The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  Weiss made many postwar trips to France, where he found people who had helped him during his time with the Resistance and the OSS. He renewed his friendship with Free French commander François Binoche and the couple who had given him a room in Lyons, Ronnie and Olga Dahan. In the spring of 2011, he returned to Bruyères, where the 36th Division had sentenced him to hard labor for the rest of his “natural life.” To anyone who did not know his story, he might have been any other American octogenarian on vacation. But Americans of his generation in French villages were rarely tourists. Men old enough to have fought in the mountains and villages of the now-prosperous French countryside were searching for the youth and laughter they left there.

  Weiss is a thin, elegant man, who carries himself with dignity. His demeanor makes him seem like a retired officer, back upright and eyes that look straight at everyone he speaks to. We were in Bruyères to find the courtroom where the army had tried him for “Misbehavior before the enemy.” Despite his eighty-six years, he needed no more help to march through Bruyères than when he was nineteen.

  Steve Weiss let me explore the town, which had once been the front line between the Wehrmacht and the United States Army, with him. A few hours earlier, he had been to the military cemetery at Epinal to see the grave of his friend Sergeant Harry Shanklin. It was the only time he cried, he told me, during his entire trip. Shanklin was twenty-two when he died near the river Moselle. It bothered Weiss that Shanklin did not live to have a wife, children, a career or a chance to reflect on what happened during the war. The thought weighed on Weiss, who saved his own life by doing something he could not help—running away.

  By the time of our promenade in Bruyères that balmy April afternoon, Weiss was in a better mood. We knocked on the doors of old people who were children in 1944 to ask if they knew where the 36th Division headquarters had been. No one was sure. One prim, white-haired matron in a cotton dress wondered why we wanted to know. When we told her that Steve had been a GI in the 36th Infantry Division, she threw out her arms. She was fourteen when they liberated the town from the Boche, she said, too young to kiss a GI. Now, she kissed Steve on both cheeks. Then she sobbed.

  A little later, I suggested to him that his desertion might have saved him from an early death or a serious wound. But there were wounds. He said, “Look what I had to do to get right again. I spent years on the psychiatrist’s couch. I became a psychologist because of it, in terms of the war. I had to put the whole thing back together again.”

  Weiss remembered a compound that included a headquarters building, a stockade and a chapel, where his trial took place. In 1944, winter snow veiled the town. The spring of 2011 was clear, almost hot. Townspeople directed us to several building complexes, where they thought the 36th might have made its headquarters. One was a large Catholic school attached to a stone chapel. Another was the local hospital, whose chapel was just outside the main building. Weiss stared at them in turn, walked around them and concluded that his normally letter-perfect memory just was not up to it. It did not matter. He had fought in Italy and France, won medals, deserted and been convicted somewhere in this Vosges village. He had served time in the Loire Disciplinary Training Center and in the confines of his memory, where the trial was reenacted for years. Finding the former courtroom was, anyway, something I had asked him to do. I thought it might bring out elements of his story that were not in the official transcript. If the room where the court-martial took place on 7 November 1944 was a key, we didn’t find it.

  William Johnson, an African-American soldier in the Union Army, hanged for desertion and “an attempt to outrage the person of a young lady” in June 1864.

  EVERETT COLLECTION/REX FEATURES

  A little over a year later, in October 1865, William Smitz became the last U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion until Private Eddie Slovik (above) was shot by firing squad on 31 January 1945. Of the 150,000 British and U.S. soldiers who deserted during the Second World War, Slovik was the only one executed for it.

  BETTMAN/CORBIS

  A young Private Steve Weiss (on the left in both photographs) at the Infantry Replacement Training Center at Fort Blanding, Florida, in late 1943.

  U.S. Navy and Marine Shore Patrolmen at a railway station near a U.S. naval operations base in the United Kingdom to prevent U.S. servicemen going AWOL.

  TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

  In the run-up to D-Day, military and civilian police rounded up U.S. soldiers in London whose papers were not in order.

  ANTHONY WALLACE/DAILY MAIL/REX FEATURES

  Official U.S. Army photograph, taken at Pozzuoli near Naples in August 1944, that happened to capture Private First Class Steve Weiss boarding a British landing craft. He is climbing the gangplank on the right-hand side of the photograph.

  Telegram received by William Weiss on 25 September 1944: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Private Stephen J. Weiss has been reported missing in action . . .”

  Steve Weiss’s rifle squad in the Vosges, October 1944. Weiss is standing, second from left, and to his left are, in turn, Dickson, Reigle and Gualandi; kneeling left is Fawcett.

  In Alboussière, Steve Weiss refused to join the firing squad that executed a Vichy milicien. The photograph above is of the execution of six members of the Milice that was witnessed by CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid in Grenoble.

  TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

  The épuration (purification) of collaborators also saw young women accused of having had sexual relations with German soldiers suffer ritual humiliation. An accusation was enough to establish guilt in the eyes of the mob.

