The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (44 page)

We proceeded to the Booking Station at No. 8 Rue Scribe and found the man to be Alfred T. Whitehead. I turned the soldier over to the Duty Officer Lt. Ball. Then I returned to Patrol Duty.

This account contained nothing of the bravado with which Whitehead characterized his behavior, producing pistols like a magician and bravely rejecting MPs’ offers of release. “
They were still telling me to go back to my outfit,” he wrote, “and I was still drunk and telling them I had overstayed my leave.” The MPs, on the contrary, appeared from the record to have behaved professionally. They locked him up at 11:00 that night. In the morning, the Judge Advocate General’s Office preferred charges against Whitehead for violation of Article of War 61 in having been absent without leave for 304 days. If the war in Europe had not ended in May, the charge would have been desertion with the possibility of a death sentence.

First Lieutenant Julius Hochstein of the Judge Advocate General’s Office assigned First Lieutenant Eugene T. Owen to investigate the charges on 17 December. Two days later, Owen submitted his report:

Witnesses requested by him [Whitehead], and other witnesses whose expected testimony was not fully and satisfactorily indicated in statements attached to the charges . . . were thereafter, if reasonably available, examined by me in his presence. He was allowed to examine and cross-examine witnesses as he wished, with my assistance, and make such statements and arguments as he wished in his own behalf, after due warning as to his rights and privileges.

Asked on a form whether he had any “reasonable ground for belief that the accused is, or was at the time of any offense charged, mentally defective, deranged or abnormal,” Lieutenant Owen answered, “None.” In the statement, “In my opinion he ________ be eliminated from the service,” Owen wrote, “should.” He completed the sentence “I recommend ________________” with “A General Court Martial.” On 22 December, Lieutenant Hochstein referred the charges for trial.

Whitehead made no mention of Lieutenant Owen or the fact that Owen allowed him to call witnesses in his defense. Instead, he complained of mistreatment by officers he said had placed him in solitary confinement for fourteen days on bread and water because he would not answer their questions. While awaiting trial and looking out of his cell window, Whitehead wrote, he saw Lea walking toward the prison, threw her a note warning her not to visit him and saw MPs bring her inside. When he pretended for her safety not to know her, he claimed she left in tears.

Whitehead wrote that he spent Christmas alone in a punishment hole that was only four feet by six feet, because he refused to answer an officer’s questions. He did not state what the officer wanted to know. At the end of fourteen days, the officer threatened him with a third week in the hole if he didn’t tell him everything, whatever that may have been. Rather than return to solitary, Whitehead wrote, “I was hustled into a courtroom like a bum instead of a soldier: no bath, unshaven, and without being given a comb for my hair.” He remembered the court-martial taking place in late December, but court records indicated it began on the morning of 2 January 1946.

As in the court-martial of Steve Weiss, no enlisted men sat on the court-martial panel. The senior officer among the six judges was Major George F. Shaw of the Signal Corps. For reasons not specified in the court-martial transcript, the trial judge advocate, his assistant and the defense counsel were excused. A second assistant judge advocate, Lieutenant Sheridan H. Horwitz, and the assistant defense counsel, Lieutenant Harry Cohen, argued the case. Lieutenant Horwitz introduced two exhibits for the prosecution, the morning reports of 19 January and 23 July 1945. The first listed Corporal Whitehead as AWOL and the second as having “escaped confinement.” He asked whether defense counsel agreed to the stipulation that “the accused, Corporal Alfred T. Whitehead, returned to military control of the United States on 12 December 1945.” The defense agreed, and the prosecution rested.

The defense case made no opening remarks to the court. Lieutenant Cohen said, “The accused having been advised of his rights in this case elects to make an unsworn statement.” Captain David L. Sprechman, as the court’s “law member” who had had legal training, delineated Whitehead’s three options: a sworn statement, which allowed cross-examination by the prosecution and the court; an unsworn statement, which excluded cross-examination but carried little weight with the court; and remaining silent, for which “no one in this court can comment on your failure to take the stand and your failure to take the stand will not be considered as an admission of guilt.” Sprechman asked the accused whether he understood the choices. Whitehead answered, “I think so, sir.”

