The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (37 page)

The court retired again to deliberate the sentence. Weiss waited without showing emotion. By secret, written ballot, the fifteen officers considered the choices available to them under the law: to send Weiss to prison or to order him “shot to death by musketry.” The court marched back to the long table a few minutes later, a duration that made clear there had been no debate. Sitting beside the fourteen other officers with the altar behind them, Lieutenant Colonel Faulkner asked Weiss to stand. The chapel was by now as cold as the snowbound town outside. “Private Stephen J. Weiss, Army serial number 128033,” Faulkner pronounced, “you are to be dishonorably discharged from the service, to forfeit all pay and allowances due or to become due, and to be confined at hard labor, at such place as the reviewing authority may direct, for the term of your natural life.”

Three-fourths of the court, the record showed, concurred in the sentence. That would have been eleven of the fifteen officers. “The court then, at 1430 o’clock, p.m., 7 November 1944, proceeded to other business.”

•   •   •

The trial that decided the fate of nineteen-year-old Private Stephen J. Weiss had taken five hours, including at least one hour for lunch, to condemn him to prison for the rest of his life.

“
They didn’t kill me physically,” Weiss wrote, “but at nineteen, my life over, I was nothing more than a living dead man. If they killed me on the spot, it would have been all right, because I didn’t give a damn.”

The fifteen officers in the court-martial of Stephen J. Weiss were not the only Americans to cast votes that Tuesday. In the United States, the electorate went to the polls to choose between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey for president and commander in chief. By the time Roosevelt learned the public had given him overwhelming support to serve an unprecedented fourth term, Steve Weiss was stomping the ground to prevent his feet from freezing. Around him in his cell were convicted murderers, rapists, thieves and other deserters. This was where he began nearly a year before, when deserters in a stockade on the Anzio beachhead warned him that he would end up like them. He did not believe it then, and he could barely believe it now.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The guard house may not be any help at all—sometimes it even makes things worse.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 355

P
RIVATE
S
TEVE
W
EISS LEFT THE
B
RUYÈRES
stockade at the end of November 1944, shackled with other convicts and shipped west on a succession of cargo and passenger trains. Several days of changing trains brought the prisoners to the Gare de l’Est in Paris. A military policeman met Weiss at the station, and Weiss got into his jeep. When the MP did not bother to put him in handcuffs, Weiss asked why. The answer was obvious, “You’ve got some place to go?”

There was only one place, the Loire Disciplinary Training Center (DTC), more than a hundred miles away near Le Mans. The MP drove in an uncovered jeep through the darkness of postliberation Paris, whose landmarks Weiss was too numb to savor. They exited the city by a western gate and, just past Versailles, turned off National Route 10 for a late-night breakfast. The policeman and his charge ate without speaking, amid cigarette smoke and kitchen fumes, at an army canteen for military truck drivers. When they finished, the MP did not linger. Icy winds battered their faces as they sped through a bleak landscape scarred by the titanic struggle of a few months earlier. Pastures and meadows made no impression on Weiss, whose court-martial sentence of hard labor for the rest of his “natural life” had deprived him of all feeling. For the nineteen-year-old, “life” was an unimaginably long time. The jeep passed the town of Le Mans, which General Patton’s Third Army had liberated on 8 August, and crossed the river Sarthe to continue west past more frozen meadows. Leaving the road, the MP maneuvered along two-wheel tracks to an unmarked square of land where another MP was waiting.

The driver asked for receipt of delivery, as if Weiss had been a consignment of boots. The jeep rumbled away, leaving the teenage convict alone with the prison guard. Looking at the barren terrain, Weiss wondered where the DTC was. The guard told him it did not exist yet. Weiss and the other inmates were going to build it.

