The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (22 page)

The 143rd Regiment raced through a fierce battle between the 141st Regiment and the German 765th Grenadier Regiment en route to its primary objective, the town of Saint-Raphaël. The 36th Division’s war history recorded, “
The 143rd Infantry ran into more opposition in the west. After assembling at Camel Green, its 1st [Weiss’s] and 3rd Battalions advanced west and northwest to secure the high ground along the slopes of the Esterel and a mile or two inland.”
They soon eliminated the German garrison in Saint-Raphaël, affording the 143rd a commanding position to protect Camel Red Beach for the landing of the 142nd Regiment.
In Saint-Raphaël, Shanklin’s squad rested near a pillbox at one end of an old iron bridge. As Weiss sipped from his canteen, a German shell crashed into the pillbox. Burning shrapnel and shards of concrete hit eighteen-year-old Private Truman Ropos in his right leg. The bleeding was severe, and medics wrapped the boy in blankets against shock. Two of them carried him away on a stretcher, while a third ran alongside with a plasma bottle connected to his vein. Doctors amputated his leg later in the day.

Reigle, Wohlwerth, Dickson, Weiss and the rest of the squad joined the fight to take the airstrip west of Saint-Raphaël. They blew up grounded German planes and cut a railway line. Along the way, dozens of German prisoners, many from the unenthusiastic
Ost
units recruited in German-occupied eastern Europe, surrendered to the Americans. Weiss’s squad moved north from Saint-Raphaël toward Fréjus. The squad heard that their two-man bazooka team was surrounded in a ravine, and they raced there to rescue them. The two soldiers had vanished, either killed or captured, to be reported as missing in action.

Ten hours after the first wave of American attackers hit the beaches, more than 20,000 troops were ashore. The Allies lost 95 men killed and 385 wounded, but had captured 2,300 Germans. Most of the prisoners were old men or from
Ost
units. Elite Wehrmacht and SS forces might not have surrendered as easily. The Seventh Army had taken the area between Toulon and Saint-Raphaël, securing the beachhead from German counterattack and preparing the way for advances north up the Rhône valley and west to the vital ports of Marseilles and Toulon. Operation Dragoon was anything but the disaster Churchill predicted. The official U.S. Navy historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, called it “
an example of an almost perfect amphibious operation from the point of view of training, timing, Army–Navy–Air Force coöperation, performance and results.”

•   •   •

Allied commanders made the most of German weakness in the south to drive speedily into France, the momentum affording no rest to the GIs. The German Nineteenth Army retreated more or less intact with the Americans and Free French in hot pursuit. On the second day of the campaign, 16 August, Weiss’s squad continued probing north of Saint-Raphaël and paused near some trees. As Sheldon Wohlwerth put down his rifle, it accidentally launched a grenade that slammed into the mouth of a private named Taylor. The grenade did not explode, but it mangled the boy’s flesh and teeth. Taylor fell in agony, and Weiss, Reigle and Wohlwerth held the young soldier until medics carried him to a field hospital.

The deputy commander of the 36th Division, General Robert I. Stack, led most of the division ninety miles north over the following fourteen hours. “This was a dangerous, gambling attack,” the 36th Division’s newspaper,
T-Patch,
wrote. Stack stretched the 36th’s lines of communications to one hundred miles, forcing drivers to work twenty-four hours a day carrying supplies from the beachhead to the front. Town after town fell to the Allied advance, which slowed only to accept the thanks, kisses and wine of the inhabitants. “
I was hugged and kissed until my mouth and ribs ached,” Weiss wrote.

Eric Sevareid, the CBS radio correspondent who accompanied the soldiers, wrote:

For the first time in the war, the troops themselves, like the optimistic people at home, began to wager on a quick end to the war. And for the first time in my observation of them they began to enjoy the war. The sun was warm and the air like crystal. The fruits were ripening, and the girls were lovely. In every village the welcome was from the heart, and for once civilians were a help instead of a hindrance.

