The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (30 page)

On 26 September, while trucks carried most of the division toward Germany, the 2nd Battalion traveled to Paris. Among them were Private Barkley and Corporal Alfred T. Whitehead. “
My thoughts went back to Timmiehaw in Normandy,” Whitehead wrote. “He said I’d make it to Paris, and now I was on my way.” Barkley and Whitehead made no mention of each other in their war recollections, despite the fact that they were in the same battalion. Both remembered Paris duty as their best in France. They reached the darkened city at about midnight on 1 October.
Barkley and the rest of Company G settled into the Hôtel Nouveau in the eastern suburb of Vincennes. Whitehead, whose Headquarters Company was billeted near the Eiffel Tower at 1 avenue Charles Floquet, went straight to a bar. He wrote,

The people there were all friendly and gave me all I wanted to drink, and wouldn’t let me pay for a thing, but I watched them all closely, not trusting any of them—I remembered the two GIs with their heads cut off. I walked back to our vehicles where I spent the night under a truck.

While guard duty was safer than combat, it was nonetheless an important job. Whitehead, Barkley and their comrades resented the black marketeers, who deprived frontline infantrymen like themselves of necessities for survival. Neither questioned their orders for dealing with looters: shoot to kill. Barkley’s son Cleve, based on his father’s reminiscences, wrote, “
Thugs and AWOL soldiers working as black marketeers were relieving some supply trains of as much as 95% of their cargoes before they reached the supply dumps at the front.” Whitehead was disgusted that “
French renegades were looting supply cars of all descriptions, along with the aid of numerous American GIs who gave a black name to the whole business, while causing shortages of food and fuel on the front lines.” The battalion history recorded,
“They knew what it was to go without cigarettes, and a clean change of clothes; now while engaged in guard duty, they did their utmost to prevent wastage or theft of these sorely needed supplies.”

Both Whitehead and Barkley rode in open trucks on trains that moved slowly to frontline supply depots. Trains made frequent stops, when their armed guards jumped off and patrolled both sides of the tracks to deter thieves. A journey could take a few days, and the men slept in shifts.
Whitehead wrote that an officer in the uniform of a full colonel ordered the diversion of several carriages from a station near the Belgian border. Whitehead’s platoon sergeant refused. “Hell,” the “colonel” said, “I outrank you, sergeant, and I am going to switch these cars off.” Whitehead claimed that, as the “colonel” attempted to detach the rolling stock, the sergeant shot him dead.

The battalion’s unpublished history noted that Headquarters Company “
daily staged an informal guard mount under the famed Eiffel Tower. The guard detail, very ‘spoony’ looking in their white gloves, newly painted helmets, and polished boots, was always a source of interest to the French people who crowded around to watch each day’s ceremony.”

Whitehead got drunk on his time off as often as he had in Texas and Wisconsin. He also frequented Paris’s many whorehouses. Barkley rarely drank and avoided the brothels of Pigalle, the risqué quarter that the GIs called Pig Alley.
Yet it was Barkley, an otherwise conscientious soldier, who robbed a train. His escapades with the black market began innocently, while he was guarding a depot in Paris. A Frenchman asked him if he had anything to sell, and Barkley pulled from his pocket a tin of polish for waterproofing boots. Neither spoke the other’s language. Barkley made a gesture as if he were spreading the unguent on bread and said, “Mmm.” This seemed to satisfy the Frenchman, who paid Barkley a hundred francs. Another man offered him a bottle of cognac in exchange for a five-gallon jerrican of petrol. The can Barkley gave him held more water than petrol, but the Frenchman’s bottle turned out to contain more water than cognac.

One night, Barkley and two other soldiers crept into the railway yard. They searched out a goods van filled with looted fur pelts left behind by the Germans. Barkley convinced himself that, because they belonged to no one, the pelts would not be missed. The three GIs grabbed bundles of fur and fled. Barkley delivered his to two young women, Paulette and Elaine, he had befriended a few weeks before. They kissed him again and again in thanks. This was the extent of his black market career, for which other train guards might have shot him dead.

Al Whitehead rotated between protecting supply stores and guarding trains. On one train that stopped somewhere outside Paris, he noticed two black GIs approaching. One of them stopped and said, “Hey, look, they got a guard on this train.” That was enough for Whitehead to level his Thompson submachine gun at them and say, “Yes, and all I want you to do is lay your hands on this train. That’s all I want you to do. By God, I’m just itching to fill you full of lead.”

