Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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is not a coward.’
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 martialled four 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 humanity. His life story should resonate with those who wonder how much they would have endured before collapsing or fleeing. Fortunately for this writer, Bain’s son John provided insights into his father’s character, motives and flaws that fleshed out the many writings and interviews Bain left behind when he died.
John Bain wrote a poem in which a deserter told his son:
But son, my spirit, underneath,
Survived it all intact;
They thought they’d crushed me like a bug
But I had won in fact.
The Second World War was not as wonderful as its depiction in some films and adventure tales. It should not be surprising that young men found the experience of it so debilitating that they escaped. John Keegan, who pioneered the writing of war’s history through the eyes of its participants, wrote, ‘What war can ever be wonderful, least of all one that killed fifty million people, destroyed swathes of Europe’s cultural heritage, depraved its politics, devalued the very moral basis of its civilization?’
From the earliest childhood, American boys are taught that it is wrong – the greatest wrong – to kill.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, Prepared for the Fighting Man Himself, Committee of the National Research Council with the Collaboration of Science Service as a Contribution to the War Effort, The Infantry Journal, Washington, DC (and Penguin Books, London), 1943, p. 349
AT THE END OF THE GREAT WAR OF 1914–18, Private First Class William Weiss was departing France with a leg scarred by German bullets, lungs choked in poison gas and a plague of memories. While convalescing in a Catholic hospital near Tours, the Jewish-American doughboy fell in love with his French nurse. The romance, which sustained him for four months, ended when his 77th Infantry Division mustered at Brest for the voyage home to New York City. In April 1919, five months after the Armistice, New York held little promise for Weiss. The post-war economic recession was beginning, as weapons factories laid off workers and banks pressed for repayment of war debts. Many 77th Division troops had lost their jobs to civilians when they entered the United States Army. At least 25 per cent of them had no hope of work and expected nothing more at home than a grateful welcome. As they set sail across the Atlantic, even the welcome was cast into doubt.
To the surprise of the 77th Division’s commanders, the Department of War declared that it would not accord the men a traditional victory parade. Only one month earlier, the 27th Infantry Division, O’Ryan’s Roughnecks, had marched proudly up Fifth Avenue to the acclaim of ecstatic crowds. The 27th and 77th were both New York divisions, about all they had in common. The all-volunteer, mostly Irish 27th were honest-to-God American Christian fighting men. The 77th was comprised of draftees and recent immigrants from Italy, Greece, Russia, Poland, Armenia, Syria and China. Thirty per cent were Jewish. Twelve thousand earned American citizenship while in uniform, making them, to most Washington politicians, not quite Americans.
When New Yorkers insisted on honouring the 77th anyway, the War Department advanced a series of pretexts to block them. It said the doughboys themselves did not want a parade. The men, once asked, were unanimously in favour. War Secretary Newton Baker then cited objections by Fifth Avenue shopkeepers to the erection of grandstands between 97th and 98th Streets. After the courts rejected the shopkeepers’ injunction, the department claimed the parade would be too expensive – almost a million dollars, a figure soon lowered to $80,000. Finally, it said that disembarking 30,000 men at the same time would paralyse the docks.
War Department prevarications infuriated New York City. All of the 77th’s boys came from the metropolis, whereas the 27th’s National Guardsmen hailed from as far as Schenectady and Albany. Meetings assembled throughout Manhattan to lodge protests. The Welcome Committee for the Jewish Boys Returning from the War sent an urgent telegram to Secretary of War Baker: ‘The East Side, which has contributed so large a quota to this division, is stirred at being deprived of the opportunity to pay tribute to this division … We strongly urge you to do everything within your power to make it possible that the parade shall take place. It will be an act of patriotism.’ The next day, the Committee cabled President Woodrow Wilson ‘as Commander in Chief of the US Army, to rescind the order prohibiting the parade of the 77th Division. The people of the east side have gladly given their sons to do battle in France for their country, and desire to pay loving tribute to the boys who are returning and to the memory of those who sleep on foreign soil.’
Charles Evans Hughes, a former Supreme Court justice and the Republicans’ nominee for president in 1916, chaired a gathering of the Selective Service Boards that had conscripted the men of the 77th two years earlier. ‘We want to do for the 77th what we did for the 27th,’ Hughes declared. ‘There should be no desire to discriminate against any of the boys who went to the front, from New York or any other place.’
No one contested the division’s achievements: more than two thousand of its men had been killed, and another nine thousand wounded – more than double the casualties sustained by the 27th. They were one of the first American divisions sent into combat and the only one at the front every day of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The New York Times wrote of the mostly immigrant troops: ‘The 77th fought continuously from the time it entered the Lorraine sector in June [1918] until it stood at the gates of Sedan when the armistice was signed. It drove the Germans back from the Vesle to the Aisne River. It rooted them out of the very heart of the Argonne Forest. And it ranked seventh among the [twenty-nine] divisions that led in the number of Distinguished Service Crosses awarded for gallantry in action.’ When they launched an assault against the Germans along the River Vesle, called by the troops ‘the hellhole of the Vesle’, General Erich Ludendorff unleashed the phosgene and mustard gas that blinded and crippled thousands of Allied soldiers. William Weiss was one of them, taken out of the front with eyes bandaged from the stinging pain of the poisons and his leg nearly shot off by German rifle fire.
The heroism of New Yorkers like Private Weiss gave the lie to military orthodoxy, as stated in the US Army’s official Manual of Instruction for Medical Advisory Boards in 1917, that ‘the foreign-born, and especially the Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native-born’. Dr William T. Manning, chairman of the Home Auxiliary Association, told a meeting in New York that soldiers’ families felt their sons were victims of racial discrimination. Woodrow Wilson, a Southern gentleman whose administration had introduced segregation by race into the federal civil service in 1913, was impervious to accusations of bias. In his State of the Union Address for 1915, the Democratic president had said, ‘There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt … Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.’ Neither the all-black 369th Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters, nor the mostly foreign-born 77th Infantry Division won the president’s admiration, although both had earned more decorations than most all-white, ‘all-American’