Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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and it is clear that many of the Mafia-Camorra sindacos [mayors] who have been appointed in the surrounding towns are his nominees … Yet nothing is done.
Army gossip about these activities circulated among the troops, some of whom believed that the officers’ behaviour justified their own acts of theft or extortion. Steve Weiss, as yet unaware of the war’s seamier side, saw the Italian campaign in terms of his father’s experiences of the First World War. The cargo wagons on the train he took from Naples to Caserta were just like the ‘previous war’s forty men and eight horses’.
At Caserta, the new GIs were stationed at the Replacement Depot (which they called the ‘repple depot’ or ‘repple depple’), near the palatial headquarters of the 5th Army Group under British Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander. The former royal palace was also home to Allied press correspondents. One of the best, Australian Alan Moorehead of the British Daily Express, thought the headquarters ‘a vast and ugly palace’, even if it was more commodious than the GIs’ tents. ‘Unlike the field marshal,’ Weiss wrote, ‘we at the “repple depot” were herded together like cattle, waiting for assignment to any one of a number of infantry divisions fighting across the Italian peninsula. I was adrift, alone and friendless, as usual, in a sea of olive drab, feeling more like a living spare part.’ For two weeks in May, the young soldiers had nothing to do while the army decided where to put them. At the end of the month, a sergeant called out the names of ninety soldiers for posting to the 36th Infantry Division at Anzio. Among them were two trainees from Fort Blanding, Privates Second Class Sheldon Wohlwerth and Stephen J. Weiss.
The 36th was a Texas National Guard division that had come under federal control in November 1940, whose men wore the Texas T, like a cattle brand, on their left shoulders. The commanding officer of the ‘T-Patchers’ was Major General Fred Livingood Walker, a First World War veteran with a Distinguished Service Cross for exceptional gallantry and a strong supporter of his troops. Ohio-born Walker had assumed command of the Texas division in 1941.
War for the 36th began with the first American landing on the European continent at the Bay of Salerno in southern Italy on 9 September 1943. German artillery dug into the Roman ruins at Paestum hit the invaders hard, pinning down one battalion of the 36th Division’s 141st Regiment on the beach for twelve hours. The Texans pushed inland to launch a frontal assault on Wehrmacht units in the village of Altavilla. Misdirected American artillery, however, halted their advance and forced the men to scramble for shelter in the brush. When they eventually conquered the village, a German detachment moved onto a summit above to batter Altavilla with artillery. The 36th withdrew, momentarily exposing its divisional headquarters to a German onslaught. Assisted by hastily armed rear echelon cooks, typists and orderlies, the 36th retook Altavilla and secured the southern portion of the beachhead. The Salerno invasion cost the 15,000-man division more than 1,900 dead, wounded and missing.
As murderous as their first few days in Italy proved, the Texans soon suffered worse. When the Wehrmacht poured in reinforcements from the north, the counter-offensive hit the 36th head-on. The division suffered another 1,400 casualties while taking San Pietro, a key village in the Liri Valley on the route to Rome, in December. In January, Fifth Army commander General Mark Clark ordered General Walker to send his division across the Rapido River as part of an operation to break out of the Salerno beachhead. It was nothing less than a suicide mission. The fast flowing river at that time of year measured between twenty-five and fifty feet wide and around twelve feet deep, not an insurmountable obstacle. However, other factors militated against a successful crossing. Winter rain made the current both fast and powerful. The river’s wide, muddy flood plain was impassable to trucks, forcing the men to carry boats to the bank. The Germans had planted a dense field of landmines, and they positioned heavy artillery on the heights beyond the river’s west bank. General Walker opposed the operation, but he obeyed Clark’s orders. His men, as he feared, were slaughtered during three attempted crossings. Those who made it to the other side fought without air or armour support. Lacking communication with the friendly shore, they ran out of ammunition and were driven back by German artillery. The two-day ‘battle of guts’ ended on 22 January with 2,019 officers and men lost – 934 wounded, the rest killed or missing in action. Some of the missing had drowned, and their bodies were swept downstream. General Walker wrote in his diary after the Rapido failure, ‘My fine division is wrecked.’ Raleigh Trevelyan, a twenty-year-old British platoon commander in Italy, summed up the 36th’s resulting reputation, ‘The 36th had, frankly, come to be looked down on by the other divisions of the Fifth Army. It was considered not only to be a “hard luck outfit”, but trigger happy.’