  GETTY IMAGES

  Steve Weiss in Paris on Armistice Day, 11 November 1945.

  And receiving the Croix de Guerre from Commander François Binoche—to Weiss the father figure who fought in the maquis under the nom de guerre “Auger”—in Paris, July 1946.

  The certificate appointing Steve Weiss an officer of the Légion d’Honneur.

  Weiss wearing some of his awards, which include the Bronze Star, three U.S. battle stars, the Second World War Victory Medal, Combat Infantry Badge and Good Conduct Medal, two Croix de Guerre, the Médaille de la Résistance and the Croix du Combatant.

  Alfred Whitehead of 4th Platoon, Company D, 63rd Infantry Training Battalion, Camp Wolters, Texas. Whitehead is in the third row, seventh from left, and his friend “Timmiehaw,” who was killed by a “Bouncing Betty” mine, is second from left in the same row.

  According to Whitehead’s autobiography, Diary of a Soldier, this is Omaha Beach, D-Day, 6 June 1944. Whitehead identifies himself as the third soldier from the right, at the front of the landing craft.

  A U.S. MP with two Italian black marketeers caught selling American cigarettes in Naples, November 1944.

  MONDADORI VIA GETTY IMAGES

  American deserters like Whitehead were not the only black-market dealers. Here, a British sailor does business in London’s Cutler Street, which came to be known as “Loot Alley.”

  GETTY IMAGES

  In April 1944, Whitehead heard an address given by General George S. Patton—“Old Blood and Guts” (which for some U.S. soldiers meant “Our blood, his guts”). Patton was in favor of shooting deserters and slapped a shell-shocked soldier in Sicily.

  BETTMAN/CORBIS

  General Bernard Law Montgomery, under whom John Bain fought as part of the British 8th Army, differed in style from Patton, if less so in content: “There will be no more belly-aching and no more retreats.”

  POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES

  John Bain at fourteen, the age at which he boxed in the finals of the Schoolboy Championships of Great Britain.

  John Bain, of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in 1940, before his transfer to the Gordon Highlanders, the regiment from which he deserted.

  Although Bain did not serve time there, the Mil
itary Detention Barracks at Aldershot was the archetypal British military prison. Its nickname, the “glasshouse,” which derived from its roof, came to stand for any military prison.

  GETTY IMAGES

  Experimental medical equipment being used to treat British First World War soldiers suffering from shell shock. Fortune magazine reported in 1934 that “twenty-five years after the end of the last war, nearly half of the 67,000 beds in Veterans Administration hospitals [in the United States] are still occupied by the neuropsychiatric casualties of World War I.”

  GETTY IMAGES

  By the Second World War, at least some commanders favored providing psychiatric care in forward aid stations, which is where this U.S. soldier, here being administered a sedative, was sent.

  GETTY IMAGES

  The artillery barrage at El Alamein inspired John Bain’s poem “Baptism of Fire” (published under his adopted name of Vernon Scannell): “And, with the flashes, swollen thunder roars / as, from behind, the barrage of big guns / begins to batter credence with its din / and, overhead, death whinnies for its feed . . .” Scannell was fortunate (or claimed to be), and was able to tell his son in a poem that “my spirit, underneath, / Survived it all intact.” He died in 2007, aged eighty-five.

  THE ART ARCHIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY LAST BOOK, Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation, dealt with expatriates who stayed in wartime Europe when wisdom seemed to dictate departure. While I was writing their story, a young woman who was then living with one of my sons asked about people who fled. Did I know whether many American and British soldiers had deserted during the Second World War? I didn’t, and I soon discovered that not many other people did either. Much had been written about military deserters during the First World War, creating a body of literature that contributed to the campaign for their posthumous exoneration. My research into the subject of American, British and Commonwealth Second World War deserters turned up surprisingly few books that mentioned them. William Bradford Huie’s 1954 The Execution of Private Slovik was almost the only lengthy discussion of the subject, although it focused on the one man who was executed rather than the 150,000 or so who survived.

  Desertion by the men of the “Greatest Generation” remained for the most part taboo. Their stories lay in archives, police files, psychiatric reports and court-martial records. To uncover so much material and to explore an underexposed subject required considerable help, and the assistance afforded me in various and disparate quarters deserves more gratitude than I am able to express here.

  I hereby thank Charlotte Goldsmith for asking the question about deserters that initiated this exploration. I must also thank my friends Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, who over wine on a restaurant terrace in Dubrovnik cut short my indecision over the book’s title by asking why I did not call it simply Deserter. While I was writing this book, a son, Lucien Christian Charles, was born to me and his mother, Anne Laure Sol, in Paris. His birth provided added inspiration as I struggled to make sense of everything I learned while researching. My work meant neglecting him at a time I shouldn’t have, and I ask his forgiveness. My older children, stepchildren and grandchildren tolerated absences and moodiness, tolerance for which I owe them apologies as much as thanks.

  I worked on the book for the most part in the United States, France and Britain, where a legion of friends, collaborators and colleagues provided support of all kinds. In the United States, I particularly want to thank Dr. Tim Nenninger and Richard Boylan of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; Mary B. Chapman, Jeffrey Todd, Lisa Thomas and Joanne P. Eldridge of the Clerk of Court’s Office, United States Army Legal Services Agency, Arlington, Virginia; Elizabeth L. Garver, French Collections Research Associate at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Austin researcher Wendy Hagenmeier; Paul B. Barton, director of Library and Archives, George C. Marshall Foundation; Colonel Lance A. Betros and Major Dwight Mears of the Department of History, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York; also at West Point, Dr. Rajaa Chouairi; Cleve Barkley and the Friends of the Second Infantry Division; and the staffs of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National Personnel Records Center. I could not have completed the book as it is without the valuable contributions of Abigail Napp, Cora Currier, Christopher and Jennifer Isham, Mary Alice Burke, Jim Gudmens, Tony Zuvich, Jeff and Anne Price, Dr. Conrad C. Crane, Dr. Richard W. Stewart, Dr. David W. Hogan, Don Prell, Joe Dillard and John Bailey.

  In Britain, I must thank, first of all, Steve Weiss. In addition, I am grateful to John Scannell and his sister Jane Scannell for their time and support in helping me to understand their father, Vernon Scannell. Scannell’s friend Paul Trewhela provided me with valuable material and the introduction to the Scannell family. I must thank my fellow writers Brian Moynahan, Colin Smith, Artemis Cooper and Max Hastings for advice and background material on the war. Professor Hugh Cecil of Leeds University and Cathy Pugh of the Second World War Experience Centre gave me valuable recorded interviews with British soldiers who recalled the deserters with whom they served during the war. I must also thank Anya Hart Dyke and Andrew Parsons; Verity Andrews and Nancy Fulford of the University of Reading Special Collections Service; and the staffs of the London Library, the National Archives at Kew, the British Library, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum.

  In France, where I wrote most of the book, my thanks must go to Lauren Goldenberg, Amy Sweeney, Charles Trueheart of the American Library in Paris, Alexandra Schwartz, Rose Foran, Alice Kaplan, Selwa Bourji, Stéphane Meulleau, Hildi Santo Tomas, Gil Donaldson, Sylvia Whitman and Jemma Birrell of Shakespeare and Company Bookshop and the staffs of the Archives Nationales de France, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Musée des Collections Historiques de la Préfecture de Police de Paris. Acknowledgment must be made and praise given to the men and women who own and work at some of my favorite cafés in southern France: Café de l’Hôtel de Ville in Forcalquier, Les Terraces in Bonnieux, Café de France in Lacoste, Chez Claudette in Saint-Romain and the Café du Cours in Reillanne—ideal locales for writing, editing and daydreaming over coffee and tobacco.

  I should also like to thank those who kindly offered me refuge from the distractions of urban life: the trustees and staff of the Lacoste campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, who generously appointed me writer-in-residence during the hot summer of 2010; the music conductor Oliver Gilmour, for lending me his luxurious house in Dubrovnik; Roby and Kathy Burke, whose villa in Haute Provence could not have been bettered for tranquility and beauty in which to work; Taki and Alexandra Theorodarcopulos, in Gstaad; Simon and Ellie Gaul, for a room in their spectacular spread beside Grimaud; and Emma Soames, for the loan of her country house in southern France as the ideal setting in which to complete the work. My thanks also to Daniel and Véronique Adel for helping me find a house to rent not far from theirs in the Luberon.

  Much gratitude must go to my editors, Ann Godoff at Penguin Press in New York and Martin Redfern at Harper Press in London. Their guiding hands (and spirits) are evident on every page. If any names are left out of this list, it is not intentional.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  “the twenty-five-year-old” William Bradford Huie, “Are Americans Afraid to Fight?” Liberty, June 1948, p. 80.

  “It is always an enriching” Charles B. MacDonald, The Siegfried Line Campaign, U.S. Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations, Center of Military History, U.S. Army, Washington, DC, 1993 (originally published, 1963), p. xi.

  “The mystery to me” Ernie Pyle, Brave Men, New York: Henry Holt, 1944, p. 164.

  “American Army deserters” Dana Adams Schmidt, “Deserters, Gangs Run Paris Racket,” New York Times, 23 January 1945, p. 5.

  “The French police fear” Dana Adams Sc
hmidt, “Americans Leave Dislike in France,” New York Times, 12 November 1945, p. 5.

  “American men have no” Committee of the National Research Council with the Collaboration of Science Service as a Contribution to the War Effort, Psychology for the Fighting Man, Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself, Washington, DC: The Infantry Journal (and Penguin Books), 1943, p. 13.

  “What war can ever” John Keegan, The Battle for History (Toronto: Random House, 1995), p. 9.

  BOOK I: OF BOYS TO SOLDIERS

  ONE

  “The East Side” “Storm of Protest May Save Parade,” New York Times, 6 April 1919, pp. 1 and 4.