The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

• • •

  Meanwhile, at Westminster, pressure to solve the “deserter problem” grew. Labour member of Parliament Woodrow Wyatt planned to table a question in the House of Commons in November 1946: “To ask the Minister without Portfolio whether he will consider making arrangements to offer some inducement to persuade deserters who have been at large for more than nine months to return to their units.” When party whips prevailed upon him to withdraw a question that would highlight governmental failure to deal with the issue, Wyatt wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee: “The position seems to be that some twenty thousand deserters are loose in the country without Identity Cards, Ration Books, etc., and are therefore virtually outlaws. . . . It is obviously a situation which no society can tolerate indefinitely.”

  The Minister of Defense, Albert Alexander, told Parliament on 22 January 1947 that deserters who surrendered before 31 March would have “any mitigating circumstances taken into account when their cases are determined.” This fell short of an amnesty, and the War Office was forced to disclose that only 1,158 men out of 20,000 had turned themselves in during the “leniency period.”

  Artists Herbert Read and Augustus John, with writer Osbert Sitwell and others, formed the Deserters Amnesty Campaign. In a letter to the Times of London, they reminded readers of “the almost total failure of the ‘surrender scheme’ announced by the Minister of Defense last January.” They appealed for an amnesty: “We are convinced that the only real solution to the deserter problem, from both the practical and the human points of view, is the granting of a general amnesty to these men—before they drift into becoming full-time criminals.” At this time, the prime minister’s office noted that, far from deserters turning themselves in, more than seven hundred men a month were adding to their numbers with fresh desertions.

  • • •

  Vernon Scannell’s loose arrangement with Leeds University entitled him to membership in the Student Union, where he took advantage of its sports facilities to train and join the boxing team. He became Northern Universities Champion in three weight divisions: welter, middle and cruiser. His status as a professional remained secret, lest he be disqualified from amateur competition.

  Although boxing and literature studies took up much of his time, he had little money and led a lonely existence in his attic room. His ever-present fear of capture, “an overshadowing presence that darkened my consciousness,” revealed itself in his poem “On the Run”:

  If sleep should come, the stairs might thunder,

  The door burst open, boots lam bone

  And split the skin, manacles’ anger

  Bite wrists and scratch the brain:

  It might be fact or dream exploding.

  Either way, it could happen.

  One Sunday afternoon, while Scannell read Crime and Punishment in his attic, it did happen: “There was a sudden banging of heavy feet on the stairs and the next moment my door burst open and two men in plain clothes charged into the room, grabbed me and pulled me to my feet.” One of the policemen said, “We know all about you.” Bain spent the next “five miserable days” in a “cell with lavatorial tiled walls and a wooden bunk and three grimy-looking blankets.” Military guards took him by train to Aberdeen, where he was put back into uniform in a cell with two other deserters.

  The junior officer assigned to defend Bain at the court-martial told him his only option was to plead guilty. Bain wrote to Bonamy Dobrée and George Wilson Knight in Leeds. Both teachers sent books and offered to testify in his defense.

  When Bain appeared before a court of three officers, his counsel entered a guilty plea and asked the court to take into consideration his client’s combat record in North Africa and Normandy. The court permitted the defendant to speak, and Bain explained that he had found his nearly five years in the army “both in and out of action, totally destructive of the human qualities I most valued, the qualities of imagination, sensitivity and intelligence.” He had no choice, he said, but to escape.

  The president of the court, reading in his notes that the defendant hoped to become a writer, asked him what he wrote. “Poetry,” answered the defendant. He later recounted the court’s reaction: “And they looked at each other with a wild surmise and said, ‘Well, send him to a psychiatrist. He’s clearly mad.’” The psychiatrist’s report led to his transfer to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental asylum, near Birmingham. The confinement would lead to the poem “Casualty—Mental Ward,” which included,

  Something has gone wrong inside my head.

  The sappers have left mines and wires behind,

  I hold long conversations with the dead.

