The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (38 page)

An indecisive battle continued until 15 December. That afternoon, cooks brought hot food up to the line where the 38th Regiment waited to follow the 9th into battle. “
To the veterans, it was like the Kiss of Death,” wrote Cleve Barkley, based on his father’s reminiscences. “Although delighted to wolf down hot chow, they knew that this gesture meant only one thing: They’d be going into action—soon!”

Early on the morning of 16 December, the 2nd Battalion of the 9th Regiment penetrated the German lines to capture prisoners and pillboxes, followed by the 3rd Battalion of the 9th Regiment. Whitehead’s 2nd Battalion of the 38th Infantry Regiment came forward: “
When we reached our attack point, we no longer had the protection of the dense forest. Here the enemy had cleared a large killing zone to the front of their forts, filling it with massive, formidable objects, wire and mines.” The 2nd Battalion led the 9th Regiment into the fray. Captain Charles B. MacDonald wrote,

By midnight the 2nd Battalion [38th Infantry Regiment] held a substantial bridgehead within the Wahlerscheid strongpoint and another battalion was filing silently through the gap. One battalion swung northwest, the other northeast. From one position to another, the men moved swiftly, blowing the doors of pillboxes with beehive charges, killing or capturing the occupants, prodding sleepy Germans from foxholes, and capturing seventy-seven at one blow at the customshouse.

Whitehead claimed no small part of the credit for victory. He allegedly destroyed “sixteen enemy emplacements, including several pillboxes with a flamethrower,” achievements other veterans of the battle doubted. Whitehead also wrote that his platoon leader submitted his name for a Silver Star. The 2nd Battalion pushed another 1,500 yards through the Monschau Forest, where German artillery and machine gunners opened up on them. By 17 December, the offensive had gone as far as it could.

•   •   •

Nature that day took Germany’s side. Fog and sleet made life miserable for the GIs and grounded Allied planes. While Whitehead was digging a slit trench, a mail orderly ran up to him. “You are surrounded,” he recalled the young man saying. “The Germans have broken through, taken the water dump, the mail dump and all the Christmas presents are gone!” Whitehead answered, “You’re crazy as hell.” The 9th and 38th Regiments were deep inside German territory.
Neither they nor their commanders knew that Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt had launched the mass counteroffensive that the newspapers would call “the Battle of the Bulge.” When Whitehead realized the mail orderly was not lying, he thought that “we’d all but won the war, when this staggering bit of bad news hit us.” The 38th Regiment’s advance was about to reverse itself.

The 38th hastily pulled back from Wahlerscheid’s crossroads to the Elsenborn Ridge. The Germans appeared to be on the way to achieving their objective of driving a wedge between the Allied armies and seizing the Belgian port of Antwerp, which had opened to Allied ships only on 26 November. By evening, the 2nd Battalion had fought a rearguard action to make its way to Rocherath. “
Not knowing the larger strategy of the situation,” Whitehead wrote, “we were all bitching, and I was wondering out loud why-in-the-hell those people in the rear couldn’t hold what we’d already taken.” Frontline troops would pay the price for the failure of command and intelligence to notice the buildup. For the next three days, the 2nd Division and the other forces arrayed along the German frontier waged a struggle for survival. The inexperienced 99th Division was nearly destroyed. Positions changed hands many times, orders were lost and men died when their own side mistakenly fired on them.

“
No pity was given by us or the enemy,” Whitehead wrote. “Our wounded and dying who fell in to the roads, or those fighting in foxholes, were run over and ground to pieces by the German tanks.” Whitehead joined a dawn patrol on 19 December. Entering a house, he saw an SS officer coming at him with a bayonet. Knocked down by the officer’s rifle butt, Whitehead said he moved quickly enough to stab the German with a trench knife. The struggle went on, until Whitehead shot him with his .45. The encounter was remarkably similar to one he described on Hill 192 in Normandy. “During these three days there had been no time to rest, except for short 10–20 minute periods could any of us close our eyes,” he remembered. “Many a time I’d reach down and grab some snow and rub it in my face to keep awake, while saying to myself, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay.’”

