The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (31 page)

The commander of Weiss’s 143rd Regiment,
Colonel Paul D. Adams, reported to General Dahlquist that his men were experiencing physical and mental breakdowns that had dramatically increased desertions, self-inflicted wounds and combat exhaustion. Officers feared that the remaining troops would not stand up to German counterattacks. General Dahlquist saw that the men of the 36th Division, even when they were willing to fight, were too exhausted to do it properly. The official army history recorded, “Colonel Paul D. Adams, commanding the 143rd Infantry of the 36th Division, reported [to Dahlquist] an almost alarming physical and mental lethargy among the troops of his regiment, and General Dahlquist, the division commander, had to tell [VI Corps commander] General [Lucian] Truscott that the 36th had little punch left.” Adams’s 143rd Regiment was, in Dahlquist’s view, his best. If its men were suffering, morale was probably lower in the 141st and 142nd. Most of the riflemen in all three regiments had been given no respite from combat since they hit the beach near Saint-Raphaël two months earlier on 15 August.

Colonel Adams told Dahlquist the men needed time off: “
You give them three days and they’ll be back in shape without any trouble. Just leave them alone, let them eat and sleep for the first day, make them clean up the second day, and do whatever they want the rest of the time, and they’ll be ready to go.” The 36th had no choice but to raise the men’s spirits. Otherwise, unnecessary deaths and desertions would doom the assault on the High Vosges.

Enlisted men were not the only victims of battle fatigue. When the Germans attacked Colonel Adams’s 1st Battalion forward of Remiremont in early October, he and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Frazior, led a reserve company into the battle to repel them. After reinforcing the line, Adams and Frazior drove back to base in an open jeep. Frazior fell asleep in mid-conversation, and Adams pretended not to notice. He regarded Frazior as “
one of the finest men and one of the best battalion commanders anybody could ever have.” In the morning, Frazior announced, “It’s time for me to quit, because I’m in no shape to command this battalion.” Adams advised him to get more sleep, but Frazior was adamant that his exhaustion rendered him incapable of battlefield command. Adams knew that Frazior did not lack courage. In Italy, he had lost part of his hand fighting the Germans. Recuperating in a hospital in North Africa, he deserted to rejoin the battalion in time to lead it in the invasion of France. Frazior’s determination and integrity were never in doubt. Adams relieved him of command, but kept him in the regiment as his executive officer.

Sensitive to the depth of his officers’ and men’s fatigue, Adams lodged a request with General Dahlquist to establish rest camps. Dahlquist approved, and the 36th’s first center for rest and recreation opened in early October ten miles west of Remiremont in the resort of Plombières-les-Bains.
The 36th established a second rest camp at Bains-les-Bains a month later. In both, the soldiers were given drugs to let them sleep for at least a day, issued clean uniforms, allowed to shower and given hot food. After three days, which included entertainment and access to physicians and chaplains, the troops returned to duty. While this had a positive effect on the men who made it to the rest centers, there were not enough reserves to spare a majority of them from the front line.

The 36th Division grew desperate for ammunition, petrol, rations, blankets, winter clothing and, most of all, men. It nonetheless assisted the French in liberating Dijon and reached the river Moselle on 21 September. Its weary men did not go much farther. Their next mission, in the words of Seventh Army’s G-2 (intelligence section), was to “
clear approaches to passes of the VOSGES in zone, to seize terrain from which to launch an offensive designed to carry the Seventh Army through the VOSGES defenses to STRASBOURG and over the RHINE.” German units fortified the Vosges natural obstacles with bunkers, land mines, machine-gun emplacements and artillery to bleed the Americans for every yard they took.

While much of the Seventh Army’s VI Corps dug into the foothills, the Germans were reorganizing their units on the heights and absorbing troop reinforcements from home. American supply lines stretched more than four hundred miles from the Mediterranean, but the Germans had edged closer to their supply bases in Alsace and Germany itself. For the first time, the Germans expended more artillery shells than the Americans. Autumn showers grounded Allied air support, increasing the defenders’ advantage in the mountains. If the American system was breaking down, so were the men. Division historian Colonel Vincent M. Lockhart put it succinctly: “
Almost every adverse factor of combat faced the 36th Division in late September and October 1944.” Correspondence among senior officers increasingly referred to shortages of troops, ammunition, rations and winter clothing. The commanders observed it, but the men lived it. As more and more were killed, captured and wounded, and as others ran away, the need for manpower was greater than ever.