Paris was becoming lawless, as goods stolen from the army flooded the city’s black market.
Joyriders used contraband petrol to prowl the capital in cars that they had not been allowed to drive under the Germans. American cigarettes were so abundant that they were selling for $1.60 a pack, about a third less than the usually cheap French cigarettes.
On 13 October, two American deserters, Privates Morris Fredericks and Turner Harris, robbed a café in Montmartre and made off with $42,000 in jewelry, bonds and cash from the owner and his customers. The two soldiers, one white and one black, had been living for the previous two months in a hotel on sales of stolen army petrol. Three other deserters were apprehended in another Paris hotel with eleven thousand packs of cigarettes. Deserters fought gun battles in the streets with MPs and Parisian gendarmes.

The 2nd Battalion’s efforts were, Wade Werner reported from Paris in the
Washington Post
, “
cutting thefts down to manageable proportions.” He explained, “It has been found that men who themselves suffered shortages at the front as the result of pilfering now are the best watchdogs for the supply trains.” Commanders praised the men for “
a job superbly done in efficiently organizing and accomplishing the duties of guarding the thousands of tons of supplies.” By early November, the Paris idyll was drawing to a close. The men mustered in a Paris auditorium to receive new orders. A colonel took the stage and declared, “Half of you sitting here today will probably not make it back. We’re going to crack the Siegfried Line!” The men were stunned. Harold Barkley whispered to a friend, “I wonder which half he was talking about.”

Al Whitehead sent a telegram to his wife, Selma, in Wisconsin. It amused him that the cable’s arrival would make her fear for a moment that he had been killed in action. He imagined her relief, when she read, “You are more than ever in my thoughts at this time. All my love, Al.” He had pictures taken at a photographer’s studio to send to her. As he left the studio, he noticed a crowd in which two Frenchmen were about to shave the heads of young women for having slept with Germans. “It made me mad anyway,” he wrote, “and in a flash I waded in and pistol whipped the two Frenchmen, ran them both off, and left the crowd standing there with mouths agape.”

On 10 November, Whitehead’s battalion boarded a train at the Gare Montparnasse. The next morning at 11:00, as the train moved slowly east, 2nd Division artillery unleashed all its guns on the German lines. Along with mortar and small-arms fire, the volley commemorated the Armistice of 1918. This time, there would be no armistice. The Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender. Whitehead, Barkley and the rest of the men heading toward the Siegfried Line sensed they would fight until the war or their own lives came to an end.

TWENTY-FOUR

Most serious of all the causes for an epidemic of dissension is the bad leader.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, pp. 326–27

T
HE MEN OF THE
U.S.
36TH
I
NFANTRY
D
IVISION
had fought a hard, relentless war in the six weeks since their retreat from Valence and the disappearance of Steve Weiss’s squad. Their next engagement began a day after Valence and lasted a terrifying week. The struggle for what became known as the Montélimar Battle Square ended without a victor, as the battered German Nineteenth Army escaped the Seventh Army’s trap on 30 August. Then, because of a shortage of artillery shells, the 36th failed to stop the Germans on Route 7. Pursuing the enemy at midnight on the thirtieth, General Dahlquist hoped to engage the Germans before they regrouped. The next day, the 36th Division reversed its setback of 24 August by liberating Valence. On 2 September, the Free French army captured Lyons with vital assistance from the 36th. France’s third largest city, which was 260 miles north of the August invasion beaches, had fallen to the Allies two months ahead of Operation Dragoon’s original schedule. Troop morale soared.

Despite formidable Wehrmacht resistance, the Texas Division initially advanced on foot at the astounding rate of ten miles a day. On 7 September, the 36th crossed the river Loue and trudged through mud and forest to the river Doubs. Engineers reconstructed a steel bridge that the Germans had blown, allowing men and tanks to cross to the eastern bank and continue their pursuit of the enemy. On 9 September, the heaviest autumn rains in years burst over France. Two days later, north of the Burgundian market town of Autun, Allied forces from the Riviera linked up with the troops who had landed at Normandy. Operation Dragoon had achieved its primary objective, joining its forces to Eisenhower’s.

