Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
of most continental bases. The memo began, ‘Absences without leave and desertion, especially from units which have been alerted for movement overseas, have reached serious proportions.’ So many men had deserted it was impossible to put them on trial, ‘except in aggravated circumstances’. Because many deserters preferred prison to overseas duty, the Adjutant General’s Office wrote, ‘The intent of the new regulations is that the shirker’s purpose will be frustrated instead of assisted … He must find that after early apprehension, a vigorous administration expedites his return to duty with his unit if it is still in the United States, or to an active overseas theater if his unit has gone.’
The memo painted a gloomy picture of draftees’ willingness to take part in the war. Because the stockades were overflowing with captured deserters and others Absent Without Leave (AWOL), ‘it has been necessary to encroach upon the barracks area for staging in order to house, feed and detain deserters and AWOL’s [sic] apprehended’. The Adjutant General advised commanders to beware of the ‘various tricks and ruses used to avoid being assigned to a task force or placed in a group for overseas shipment …’ The deserters’ ‘tricks’ were:
a. They maim themselves, necessitating hospitalization.
b. They feign physical and mental illness.
c. They hide out for days to avoid being placed on an overseas shipment list.
d. They go AWOL in order to stand trial and be confined.
e. They dispose of clothing and equipment.
f. They throw away their identification tags.
g. They answer for absentees on roll call.
h. When an officer approaches the area, the word is passed along and they dash for the woods through windows and doors, even jumping from upstairs screened windows, taking the screens with them.
General Cooke extended his mission to Camp Edwards on Cape Cod, where 2,800 soldiers who had deserted in the eastern United States were imprisoned. (Deserters west of the Mississippi went to a similar prison in California.) Cooke asked the camp’s commandant how long the men remained behind bars. ‘As long as it takes to find out who they are and what outfit they belong to,’ he said. ‘Then we take them under guard and put them on a ship.’ When trainees broke their spectacles or false teeth to avoid shipping out, the army changed the regulations so they could be sent to battle without them. Many went into hiding. The commandant said, ‘We’ve dug them out of bins under the coal and rooted them out of caves and tunnels dug underneath their barracks.’ Camp guards resorted to confining deserters in special compounds without explanation a few hours before putting them on trains for embarkation ports. Cooke asked whether any men tried to bolt outside the camp. ‘Only when they’re being taken to the port. Then they’ll jump out of windows, off of moving trucks and even over the sides of harbor boats.’ The army name for it was ‘gangplank fever’.
Cooke spoke to the prisoners. Some had family worries that they had to deal with before they could leave the United States. One soldier said he could not abandon his wife, who was pregnant and sick. Others told him: ‘I can’t fire a gun or go under fire.’ ‘I can’t kill anyone, I don’t believe in killing people.’ ‘I was afraid, I guess, so I went home.’ ‘I wanted to see my girl; I don’t like the Army and I’m scared of water.’
From Fort Meade, Steve Weiss, Sheldon Wohlwerth and the other graduate trainees went to Newport News to board ships. None of them knew their destination or their future divisions and regiments. As infantry ‘replacements’, they would fill positions left in the ranks by men who had been killed, captured, disabled physically or mentally or were missing in action. Some of the battlefield missing, about whom no one spoke, had gone ‘over the hill’, deserting the army with no intention of returning. As the replacements neared the Straits of Gibraltar aboard troop transports that were prey to German U-boats, a rumour circulated that they were bound for a place they had never heard of, Oran. The French Algerian port town, occupied by the Americans and British since November 1942, had become the US Mediterranean Base Section and theatre supply depot. A few of the replacements were so sure Oran was Iran that they lost a month’s pay betting on it.
Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke had beaten Weiss to North Africa, where he continued his research into the high rate of desertions and nervous breakdowns. He asked a nineteen-year-old corporal, Robert Green, if he had been afraid when the patrol he was leading ran into the Germans. ‘Yes, sir, I was scared all right! Anybody tells you he isn’t scared up front is just a plain liar.’ Cooke probed the young soldier about men who ‘cracked up’. He answered, ‘Some of them do. But you can see it comin’ on, and sometimes the other guys help out.’ Cooke asked how he could see it ‘coming on’. Green said they became ‘trigger happy’:
They go running all over the place lookin’ for something to shoot at. Then, the next thing you know they got the battle jitters. They jump if you light a match and go diving for cover if someone bounces a tin hat off a rock. Any kind of a sudden noise and you can just about see them let out a mental scream to themselves. When they get that way, you might just as well cross them off the roster because they aren’t going to be any more use to the outfit.
Cooke wondered how to help such men, and Green answered,
Aw, you can cover up for a guy like that before he’s completely gone. He can be sent back to get ammo or something. You know and he knows he’s gonna stay out of sight for a while, but you don’t let on, see? Then he can pretend to himself he’s got a reason for being back there and he still has his pride. Maybe he even gets his nerve back for the next time. But if he ever admits openly that he’s runnin’ away, he’s through!
In Algiers, a senior officer told Cooke, ‘If a soldier contracts a severe case of dysentery from drinking impure water, his commander feels sorry for him and is glad to see the man sent to a hospital. But if the soldier becomes afflicted with an equivalent ailment from stress and strain, that same commander becomes incensed and wants the soldier court-martialed.’
General Cooke wryly proposed a cure, ‘Then the only remedy is to eliminate fear.’
After two weeks in a camp near Oran, Steve Weiss and eighty-nine other replacements from Fort Meade boarded a converted British passenger liner, the Strathnaver, for the four-day cruise to Naples. The Allies had conquered Naples on 1 October 1943. By May 1944, when Weiss arrived, the Allied armies, the Mafia and the Allied deserters who controlled the black market in military supplies jointly ran the city. Thousands of soldiers were enriching themselves at army expense, stealing and selling Allied supplies. Some Italian-Americans had deserted to drive trucks of contraband for American Mafia boss Vito Genovese. Other deserters had joined armed bands in the hills, robbing both the Allies and Italian civilians. Reynolds Packard, the United Press correspondent who had lived in Italy before the war and returned on the first day of the invasion, wrote,
Within a few weeks Naples became the crime center of liberated Italy. And the word ‘liberated’ became a dirty joke. It meant to both the Italians and the invaders that an Allied military government got something for nothing: such as an Italian’s wife or a bottle of brandy he took from an intimidated bartender without paying for it. Prostitution, black marketing, racketeering, and confidence games were rampant … It was a mixed-up circle. The GIs were selling cigarettes to the Italians, who in turn would sell them back to the Americans who had run out of them. But the main trade was trafficking in women.
Norman Lewis, an Italian-speaking British intelligence officer in Naples, noted the same phenomenon: ‘Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than the other ranks.’ The officers were both American and British, some of whom had sent looted artworks back to England on Royal Navy ships. When Lewis investigated corruption in Naples, the black marketeers’ influential friends blocked him. He wrote,
One soon finds that however many underlings are arrested – and sent away these days for long terms of imprisonment – those who employ them are beyond the reach of the law. At the head of the AMG [American Military Government] is Colonel Charles Poletti, and working with him is Vito Genovese, once head of