  He remained there for many weeks, during which he twice saw a young captain serving as the unit’s psychiatrist. At their second session, the psychiatrist told him, “If you are ill—and I don’t think you are—then this is the last place to get well.” He referred Bain to a medical board, which would probably release him. The captain advised him to “keep your nose clean in the meantime.” He did as he was told and waited. “After a short spell,” he wrote, “I was discharged, quite honourably, suffering from ‘an anxiety neurosis.’”

  His freedom, so long sought, was tinged with guilt. He wrote,

  The shades of all those men who had done nothing worse than I and were now serving long prison sentences rose to accuse me. But they were not my only accusers. I had survived a war in which many men, some of them my friends, and all with as much to live for as I, had been killed; they lay in the sands of Libya or in the orchards and meadows of Normandy and, however clean they kept their noses, no Board would give them their discharge. They, too, accused, and they accuse me still.

  A former army colleague told him about the captain they had seen desert from the Mareth Line in 1943. During an artillery barrage, John Bain as company runner had “looked to see how he [the captain] was getting on, and he wasn’t there. He deserted. He’d gone back. He ran away in the middle of an attack. I never knew what happened to him.” Now, he learned that the captain had been promoted to major and was still serving. If he had any qualms about the inequities of military justice that sent privates to the Mustafa Barracks and awarded promotions to officers, they vanished.

  THIRTY-TWO

  They may not realize it, but often the truth is they have become homesick. They are longing for those upon whose presence and affection they have long depended. They want their wives or mothers.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 334

  WHEN ALFRED WHITEHEAD’S TRAIN ARRIVED from Fontainebleau at the Gare de Lyon on 24 July 1945, he took the Metro, which he called the “underground streetcar,” to his apartment in the avenue de la Motte Picquet. In a full-dress uniform and with stolen passes from the prison office, he had little to fear from military police in postwar Paris. He did not know, however, what to expect from Lea. When she opened the door, they stared at each other in silence. Something had changed in the month since he left. It took him a moment to realize what it was. Another American soldier had moved in.

  She whispered to him to wait in the bathroom, while she told her new lover to leave because her husband was coming home. Whitehead considered killing them both. His mind, as already evidenced by his contradictory decisions to surrender and escape, was confused. Jealousy demanded revenge, but murder would send him back to the stockade and probably the gallows. He waited in the bathroom. When the other GI left, Lea gave Al a glass of wine. He had nothing to say to her. “I hadn’t been faithful to my wife,” he thought, “so I had no room to talk. But I never did forgive her.” After downing more wine, he fell asleep in her bed.

  The summer of 1945 saw Paris gradually returning to normal. Although the black market provided some illegal bounty to the city’s residents, regular supplies of basics were reaching the city from the country and harbors. Bands of deserters were still on the run, but the army had more men available to hunt them down. Whitehead, although
he carried concealed weapons, avoided his old gang. He drank more, gambled and sought the company of other women. His dissolute life made him consider, as other deserters had, joining the French Foreign Legion. The Legion asked no questions and, at the end of five years’ service, allowed its veterans to resume life with a new identity. “But,” he wrote, “I had grown to hate war and was tired of killing.”

  • • •

  On 12 December 1945, a freezing day in Paris, Whitehead was drunk again. He missed Selma, pitied himself and wanted to go home. Walking back to the apartment, he made a decision. He changed out of his civilian clothes, put on his U.S. Army dress uniform and wrote a farewell letter to Lea. Outdoors, he attracted a policeman’s attention by shooting out streetlights with two ivory-handled .25 automatics. The gendarme approached with weapon drawn and ordered the American to raise his hands. “I never put my hands up for the goddamned German Army,” Whitehead claimed to have shouted, “and I sure as hell am not going to put them up for a two-bit French cop.” The policeman attempted to disarm him, but Whitehead claimed he turned over only one pistol. They could negotiate for the other at the station.