That need, for Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 143rd Regiment, included Private Stephen J. Weiss. Weiss, taking one ride after another toward the 36th Division, passed much of the war-wrecked equipment that both the Allied and German armies had abandoned. Riding beside drivers of jeeps and trucks, he observed thousands of rear echelon troops who had never come near a battle. Every French town seemed to be filled with “pencil pushers” entertaining French women in cafés. Many of these “civilians in uniform,” as Weiss called them, were supplying their girlfriends with food and cigarettes intended for frontline troops. Tales of GIs working with the black market to steal and sell American petrol and other supplies, mainly from the port at Marseilles, bothered him. So did his conviction that the rear echelon boys were not pulling their weight.
Although there were more than three million American troops in Europe, no more than 325,000 were in combat at the same time.
The infantry, barely 14 percent of the total American military presence in Europe, suffered 70 percent of the casualties. Weiss’s sense of injustice, compounded by his misgivings about Captain Simmons, gnawed at him all the way to the front.

Weiss reported to the headquarters of VI Corps, the main component of General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army, in Vittel. The brass had commandeered the 1920s Hôtel de l’Ermitage, one of the Alpine spa’s most luxurious establishments. Weiss met a fellow ex-trainee from Fort Blanding named Santorini in the hotel’s elegant art deco lobby. Santorini, who was working in counterintelligence, mentioned that his colonel needed a photolithographer. Weiss, with his year’s experience in photolithography for the Office of War Information in New York, was an ideal candidate. The colonel interviewed Weiss and requested authorization from the 36th Division for his transfer to counterintelligence. Not many troops were trained in photolithography, encouraging Weiss to believe he would avoid returning to Captain Simmons after all. The next morning, however, division turned the colonel down.

“Rebuffed and angry, I packed my meager belongings, thanked the colonel and Santorini for their efforts on my behalf and left in search of the 36th,” Weiss wrote. Division headquarters was fifty miles east of Vittel in the town of Remiremont, about a day’s drive on France’s narrow and crowded rural highways. Weiss walked to the road and put out his thumb.

The 36th Division had captured Remiremont on 23 September. On 24 September, it moved its command post forward to Éloyes and on 1 October to an old house in the town of Docelles beside a bombed-out bridge over the river Moselle. In Docelles, their advance stalled. The division’s command post was stuck in Docelles for twenty-one days, its longest time in a single location since the August invasion. “
The 36th was back to the old Italian situation of mud, mountains and mules,” one officer wrote, “but we had very few mules.” The next main objective, Bruyères, was only seven and a half miles away. However, against entrenched German positions, high mountains, dense forests, rain and mud, it might have been a hundred.

•   •   •

On 8 October, a new replacement joined the ranks of Weiss’s Company C, 1st Battalion, 143rd Regiment, at Docelles. He was Private First Class Frank Turek, a good-looking twenty-two-year-old Polish-American draftee from Hartford, Connecticut. His arrival, however, did little to fill the void left by the many men who had disappeared from the ranks. Four days later, Columbus Day, Thursday, 12 October, Steve Weiss walked into 36th Division headquarters. The 143rd Regiment’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel David Frazior, recalled his relief on learning that Weiss, following the other seven men from the missing squad, had returned: “
I remember it distinctly, because we were so glad to get them back!” Unfortunately for Weiss, Frazior was not at divisional headquarters to express his relief. Instead, a “bored headquarters clerk” ignored him for a few minutes before asking what he wanted. Weiss gave his name and unit. Looking at his file, the clerk told him his family had been informed he was missing in action. Weiss thought of his mother, father and sister in Brooklyn. “
I was sure they were overwhelmed with anxiety,” he wrote. The clerk showed no interest in Weiss’s problems and failed to offer him coffee from a pot brewing nearby. An officer came in and asked Weiss if he would consider working in his headquarters office. He would, but their superiors quickly rejected the request. That afternoon, Weiss got a lift four miles forward of Docelles to Charlie Company’s command post in a forest halfway to Bruyères.

