The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (27 page)

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

A
T 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 parachuting 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.

Lieutenants Rickerson and McKenzie had an impeccable record of achievement since parachuting into France six weeks earlier. After liaising with the local Resistance and taking Sergeant Biledeau to a hospital to set his fractured leg, Rickerson and McKenzie established their operating base. Five days later, they went into action blowing up two bridges. French engineers with Rickerson cut the cable at one end of a suspension bridge fifty miles north of Avignon at Viviers before destroying its foundations with eight 20-pound charges on the bridge’s suspension cables. The technique knocked out the bridge so that it fell intact to block the river, forcing a barge laden with petrol for German forces to turn back. McKenzie meanwhile demolished a railway bridge near Viviers. Six days later, on 29 July, OG Louise launched an assault that was nothing less than astounding for a small group of a dozen Americans with fewer than a hundred
maquis
allies. They attacked a German garrison of ten thousand men northwest of Lyons in the town of Vallon, destroying a fuel depot, heavy artillery and most of the Germans’ vehicles. They also left about two hundred German troops dead. Then, using air-dropped 37-millimeter antitank guns, they attacked a German column as it retreated north.

On 25 August, the battalion suffered a setback when a failed ambush of German troops forced the
maquis
to withdraw and the Americans to fight their way to safety. Rickerson suffered “
superficial if bloody wounds” that he did not mention to the Charlie Company recruits.
At Chomerac on 31 August, Lieutenant Rickerson and two Free French officers convinced the German commander that an Allied army surrounded his forces. Three thousand eight hundred Germans surrendered to the tiny band.

Weiss had become part of one of the most successful guerrilla operations of the war in Europe, and the more he learned about Rickerson, whom the men called “Rick,” the more he admired him. The lieutenant’s professionalism persuaded Weiss that joining the American unit was right after all. He thought that “
unlike Simmons, Rick’s feats of arms proved him to be an officer worthy of command. I needed that.” Rickerson assigned Weiss to guard the radio operator, Sergeant Frank Laureta of Denver, Colorado, while he made his transmissions to Algiers. German radio-detection vans operated throughout the area. If one tuned into Laureta’s frequency and Germans broke into the house, Weiss would be Laureta’s last line of defense.

Rickerson outlined the unit’s next mission: to attack the German 11th Panzer Division, one of the Wehrmacht’s toughest in France, near Lyons. France’s third most populous city had been liberated on 2 September, but the German Nineteenth Army was using routes around it on their retreat to Germany. The 11th Panzers was the Nineteenth’s rear guard. Rickerson estimated the panzer division’s strength at fifty Panther heavy tanks, a dozen Mark IV medium tanks, four mechanized infantry battalions and an armored artillery regiment.

Weiss was astonished that Rickerson would send a dozen OSS paratroopers, eight Charlie Company riflemen and about a hundred French part-time guerrillas against a German armored division. “It can’t be done. We’ll be wiped out,” he muttered. Rickerson, who either ignored or didn’t hear the teenage private, discussed with McKenzie the weapons and equipment the operation required. They gave a shopping list to radio operator Frank Laureta, who went upstairs with Weiss to transmit to OSS Algiers. Laureta pulled his communications equipment out of a cubbyhole in the attic, fixed an antenna to the roof, wired it to his radio set, put on the headphones and encoded the message. Weiss asked him if he believed the army would actually deliver the men and equipment Rickerson was asking for.

“Yes, why not?”

Weiss told him the 36th Infantry Division’s supply sergeants were reluctant to hand out so much as “a chalky D-ration chocolate bar.” Laureta advised the young soldier to wait and see.

Three nights later, on schedule, a black B-24 Liberator bomber flew through the dark sky over a drop zone guarded by Rickerson’s team, the eight Charlie Company troops and some
maquisards
with horses, carts and trucks. Dozens of crates and a few men fell to earth. A few parachutes failed to open, smashing cargo onto the ground. The team took the new men and supplies for the Lyons operation back to the safe house. They ate dinner, during which Weiss appreciated the friendliness between officers and men, the banter and the professionalism. It was at least as good as it had been with Captain Binoche, perhaps better owing to the easy access to supplies. “This is the kind of war I want to fight,” he thought, “with guys you can rely on.”