The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (17 page)

ELEVEN

It takes more than brains to make a good soldier; it takes guts.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 295

O
N 6
J
UNE, MOMENTOUS NEWS
circulated among Allied troops in Italy. Their comrades had just invaded France on the beaches of Normandy, opening up a new front against the Wehrmacht. Moreover, the American Fifth Army had liberated Rome, “just half an hour’s jeep drive away,” the day before. Credit for the breakout went to the 36th Infantry Division, one of whose reconnaissance units had found a gap in the German lines near Velletri. General Walker, despite General Clark’s misgivings, quickly exploited the opportunity. The mission was a complete success, opening the road to Rome. “
Maybe the war will end soon, after all,” Private Steve Weiss thought.

Italy was being relegated to a sideshow. The Normandy campaign moved to top priority for both matériel and attention at home. Even Ernie Pyle, the Scripps Howard newspaper chain correspondent known as “the GIs’ friend,” had left Italy for France. That was where the war in the west would be won or lost, and everyone knew it.
Troops in Italy, no matter how many battles they fought or how many men they lost, would soon be called “D-Day Dodgers” for missing D-Day in Normandy. This would be no help to morale, already low in Italy owing to poor strategy, command mistakes and tenacious German resistance.

The replacements from Fort Meade packed their gear and climbed into open trucks on 6 June to rendezvous with the 36th Division north of Rome. At nightfall, they reached a battlefront of barren earth where the sight of bodies wrapped in canvas made Weiss “physically ill.” A sergeant counted in the ninety replacements, who jumped from the trucks and got into sleeping bags for the night. Morning came and with it a shock: the corpses of the night before crawled out of their canvas covers. Weiss realized they were not “goblins, but ordinary GIs” who had been sleeping. Awake, though, they were no friendlier to the arrivals than when they appeared to be dead.

A sergeant about his own age ordered Weiss into a twelve-man rifle squad in the 2nd Platoon of Company C (Charlie Company), 1st Battalion, 143rd Regimental Combat Team of the 36th Texas Infantry Division. Weiss soon learned that the regiment had been wiped out twice before he joined it—“the first time at the battle of San Pietro in December 1943 and at the Rapido River, one month later. Only in the relative safety of the division’s rear did some of the original cadre remain.” Sheldon Wohlwerth, the twenty-eight-year-old Ohioan whom Weiss had befriended at Blanding, was posted to the same rifle squad. The two became foxhole buddies. The other eighty-eight replacements were distributed among the rest of the division’s rifle companies. The sergeant offered Weiss a choice of assignment. He could join a three-man team to lug the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), a First World War vintage light machine gun that weighed sixteen pounds and fired at half the speed of its German equivalent. Or he could be first scout. Weiss chose first scout. Although the Germans would spot him before they saw the rest of the squad, he could move faster without a BAR.

Weiss crouched in the dirt with his M1 rifle and awaited orders. Charlie Company’s commanding officer, Captain Allan Simmons, came up to the line. Simmons, a native of Belfast, Maine, did not acknowledge the replacements. Nor did he greet the veterans, signaling an absence of rapport with the men. The captain, aged about thirty, looked to Weiss like an old man. Weiss thought that, with his soiled fatigues and three-day beard, he was “
locked within himself, his own emotional executioner,” not unlike Weiss’s father.

The platoon sergeant, a tough but friendly Texan named Lawrence Kuhn, sent Weiss on his first mission with a corporal named Robert Reigle. They were ordered to find Company A (Able Company) somewhere forward out of radio contact. Bob Reigle was a five-foot-seven noncom from Hershey, Pennsylvania, who had fought with the division throughout the Italian campaign, at Salerno, the river Rapido and Monte Cassino. Reigle took Weiss in hand. The younger soldier immediately sensed in the corporal competence and solicitude he could trust. “
The two of us headed out,” he wrote, “hacking our way noisily through a jungle of heavy underbrush. Skirting the side of a hill toward the canal, we walked in single file.” As they neared the edge of the natural cover, Reigle motioned to Weiss to stop. The two went dead quiet. Reigle listened carefully. Someone was coming their way. A lone German soldier with a sniper’s rifle called,
“Kamerad.”
He was trying to surrender.

