The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (39 page)

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When courts-martial condemned soldiers to death, someone had to execute the sentence. All American troops in the European Theater of Operations were trained to fire rifles, qualifying them for firing squads. Few if any had the skills of a hangman. With more men sentenced to hang than to be shot, a hangman had to be found.

The army’s initial proposal was to hire a local executioner, but a French liaison officer at U.S. Army G-1 (Personnel) Headquarters “
expressed doubt that a French national could be found as a hangman because hanging is not a method of execution in France.” Unwilling to employ the guillotine, the army searched for an American hangman. On 16 September 1944, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, commander of the Services of Supply in Europe, appealed to all base section commanders for a hangman. His “OUTGOING CLASSIFIED MESSAGE” stated:

Classified confidential survey requested to be made of your Command to determine whether any EM [enlisted man] is a qualified hangman. If qualified EM is located, determine whether he will volunteer for such duty. Report name, rank, ASN [army serial number], and organization of all volunteers by TWX [teletype writer exchange] giving qualifications.

Corporal Eric Klick of the 4237th Quartermaster Sterilization Company volunteered, but he had merely witnessed rather than taken part in a few executions in the United States. Two other potential executioners stepped forward, Private Second Class John C. Woods of the 5th Engineer Special Brigade and Private First Class Thomas Robinson of the 554th Quartermaster’s Depot. Lieutenant Colonel Allen C. Spencer of the Adjutant General’s Office wrote to General Lee that Woods’s experience had been limited to his “having been assistant hangman twice in the state of Texas and twice in the state of Oklahoma.”
A simple check of Woods’s claims would have shown that the electric chair had replaced the noose in both states: Oklahoma in 1911, when Woods was seven; and Texas in 1923, when he was twenty. Private First Class Robinson of New York City had been a baker. Nonetheless, the army appointed Woods its official hangman and Robinson his assistant.

While the generals wanted enlisted men to conduct the hangings, just as only enlisted men served on firing squads, the executioner needed a higher rank than buck private. This was quickly rectified, as Major General Milton A. Reckord, theater provost marshal, wrote on 28 September: “
G-1 has promised to provide the grade recommended by me for the hangman in order to compensate him in a small measure for the work he is to perform. I am recommending the hangman be made a Master Sergeant and the assistant hangman a T/3 [technician third grade].”

At a stroke, Woods, a buck private, was promoted to master sergeant, leapfrogging Private First Class (contradictory records refer to him as both PFC and corporal) Robinson to outrank him by two grades.

In October, Woods and Robinson began a pilgrimage through France in an army truck lugging their portable scaffold on a trailer. Army policy directed that hangings for rape take place in the communities where the offense was committed. The victims and their families were invited to witness American military justice, proof that the United States Army condemned mistreatment of the local population. When hanging in the community proved impracticable, executions took place in DTCs.

Woods’s and Robinson’s peregrinations took them in mid-December to the Loire Disciplinary Training Center, where Steve Weiss was detailed to help erect the gallows for the hanging of two men. One had been convicted of murder, the other of raping a Frenchwoman. Both were black.
The War Department’s “Procedure for Military Executions” of 12 June 1944 laid down guidelines for every aspect of putting soldiers to death by hanging, as well as “by musketry.” Weiss, who had long conversations with hangman Woods, saw the forty-one-year-old sergeant as a “small framed Texan from San Antonio, the bottom of his overseas cap resting at eye level, wearing a .45 automatic on each hip.” Not only did Woods sport the two .45s in matching holsters like a cowboy, he regaled Weiss with tales of hangings he had done. One of his claims was to have hanged more than three hundred men in fourteen years. This was an unlikely statistic for a man who had become a military executioner only two months before and whose prior record had included self-claimed assistance at only four hangings. When Weiss and the other inmates completed the scaffold at the top of a rise beside the camp, Woods made a show of testing the drop, the trap door and the rest of the equipment. To Woods’s eye, everything was in working order.