In eleven months of Italian fighting, the division lost 11,000 men. Only 4,000 thousand of the original cadre remained, the rest having been replaced by inexperienced young recruits like Steve Weiss. When Weiss arrived in Italy in May 1944, there were few less hospitable divisions than the war-drained 36th and no more dangerous place than the Anzio beachhead. In his memoirs, General Clark called Anzio a ‘flat and barren little strip of Hell’. British platoon commander Trevelyan wrote that ‘nowhere in the Beachhead was safe from bombs or shells’. Even the naval shore craft, the only means of supplying the troops from the rear area at Naples, were subject to German fire.
Only thirty miles from Rome, the beaches had been peacetime resorts with first class hotels, restaurants, cafés and ice-cream shops. Allied bombardment of Anzio and Nettuno before the landing, intended as an end run north of Salerno that would ease the advance to Rome, emptied both towns of most of their inhabitants. The Anzio invasion began at two o’clock on the morning of 22 January 1944, when the US 3rd Infantry Division hit the undefended beach and British commandos and American Ranger units took control of the surrounding area. As with the landing at Salerno, early success was undermined by the Allies’ failure to take advantage of weak German defences by pushing quickly inland. The Germans thus had time to regroup and counter-attack. By May 1944, when Private Steve Weiss and the other replacements arrived to fill the ranks of the badly depleted 36th Division, the Allies were still dug in on the exposed beachhead.
The first soldiers Weiss encountered were barricaded in a makeshift stockade of wood and barbed wire. The fifty dishevelled troops were not German prisoners of war, but, to Weiss’s astonishment, Americans. ‘Under armed military police guard, some of the prisoners seemed very weary and disoriented, like vagrants down on their heels and luck,’ Weiss wrote. ‘Others, more aggressive than the others, threatened and hurled obscenities at us, warning, with pointed finger or clenched fist, we’d end up like them, misunderstood and deserted by the army.’ The army, though, had not deserted these men. They had deserted the army.
Raleigh Trevelyan, the British platoon commander who spent months at Anzio, wrote that not all deserters were in the stockade: ‘There were said to be three hundred deserters, both British and American, at large on the Beachhead. At first nobody made out where they could hide themselves in such a small area.’ Another British officer, Lord John Hope of the Scots Guards, was bird-watching in some deserted gardens east of Nettuno, when he uncovered a cache of canned food under a pile of wood. He told Trevelyan:
I turned a corner and was confronted by two unshaven GIs, one with a red beard, with rifles. I knew it was touch and go. ‘What are you doing here?’ one of them asked. I showed him my British badges, and when I said I was bird-watching they burst out laughing. They pretended they were just back from the front.
Hope reported the deserters to the American Provost Marshal, who sent MPs in a jeep with Hope on the hood to show the way. They found the deserters, who, in Hope’s words, ‘jumped up and ran like hell into a tobacco field; the men in the jeep belted off into the crops … No expedition was organized to go into the bushes to find out who was there. Men just couldn’t be spared.’
United Press correspondent Reynolds Packard came across another deserter near Anzio. The American soldier had no rifle, a court martial offence. Packard asked where it was. ‘Fuck it,’ the GI said. ‘I threw it away. I’ve quit fighting this goddamn war.’ Packard told his jeep driver to hold the deserter while he searched for the missing weapon. He found it and gave it to the soldier, who threw it away again. ‘Fuck this war,’ he said. ‘I’m not fighting anymore.’ Packard decided to take him to division headquarters:
Just before we