The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (40 page)

The problem of war weary men in the Infantry of the old divisions which fought in Italy is one of the most serious we have. . . . Medically, these men are alright [
sic
]; that is, the doctor is not able to find anything wrong with them. They do not qualify as exhaustion cases, therefore they cannot be reclassified for other duty under present regulations. Yet, these men should be removed from the Infantry because they have lost their “zip” and tend to weaken the fighting spirit of the new men.

 . . . For the past month, we have been gradually ridding our ranks of the bad exhaustion (psychoneurotic) cases and the war weary where possible. This must be handled very quietly however, for if any intimation that we were doing such a thing got noised around, our aid stations would be flooded with infantrymen trying to get reclassified.

Combat infantry commanders, like Dahlquist, were daily confronted with the reality that some men could not help breaking down. Rear echelon officers, however, were not ready to recognize the problem. Major General E. S. Hughes, on reading a copy of Dahlquist’s letter, wrote to General Lear, “
I do not agree with General Dahlquist that men who have lost their zip should be removed from the Infantry. I think General Dahlquist over-stresses both physical and mental fatigue.”

Parts of the army apparatus were changing. The Army Medical Corps sent psychologists to detention training centers in the spring of 1945 to discover from inmates themselves what made them desert. One visiting psychologist at the Loire DTC asked to examine Steve Weiss. Weiss recalled, “
I reported to a medium sized, dark-haired, scholarly man wearing glasses, in a small office in one of the camp’s administrative buildings.”

The army psychologist asked him, “How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” Weiss answered. “I don’t feel anything.”

This initiated a conversation in which, for the first time since he joined the army, Weiss discussed what he had done, what had been done to him and his impressions of both. The full story that he had kept inside, even at his court-martial, came rushing out: his alienation from Captain Simmons, his experiences in combat, his service with the Resistance and the OSS, his sense of abandonment when he returned to the 36th Division, the deaths of his friends, his fears and his breakdown under artillery barrages. The psychologist was more sympathetic than Weiss had expected from someone who was also an officer. The psychologist put the young soldier’s confusion into context, explaining that Weiss had turned his anger at Captain Simmons against himself. What Weiss ought to have done to preserve his sanity, he said, was to confront Simmons rather than run away. He said, “Enduring prolonged combat left you with very little choice, hang tough another day or withdraw. You chose the latter, because it was no longer possible to tolerate that amount of anxiety.” For the first time since Weiss enlisted, someone understood him.

The psychologist said that Weiss’s desertion did not mean he was a failure. “Rather,” he explained, “it seems that you simply tried to reduce the threat of being overwhelmed emotionally without having accumulated the required coping tools.” The vocabulary of psychological analysis was new to Weiss. The psychologist let Weiss absorb his words before concluding, “Someone has made a horrible mistake.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“You don’t belong here. You belong in a hospital.”

At this time, officers at disciplinary training centers reported that half the men convicted of desertion and absence without leave were suffering from “combat fatigue.”
At the Loire DTC, 90 percent of the convicted deserters were, like Weiss, from infantry rifle companies. The psychologist who examined Weiss recommended that the charges against him be dropped and the young soldier returned to duty.

Weeks passed during which Weiss heard nothing. He endured the prison routine, slowly losing hope that he would ever leave. In April, President Roosevelt died. In May, the Red Army conquered Berlin, Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered. Some American troops in Europe were being prepared for service in the Pacific, where the war against Japan still raged. History was passing Weiss by. One day in June, a colonel from the Judge Advocate General’s Office arrived at the Loire DTC to interview Weiss. Having studied the psychologist’s report, the colonel had to determine whether the young soldier merited a second chance. On him alone depended Weiss’s future: another twenty years in prison or a return to the United States Army. Weiss waited in front of the colonel’s desk, watching him study the case file. The colonel asked, “Will you fight in the Pacific?”

Weiss stood at attention and answered, “Yes, sir.”

It was the right answer. Weiss had not changed his mind about returning to the infantry. General Eisenhower had given an order, which every infantryman knew, that no soldier who had fought in two theaters of operations would be sent to a third. Weiss had fought in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in Italy and southern France and in the European Theater of Operations in eastern France. He could not be forced to fight in the Pacific theater. The colonel, who was apparently unaware of Eisenhower’s directive, approved Weiss’s release from prison and restoration to the service. Weiss was free, but he was not going to the Pacific. He was on his way to Paris. The last laugh was his.

THIRTY

For love there is no substitute. For the pangs of separation there is no perfect cure, except winning the war and getting home to the loved ones again.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 342

A
L
W
HITEHEAD WAS ANYTHING
but a cooperative patient at the 1st Hospital of the Seine Base Section in Paris. When a nurse attempted to relieve him of his weapons soon after his arrival in early January, he clung to his .45-caliber pistol and kept it under his pillow. He ate little, months of short rations in the field having reduced his appetite. Unable to sleep, even with tranquilizers, he paid someone in the hospital to bring him “calvadose [
sic
], cognac, or anything else he could get his hands on.” A bottle of calvados arrived. Whitehead took it to the kitchen, mixed it with a can of grapefruit juice and drank it all. As he recalled later, he slept for three days.

When he woke, an American nurse informed him that, following his recovery from appendicitis, he was shipping out. “
That was the best news I’d heard since my arrival, so I didn’t ask where—I assumed it would be back to my division, since the pain in my side had subsided.” The 2nd Division at this time, 11 January 1945, was still holding the Elsenborn Ridge in Belgium. The army dispatched Whitehead to the 94th Reinforcement Battalion, a replacement depot in Fontainebleau, south of Paris.

Whitehead arrived at the depot at 10:00 on the morning of 12 January, and he did his best from that moment not to fit in. He resented being a replacement, waiting to be sent to a new outfit. The 2nd Division, he wrote, was where he belonged. However, he recognized he was suffering from “combat fatigue and would have been a detriment to myself and others.” When a sergeant upbraided him for filling his cigarette lighter with petrol, as he had done at the front, he threatened to kill him. Most of the officers and noncoms at the depot, like the majority of replacement enlisted men there, had not seen action. Whitehead had been in combat continuously from D-Day through to 30 December 1944, and he had earned the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, Combat Infantry Badge and Distinguished Unit Citation. As far as he was concerned, he did not have to take shit from anyone. And he didn’t. When a young lieutenant issued him a bolt-action, First World War vintage rifle for guard duty, he told him to take the “peashooter” and “shove it up his ass.” Unable or unwilling to accept he was no longer on the front lines, he demanded a Thompson submachine gun and a trench knife.

Steve Weiss resented being forced to return to Charlie Company, but Al Whitehead was enraged that the army was not sending him back to his old outfit. By January 1945, with a desperate need to replace men lost during the Germans’ Ardennes offensive, the policy had changed. The army sent veterans who had recovered from wounds or illness wherever they were needed, not necessarily back to their old divisions. After six days at the depot, Whitehead was fed up and requested a three-day pass. The first sergeant, company commander and chaplain in turn told him to wait, and he cursed them all. As he stormed out the front gate, a sentry called out, “Halt or I’ll shoot.” Whitehead shouted back, “Go to hell.”

When Whitehead marched out of the depot, he could have done what many soldiers in the rear had done before him: desert
to
the front. Steve Weiss’s battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Frazior, had done just that in 1943, when he left a military hospital in North Africa to rejoin his men for the invasion of Italy. At about the same time, three nineteen-year-old privates left their unit in Algeria to fight in Tunisia. After hitching rides to reach the front eight hundred miles to the east, they were confronted by Major John T. Corley of the 1st Infantry Division. Corley did not condone their offense, but he put them into battle. “You certainly went AWOL in the right direction,” he said. (
Corley was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the 3rd Battalion of the 26th Infantry Regiment, indicating that his superiors at least tacitly accepted his decision to put the AWOLs into combat.)

A month before Whitehead walked off the base, an American Red Cross volunteer, Virginia von Lampe of Yonkers, New York, deserted her post in Paris. Although under military discipline, Miss von Lampe headed east in search of the “Battered Bastards of Besieged Bastogne,” as newspapers had dubbed the 101st Airborne Division. Surrounded by Germany’s XLVII Panzer Corps while the Battle of the Bulge raged, the men were running out of ammunition and food. Their acting commander, General Anthony McAuliffe, had just made history by rejecting the Germans’ surrender demand with one word: “Nuts!” A week before General Patton’s Third Army broke through as promised to relieve Bastogne, Ginny von Lampe made it into the maelstrom. She explained to a bemused major inside the city, “I’ve got some donuts for the fellows, Sir.” He held her as a spy, until she proved her nationality by naming the winner of the 1943 World Series—no great difficulty for a New Yorker—as the Yankees.

•   •   •

Whitehead, walking through Fontainebleau to an American service club, had not considered deserting
to
the action. The 2nd Infantry Division, still fighting the Battle of the Bulge that January, was in such desperate need of veteran fighters that it would in all likelihood have taken him back. Instead, Whitehead went looking for a drink. MPs at the American service club refused him admittance, because he had no pass. As he left in search of a bed in a brothel, he thought, “Well, it’s death either way you look at it. If I go back up front with that damned peashooter I’ll be killed, and if I go AWOL I’ll be shot. I might just as well go to Paris and live it up.” That is exactly what he did.

In Paris the next day, 19 January, he checked into the hotel at 1 avenue Charles Floquet, where he had lodged while on train guard duty. The hotel proprietress hesitated to give him a room, until he assured her he had a thirty-day furlough and was not a deserter. His room had “creaky furniture and faded wallpaper,” and the bathroom was down the hall. He drank wine and cognac until he passed out. Like many soldiers at the end of a long period of tension, he slept for several days. Sleep, though, did not mean peace. Recurrent nightmares of being under artillery barrages made him break into cold sweats.
In the dreams, his younger brother, Uel, appeared helpless on the battlefield. After several days of bad dreams and intermittent sleep, he went out to eat.

He ordered soup and bread in a small café. The waitress, who had a pronounced limp, took pity on him and added some fried eggs and potatoes to his plate. He got into a game of craps with a Frenchman, winning several hundred dollars. (Whitehead, in the telling, never lost at gambling.) As he was leaving, two MPs came in. They asked him his division, and he said the 2nd. This was no longer true. Since leaving the hospital, he had been attached to the 94th Reinforcement Battalion at Fontainebleau. When the MPs demanded his pass, he proffered the .45 he had refused to surrender to the nurse. According to Whitehead, the MPs wanted no trouble with him and left.

The waitress gave him the key to her furnished room in a cheap hotel nearby and told him to wait for her there. She returned from work at about midnight. A romance and business partnership, similar to many others between American deserters and their French girlfriends in Paris, began that night. “
So we took up a life together,” Whitehead wrote, “this little French girl with a limp and myself.” Her name was Lea, “a pretty girl with dark hair, blue eyes, and a beautiful smile that played hide-and-go-seek with the dimples in her cheek.” She taught him rudimentary French, introduced him to museums and took him to movies and plays. It was the farm boy’s first experience of a cultural life he had not known in Tennessee. When he wore old clothes that Lea gave him, no one took him for a soldier. “By that time,” he wrote, “I decided I was a civilian.”

In the café where Lea worked, he met other deserters. They, however, were German. One was an officer, “a blond-haired, blue-eyed man of about thirty-five, with a combat hardened personality like my own.” The officer had served in Paris during the occupation, but he did not retreat with his division. Paris, five months after its liberation, was home to deserters from most of the armies in Europe. Living in an underground network of black market conmen, pimps, thieves and gangsters, ex-soldiers of a dozen nationalities evaded American military police and French gendarmes whose job was to hunt them down.