue Charles Floquet, where he had lodged while on train guard duty. The hotel proprietress hesitated to give him a room, until he assured her he had a thirty-day furlough and was not a deserter. His room had “creaky furniture and faded wallpaper,” and the bathroom was down the hall. He drank wine and cognac until he passed out. Like many soldiers at the end of a long period of tension, he slept for several days. Sleep, though, did not mean peace. Recurrent nightmares of being under artillery barrages made him break into cold sweats. In the dreams, his younger brother, Uel, appeared helpless on the battlefield. After several days of bad dreams and intermittent sleep, he went out to eat.

  He ordered soup and bread in a small café. The waitress, who had a pronounced limp, took pity on him and added some fried eggs and potatoes to his plate. He got into a game of craps with a Frenchman, winning several hundred dollars. (Whitehead, in the telling, never lost at gambling.) As he was leaving, two MPs came in. They asked him his division, and he said the 2nd. This was no longer true. Since leaving the hospital, he had been attached to the 94th Reinforcement Battalion at Fontainebleau. When the MPs demanded his pass, he proffered the .45 he had refused to surrender to the nurse. According to Whitehead, the MPs wanted no trouble with him and left.

  The waitress gave him the key to her furnished room in a cheap hotel nearby and told him to wait for her there. She returned from work at about midnight. A romance and business partnership, similar to many others between American deserters and their French girlfriends in Paris, began that night. “So we took up a life together,” Whitehead wrote, “this little French girl with a limp and myself.” Her name was Lea, “a pretty girl with dark hair, blue eyes, and a beautiful smile that played hide-and-go-seek with the dimples in her cheek.” She taught him rudimentary French, introduced him to museums and took him to movies and plays. It was the farm boy’s first experience of a cultural life he had not known in Tennessee. When he wore old clothes that Lea gave him, no one took him for a soldier. “By that time,” he wrote, “I decided I was a civilian.”

  In the café where Lea worked, he met other deserters. They, however, were German. One was an officer, “a blond-haired, blue-eyed man of about thirty-five, with a combat hardened personality like my own.” The officer had served in Paris during the occupation, but he did not retreat with his division. Paris, five months after its liberation, was home to deserters from most of the armies in Europe. Living in an underground network of black market conmen, pimps, thieves and gangsters, ex-soldiers of a dozen nationalities evaded American military police and French gendarmes whose job was to hunt them down.

  The presence of so many armed men outside military control wreaked havoc in postliberation Paris. A U.S. Army legal study noted, “Of course, no black market could have grown in any liberated country without cooperation of American military personnel. Cupidity is not an exclusive characteristic of foreigners.” French civil courts were more lenient toward black market thieves than were American courts-martial. The French director of military justice denounced his country’s military tribunals for “unjustified leniency.” The problem for the U.S. military was not punishment so much as finding the deserters who supplied American equipment to the black market.

  • • •

  Late one night, MPs raided the hotel where Al Whitehead was living with Lea. As they knocked on the door, Whitehead crawled out of the window clasping his .45 and waited on the ledge until they left. It was time to move. The couple rented an apartment the next morning. The modest flat, at the river Seine end of the tree-shaded avenue de la Motte Picquet, was less likely to be searched than a hotel. In the new place, he and Lea confided their life stories to each other. Her father had been a village policeman, who sent her to a convent to separate her from a young man she loved. She hated her father and had bitter memories of convent life. At the first opportunity, she fled to Paris. When the Wehrmacht occupied Paris, she became the mistress of a German officer. Whitehead admitted he had a wife in Wisconsin. Because he could not write to her without risking capture, Lea sent a letter in French to Whitehead’s mother. Whitehead hoped his mother would tell Selma he was alive. Al and Lea survived on her earnings as a waitress, but it was not enough.

  Another deserter advised Al he could make money with an American black market gang based in a hotel near the Arc de Triomphe. Al went to the shabby lodging off the avenue Foch to find them. A uniformed American soldier sat in the lobby, as if keeping watch. Whitehead was too cautious to speak to him, but he returned to the hotel the next morning. The same GI was there. Again, Whitehead left without saying anything. When he paid a third visit, he said to the soldier, who was reading a newspaper, “I guess you’re going to tell me this is your day off.”

  “Hell, no. I’m AWOL,” the soldier said. “What are you going to do about it?”

/>   “I’m going to join you.”