On 17 August, Weiss took part in liberating the capital of the Var department in Draguignan. The GIs called the town, about fifteen miles inland from their landing beaches, “Dragoon.” Most of its twenty thousand inhabitants came out to submerge the soldiers in gratitude and presents. Men, women and children kissed the American boys and decked them in wildflowers. Weiss thought it was “
more like a Broadway musical than war.” The mood changed when
the mayor invited the commander of Weiss’s regiment, Colonel Paul D. Adams, through a stone wall into a tranquil garden shaded by tall cypress trees. It was the quietest spot in Draguignan. “All the people of my town have contributed to give you this land,” the mayor said. The land was a cemetery.

Trucks collected Shanklin’s squad the next morning, 18 August, and drove them along Highway N-85, the old Route Napoléon, in an armored convoy. For the first time, Weiss saw the
résistants
of the FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur), tough fighters who guarded roads and mountain passes for the Allies. They wore “baggy trousers and ill-fitting, mismatched suit jackets” and wielded obsolete but serviceable rifles. Most had cigarettes fixed tight between mustachioed lips.
Called
maquisards
and sometimes simply the
maquis,
names taken from the Corsican word
macchia,
which means a type of bush, Resistance members in the south of France numbered about seventy-five thousand. Although roughly two-thirds of them lacked even rifles, they contributed significantly to the Allied advance. Their sabotage destroyed bridges, train tracks and telephone lines, forcing the Germans to divert troops from defense to chase the “terrorists” in the mountains both before and during the invasion. “
Many of them carried on the fight for three or four years, operating as individuals or in small bands,” a U.S. Army study noted during the campaign in the south. “They made the occupation of FRANCE a continual hell for the Germans.” The Resistance gave the American boys confidence, and grateful civilians made the war seem worth fighting.

“If we paused for a moment’s respite, our shirts bathed in sweat and covered with dust, our mouths parched with thirst, they would run to greet us, arms outstretched, with tears of joy streaming down their cheeks,” Weiss wrote of the Provençal population. In four days, the 36th Division liberated Castellane, Digne, Sisteron and Gap. It pushed north of the main German forces in line with Seventh Army commander General Alexander Patch’s strategy to entrap the German Nineteenth Army between Allied forces to the north and south. On 22 August, the 36th drove into Grenoble, an Alpine ski resort and university town. The crowd, the largest the Americans had seen, wielded flags and wine that were by now familiar tributes to the boys who had come far to liberate France from foreign occupation.

The 143rd Regiment’s officers installed themselves at the Hôtel Napoléon, where Colonel Adams made his headquarters. The GIs were billeted behind the walls of an old French army barracks. The noise of celebration tempted some of the soldiers outside. Weiss wrote, “[
Jim] Dickson and I found an old, possibly forgotten, rusty iron door, falling off its hinges, embedded in the stone wall that gave way to our touch.” Leaving the barracks, they walked past a bakery where women waiting for bread applauded them. Another woman leaned out of a window and invited the two soldiers upstairs. Assuming she wanted to demonstrate her gratitude in the most basic manner, the boys ran to her door. The scene was not what they expected. An exhausted, sickly man was standing beside an old cupboard, almost the only furniture in the room. Weiss’s high school French and the woman’s few words of English helped them to communicate. Pouring out her only bottle of cognac, she said her husband had waited four years for this moment. Her husband wept, raised his glass and said he had never doubted that the Americans would come. Weiss and Dickson drank the cognac and went out to find the festivities.

The two young Americans tried to buy bicycles from a shop, whose owner insisted they borrow them free of charge. After all, the man said, the Germans took bikes without paying or returning them. The GIs cycled from café to café, where people gave them wine and thanks. At sunset, they dropped off the bicycles and walked through a city alight with bonfires and fireworks. “
Hordes of men and women strode arm in arm singing
La Marseillaise
and drinking champagne,” Weiss recalled. He and Dickson drank wine and they exchanged kisses with exuberant and not always young women. Their new French friends kept them up until dawn, when the two liberators fell asleep on the ground beside a petrol station.