What the army manual called “the ceremony” began when a detail of MPs unlocked the condemned man’s cage and put him in handcuffs. The other Death Row inmates erupted in fury, screaming and banging tin cups against their cages. The rest of the prisoners stood at attention beside their pup tents. The MPs led the condemned man through the camp and out the gate to the gallows. Weiss, who was standing nearby, watched the black soldier mount the steps. The commanding officer, the chaplain and the medical officer, as prescribed in the manual, were waiting for him at the top. With them was Sergeant Woods. The commanding officer read out the sentence and, as the manual required, asked, “Do you have any statement to make before the order directing your execution is carried out?” The convict had nothing to say.

Sergeant Woods stepped forward holding out a hood that, according to the regulations, was “
of black sateen material, split at the open end so that it will come well down on the prisoner’s chest and back. A draw string will be attached to secure the hood snugly around the neck.” Weiss wrote, “Woods placed a black hood over the man’s head, tied a rope around his neck and sprang the trap door.” The convict disappeared, the regulations stipulating that “
the lower portion of the scaffold will be covered to conceal the body of the prisoner from the spectators after the trap is sprung.”
The medical officer, who was required to certify death, pulled aside the green canvas cloth. Weiss saw that the condemned man was still breathing. The doctor pressed a stethoscope to the writhing chest and shook his head. Weiss realized the man’s neck had not broken, leaving him to writhe at the end of the rope unseen by everyone except Weiss and the medical officer. Fifteen minutes later, the body went still. The doctor listened again. The man had at last strangled to death.

The regulations stipulated a different procedure. “
Every precaution will be taken to prevent the protracted suffering of the prisoner,” Adjutant General A. E. O’Leary had instructed in an order of 8 July 1943. The 27 September 1944 directive from the judge advocate updated the order: “
In the event the construction proves to be defective, the rope breaks or the execution is not successful, the procedure will be repeated until the prescribed punishment has been administered.” No precaution had been taken to prevent “protracted suffering,” and the doctor did not suggest cutting the man down to be hanged again.

As with the French firing squad that shot the
milicien
in Alboussière, the hanging had been botched. Both experiences left Weiss sick. A few days later, he was ordered to assist at the hanging of the second black convict. Woods was no more efficient than he had been at the previous execution, and the second man also strangled slowly to death. Weiss gave Woods the benefit of the doubt, writing, “
Whether it was Woods’ failure to kill quickly or whether the fault lies in hanging as a method, that allowed the condemned to linger inhumanely, may never be known.”

From D-Day in Normandy to the autumn of 1945, the judge advocate general’s official history noted, seventy soldiers “—
all enlisted men—had been executed in the European Theater of Operations.” Of this number, fifteen were white, and fifty-five, nearly 80 percent, were black.

The bodies of the executed prisoners were sent to a First World War cemetery near Fère-en-Tardenois, where they were interred in unmarked graves. Their families were not informed how they died or where they were buried, another violation of procedure. Some families received a second telegram, following the announcement of death, saying the soldier had died of “willful misconduct.” The War Department officially instructed, “
If the next of kin or other relatives of the deceased desire the body, the officer designated to execute the sentence will, if practicable, permit its delivery to them for burial.” In practice, this almost never happened. Weiss, already convinced that the army was unjust to the living, observed that it was unfair to the dead as well.

Journalists were not permitted to cover executions. Instructions from Brigadier General Ralph B. Lovett, adjutant general for the European Theater of Operations, on 14 December 1944 to “All Officers Exercising General Court-Martial Jurisdiction” were clear: “
Appropriate information will be made available to the press after an execution has been carried out. . . . Under no circumstances will any such release include the name of the soldier or identify the organization of which he was a member.” Reporting details of the execution of “our boys” might have harmed morale on the home front.