  The gendarme took him to the police post at 69 rue de Fondary in the Fifteenth Arrondissement. American MPs arrived soon afterward. Whitehead’s account of his arrest differed significantly from that of the MPs who took custody of him. He contended that he had asked the French police to call for the MPs, who came and offered to release him. The MPs’ report stated clearly that the French police apprehended him and called the American authorities on their own initiative. Whitehead contended that he gave a third .25-caliber pistol to the MPs as a souvenir. While driving in the jeep with them to their headquarters, he said he produced two more pistols from his boots. He wrote, “I can still see their shocked faces.” Nothing in their report mentioned the additional weapons. Whitehead went further, claiming he produced yet one more .25 automatic for the “desk sergeant” when he arrived. By Whitehead’s count, he had given over six automatic pistols to French and American police. The official police report said he had only one pistol with three bullets.

  Whitehead said he told the gendarmes his name was Joe Givodan, but identified himself immediately to the MPs as Corporal Whitehead. Corporal Richard S. Capone, Company C, 787th MP Service Battalion, provided another version:

  I questioned the soldier and he said his name was George and handed me a pass (class “B”) which read George Wasko. The French police turned over to me a 25 Cal. Pistol, Werk Erfurt, Serial No. 2993 and a clip with 3 rounds of ammunition.

  I frisked the soldier and found dog tags bearing the name of Alfred T. Whitehead and also a set of Officers dog tags bearing the name of Nixon. I asked him how long he was AWOL and he continued to lie and to say that Whitehead was his buddy. When I asked the soldier his serial number he seemed at a loss of an explanation.

  We proceeded to the Booking Station at No. 8 Rue Scribe and found the man to be Alfred T. Whitehead. I turned the soldier over to the Duty Officer Lt. Ball. Then I returned to Patrol Duty.

  This account contained nothing of the bravado with which Whitehead characterized his behavior, producing pistols like a magician and bravely rejecting MPs’ offers of release. “They were still telling me to go back to my outfit,” he wrote, “and I was still drunk and telling them I had overstayed my leave.” The MPs, on the contrary, appeared from the record to have behaved professionally. They locked him up at 11:00 that night. In the morning, the Judge Advocate General’s Office preferred charges against Whitehead for violation of Article of War 61 in having been absent without leave for 304 days. If the war in Europe had not ended in May, the charge would have been desertion with the possibility of a death sentence.

  First Lieutenant Julius Hochstein of the Judge Advocate General’s Office assigned First Lieutenant Eugene T. Owen to investigate the charges on 17 December. Two days later, Owen submitted his report:

  Witnesses requested by him [Whitehead], and other witnesses whose expected testimony was not fully and satisfactorily indicated in statements attached to the charges . . . were thereafter, if reasonably available, examined by me in his presence. He was allowed to examine and cross-examine witnesses as he wished, with my assistance, and make such statements and arguments as he wished in his own behalf, after due warning as to his rights and privileges.

  Asked on a form whether he had any “reasonable ground for belief that the accused is, or was at the time of any offense charged, mentally defective, deranged or abnormal,” Lieutenant Owen answered, “None.” In the statement, “In my opinion he ________ be eliminated from the service,” Owen wrote, “should.” He completed the sentence “I recommend ________________” with “A General Court Martial.” On 22 December, Lieutenant Hochstein referred the charges for trial.

  Whitehead made no mention of Lieutenant Owen or the fact that Owen allowed him to call witnesses in his defense. Instead, he complained of mistreatment by officers he said had placed him in solitary confinement for fourteen days on bread and water because he would not answer their questions. While awaiting trial and looking out of his cell window, Whitehead wrote, he saw Lea walking toward the prison, threw her a note warning her not to visit him and saw MPs bring her inside. When he pretended for her safety not to know her, he claimed she left in tears.