“Damn!” Reigle whispered to Weiss. “We’re as exposed as hell, and it could be a trap. Might be more Krauts around.” Reigle patted Weiss’s arm to reassure him. The German could come to them. When he did, they shoved him against a tree. Reigle searched him and told Weiss to check his papers. These showed that he was a Nazi Party member and part of the Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1, the elite Hermann Goering 1st Paratroop Panzer Division. Reigle knew the division by reputation. After the Allies invaded Sicily, it had escaped intact across the Strait of Messina to mainland Italy. At the end of the previous January, two U.S. Ranger battalions had fought a pitched battle with it in the village of Cisterna. As the Rangers ran out of ammunition, some of them were captured. The Germans threatened to murder the prisoners if the rest of the Rangers did not surrender—
a blatant violation of the laws of war.

“Let’s shoot the sonofabitch,” Reigle said. Weiss said that was illegal. Reigle conceded, “I’d do it, but his pals are bound to hear the shot.” They brought the prisoner to 1st Battalion intelligence, which assigned his interrogation to a Jewish corporal who had immigrated to the United States from Germany. The corporal thanked Reigle for delivering the prisoner, whom he planned to question for many hours, “before I throw him in the cage.” Weiss, recounting his first patrol, noted, “
We never found Able Company.” But he had found someone in his new division to rely on, Corporal Bob Reigle.

•   •   •

The 36th Division advanced north, methodically pushing the Germans up the Italian Peninsula. The Germans were retreating, but they were not running. They regrouped, established defenses and launched counterattacks against their pursuers. The steep and rocky terrain was a godsend to the defenders, hell to an attacking army. Allied troops in Italy paid a high price in lives for every acre they took. Shortages of trucks and jeeps meant the Americans had to walk and climb most of the way, although they occasionally hitched rides on the sides of tanks.

On the way to Grosseto, a coastal town in southern Tuscany, a staff sergeant ordered first scout Weiss to cross a field alone in heavy rain. “The Germans are out there somewhere,” he said. Weiss realized he was a “clay-pigeon, a fall guy,” set up to make the Germans expose their position by firing at him. He marched through the mud, afraid but determined to make it across. Rain hit him in the face and dripped inside his shirt. He did not let his fear show. He wrote later, “
I discover that the battlefield is a lonely place, increasing fear to a higher, unexpected level, and alienating soldiers rather than bringing them together.” The rain increased its tempo the rest of the day, pouring mud into the squad’s hillside foxholes. For a moment, Weiss could not take any more. “Feeling wet, cold, and depressed, my eyes fill with tears. Cradling my head in my arms, I cry. My tears merge with the rain. I think of my mother. I call out to her, in need of her comfort and protection.”
Weiss did not understand why he broke down, unaware that many other soldiers had the same experience.

For the next twenty-four hours, the 36th Infantry Division marched through brush, pastures, olive groves and swamps toward Grosseto. Sparsely inhabited because of malarial mosquitoes in its marshes, the Maremma region, with its
butteri,
cowboys and long-horned
chianina
cattle, resembled the ranges of Texas. Trudging through mud, up and down hills, the only opposition Charlie Company met that day came from the harsh landscape and miserable weather. Slipping in mud, Weiss grabbed a branch that turned out to be a dead German’s hand. The company reached the periphery of Grosseto, where the troops took a cigarette break. Using helmets for pillows, they slept beside the road. When Weiss woke up, the rest of the company was gone.

Alone and lost, he went into the seaside town to search for his comrades. Two armies were battling for control of Grosseto, while Weiss rushed from street to street. In urban fighting, soldiers had to be wary of rooftops, windows, doorways and piles of rubble concealing snipers and booby traps. Dodging through the city, Weiss sought a moment’s shelter in the basement of an abandoned house. It turned out to be the temporary command post of another American unit. An officer cast a suspicious eye at Weiss, who stammered that he was lost. “Lost?” the officer shouted. “Cut the crap. You probably took off like a jack rabbit.” Weiss insisted he had not run away, but was merely cut off from his company. The officer told him, “I ought to have you court-martialed for desertion.” Not wanting to end up caged in the stockade back at Anzio, Weiss took advantage of gunfire that distracted the officer to run outside. Searching for Charlie Company in Grosseto’s whitewashed streets and alleys, he crossed from one side of town to the other. Bob Reigle spotted him approaching and said nonchalantly, “I thought you were either killed or captured.”