  Whitehead met the gang’s leader, a sergeant and “ex-paratrooper; a short, stocky soldier with blond, curly hair.” The seven-man gang included veterans of the 82nd Airborne, 2nd Armored and 1st, 3rd and 8th Infantry Divisions. The sergeant, suspicious that Whitehead might be a police informer, put him to the test: he could join their gang if he stole an army six-by-six truck. Within minutes, Whitehead spotted an American supply truck stopped in traffic and climbed in. He pressed his .45 against the head of the driver, a black enlisted man, and said, “Get out and run down to that red neon sign, and keep going and don’t look back, or I’ll shoot you right between your eyes.”

  Whitehead passed, taking his place in one of many gangs of ex-soldiers terrorizing Paris. His group planned robberies in the sergeant’s hotel room as if preparing military operations. Among the tools of their trade were French and U.S. Army uniforms, a vast array of stolen weapons, forged passes and hijacked vehicles. Whitehead wrote that “we stole more trucks, sold whatever they carried, and used the trucks to rob warehouses of the goods in them.” For the next few months, the gang used combat tactics to rob military warehouses. Like a night patrol, they stealthily crept behind guards and knocked them out cold before seizing the loot. Their activities spread to Belgium, where they stole civilian cars to sell in France.

  Gangland operations gave Whitehead a bigger thrill than battle. One night, he and his accomplices spotted a blue Buick in front of a military headquarters. Its two stars made it clear the owner was an American general. The gang jumped into the car and forced the driver out. As they drove off, MPs fired at the Buick. Whitehead and the others shot back, but apparently no one on either side was killed. The car had so many bullet holes, though, that the thieves abandoned it. On other occasions, they disguised themselves as military policemen. Real MPs saluted them in the streets, and they had fun checking the passes of off-duty GIs. When they robbed cafés, they made their getaway in jeeps with the gendarmes giving futile chase on bicycles.

  • • •

  The paratroop sergeant’s gang was one of many rampaging through Paris in the months after the city’s liberation. Like other deserter mobs in Paris, they were “armed to the teeth with .45s, rifles and Thompson sub-machine guns.” Whitehead himself always carried his Colt .45 automatic plus three smaller .25-caliber pistols that he hid in his pockets and boots. The Paris press compared life in the city to Prohibition-era Chicago, and it put the violence down to the same cause: American gangsters. The army’s Criminal Investigation Branch had to deal with a crime wave for which it was unprepared, as it noted:

  In the eleven month period from June 1944 (the month of the invasion) through April 1945, for example, C.I. agents handled a total of 7,912 cases, of which 3,098, or nearly 40 percent, involved misappropriation of U.S. supplies. Greater yet was the proportion of crimes of violence (rape, murder, manslaughter, assault) which supplied 44 percent of the C.I. work, leaving the remaining 12 [sic] percent for such crimes as robbery, burglary, housebreaking, riot and mutiny.

  Time magazine reported, “Informal G.I. markets have sprung up around the Arc de Triomphe, in the Place Pigalle, under the Eiffel Tower, in bistros, restaurants, around jeeps pausing in traffic jams.” Prices for goods the GIs provided were exorbitant. The Criminal Investigation Branch reported that a fifty-carton box of cigarettes went for $1,000 and twenty pounds of coffee for $200. The sellers were both deserters and serving soldiers, and the goods were invariably contraband. Betraying considerable pride in his audacity as a gangster, Whitehead wrote, “We robbed every café in Paris, in all sectors except our own, while the gendarmes went crazy.” The gang showed up at cafés and ordered cases of cognac and champagne. After the owners loaded the boxes onto their jeeps, the men turned their weapons on them. They stole money from patrons and customers alike. Whitehead recalled raiding cafés regularly for three months without interference from the police. The gang robbed private houses, whose bedsheets and radios were “easy to fence.”

  Profits from stolen petrol, cigarettes, cognac, champagne, cars and weapons were making the gang’s members rich men. Within six months, Whitehead reckoned his share at $100,000. This was probably an exaggeration. The theater provost marshal’s “History: Criminal Investigation Branch” estimated that “profits realized through illicit traffic in essential U.S. Army goods had reached nearly $200,000.” That was the achievement of months of stealing by more than 150 officers and men of the 716th Railway Battalion until their apprehension at the end of November 1944. Whitehead could not send the money home, because the army had declared a “Prohibition Against Circulating Importing or Exporting United States and British Currencies” on 23 September 1944. Whitehead hid his money under the bed at his and Lea’s apartment, until he invested in a café and small hotel. He put both in Lea’s name and let her manage them.

  Al Whitehead prospered amid the highlife of underworld Paris, occasionally straying to brothels and often getting drunk. He ran into one soldier on leave from his old 2nd Division and escorted him to an establishment where he covered the prostitutes’ fees for them both. The soldier, who seemed more envious than disturbed by Whitehead’s clandestine life, said he was returning to the 2nd somewhere near the German-Czechoslovakian border. Whitehead wished he could go back as well, but the soldier warned he would be shot like Private Eddie Slovik had been the previous January. “Well, buddy,” Al said, “what difference does it make whether the Germans kill me, or our own army shoots me—I’m still one dead son of a bitch.” Nonetheless, he stayed in Paris.

