Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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later, the army shipped him south to the Infantry Replacement Training Center (IRTC) at Fort Blanding, Florida. Weiss’s General Classification Test score qualified him for Officer Candidate School and a shot at the Psychological Warfare Branch. But the army, he quickly realized, ‘needed infantry replacements, not junior officers, in late 1943’.
The army posted Weiss to Combat Intelligence (CI), which a second lieutenant defined for him as ‘specialized C.I. infantry probing beyond the front line, patrolling and observing either on foot or by jeep …’ Weiss wrote, ‘Although seemingly glamorous, I felt that C.I. missions would be more dangerous than those assigned to the regular infantry.’ Whether glamorous or dangerous, it was still the infantry. Weiss applied for transfer to Psychological Warfare. In the meantime, the army put him through seventeen weeks of Basic Training, ‘map reading, aerial photographic interpretation, enemy identification, prisoner interrogation, infantry tactics, use of weapons, and small group cohesion’. Propaganda films screened at Fort Blanding, like director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, did not impress him. He thought the documentaries ‘gave a false impression of modern war’ and ‘added little to my reasons for enlisting’. Many aspects of life at Fort Blanding grated on the trainees, especially the swamps, the chow and what the GIs called ‘chickenshit’, rigid enforcement of petty rules. Incompetence was rife in an army that had expanded from its 1939 level of 227,000 regular soldiers (with another 235,000 National Guardsmen) to a total of 7,482,434 personnel by the end of 1943. Health care suffered along with everything else in the military’s rapid growth. One medic gave Weiss stomach tablets for his athlete’s foot, and another injected him with so many vaccines at the same time that he spent five days in the base hospital with a dangerously high fever.
Weiss experienced no anti-Semitic bullying or slurs at Fort Blanding, but the only other Jewish recruit he knew there did. This youngster, nicknamed Philly, was short and as religious as Weiss was secular. When a Southern redneck insulted Philly in anti-Semitic terms, Weiss warned the Southerner to lay off his friend or he would ‘stomp his ass’. One day in the kitchen, Philly and the Southerner had a punch-up. The sergeant broke it up and ordered them to settle it in the boxing ring. The other trainees watched as Philly took punch after punch, but the Jewish kid did not go down. Philly was losing on points, until he smashed his opponent’s jaw and knocked him out. The sergeant told the loser, ‘If you don’t change your attitude, I’ll have you court-martialed.’ To Weiss, ‘this was an object lesson in human rights connected to the war itself.’
While Weiss underwent Basic Training at Fort Blanding, other recruits were deserting or suffering severe psychological problems. Time magazine reported that 300 trainees each week were succumbing to nervous breakdowns. Dr Edward Strecker, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychiatry Department and an adviser to the Secretary of War, bemoaned ‘the cold hard facts that 1,825,000 men were rejected for military service because of psychiatric disorders, that almost another 600,000 had been discharged from the Army alone for neuropsychiatric reasons or their equivalent, and that fully 500,000 more attempted to evade the draft …’
The army Adjutant General alerted commanding generals in his letter of 3 February 1943, ‘Absences without leave and desertion especially from units which have been alerted for movement overseas, have reached serious proportions.’ Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson proposed a more punitive solution to the desertion problem. On 22 October 1943, he wrote to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith, ‘Absence without leave in time of war is under any circumstances a serious offense … sufficiently grave to warrant serious punishment which cannot be imposed under the present limitations.’ Stimson recommended that President Franklin D. Roosevelt issue an Executive Order suspending the limits on punishments in the Table of Maximum Punishments of the Manual for Courts-Martial of 1928. Roosevelt duly signed Executive Order 9367 on 9 November 1943, ‘Suspending until further orders the maximum limitations of punishment for violations of Article of War 61.’
A letter from Brigadier General M. G. White, the army’s Assistant Chief of Staff, informed army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall that ‘in May, 1942, there were 2,822 desertions …’ The overall number of deserters grew as the Army expanded, but the percentage remained low at less than 1 per cent of the total number of personnel in uniform. However, most of the desertions were coming from the small percentage of soldiers serving or about to serve as combat infantry troops.
General Marshall established a committee to study desertions and their relationship to nervous disorders. Among those he appointed to the committee was a First World War veteran, Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke. Cooke assumed he was selected because ‘if a guy like me could understand such a subject, anybody could’. Cooke had no fixed view of the problem, its causes or its solution. He noted in early 1943 that ‘nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations’. This was before most of them had been shipped overseas. General Cooke, a bluff and self-effacing soldier, wrote that he had not heard the word ‘psychoneurosis’ before this time and had no idea how to spell it. He also admitted to sharing a common military suspicion of ‘psychiatricks’.
Cooke visited Fort Blanding during Weiss’s training period. The camp commandant gave him access to one ‘locked’ and three ‘open’ wards for psychoneurosis patients. In an open ward, not all of the patients seemed genuine.
A hundred or more patients were loafing around in hospital suits, talking, reading, or playing games. They didn’t act any sicker than I did. As a group, they seemed just about like any other collection of soldiers. I spoke to one of the more intelligent looking ones.
‘What’s wrong with you, soldier?’
He stared at me defiantly.
‘I’m queer,’ he stated flatly, meaning he was homosexual.
Another patient complained of back pain, and a black soldier said simply, ‘I’se got the misery.’
At the Officers’ Club, Cooke had a drink with the camp psychiatrist to discuss the malingerers he had met. The psychiatrist told him,
Whether you believe it or not, I can assure you those men suffer with the pains they complain about. You say they are malingerers and merely pretend to be sick. But, after ten years of practicing psychiatry, I am confident I can tell the difference between a person who is suffering from pain and one who isn’t.
Pain with a psychological cause was still pain. Cooke said he did not understand, but he resolved to continue his investigation with an open mind.
At Fort Blanding, Steve Weiss gravitated to older soldiers, as if seeking a reliable father or older brother. Sheldon Wohlwerth, a twenty-eight-year-old trainee from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, became a friend. Wohlwerth was ‘ungainly, artistic and bright’ and had ‘sound common sense’. Weiss said, ‘I liked him a lot.’ On completion of their seventeen weeks’ Basic Training, Weiss and Wohlwerth went to Fort Meade, Maryland, for rifle training. To his surprise, Weiss qualified as a marksman. At Fort Meade, a recruit named Hal Sedloff befriended him. In civilian life, Sedloff had been a butcher. Weiss looked up to Sedloff, who like Wohlwerth was ten years his senior. The older man’s extreme yearning for his wife and baby daughter, however, left him miserable. In April 1944, the army shipped Sedloff overseas from Newport News, Virginia. A week later, it was Steve Weiss’s turn.
Not every soldier assigned to overseas duty made it as far as the ships. General Cooke interviewed doctors and recruits at induction stations, hospitals and army stockades to discover why so many were refusing to serve. Some of his discoveries undermined his faith in the young generation’s patriotism. Special treatment by civilian Selective Service Boards had created resentment among draftees. ‘When, in 1943, it was found that fourteen members of the Rice University football team had been rejected for military service, the public was somewhat surprised,’ he wrote. They were not the only athletes whose talents spared them military service early in the war, and General Cooke sympathized with those who believed that local Selective Service Boards were unfair.
So urgent had the problem of desertion within the United States become that the Adjutant General’s Office circulated a memo on 3 February 1943 to ‘Commanding Generals, Army Ground Forces,