Although Whitehead’s account of his bravery from 16 to 19 December seemed unbelievable, some soldiers achieved at least one of the many feats he claimed for himself: calling in artillery on his own position to eliminate Germans who had overrun it; disabling Panther tanks with bazookas and shooting the crews as they climbed out; and hiding in a house with Germans inside and sneaking out wearing a German coat. All of these things happened, but it is unlikely the same man was responsible for them all. Nothing in his service record confirms these tales of derring-do, but there is no doubt Whitehead was entitled to a share in the 2nd Battalion’s Distinguished Unit Citation for “
outstanding courage, skill, and fearless initiative demonstrated by all personnel.”

Three days of fighting, house-to-house and hand-to-hand, in the twin towns of Krinkelt and Rocherath ended with the 38th’s withdrawal under fire. By 20 December, most of the 2nd Division had withdrawn about three miles to the heights at Elsenborn, “
a long natural ridge and a far tighter and more defensible position than the scattered roads and villages of the border.” From there, U.S. forces could shell the Germans below. Whitehead recalled that officers never used the word “withdrawal,” preferring “move to different positions.”

At least 1,030 2nd Division troops received treatment for wounds in the first three days. Hundreds of others were dead, had deserted or were taken prisoner. Al Whitehead was alive, free of injury and had not run away.
Nor was he in a German prison camp, like Sergeant Frank “Hardtack” Kviatek, who had trained him at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin.

By Christmas, the German offensive was concentrating farther south against the U.S. 101st Airborne and other units in Bastogne. Around Elsenborn, 38th Regiment troops dug slit trenches most of Christmas Day and celebrated with cold K rations. A few days later, overseeing a burial detail of Germans, Whitehead betrayed callousness that was unusual even in a man who had been long in battle: “I put my pick through their heads, pried them up, and dragged them over to the edge of a pit that had been dug, then shoved them in. The other men in the detail, new replacements, didn’t like the way I was doing the job, and stared at me in disbelief.”

The right side of his abdomen had been hurting for several days, and he requested painkillers from the dispensary. The doctor, whom he had known at Camp McCoy, examined him and said, “My God, Whitehead, this war’s over for you.” Whitehead was incredulous. The doctor explained, “You’ve got to have an operation for appendicitis. You’ll have to go back to England, and then it will probably be back to the States for you.”

TWENTY-NINE

Such a sufferer from war shock is not a weakling, he is not a coward. He is a battle casualty.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 353

O
NE EVENING IN LATE
D
ECEMBER
, an infantry captain came to the Loire Disciplinary Training Center near Le Mans. The prisoners lined up outdoors at his makeshift desk to hear the captain’s proposal. A veteran recovering from battlefield wounds, the captain invited volunteers for the front lines. The German counteroffensive that began in the Ardennes Forest on 16 December was taking thousands of Allied lives, and the army needed men to replace them. It would grant freedom to any inmate who returned to fight. When the war ended, records would be wiped clean and discharges would be honorable. A few convicts signed up, demonstrating bravery that Weiss admired.

When Weiss faced the captain, he volunteered for any duty, including mine disposal, apart from the infantry. His mental condition, which had received no medical attention, made infantry combat unimaginable. The captain said it was the infantry or nothing. Weiss later wrote, “I turned him down cold.”

Before sunrise every morning, the camp bugler blew reveille. Men who slept in their uniforms for warmth needed no time to dress. They queued to brush their teeth and headed to the mess hall to wait for powdered eggs or porridge. Someone yelled at Weiss one dark morning on the way to breakfast, “Get the lead out.” He responded, “Blow it out your ass.” It was a mistake. An MP pushed his face into the mess hall’s brick wall. After an hour frozen to the spot, Weiss heard the staff sergeant behind him shouting, “So, this is the son of a bitch who won’t follow orders?” Before Weiss could answer, a fist slammed into the side of his face and cracked his skull into the brickwork. “My eyes stung, blood rushed down my cheek and dripped on the ground,” Weiss wrote. “Bow Legs” dragged him to the administration office, kicking him all the way.

An officer ordered Weiss to explain himself. Bleeding and humiliated, he said that he had thought the person telling him to “get the lead out” in the dark was a fellow prisoner. Otherwise, he would have kept his mouth shut. “Bow Legs” challenged Weiss to put on the gloves. Before Weiss could answer, the officer ordered him to shut up and get out. That would have been the end of it, but the staff sergeant selected Weiss for further torment. He took particular satisfaction in catching Weiss visiting another prisoner’s cage and beating the hell out of him with his tent pole. Weiss was as bitter as he was powerless.