  The city that spring lost its allure for Whitehead. His gangland activities were dying down, and he had little to do. On 7 May, the radio announced the Allied victory in Europe. He recalled the announcer saying, “Le guerre ce fini! Le guerre ce fini!” Despite his seven months in Paris, Whitehead’s French was rough at best. (The announcer may have said, “La guerre, c’est fini!”) He went outside to take photographs of Allied flags flying in the streets that he included in his self-printed diary, and he went back to the apartment alone to brood. “That day and night everyone in Paris and the rest of Europe was celebrating, but I just stayed in my apartment thinking about it all.” He wandered aimlessly through Paris, occasionally finishing along the banks of the Seine. At the end of June, he told Lea he wanted to go home. The only way to do that was to give himself up to the United States Army.

  The easiest course for Whitehead to follow was to walk into any military police post. Instead, he said that he took a train to Czechoslovakia to find the 2nd Division. In Whitehead’s absence, the division had fought its way into Germany and captured Leipzig. On 1 May, it moved into Czechoslovakia. Whitehead stated that he surrendered in Czechoslovakia, but the division had left for an encampment outside Rheims on 18 June. An army telegram of 13 December 1945 recorded Whitehead’s “apprehension in Rheims, France, on or about 1 July 1945.” On 12 and 13 July, most of the Second to None Division, including Whitehead’s Headquarters Company, sailed from Le Havre to New York.

  Whitehead nonetheless wrote that he reached the 2nd Division in Czechoslovakia and reported to a first sergeant, who ordered him to his former platoon. After a few days in the company stockade, he was transferred to the division’s authority. Because Whitehead’s last posting was with the 94th Reinforcement Battalion at Fontainebleau, it ordered him transferred there. With fifteen other handcuffed prisoners, charged with rape or murder as well as desertion, he rode in a truck to another stockade about six hours away.

  Whitehead slept on the floor of a cell with fifty other inmates on the second floor of an old prison building. In the morning, guards moved him to a ground floor cell of his own. He wrote that he was “restless” and angry at being shipped from one place to another. He decided to escape, chipping at the mortar between the bricks to dig his way out. He had not made much progress by 6:00 that evening, when he was led outside and put into a jeep that took him to Fontainebleau. The
re, the 9th Reinforcement Battalion locked him in a cell with three other prisoners.

  “During his confinement at this depot,” the “Informal Routing Slip” noted, “Cpl. Whitehead gave no difficulty, performed his work satisfactorily and, in view of the fact that he was not apprehended, but gave himself up, there apparently was no reason to think he might escape.” While persuading guards that he was resigned to his fate, Whitehead was filled with resentment. The sentry assigned to watch him was Private First Class Robert C. Shumate, whom Whitehead referred to in his diary as “a corporal.” A corporal himself, Whitehead may not have wanted to admit taking orders from a private. In the morning, Shumate ordered Whitehead and two other prisoners to clean a large house on the base. Whitehead hated Private Shumate. “He had us emptying ash trays and waste baskets, all the while saying, ‘None of you guys are going to escape from me. I’m not going to be pulling your time.’ I thought, ‘You stupid jerk, in just about five minutes I’m going to show you just how stupid you really are.’”

  Whitehead saw himself as a battle veteran, “a professional soldier,” and looked down on Private Shumate as “a punk recruit.” When Shumate ordered him to tidy an office in the house, he found blank passes on the desk and secreted them in his clothing. The passes would allow him to roam freely in Paris without trouble from MPs. The work completed, Shumate marched the three inmates to the mess hall for lunch. Whitehead sat outside, saying he was too sick to eat. Shumate threatened to shoot him if he tried to escape, and Whitehead answered, “Why, I like it here.” Shumate led the other two prisoners inside. The stockade report stated that Shumate in fact put Whitehead to work in the mess hall, while the other two prisoners were assigned to duty in the kitchen. “Due to the relative location of the kitchen and Mess Hall in the M.P. billets,” the stockade report noted, “it is impossible for one man to keep both rooms under observation at the same time.” At about 1:30 in the afternoon, Whitehead was either sitting outside, as he wrote, or working in the mess hall, according to the official report. The differing accounts agreed on one thing: a minute later, he escaped. According to the report, “He did escape at approximately 1330 hours.” He did not go far, as he recalled: “I rolled over behind the rock fence I was sitting on, and raking out a depression in the leaves, I camouflaged myself with them completely.”