The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (32 page)

Weiss’s first night on the line turned freezing, unbearable for soldiers in summer uniforms. Lieutenant John D. Porter, a platoon commander in the Vosges, wrote, “
Poor supply of a critical Class II item, winter clothing, was responsible for much of the trench-foot and respiratory diseases.” Some of the men sought warmth in a farmhouse. Weiss joined them inside. Suddenly, German artillery peppered the ground around the house. Outside, men asleep in tents, “
vulnerable and unprotected, were pulverized. . . . Screams and shouts mingled with the whine and crump of shells.” Weiss and the others ran out of the house to assist the wounded, but the shelling cut them off from one another. Weiss took shelter in a covered pen, where two goats trembled in fear. More shells shattered the pen’s door and roof. Weiss wrote that, when the barrage stopped,

I ran into the woods. Thirty men had been killed and wounded, their thin canvas tents had been torn to shreds. Tent poles were splintered; blood-stained blankets and combat packs were strewn all over the tangled earth. . . . More medics and stretcher bearers arrived from Docelles by ambulance to care for the wounded and to collect the dead.

“No foxholes had been dug,” Weiss observed, one of many signs that the men were too exhausted to take the basic precautions they had taken earlier in the war.

The next day, the squad waited in a barn to collect bullets and grenades, knowing that fresh supplies meant more combat. With so many dead and so few to replace them, Platoon Sergeant Kuhn asked Weiss to take over as squad leader with the rank of staff sergeant. He refused.
“I didn’t want the responsibility for eleven other guys,” he said. Instead, he settled for assistant squad leader as a buck sergeant. A lieutenant he had never met came out of a bunker a night later to issue orders. Weiss was to lead the eleven men of his new squad through a dense mass of trees into no-man’s-land. Weiss’s first scout was trembling, and the second scout stared toward an infinite horizon. The men were not in any shape to face the enemy, but they marched behind Weiss through the moonless night forward of the American lines. Waist-high bushes wet with autumn rain drenched the troops’ summer uniforms. None of the landmarks that the lieutenant had described was there. In the dense woods, the men sensed Germans behind every rock, a booby trap in every tree and a land mine under every step. When the second scout starting quivering, Weiss assured him he would be fine. He felt that the GI was reacting like “a sane young man to insane circumstances.”

The squad came back without finding any Germans. The lieutenant upbraided Weiss for failing to achieve the objective. “Easy for him to complain,” Weiss wrote, “from his large protected dugout wrapped around him like a full length fur coat.”

Weiss overheard a southern soldier in a foxhole nearby. “You never see any Jews up on the front,” he drawled. “They’re always behind the lines working as doctors or dentists.” It was bad enough returning to the infantry and fighting in freezing mountains, but he resented this reminder that the Nazis were not the only racists in the war. For the first time, “The thought of clearing out entered my mind.”

•   •   •

This was day one of the offensive to capture Bruyères. To reinforce the village’s natural protections, which included the Vologne River to the south and tank-resistant marshlands on two sides, German engineers had felled and booby-trapped large pine trees to block the roads. Interlocking machine-gun positions surrounded the village, and strongpoints in sturdy stone houses guarded the passes. One American platoon commander wrote, “
The discovery of a machine gun battalion in the defense of Bruyères alerted U.S. Intelligence that the Kraut intended to make a permanent stand in this sector. Machine gun battalions were never used unless the enemy was attempting to hold the position permanently.”

At 8:00 that morning of 15 October, elements of the 36th Division moved through the Forêt-de-Faite to take the first objective, called Hill A. The Germans responded with small-arms and automatic-weapons fire, but the T-Patchers pushed about four hundred yards forward to another hill overlooking the village. Renewed mortar and artillery fire stalled the American advance at the summit.