The stockade had been farmland until 17 October 1944, when the 2913th Guardhouse Overhead Detachment of MPs arrived from Britain to transform it into a penitentiary. German prisoners of war laid the rudiments of a prison that awaited 4,500 U.S. Army convicts. By the time of Weiss’s arrival, the only structures were three single-story brick hovels that had been farm buildings. One served as a clinic. The other two were the mess hall and the camp office. The prisoners had to construct everything else, from the cages they would be kept in to the watchtowers from which they would be shot if they attempted to escape. Weiss was assigned to a pup tent with another inmate for the rest of the night. In the morning, black truck drivers from racially segregated Services of Supply units delivered wood, barbed wire, nails and other materials for the prisoners to construct their new home. Work details broke the frozen ground with picks to make punishment pits and to plant fence posts along the base perimeter. The men worked quickly and for long hours. When they were not working, they lined up outdoors for meals from the camp kitchen and shared a communal latrine. Short of blankets, they slept in their clothes.

The inmates’ uniforms were neither warm nor waterproof. Incessant rain soaked their jackets, trousers and combat boots. They batted their bodies with cold hands to keep from freezing. Those who contracted pneumonia were taken to military hospitals off base and returned to work as soon as they recovered. The camp canteen had little hot food, and prisoners survived mostly on cold rations. “
However, to be fair,” Weiss wrote, “we didn’t get enough food on the front either.”

Weiss observed the camp’s staff of military police, most of whom had been civilian police officers before the war. His opinion of them was not high. The staff sergeant in charge of the guard detail carried a tent pole that he used to beat prisoners who annoyed him. He had been a policeman in New York, but the city was no bond between him and Weiss. Behind his back, Weiss called him “Bow Legs.” His nickname for one huge MP, who had been a beat cop in Chicago, was “Big Al.”
The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry L. Peck, had been a building contractor in the United States. Weiss recalled, “
Sometimes I’d see him walking to his office, a dour, inaccessible, crisp looking officer, and wondered how he reconciled his position as a prison administrator, trapped in a backwater, riding herd on a bunch of misfits, when fighting colonels were leading men at the sharp end.” Having been at the “sharp end” and, in his own mind, failed, Weiss knew that it held fewer dangers for a colonel than a dogface infantryman. It troubled him that, at the disciplinary training center, there was neither training nor rehabilitation. The men were “simply warehoused.”

Disciplinary training centers were intended as a progressive alternative to the army’s “disciplinary barracks,” where only the worst offenders were caged. The new name pointed toward a reformed philosophy of punishment, whose guiding idea was that convicts remained soldiers capable of being retrained for service. The “Prisoner’s Handbook” for another DTC stated that the purpose of confinement was “
honorably restoring to the army those of you who can demonstrate by your attitude, conduct, aptness, and bearing that you are worthy of such action.” The practice at most DTCs never matched the theory.
At the Lichfield DTC in Staffordshire, England, guards were so brutal to prisoners, especially convicted deserters, that they were court-martialed. As Weiss discovered, the Loire DTC had no program to rehabilitate any prisoner or “honorably” to restore him to service. It did have a rigorous regime of hard labor, gratuitous cruelty, petty privations and insufficient, inedible food.

Guidelines set by the theater provost marshal, Major General Milton A. Reckord, stipulated that “prisoners should be treated neither with such laxity that confinement might appear an attractive alternative to duty, nor with a severity that would create undue resistance to any possibility of rehabilitation.” His directives required that prisoners housed in buildings sleep on “wooden pallets or wooden bunks, without mattresses or springs; while those housed in shelter tents [like Weiss] may be provided bed sack with a minimum amount of straw.” Regarding diet, General Reckord’s instructions stated, “Meat will not be provided solely for the comfort of the prisoner except under most unusual circumstances.” He added, “Light shall not be made available for the comfort of the prisoner. It may, however, be used to facilitate work and instruction.”