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Steve Weiss spent the winter of 1944–45 doing calisthenics and mulling over his crime. Despite his mental dislocation, the camp psychiatrist did not interview him. The Loire DTC offered the teenage soldier no psychological care, no rehabilitation and no training. Weiss had every reason to believe that he would spend the rest of his life there, because the army had not informed him that two days after his trial the 36th Division’s judge advocate had reviewed his sentence. “
The sentence is approved,” Major Harry B. Kelton, the adjutant general in General Dahlquist’s headquarters, wrote on 9 November, “but the period of confinement is reduced to twenty (20) years.”

After the court-martial, the War Department sent a telegram to William Weiss to inform him his son was alive. “When the telegram came that I was back on duty, there was a big celebration,” Steve Weiss remembered. “All the family, the extended family, got together at the apartment and celebrated.” He was alive, no longer missing in action, no longer presumed dead. He was, however, a deserter. “It didn’t seem to be an issue,” Weiss recalled. The family’s response to his desertion might have been shame, “if I had a different kind of father.” Far from rejecting his son, the First World War veteran wrote to the War Department demanding a fair hearing for him:

I am writing to you in reference to my son, Pvt. Stephen J. Weiss, #12228033. . . . It will interest you to know what has been done to a boy who enlisted in the Army at the age of 18, who gave his blood to the Red Cross at various times, who saved every penny to buy bonds, who could not wait for his graduation from high school to sign up with the army.

After five months’ training, he was sent overseas, arrived in Africa, fought at Anzio beachhead. We received two telegrams from the War Dept. that he was missing in action. He was attached to the Seventh Army, 143rd Infantry, and fought his way into the southern part of France.

While he was lost from his outfit, he attached himself with a paratroop outfit. In Yank magazine of November 12, 1944, the story will tell what 13 guerrillas did as he was one of a band of irregulars, soldiers who were lost from their outfit. They blew up bridges, hampered the German transportation. For days they were living in a hay loft; they finally attached themselves to the French Underground, with the Marquies [
sic
] of France, who looked after them. One day they came with French Police uniforms and dressed in them and were taken in back of the lines. If they were caught they would have been shot as spies. My boy reported to his outfit, sick, starved and in a state of psychoneurosis. The medics laughed at him.

They gave him a General Court Martial because he was away from his outfit and accused him of leaving his outfit in the line of duty under fire with the enemy; his sentence was handed out, life in prison. The reviewing authority reduced the period of confinement to 20 years and suspended the execution of dishonorable discharge until the soldier’s release from confinement, forfeiture of all pay and allowances. He has been confined since Nov. 7, 1944. My desire is that you please take action in this matter as my wife is very sick and my father who is an old man, won’t live much longer if this condition keeps on. If ever a boy of 18 was given a raw deal, my boy received same. He has had frozen feet and a skin infection; every letter we receive from him tells of what he is going through. This is the thanks he received for giving his all for his country. Please investigate this; all that I ask is that my boy be restored to duty and given a square deal. I am a Purple Heart man, having fought in the last war.

The adjutant general, Norman B. Nusbaum, wrote to the commanding general asking that “this office be furnished information upon which to base a reply, together with a copy of the Staff Judge Advocate’s Review, if available.” Although Weiss’s father had not kept him out of the army in 1943, he was doing all he could to free him from prison in 1945. In his view, the army was treating the common soldier no better in this war than it had when it tried to deny his New York 77th Division the honors of victory in 1919. In the meantime, the military authorities were slowly addressing the case of Private Stephen J. Weiss.

Treating combat exhaustion through courts-martial was proving to be a failure. Among the consequences for the armed forces was the steady loss of good soldiers to prisons, when psychiatrists might have rendered them fit for further service. Its effect on the men themselves was incalculable. Because the war had damaged their mental health as surely as bullets had their bodies, they needed treatment rather than punishment. Among the senior officers who began to understand this problem was Major General John E. Dahlquist, Weiss’s former commander. Although he had demanded in 1944 that division courts-martial bring in more guilty verdicts and harsher sentences for desertion, he had changed his mind by February 1945. At the time, his division was suffering more desertions than any other. On 27 February, he wrote to Lieutenant General Ben Lear, the deputy theater commander: