The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (53 page)

“I told you”
Ibid., p. 136.

“They would live”
Norman Craig,
The Broken Plume: A Platoon Commander’s Story, 1940–1945,
London: Imperial War Museum, 1982, p. 146.

“a great dark cave”
Scannell,
Kings
, p. 158.

“The lucky bastards”
Ibid., p. 160.

“They were confident”
Miles,
The Life of a Regiment
, Vol. V, p. 257.

“The fact must”
Salmond,
The History of the 51st Highland Division, 1939–1945,
pp. 144–45.

“during the whole”
Russell and Burrows, quoted in Delaforce,
Monty’s Highlanders
, p. 143.

“People get lost”
Lieutenant Hugh Temple Bone, Imperial War Museum, Catalog number: Documents 1464, Second World War, private papers. Quoted in French,
Raising Churchill’s Army
, p. 139.

“The fury of”
Scannell,
Kings
, p. 165.

At first light
Ibid., pp. 170–71.

THIRTEEN

They pitched
Steve Weiss, interview with the author, London, 28 June 2010.

Combat troops turned
WD/Second Draft, p. 22.

“Dear God!”
Bowlby,
The Recollections of Rifleman Bowlby
, p. 118.

“Whoever dreamed this”
Norman Lewis, op. cit., p. 101.

“freedom of speech”
President Roosevelt enumerated the Four Freedoms in a speech to Congress on 6 January 1941, before American entry into the war. They subsequently became the war goals. See the
Congressional Record
, 1941, Vol. LXXXV, Part 1, 1941.

“The sheer irony”
Vincent Sheean,
This House Against This House
, New York: Random House, 1945, p. 297.

“His face was”
Steve Weiss, e-mail to the author, 29 July 2011.

The new divisional
Jeffrey J. Clarke and Robert Ross Smith,
Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations
, Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1993, p. 38.

“Desertions became wholesale”
Packard,
Rome Was My Beat
, p. 110. Packard wrote that censors blocked his stories on the black market and deserters.

“twenty-five mile hikes”
WD/Second Draft, p. 40.

The 36th Division
Jacques Robichon,
The Second D-Day
, London: Arthur Barker, 1969 (originally published in French as
Le Débarquement de Provence: 15 Août 1944
), p. 191.

A Royal Navy crew
WD/Second Draft, p. 39.

“I immediately sensed”
Ibid., p. 40.

“One soldier came”
Ernie Pyle, “The Death of Captain Waskow,” Scripps Howard News Service, 10 January 1944. Reynolds Packard wrote that Pyle told him in Italy that he managed to persuade Scripps Howard to publish the piece, which unusually for him was about an officer rather than an enlisted man, by emphasizing that the GIs shook the dead man’s hand. Packard quoted Pyle on the GIs, “They are really dull. Sometimes they are tough and mean. But my editors won’t let me write about anybody except these goddamn GIs. I’m tired of being called the letter writer for the doughfoot.” Packard,
Rome Was My Beat
, p. 113.

FOURTEEN

Near the Forêt de Cerisy
S/Sgt Charles R. Robb, Jr. (Army Serial Number 37529161) of Company F, 9th Regiment, wrote on the Yahoogroup “Friends of U.S. 2nd Division” site (Message 8401), “Now I have to give him (Whitehead) credit for the story of the two American soldiers that lost their heads, over two girls. Well, true or untrue, this same story was passed along to us and we again were warned not to fraternize with the French, especially the women.”

“One was a group of strange”
Whitehead Diary, p. 62.

“Snipers were seldom”
Cleve C. Barkley,
In Death’s Dark Shadow: A Soldier’s Story
, published by the author, 2006, p. 124.

“I sat right down”
Whitehead Diary, p. 65.

“This was hedgerow”
Ibid., p. 66.

“The hedgerows themselves”
Walter M. Robertson,
Combat History of the Second Infantry Division in World War II
, Baton Rouge, LA: Army and Navy Publishing Company, 1946, p. 29.

Whitehead’s 2nd Squad
E-mail from Cleve C. Barkley to the author, 9 April 2012.

“I’d get an enemy”
Whitehead Diary, p. 70.

Despite Whitehead’s impression
Edward W. Wood and Raleigh Ashbrook,
D + 1 to D + 105: The Story of the 2nd Infantry Division,
Czechoslovakia: G-3 Section, 2nd Division Headquarters, 1945, p. 11.