Two prisoners from the 82nd Airborne Division could not take the Loire DTC any longer and cut through the wire one night. At morning roll call, no one answered to their names. Guards were irate, prisoners elated. “
I was not only pleased with their accomplishment,” Weiss wrote, “but delighted they had lulled the staff into thinking that as prisoner athletic instructors, a soft billet, they would stay behind the wire.” The convicts bet cigarettes on whether the two paratroopers would be captured.

Four days later, Staff Sergeant “Bow Legs” dragged the two escapees through the wire into camp. The other prisoners watched disconsolately as he kicked the paratroopers and beat them with his tent pole. “Bow Legs” shoved them underground into a punishment hole, where they languished for a week on bread and water. When the week was up, the army transferred them to federal prison in the United States. Official policy stated that “
those having no salvage value were sent to the U.S.”

The directive on “Treatment of U.S. Soldiers in Confinement” from the theater provost marshal, Major General Milton A. Reckord, stated, “
Cruelty or unusual punishments will not be tolerated.” That did not prevent brutality from characterizing the camp regime, whether by design or due to lack of supervision of the more sadistic guards. One afternoon when there was no rain, the guards took the men on a march outside the base perimeter. One prisoner strayed to the left, and a guard shouted, “Hey, you, get back in the line.” When the man slipped to the side of the column again, the same MP aimed his .45-caliber revolver and fired. The man fell. Grabbing his bleeding leg, he cried out in agony. Some of the prisoners went to his aid, while the others stared in disbelief. Another guard called for the medics, who came about an hour later in an ambulance to take him to a hospital. The other prisoners concealed their outrage at the guard, who was not punished.

Steve Weiss met two other deserters from the 36th Division, Jim Dickson and Frank Turek. The last time Weiss saw Dickson, in Lyons, he was on his way with Clarence Weidaw to a medical station to seek treatment for psychoneurosis. The doctors accepted that Weidaw, who had gone silent after having nearly been burned alive by Germans, needed treatment. They returned Dickson to the division, whose court-martial board convicted him of “Misbehavior before the enemy” and sentenced him to twenty-five years’ hard labor. “
I remember running into Dickson at the DTC,” Weiss said, “but we never had much in common. He was not trustworthy.” The two soldiers, who had deserted together on 28 October, avoided each other after their initial meeting at the DTC.

Frank Turek, who had deserted from the 36th on the same day as Weiss, had not been with Charlie Company long enough for them to have become friends. “We talked a bit,” Weiss said. “We did not know each other. What I remember about him, and that behavior I admired, was that he was able to directly assess, for whatever it was worth, that being up on the front was too dangerous [for him] to exist. I couldn’t do that. I wavered.”

Once construction of the camp was complete, time passed slowly. There were no books to read, little work to do, no sports program and no rehabilitation or counseling. Hard labor became anything but hard. “It was calisthenics, marching, a lot of hanging around,” Weiss said. “I was leading a bunch of fellows, maybe an hour or two a day, in calisthenics.” Some of the inmates, black and white, formed a choir to entertain the other prisoners. Their repertoire consisted of what Weiss called “the typical songs that white and black would know.” One of the most popular was “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Black-white cooperation in the choir did not imply that relations between the races were relaxed.
A Texan Weiss had known in the 36th Division resented sharing quarters with black prisoners. “He was a tough hombre, tall, slender, a Gary Cooper type,” Weiss said. The Texan attacked one black prisoner, who fought back with all he had. The other inmates urged them on, and the guards ignored the fracas. “It was a good slugfest,” Weiss said. “I’d call it a draw.”

A majority of the inmates at the Loire DTC were black enlisted men, most of whom had been convicted for “non-military crimes” like murder, rape, larceny, armed robbery, petty theft and other violations of civilian criminal law. Army records showed that black soldiers received harsher penalties than whites convicted of the same crimes, and they were more likely to be put to death. There were two methods for administering the death penalty in the army: shooting and hanging. “
Hanging is considered more ignominious than shooting,” an army circular of 8 July 1943 noted, “and is the usual method, for example, in the case of a person sentenced to death for spying, for murder in connection with mutiny or for a violation of Article of War 92 [rape]. Shooting is the usual method of a person sentenced to death for a purely military offense, as sleeping on post.”