The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Read Free

Werner Schmeidel. His mob terrorized the military and civilians alike in a crime spree of robbery, extortion and murder. After MPs captured them in November 1944, they made a daring Christmas Eve prison break and hid among the Roman underworld. Recaptured many weeks later, Schmeidel and his top henchman were hanged for murder in June 1945. That did not put an end, however, to other deserter criminal operations that continued well into the postwar era. (Two members of the Lane Gang who remained at large hijacked an army safe with $133,000 in cash on its way from Rome to Florence one week after their accomplices’ hangings.) In France, American deserters collaborated with Corsican hoodlums in the theft and sale of cigarettes, whiskey, petrol and other contraband. French civilians compared the German troops’ supposedly “correct” behavior during their four-year occupation to the terror wrought by rampaging American deserters who raped and robbed at will.
    In Paris, especially, the lure of pretty women and unearned wealth beckoned to any American GI or British Tommy willing to desert. One of these was Sergeant Alfred T. Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who had earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy. He became a gangster in postliberation Paris, living with a café waitress and robbing Allied supply depots as well as restaurants and ordinary citizens. His type of deserter, who operated in what the French press called “Chicago” gangs, caused more worry to the Allied command than the ordinary deserter who simply went into hiding. New York Times correspondent Dana Adams Schmidt wrote that “American Army deserters hijack trucks on the open highway and fight gun battles with the American military police.” Another of his dispatches from Paris added, “The French police fear to interfere unless accompanied by M.P.’s.” Hunting down deserters became a full-time job for MPs from most Allied countries.
    From the beginning of the war, the military in both Britain and the United States understood that some men would collapse mentally under the strain of combat. They had seen it often in the First World War, when the term “shell shock” came into common usage. An old school of thought held that shell shock, later christened “battle fatigue,” was a newfangled term for cowardice, but psychological research between the wars found that the human mind suffered stress as did the body and acquired its own wounds. Much study was devoted to discovering which men were likely to break down and which were not. Leading psychologists, led by Harvard’s Professor Edwin Garrigues Boring, cooperated with the military to produce a book called Psychology for the Fighting Man . A kind of guidebook to mental survival in battle, it was intended for every soldier going into combat and quickly sold 380,000 copies. Its insights inform much of this book, especially its dictum about the average soldier who broke down under pressure: “He is not a coward.”
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    Just as fear and mental collapse drove Steve Weiss and avarice motivated Al Whitehead, another type of deserter left the armed forces out of pure disgust. Psychology for the Fighting Man acknowledged that war and killing were not normal activities for boys raised in peacetime: “American men have no particular love of killing. For the most part they hate killing—they think it is wrong, sinful, ordinarily punishable by death.” This view of life was not unique to Americans. One British soldier, John Vernon Bain, deserted three times. He never ran during a battle, and he fought well in North Africa and northern France. In Normandy, where the British Army court-martialed 4 officers and 7,018 men for desertion in the field, Bain stayed at the front. He eventually left, not the war, but the army. To him, it was a dehumanizing institution that encouraged actions that in any context but war would be regarded as criminal. He deserted to preserve his