Whitehead stuck by his decision to make an unsworn statement. He took the stand without taking the oath, and only Lieutenant Cohen questioned him. His short testimony covered little more than a page of the court-martial transcript. Cohen asked his name, military organization, whether he was the accused in the case and his date and place of birth.

Cohen continued, “What happened when you were four years old?”

“My father got killed, sir.”

“And what did you do?”

“I went to work on a farm.”

“How much schooling have you had, Whitehead?”

“Not any.”

“Where did you work?”

“On a farm for Walter K. Parnell.”

The next questions established he had not been prosecuted for any criminal offense as a civilian and had been in the army for three years.

“Have you had any combat, Whitehead?”

“Seven months.”

“How many campaigns have you been in?”

“I been in, sir? Normandy to Germany, sir, about four or five.”

“Were you wounded?”

“Well, yes, sir, I was.”

“How many times?”

“Twice.”

“And what did you do when you were wounded?”

“I kept on fighting. I knew I’d get it if I stayed there.”

“Have you ever been court martialed before, Whitehead?”

“No.”

“Is there anything else you would like to tell the court about yourself?”

“No, sir, I do not.”

The court excused the witness, and Lieutenant Cohen declared, “The defense rests.”

The court reporter did not record the defense’s closing argument, and the assistant trial judge advocate did not make one. The court retired briefly. When it returned, Whitehead stood to attention. On the charge and both specifications, the verdict was “Guilty.” The court deliberated a moment before pronouncing sentence. The maximum penalty for violation of Article of War 61 was life at hard labor. The court was lenient, declaring that Whitehead “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 five years.”

Whitehead wrote that the court did not afford him the opportunity to explain his exhaustion and his desire to return to the 2nd Division rather than to a new division as an unknown replacement. The court record, however, made it clear that he could have said anything he wanted. Moreover, he was fortunate the prosecution did not ask him how he survived in Paris during his two periods of desertion. His criminal activities, as recounted in his memoir, would have earned him the death penalty.
At 10:25 that morning, the court “proceeded to other matters.”

EPILOGUE

These are real battle casualties, just as much as if they had lost a leg.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 352

A
FTER HIS
P
ARIS COURT-MARTIAL
, Whitehead served time in the Delta Disciplinary Training Barracks in the south of France and in federal penitentiaries at Fort Hancock, New Jersey, and at Fort Jay and Green Haven, New York.
When the army remitted half of his five-year sentence, he walked out of Green Haven with $25 and a brown tweed suit on 17 May 1948. His wife, Selma, was waiting for him. His parole terms could not have been more irksome: to work as a farm laborer for the stepfather he had joined the army to escape in 1942. Two years later, he used the skills he had mastered cutting GIs’ hair during the war to become a barber. Al’s Barber Shop opened sometime in the early 1950s in the Gilsville Family Center on Sam Davis Road in Smyrna, Tennessee. He and Selma moved into a small house on Maple Street and raised three children.

Whitehead felt aggrieved about his dishonorable discharge, which he thought was unfair to a soldier who had fought and been decorated. He believed that, by proving he had been wounded, he could convince the authorities his desertion had its origin in his medical condition. In March 1949, Dr. R. C. Kash of Lebanon, Tennessee, examined him and wrote,

I find a one-inch scar over a depression from which bone appears missing at the right front-parietal region of the skull. Also there are some scars on the dorsum of the right hand at the articulation of the metacarpal and first phalanx of the right index finger, said to have been received in a bayonet engagement.

These scars are neither old nor recent. I think it is reasonable to believe that they are of approximately four or five years’ duration.

In response to Whitehead’s appeal that year to the Pentagon’s Clemency and Review Board, the board reviewed his file. In his favor, it noted, “Applicant had an otherwise good record. He landed in France on D-Day and fought in France, Belgium and Germany.” On the other hand, the board’s report commented, “He claims to have been twice wounded but to have kept on fighting. . . . There is nothing of a medical or psychiatric nature in the file to excuse his conduct.” The fact that he was carrying a false identity card and a concealed weapon when French police apprehended him in December 1945 also counted against him. The board recommended that “the case
be not
reviewed by the Army Board on Correction of Military Records for the reason that there is no record of error or injustice in the case.”