By the second week of December, the outlines of the camp were becoming visible: cages, each as large as a football field, in which the prisoners pitched their two-man tents; underground solitary confinement holes sealed with iron bars; barbed wire surrounding the camp and dividing it into sections; and watchtowers from which MPs with .30-caliber machine guns were prepared to shoot anyone who stepped outside the wire. The Provost Marshal’s Office reported that the men soon constructed the basic compound, comprising “
a large area surrounded by a double apron fence, 14 feet high. Eleven cages kept the prisoners segregated according to the crime which they had committed.” Weiss was confined with the other deserters, all of them serving from twenty years to life. This was nothing like his father’s war.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Anger shared, controlled and directed to the single purpose of destroying the enemy, is a powerful force for survival and for victory.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 325

C
ORPORAL
A
LFRED
T. W
HITEHEAD
had much to be grateful for when Thanksgiving came to the Schnee Eifel region on 23 November 1944. Since the return of his 2nd Battalion from Paris ten days before, the front line along the Belgian-German border had been static.
The 38th Regiment had dug deep trenches and fashioned log cabins from the ubiquitous pines. It had also constructed a small church that would not have been out of place on the frontier in Davy Crockett’s time. Cooks delivered hot food much of the time, and some of the better hunters supplemented their diet with venison. Charles B. MacDonald, an infantry captain and later the leading historian of the Siegfried Line campaign, wrote, “
It was also true that the Germans on the other side of the line were for the most part content to emulate the Americans in keeping the sector relatively quiescent.” For the infantry, despite making regular patrols and braving mortar and artillery rounds, the battlefield did not get much better.

To celebrate Thanksgiving, Headquarters Company rotated to a rest area near the Belgian town of Saint-Vith. As they pulled out of the line, Whitehead perched on the tailgate of one of the trucks beside another soldier. After about ten miles, the men saw an ambulance burning beside the road. It must have been hit by German artillery. Before they could react, the Germans shelled them. “A roaring explosion rocked the truck,” Whitehead wrote, “and metal fragments flew up only inches from my head, going right through the hand of the non-com sitting next to me.” The truck raced for safety to a bend in the road, where the driver fell dead. Whitehead and another soldier jumped off and ran through a snowbound field. The other soldier said he had been hit, and blood gushed from his foot. Medics picked him up, and the troops resumed their journey.

Their billet was an old farmhouse with a front porch that reminded Whitehead of “
those back home in Tennessee.” The camp provided rare luxuries like hot showers, clean uniforms and USO shows. Thanksgiving turkey was served with all the trimmings, but the roadside shelling had rattled Whitehead so much that he could not enjoy it. As he had done in childhood to escape his stepfather, he sauntered into the woods alone in search of game. There was nothing worth shooting until sunset, when a large “jack rabbit” bounded into his line of sight. He shot it, but, without an appetite, gave it to a Belgian farmer.

Back on the line a week later, Whitehead alternated between patrols and standing watch. For the first time, he heard the famous voice from Radio Berlin of an American woman who called herself “Midge at the Mike.” The GIs called her “Axis Sally,” but her real name was Mildred Elizabeth Gillars. She had quit her job teaching English in Berlin in 1935 to broadcast for the Nazis. From December 1941, when the United States entered the war, her target audience was the U.S. military. “I’m afraid you’re yearning plenty for someone else,” her sultry voice cooed to homesick GIs. “But I just wonder if she isn’t running around with the 4-Fs way back home.” Her appeals for troops to surrender and enjoy “eggs and bacon frying” failed to impress Whitehead. “
That kind of propaganda bullshit didn’t move us in the slightest,” he wrote.

On 11 December, the 106th Infantry Division relieved the 2nd along the thinly defended front lines. The 2nd moved west by motor convoy through Saint-Vith to Camp d’Elsenborn, just behind the Elsenborn Ridge, in Belgium. This was the assembly point for a proposed attack on the highway between Krinkelt in Belgium and Dreiborn in Luxembourg. The objective was control of the Schwammenaeul Dam on the river Roer, where the Germans stood ready to flood American forces moving toward the Rhine. On 13 December, the 2nd Division left Elsenborn for a Belgian village called Rocherath. From there, the 9th Infantry Regiment attempted to breach the German lines. The 38th stayed just behind, waiting to pour through any opening the 9th made, but German resistance at a fortified customshouse near the Wahlerscheid road junction stopped the offensive dead.