Whitehead wrote of
Whitehead Diary, p. 71.

“started serenading the”
Ibid
.,
p. 72.

“a showy mathematical”
Paul Fussell,
Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1996, p. 134.

“A second division”
Whitehead Diary, p. 73.

“The ‘Rhino’ was”
The General Board, United States Forces, European Theater, “Armored Special Equipment,” Center of Military History, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 1945, File R475/4, Study No. 52, p. 14.

“He was dead”
Whitehead Diary, p. 75.

The next day
Second Battalion Staff, “The Second Battalion, 38th Infantry, in World War II,” p. 18.

“I don’t believe”
Whitehead Diary, pp. 77–78.

The mine that
The toll of 2nd Division troops killed during the war in Robertson’s
Combat History of the Second Infantry Division in World War II
, pp. 38–39, lists Schwerdfeger, Sanchez and Turner as having died in combat on the same day. But the date given is 26 July 1944, not 11 July, the date of the assault of Hill 192. General Robertson wrote that, on “that bloody day of July 26,” the 38th Regiment advanced on Saint-Jean-des-Baisants. It is not clear why Whitehead confused the dates of the Hill 192 and Saint-Jean-des-Baisants battles.

The 38th Infantry
Barkley,
In Death’s Dark Shadow
, p. 144.

One of the eighty-three
Second Battalion Staff, “The Second Battalion, 38th Infantry, in World War II,” p. 22.

His service record
“Personnel Records Section,” in File, Whitehead, Alfred T., CM ETO 309739, Office of the Clerk of the Court, U.S Army Judiciary, 901 North Stuart Street, Suite 1200, Arlington, VA 22203-1837. (Whitehead’s Court-Martial File CM ETO 309379 is hereafter referred to as Whitehead Court-Martial File. Most pages in the file are unnumbered.)

Many 2nd Division
Whitehead Court-Martial File.

“I went a little”
Whitehead Diary, p. 82.

FIFTEEN

At almost the
Eric Sevareid,
Not So Wild a Dream
, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946, p. 436. CBS News reporter Sevareid landed in the south of France just after the first wave of troops and sent the first reports to the United States via Rome.

A fabulous armada
Clarke and Smith,
Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II
, p. 92.

“experienced the magnitude”
WD/Second Draft, p. 42.

Weiss and the other
Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War
, Vol. VI:
Triumph and Tragedy
, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953, p. 94.

“a ringside seat”
Clarke and Smith,
Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II
, p. 22.

Dawn broke dry
Ibid., p. 108.

“absolutely petrified”
Robichon,
The Second D-Day
, p. 190.

For this feat
Clarke and Smith,
Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II
, p. 111. Murphy won, among other honors, the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star with First Oak Leaf Cluster, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal with “V” Device and First Oak Leaf Cluster, Purple Heart with Second Oak Leaf, European–African–Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with One Silver Star, Four Bronze Service Stars (for nine campaigns) and one Bronze Arrowhead (for the assault landings at Sicily and southern France). After the war, he became an actor in Hollywood and was killed in an airplane crash in 1971.

“Here we saw”
Winston Churchill,
Triumph and Tragedy
, p. 95.

The 141st Regiment
Steven J. Zaloga,
Operation Dragoon: France’s Other D-Day
, Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009, p. 47. Zaloga added, “Each of these [strongpoints] was in turn made up of two or three resistance nests (
Widerstandsnester
), which were clusters of bunkers usually a platoon in strength with more machine guns, mortars, and light guns than a normal infantry formation.”

“prove myself a man”
Jacques Robichon,
The Second D-Day
, p. 190.

“webbing and leather”
WD/Second Draft, p. 43.

“The 143rd Infantry”
Clarke and Smith,
Riviera to the Rhine, United States Army in World War II
, p. 115.

They soon eliminated
Ibid., p. 121. See also John A. Hyman, “From the Riviera to the Rhine,”
T-Patch
(36th Division newspaper), First Anniversary Supplement, 1945, republished at texasmilitaryforcesmuseum.org/36division/archives/frame/hymans1.html. The 142nd Regiment was unable to land at Camel Red below Saint-Raphaël because of the strength of German underwater defenses. They ended up on Green Beach.

In Saint-Raphaël
WD/Second Draft, p. 45.

Ten hours after
J. Zaloga,
Operation Dragoon
, p. 50.