Eighteen years later, a lawyer with offices in the same shopping center as Al’s Barber Shop, C. Alex Meacham, took up Whitehead’s case. Meacham, following President Jimmy Carter’s January 1977 amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders, wrote to the White House on 14 March 1977:

I am writing on behalf of a very good friend of mine, Mr. Alfred T. Whitehead, a copy of whose Enlisted Record and Report of Separation–Dishonorable Discharge is enclosed herewith.

Mr. Whitehead was in combat in World War II from December 1943, until December 1944. During this time he was wounded twice, and after the second wound his army records and medical records were lost or misplaced. Through an unfortunate misunderstanding, this led to his being counted as AWOL and he was Court-martialed and given time in Military Confinement. At that time, he also received a Dishonorable Discharge from the army.

 . . . He has never been able either to get copies of his records or the case re-opened. He feels strongly that he was wrongfully Court-martialed and sentenced when his true records were not available to the court . . .

 . . . I am requesting that due consideration be given to clearing Mr. Whitehead’s record.

Meacham’s letter was disingenuous at best, although certainly based on information Whitehead had supplied. Whitehead apparently neglected to tell Meacham that he simply ran away from the replacement depot at Fontainebleau. Rather than return to the 2nd Infantry Division on the front lines, he went to Paris. He did not seem to mention to his lawyer, as he wrote in his privately printed memoir of 1989, that he stole Allied supplies, shot at military policemen and escaped from a stockade. If he had, Meacham could not have written that Whitehead’s seven months’ absence from military duty was the result of “an unfortunate misunderstanding.” However, the army Board for Correction of Military Records upgraded Whitehead’s discharge from “dishonorable” to “general” on 27 October 1978. Whitehead’s son, Alexander T. Whitehead II, wrote, “
The day it arrived in the mail was only the second time in my life I ever saw my father, while sober, cry. The other was at the funeral of his mother.” Although a “general” discharge ranked below “honorable,” it was probably more than Whitehead, if he had told the full story of his desertion, was entitled to. The board did not reverse the guilty verdict.

His former comrades in the Indianhead Division did not forget him or his desertion. He attempted to take part in one of their annual reunions in Columbus, Georgia, in 1970.
Division veteran Jesse Brode later wrote that Whitehead “was told to leave as he was not a member and could not become a member.”

In the spring of 1986, forty years after his court-martial, Al Whitehead flew alone to Paris. “Everything was different,” he wrote. “Where the old hotels once stood, there were apartment houses. I was drinking and felt like I’d walked twenty miles trying to find a hotel like the ones I knew.” The hotels Whitehead remembered were more like rooming houses, where people lived and ate year-round. Most had long since disappeared. Whitehead had also changed. Aged sixty-four, he was not the bold young soldier discovering the City of Light. His hair and thick mustache had turned white. Paris’s black markets and American MP patrols had long since disappeared, and the modern city so disoriented Whitehead that he returned to the airport and slept on a bench in the terminal.

When he woke up in Charles de Gaulle Airport, he went back to Paris in search of familiar haunts. He changed dollars into francs, no longer enjoying the black market rate, and wandered from one street to another. As the sun was setting, a taxi took him to the Seventh Arrondissement café where he met Lea in 1945. He wrote, “I walked inside and stood there for a moment, the memories rushing back to those days long ago.” He got drunk again and asked the woman behind the bar whether she knew of a room where he could sleep. She walked him outside, where a young, dark-haired man was waiting. The three of them went to a squalid room on the top floor of an old building. Whitehead, convinced his companions were a prostitute and her pimp, said he wanted a bed but not the girl. He offered money to the man, who threw it in his face. Whitehead the old soldier, black marketeer and ex-convict felt his wartime anger rising. “That’s when I got tough with them,” he wrote. “He backed off and we went downstairs with them in front.”