SIXTEEN

There are a few men in every army who know no fear—just a few. But these men are not normal.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 304

A
YOUNG REPLACEMENT LIEUTENANT
in Headquarters Company of the 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, had a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of the battle for Hill 192. Alfred T. Whitehead, now promoted to corporal, had no sympathy. Taking the trembling officer, a high school teacher in civilian life, to the company commander, he said, “I’ve been doing this man’s job all day, and here he is crying and carrying on like a baby. I’m scared too, but I’m still fighting.” The lieutenant was reassigned, undoubtedly to a psychiatric center behind the lines. Already tough when he entered the army, Whitehead was becoming merciless.

The conquest of Hill 192 left the just-promoted corporal with two wounds, one in his left thigh, the other in his left hand. Although he stated in his memoir that the injury to his hand was from a German bayonet, medical records indicated that he sought treatment for both at an aid station. The medical tent was filled with casualties that made his shrapnel wounds look slight, and seeing limbless soldiers made him decide to rub sulpha powder on his cuts and leave. His hand sometimes bled through the bandages, and he changed the dressing daily. For the next few days, during the battle that destroyed the ancient Norman town of Saint-Lô, his unit was in reserve. This gave him time to recuperate physically, if not mentally.

The 38th Regiment’s next objective was the village of Saint-Jean-des-Baisants. This meant more fighting through hedgerows and across pastures defended by German machine guns. One night on guard duty, Whitehead admitted, he fell asleep.
This was a serious offense, punishable under military law by death but usually by long imprisonment. Sentries who fell asleep could easily be killed by German patrols. More than that, they endangered all the men of the unit.
Whitehead’s squad leader woke him, but did not report him. Whitehead claimed he later chanced upon a sleeping German sentry and severed his throat with a wire garrote.

Whitehead’s memoir described his squad’s existence at this time: foraging, occasionally shooting cattle for food, stealing eggs from farmers and picking apples. Some unripe apples upset his stomach. He recalled the smell of “dead bodies lying along the sunken roads—bloated, blackened, rotting bodies of Americans and Germans, with maggots working through them.” While he occasionally exaggerated his martial feats, his was anything but a heroic war. There was no mention of patriotism, of struggling against Nazi tyranny or of the unit cohesion that made men risk their lives for one another. Whitehead’s war was a steady slog through minefields, up and down hills and over fields littered with the human and mechanical debris of war.

Germans often surrendered by raising their hands and calling out,
“Kamerad
.
”
Whitehead’s response was, “Kom-a-rod, hell! After all you put me through, and then you come out with your hands up. Shame-on-you.” Acknowledging his duty to turn prisoners over to MPs, Whitehead added, “A combat soldier is a lot different from anyone else: he’s not eager to live-and-let-live or forgive-and-forget. He’ll shoot the hell out of you, damn quick, and he won’t bat an eye when he does it.” When two Germans surrendered to him near a bombed-out bridge, he gave each of them a cigarette. This turned out to Whitehead’s advantage. He released them to persuade the rest of their company to surrender. They returned with forty more soldiers.

Germans were not the only ones ready to surrender. Whitehead carried a clean, white handkerchief to wave at the enemy if his time came.

•   •   •

At 9:00 in the morning on 15 August, the 2nd Division moved on the town of Tinchebray. Whitehead had his first encounter with Free French partisans, who provided his unit with intelligence on German positions. The destructive battle for Tinchebray lasted most of the day. Many civilians were sheltering in their houses. Whitehead recalled,

We sometimes accidentally killed whole families while clearing out buildings: you didn’t have time to ask who was in the cellars when you tossed hand grenades in them. It was a terrible experience. Sometimes, too, a little girl or boy would come running out with one or both arms blown off, crying hysterically and wild with fear.

The German defense of Tinchebray had been, in the estimation of 2nd Division commander Major General Walter M. Robertson, “half-hearted and ragged.” The Germans surrendered at 4:30 that afternoon. The 2nd Battalion quickly secured Hill 248, above the town, where they heard on their radio that Allied forces had invaded southern France earlier that day. The men were grateful that the Germans would be forced to divert resources from them to another front. A British battalion soon arrived to relieve them. General Robertson wrote, “
The last objective of the 2nd Division in Normandy was secure.”