Grosseto fell to the 36th Division on the evening of 15 June. The old hands donned Stetsons and played guitars for a Texas-style jamboree. Replacements from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and the rest of America joined them in singing “The Rose of Ole San Antone.” The T-Patchers had become a Texas division in name only, most of the original volunteers having been killed, wounded or captured. Weiss, listening to Texan ballads in every sort of American accent, thought that “
most divisions took on the same coloration, regardless of attempted mythology.” Myth was strong in the 36th, whose origins stretched back indirectly to the Alamo. The division carried a Lone Star flag to hoist over Germany, if it ever got there.

From Grosseto, the 36th advanced north, again on foot, and crossed the river Ombrone that night. They marched toward Siena through foothills of the wine country around Monte Amiata and Montalcino. If the Americans were short of modern transport, so were the retreating Germans. When Charlie Company spotted them, horses were pulling the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery up rugged Tuscan hillsides. American artillery opened with a barrage of 105-millimeter howitzer shells, and panzers returned fire. Shells from both sides flew over Charlie Company’s freshly dug foxholes. When the Germans extricated themselves and escaped north, Charlie Company moved toward their position. Weiss came face-to-face with a German soldier. He aimed his rifle, but the German, sitting upright on a tree stump, did not react. He was dead. The ground was an undug graveyard of men and horses, their flesh shredded and bleeding. Weiss recalled, “
The stench of decomposition pervaded the air.”

•   •   •

Although the army sometimes failed to send food and ammunition to men at the front, the army post office delivered their mail. Weiss received a letter that night from a friend in the Office of War Information, where he had worked in New York. He read it by candlelight in an abandoned house. The roof let in the rain, and stucco walls provided scant protection from German artillery. His friend had written that, despite her efforts, his request for a transfer to Psychological Warfare had been rejected again. This was the last time they would consider it. Listening to the mingling of thunder and 155-millimeter Long Tom artillery, he knew he was stuck in the infantry for the rest of the war. How much longer would that be? At the rate the Allies were moving through Italy, it might take years. He wrote, “
I was nothing more than a dog-face slogging infantry soldier.” For troops who were not killed or injured, the only way out was surrender, a self-inflicted wound, insanity or desertion. Weiss stuck with it.

Proceeding on foot the next day, Weiss’s rifle squad came to a farm. Its two-story
casa colonica
(peasant house) might have been empty. Or Germans may have been waiting inside to attack the squad after it passed. The sergeant ordered Weiss, as first scout, to check. Weiss went cautiously to the door and kicked it open, ready to fire at any Germans inside. The only inhabitants were a peasant family, all four of them terrified at the intrusion of an American warrior. Weiss held the life of the farmer, his wife and two teenage children in his almighty hands, and he felt a surge of power that he immediately despised in himself. The father, shielding his family, spoke to him in Italian. Weiss, who did not understand, used one of the few Italian words he knew,
“Tedeschi?”
(Germans?) The man indicated there were none in the house, but Weiss made a fruitless search anyway. The absurdity of the scene weighed on him as he went back to the squad. It did not seem right that, owing to his armed presence, “the son had displaced the father.”

First scout Weiss marched uphill ahead of the squad through heavy brush. Two soldiers in German uniforms suddenly stopped him. Rather than shoot, they put their hands up and spoke to him in what sounded like gibberish. Their Oriental features marked them out as Turcoman tribesmen, recruited by the Wehrmacht as a partial solution to its manpower shortages. Behind the Asians, Weiss saw five more enemy troops with a light machine gun. He knew they could easily kill him and eliminate the rest of the rifle squad, but they too surrendered. To Turcoman conscripts, a U.S. Army prison camp was preferable to a German graveyard.

Charlie Company’s commander, Captain Simmons, arrived and ordered the men to fix bayonets. Company A, the same Able Company that had gone missing south of Grosseto, was under German attack on the high ground to Charlie Company’s left. Simmons wanted Charlie Company to charge the hill. “
Lying in a fold in the ground, I fixed my bayonet and noticed my hands were shaking,” Weiss wrote. The troops had trained with bayonets on straw-stuffed dummies, but they had yet to rip a man’s guts open in face-to-face combat. Weiss waited for Simmons to order the attack, but no order came. Company A beat back the German force—without bayonets.