The squad dug in for protection against the night’s German artillery and mortars. Between impacts, they discussed their reasons for staying in the army. An older veteran told Weiss he would have left the outfit but for one reason: “Blackmail.” Weiss did not understand. “Married with a kid,” he said. A German shell exploded near their foxhole. “I’d leave in a flash, but for the wife and kid.” Another artillery round rattled the earth, and the soldier raised his voice: “No government allotment check means no support for the wife and no milk for the baby.” A new replacement, aged thirty-eight and with a wife and baby back in Brooklyn, sought counsel from Weiss the veteran. “What can I do to stay alive?” he asked. Suddenly, the teenaged soldier was playing “old man” to someone twice his age. He had no answer, but he tried: “Watch me, and do as I do. Don’t be too cautious, and don’t be too aggressive. Choose somewhere in between.” It was pure Hollywood, and Weiss felt like a fraud. Nothing guaranteed survival.

When the sun rose on 16 October, the Japanese-American, or “Nisei,” 442nd Regimental Combat Team, recently incorporated into the 36th following its unparalleled achievements on the Italian front, advanced through German roadblocks toward Hill B. American engineering units tried to clear the roads of the fallen trees and ordnance that the Nisei regiment had penetrated, until the Germans fired and drove them back. All morning, the Germans deployed fresh artillery shells from their home bases to devastate the Americans between Laval and Bruyères. More GIs were dying, and there were no troops to replace most of them.

At 7:30 that morning, German artillery pounded the American positions to an intensity that no human psyche was constituted to withstand. Private Stephen James Weiss of Company C, 1st Battalion, 143rd Regimental Combat Team, 36th U.S. Infantry Division, shook with each tremor of the earth. His foxhole was no protection from the assault of steel and fire. Men around him were dying. It was more than he could take. He went over the hill.

BOOK III

Military Justice

TWENTY-FIVE

“Giving up” is nature’s way of protecting the organism against too much pain.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 347

S
TEVE
W
EISS WANDERED DEEP INTO THE FOREST
, each step taking him farther from the artillery that rocked the ground behind him. He stumbled onto a footpath, unconsciously following its course through a thick pine labyrinth. A light rain soaked his shoulders and spread down his body. Shivering with cold and dragging his rifle, Weiss walked for two and a half hours. The trail took him to a clearing near a small village. French 2nd Armored Division tank crews, mostly Arabs and Berbers from North Africa, were roasting fresh lamb over a log fire. They offered Weiss a share of their food, but what he wanted was a place to sleep. They showed him a barn just beyond their circled tanks. At the top of a ladder, he carved a bunk in the hay and lay down beside his rifle. Coma-like unconsciousness overcame him. It was just before noon on 16 October.

A day or two later, Weiss woke up. When he went outside to relieve himself, his Arab hosts gave him something to eat. In a brief conversation, Weiss and the tankers discovered they had all fought in Italy and were first-timers in France. Weiss returned to the loft and fell immediately asleep.

•   •   •

At the 36th Division headquarters in Docelles on 19 October 1944, a general court-martial convened to consider the case against Lieutenant Albert C. Homcy for violating Article of War 75, “Misbehavior before the enemy.” His alleged offense was refusing to obey an order to lead unqualified service troops, all of them cooks, bakers and orderlies, against German tanks the previous August. Homcy’s counsel, Major Benjamin F. Wilson, Jr., raised a peremptory challenge to one member of the court panel. As a result, the president of the court, Lieutenant Colonel David P. Faulkner, withdrew. Another member, Major Harry B. Kelton, replaced him. Lieutenant Homcy, who had been cited in Italy for “exceptionally meritorious conduct . . . under almost constant enemy artillery and mortar fire,” could not easily be charged with cowardice. Yet he had disobeyed an order. Homcy testified that he could not, in accord with his duties as an officer, lead untrained men to certain death. His admission that he had disobeyed a direct order from a superior officer left the court little option but to convict him, because the officers on the panel would not rule on the legality or wisdom of orders. The court sentenced him to dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and fifty years at hard labor. Five members of the court submitted a clemency petition that recommended suspending his sentence and allowing him to return to duty. The 36th Division judge advocate, however, rejected clemency and confirmed the sentence.