  Whitehead wrote that he spent Christmas alone in a punishment hole that was only four feet by six feet, because he refused to answer an officer’s questions. He did not state what the officer wanted to know. At the end of fourteen days, the officer threatened him with a third week in the hole if he didn’t tell him everything, whatever that may have been. Rather than return to solitary, Whitehead wrote, “I was hustled into a courtroom like a bum instead of a soldier: no bath, unshaven, and without being given a comb for my hair.” He remembered the court-martial taking place in late December, but court records indicated it began on the morning of 2 January 1946.

  As in the court-martial of Steve Weiss, no enlisted men sat on the court-martial panel. The senior officer among the six judges was Major George F. Shaw of the Signal Corps. For reasons not specified in the court-martial transcript, the trial judge advocate, his assistant and the defense counsel were excused. A second assistant judge advocate, Lieutenant Sheridan H. Horwitz, and the assistant defense counsel, Lieutenant Harry Cohen, argued the case. Lieutenant Horwitz introduced two exhibits for the prosecution, the morning reports of 19 January and 23 July 1945. The first listed Corporal Whitehead as AWOL and the second as having “escaped confinement.” He asked whether defense counsel agreed to the stipulation that “the accused, Corporal Alfred T. Whitehead, returned to military control of the United States on 12 December 1945.” The defense agreed, and the prosecution rested.

  The defense case made no opening remarks to the court. Lieutenant Cohen said, “The accused having been advised of his rights in this case elects to make an unsworn statement.” Captain David L. Sprechman, as the court’s “law member” who had had legal training, delineated Whitehead’s three options: a sworn statement, which allowed cross-examination by the prosecution and the court; an unsworn statement, which excluded cross-examination but carried little weight with the court; and remaining silent, for which “no one in this court can comment on your failure to take the stand and your failure to take the stand will not be considered as an admission of guilt.” Sprechman asked the accused whether he understood the choices. Whitehead answered, “I think so, sir.”

  Whitehead stuck by his decision to make an unsworn statement. He took the stand without taking the oath, and only Lieutenant Cohen questioned him. His short testimony covered little more than a page of the court-martial transcript. Cohen asked his name, military organization, whether he was the accused in the case and his date and place of birth.

  Cohen continued, “What happened when you were four years old?”

  “My father got killed, sir.”

  “And what did you do?”
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br />   “I went to work on a farm.”

  “How much schooling have you had, Whitehead?”

  “Not any.”

  “Where did you work?”

  “On a farm for Walter K. Parnell.”

  The next questions established he had not been prosecuted for any criminal offense as a civilian and had been in the army for three years.

  “Have you had any combat, Whitehead?”

  “Seven months.”

  “How many campaigns have you been in?”

  “I been in, sir? Normandy to Germany, sir, about four or five.”

  “Were you wounded?”

  “Well, yes, sir, I was.”

  “How many times?”

  “Twice.”

  “And what did you do when you were wounded?”

  “I kept on fighting. I knew I’d get it if I stayed there.”

  “Have you ever been court martialed before, Whitehead?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything else you would like to tell the court about yourself?”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  The court excused the witness, and Lieutenant Cohen declared, “The defense rests.”

  The court reporter did not record the defense’s closing argument, and the assistant trial judge advocate did not make one. The court retired briefly. When it returned, Whitehead stood to attention. On the charge and both specifications, the verdict was “Guilty.” The court deliberated a moment before pronouncing sentence. The maximum penalty for violation of Article of War 61 was life at hard labor. The court was lenient, declaring that Whitehead “be dishonorably discharged from the service, to forfeit all pay and allowances due or to become due, and to be confined at hard labor at such place as the reviewing authority may direct for five years.”

  Whitehead wrote that the court did not afford him the opportunity to explain his exhaustion and his desire to return to the 2nd Division rather than to a new division as an unknown replacement. The court record, however, made it clear that he could have said anything he wanted. Moreover, he was fortunate the prosecution did not ask him how he survived in Paris during his two periods of desertion. His criminal activities, as recounted in his memoir, would have earned him the death penalty. At 10:25 that morning, the court “proceeded to other matters.”