Captain Simmons had yet to return from the aid station, where he had gone for treatment of a sniper’s bullet in his neck. Commanding Company C in his absence was the executive officer, Lieutenant Russell Darkes. Darkes, a twenty-four-year-old officer candidate school (OCS) graduate from Mount Zion, Pennsylvania, did not acknowledge Private Weiss’s return. While not expecting a warm homecoming, Weiss resented being treated “just like ammunition, petrol or rations.” It bothered him that no officers shook his hand, despite needing him so much that they rejected his transfer to the OSS and several other units.
No soldier, according to a survey of GI opinion called “What the Soldier Thinks,” welcomed such impersonal treatment. “Men resent being treated as ‘manpower’ in the abstract,” the report on troops who fought between December 1942 and September 1945 stated. “They want to retain their essential dignity as human beings.” One soldier wrote on his survey form, “Treat them as men not dogs.”

Officially, army policy was for officers to put their men first. “
The good leader had faith in human nature,” Colonel L. Holmes Ginn, Jr., of the army medical section, wrote in his report on combat exhaustion. “He knew his men, he was their friend, he insisted they be treated as human beings, he looked after their wants, and he was firm but just in his dealings with them.”

While Weiss stood in a cavernous farmhouse command post that had no furniture or other sign of human habitation, only one person spoke to him. It was his old platoon sergeant, a tall and amiable Texan named Lawrence Kuhn. Kuhn smiled and said, “Reigle told me you were alive.”

Weiss, grateful for the only greeting on offer, asked Kuhn about his squad leader, Sergeant Harry Shanklin. Kuhn hesitated, then said, “Shanklin’s dead.” A German patrol had killed him in a firefight near the river Moselle a few weeks before. Weiss felt sick, remembering Shanklin’s friendly grin and “boyish good looks.” The twenty-two-year-old Shanklin had led him from the beach at Saint-Raphaël all the way to Valence, sustaining the squad’s morale and protecting them from unnecessary danger. “
When Harry Shanklin was killed,” Weiss said, “I was devastated.” A few hours later, as the sun was setting, Weiss moved up to a woodland clearing where the men of Charlie Company were coming off the line for the night.

The first friends he saw were Bob Reigle and Settimo Gualandi, who had been with him in the Resistance and the OSS. Reigle and Gualandi, now a sergeant, were happy to see him. The three GIs rested on the soft earth, and Weiss asked about Sergeant William Scruby. Reigle had bad news. Scruby, whose ingenuity had saved them from death or capture in the irrigation canal near Valence, was gone. A mortar shell blew his leg off two weeks before, and he was unlikely to survive. Sheldon Wohlwerth had taken German machine-gun rounds in his chest, and he too had been evacuated with little hope of making it. Weiss noticed that the other three guys from their Resistance service, Fawcett, Garland and Caesar, were also absent. Of the eight, only Reigle, Gualandi and now Weiss himself were in the line. The other men in their old squad were replacements. This was bad enough, but Weiss was assigned to another squad where he knew no one.

“
I was just nineteen,” Weiss recalled. “When I got back, half of the others were dead. I felt so alienated, so nonexistent.” Every man there had troubles, and Weiss’s were no worse than anyone else’s. However, returning from the land of the living, he detected changes in the others that they did not see in themselves. The men around him, especially Reigle and Gualandi, were not as he remembered. Combat exhaustion was etched into each face as sharp as a bullet hole.

Weiss recognized an ex-trainee from Fort Blanding, thirty-year-old Private Clarence Weidaw, quietly eating his rations. Weiss walked over and said, “Weidaw, it’s me, Steve.” Weidaw went on eating. “Weidaw’s gone mute on us,” another soldier said. “The Krauts had him trapped in a hayloft. He wouldn’t surrender, so after they pulverized the hayloft and set it alight, Weidaw jumped and escaped under a hail of fire.” Since then, the private had not said a word.

“Why did you come back?” Weiss’s friends asked. Reigle said he should have stayed away. All that he and Gualandi had known since their return were “S-mines, booby-traps, mortars, machine guns and heavy-duty artillery,” but not sleep or a few hours out of danger. “Why did you come back?” Weiss wasn’t sure. He said maybe it was because he was loyal. “Loyal,” his comrades laughed. “Are you kidding? You’ll be dead in a month.” As if confirming their prediction, a German reconnaissance plane soared overhead and, undoubtedly, reported their position to its artillery batteries. This was war, the real war, the infantry war, and Weiss was back in it.