The court, as subsequent disclosures at the appellate level made clear, had been under undue influence from the 36th Division’s commander, General Dahlquist. Lieutenant Colonel David Faulkner had been the main conduit of Dahlquist’s pressure, which explained why defense counsel Wilson had asked for him to be removed from the panel. The other officers, as they would later testify, knew of Dahlquist’s insistence on convictions “for the good of the service.” Court member Captain Lowell E. Sitton admitted that he felt “intimidated” and “vividly” recalled “
that severe pressures were applied to court martial boards in his [Dahlquist’s] division at or about the time of [Homcy’s] trial to make findings of guilty ‘for the good of the service’ without regard to the rights of the individual or the merits of the particular case in question.” The president of the court, Major Kelton, and other officers on the panel remembered being subjected to the same influence. Court member Captain Eldon R. McRobert said Dahlquist came to him personally:

He said that we were not doing our job, as we were being too lenient to the soldiers being tried, that we should find more of them guilty and if they were found guilty then we should assess a stronger sentence than we had been doing. He also gave us a very strong reprimand that we had not been doing our job and made a statement to the effect that if it were not so much trouble he would make this a matter of record and report it on our military records.

McRobert further recalled a meeting between the court-martial board and Dahlquist during Homcy’s trial:

After the Court-Martial Board left General Dahlquist’s headquarters, after he had given the verbal reprimand, we had discussed among all members present and I am sure that I remember without exception that each of us felt that our private rights had been invaded and that General Dahlquist had no authority to do what he had done.

Another panel member, Captain Isidore Charkatz, stated that Dahlquist intervened directly in other cases, including that of a soldier found “not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity.” Dahlquist called Charkatz a few days after the verdict and “gave me a strong verbal reprimand. . . . I was asked to take a letter to each member of the Board to be read and signed and then returned to the General.”

Homcy, formerly a lieutenant but now a private, was sent to the Disciplinary Training Barracks in Green Haven, New York, to begin fifty years at hard labor.

•   •   •

On 22 October, Weiss woke up again in the barn. Coming outside, he spoke to the North African tank crews and discovered his slumber had lasted six days. He thanked his hosts and retraced his steps through the forest. A few hours later, he snapped to attention in front of Captain Allan Simmons at Charlie Company’s new forward command post. Simmons was calm, more disappointed than vengeful. “You could have told me,” he said, in an unprecedented expression of sympathy. “Don’t you remember that, when we first met in Italy, I offered to be your priest, rabbi, friend and confidant, that you could come to me with your troubles?” Weiss did not recall Simmons speaking to him at all when he joined the 36th Division the previous June in Italy. Unable to speak, he wanted to say, “You never gave a damn. Aloof as always! You played it safe and never led from the front. Where the hell were you, when the fighting started, when the rest of us got knocked about? How come our casualty rate is consistently over one hundred percent a month and you, your second in command, Lieutenant Russell Darkes, and the company first sergeant are still around?”

Simmons had, however, been wounded by shrapnel during the river Rapido crossing in Italy. When Simmons was taken to an aid station, his executive officer, Lieutenant Russell Darkes, crossed the river under fire. In an unpublished memoir, Darkes wrote that he and other Company C survivors “
ended up in a shell hole on the German side of the River and were absolutely pinned down. . . . We finally made our way across the foot bridge in spite of the precarious condition, to the American side of the River. Upon our return, we discovered that the Battalion Commander and several of his staff members were either killed or wounded during the night.” The army awarded the then twenty-four-year-old Darkes the Silver Star for his actions that day. Weiss was unaware of the risks his company officers had taken, because he had not seen them leading from the front since he joined the division.

Weiss kept silent, which may have spared him a court-martial for desertion or going absent without leave. Simmons did not press charges. All Weiss had to do was return to his squad. Weiss, though, did not move. He felt incapable of going back into the line. Would the captain let him unload rations and equipment for a few days, at least until he was fit to fight without endangering anyone else? He knew that other company commanders had assigned traumatized soldiers to noncombat duty to give them time to readjust. For officers, reassignment appeared to be automatic. When Lieutenant Colonel David Frazior was too exhausted to lead the 1st Battalion, Colonel Adams had simply made him his executive officer. Simmons declined Weiss’s request with one word: “Dismissed.”