The momentum that had propelled the Seventh Army from the Mediterranean to Lorraine was drowning in the early autumn storms. The Americans suffered shortages of men and supplies.
Operation Dragoon’s three advancing American divisions—the 3rd, 36th and 45th—lost 5,200 men in September. Only 1,800 replaced them, a shortfall of 3,400 soldiers.
The 36th alone suffered another 1,045 casualties at the beginning of October, reducing its strength from 14,306 to around 10,000. Once again, the army was unable to replace most of them. The survivors, deprived of sleep and under constant threat of death, exhibited signs of severe strain. New men coming into the line at this time were usually killed within five days, and they too had to be replaced. The 36th’s daily advance of ten miles in the first half of September slowed to a few yards in the second half and came to a standstill by the beginning of October.

“
October was upon us,” wrote CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, “the October of eastern France, which is filled with dull cloud masses, the smell of manure in the villages, and the freezing rain which never ceases, so that one exists in a perpetual twilight and moves in a sodden morass of wet clothing and yellow clay.” With the change in weather, Sevareid detected a change in the war:

The parade and pantry were finished; for the first time the enemy had beaten us to the high ground with time enough to organize a stand. His supplies were rushed to him in a hurry from their near-by stores within the Reich, while ours moved painfully through the mountains from the southern ports hundreds of miles away, the frozen drivers falling asleep at their wheels, frequently to die ignominiously in the mud of the ditches. Tempers grew short, there were long silences in any conversation, the honeymoon with the French civilians ceased by mutual withdrawal, and our men, who had known so much more war than most of those who invaded from England, remembered the Italian winter and began to long again for home.

Morale collapsed among both replacements and veterans, as units fought below strength because of delays in dispatching replacements to the front.
Until then, the 36th led the army’s infantry divisions in the number of decorations it received: 266 to its officers and 963 to the enlisted men. Major General John E. Dahlquist, the 36th Division’s commander, observed in September 1944 that his troops were losing both efficiency and aggressiveness. He also detected a steep decline in morale, which he measured in a manner familiar to military commanders throughout history: the percentage of men who avoided battle. Some soldiers were deliberately wounding themselves, and many did their best to contract trench foot and other illnesses. Some troops held back when ordered forward. Dahlquist wrote of
“desertions among the line infantry companies in combat (50–60 per division) and the ever-present straggler phenomenon.”
Courts-martial convicted 1,963 soldiers in the European Theater of Operations of outright desertion and another 494 for “Misbehavior before the enemy” (which often included desertion in battle).
Most received sentences of about twenty years at hard labor, and all but one of 139 death sentences for desertion were commuted. Special and summary courts-martial convicted more than 60,000 troops of being AWOL, and a further 5,834 cases of AWOL were serious enough to be tried by the more formal general courts-martial, which handed out sentences averaging fifteen years at hard labor. Dahlquist attributed some of the desertions to the heavy loss of officers and noncoms and their replacement by those lacking both field experience and acquaintance with the men they commanded. Desertion was an indication of poor leadership. Earlier in the war, Major General J. A. Ulio, the army’s advocate general, had written, “
All officers, particularly those of company grade, and all non-commissioned officers, must understand that absenteeism is a serious reflection on leadership. They must develop that spirit of comradeship and responsibility among the men which is the best deterrent to absenteeism.”

There was an added consideration, of which Dahlquist was aware: men who had survived the previous winter in Italy’s Apennines “
had little stomach for another winter’s operations in French mountains.” Even soldiers who had not fought in Italy felt they had endured enough by late 1944. An army investigation noted, “
The troops who had been fighting continuously all the way across France developed the feeling that they had done their part and should be afforded some relief.” The Seventh Army’s other two divisions, the 3rd and the 45th, had the same problems that the 36th did with officer casualties, morale loss and desertions. The 3rd Division commander, Major General John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, complained that his troops had lost the fighting spirit they brought with them to the beaches in August. One regiment of the 45th Infantry Division suffered forty-five troops coming off the line with “combat fatigue” in one week. Matters were exacerbated by the rain and mud, which caused skin infections and trench foot in conditions that did not allow soldiers to wash. Trapped in foxholes under enemy fire, the troops fought knee-deep in their own excrement. Furthermore, chronic shortages of ammunition due to the long supply route from Marseilles to the Alps meant that when the Americans caught up with the Germans, they were not always able to attack. The GIs called the failure to support them with sufficient ammunition a typical SNAFU, “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.”