This is a flawed but deeply fascinating look at a totally neglected and even taboo subject -- Allied soldiers who deserted their colors World War Two. Author Charles Glass plunges into this unfamiliar territory with a great deal of gusto from the very first page, and delivers a book which is informative and highly readable, but also structured in such a way that, at the end, we feel as if we've barely scratched the surface of a massive subject.
Glass examines the phenomenon of desertion through three particular soldiers -- Bain, a Scotsman with the Argyll and Southerland Highlanders; Whitehead, an American from Tennessee who ends up in the 4th Infantry Division; and Weiss, an American from New York who serves with the 36th Division. Each man's story is markedly different, as is their characters and background. Bain, a boxer by trade but a poet at heart, is disgusted by the cruelty and ugliness of military life. Whitehead is a hard-drinking chronic liar from a broken home who seems to be destined for the stockade almost from his first day in the military. Weiss, a volunteer, is a fine combat soldier who ends up with the OSS and does good work there, but, transferred back to the infantry, cannot endure the savagery and slaughter of the Vosges campaign and finally breaks under pressure. In each instance, we see not only the basic character but the specific pressures the soldiers were subjected to that caused them to walk off the line, and the different ways in which they were caught, punished, and responded to punishment. In the case of Whitehead, we also get to explore yet another taboo subject (touched on in "The Dirty Dozen"): how Allied, and especially American, deserters fueled organized criminal rings which made their living in Allied-occupied Europe by stealing and robbing supplies meant for the troops on the front line. These gangs committed murder, rape and fought savage gun battles with military police, and were not fully wiped out until several years after the war.
This book is as readable as a novel, and expresses both the terrible cruelty of the front line and the merciless punishments handed out by military courts for deserters, which were often composed of officers with no frontline experience at all, and in some cases under intense pressure by their own superiors to render savage verdicts. Whenever it broadens its scope to discuss the phenomenon of desertion in Allied armies itself, it is even more interesting, noting that 100,000 British and 50,000 American soldiers left the colors between 1939 - 1945 (the British have more, despite their smaller population, because they were at war much longer). Glass notes, for example, that desertion in the Pacific was almost unheard-of, because "there was no place to go," whereas in Europe and North Africa there were wealths of choices. Issues like how social class, rank, and psychological factors (1.8 million men were DQ'd from service because of mental health issues) factored into how and why desertion occurred are also discussed, and seem to have played as much of a role as the conditions of combat.
Where the book left me wanting was in Glass' choice of structure. By focusing mainly on three men who may have been atypical (especially Weiss), he leaves me with the impression that there is much, much more to this story than he is able to tell in the 400 pages of DESERTERS. His broad overviews are good but all too brief, and when I finished, I couldn't help but feel he had selected his three subjects out of convenience rather than because they were archetypes of Allied deserters generally. Many readers object to Whitehead being part of the book at all, since he is a chronic liar with deep psychological problems, and many aspects of his story may be simply made up. However, Whitehead may in fact be representative of a certain type of deserter, one who entered the army with two (psychological) strikes against him.
Overall I think this a very good book, extremely reader-friendly and quite vivid in its depictions of the horrors the men had to endure both at the front and at the hands of military justice: but it is only the tip of an iceberg I would like to see explored much further by additional authors. As for those readers who say that "the author was just trying to make me feel sorry for these men," I am tempted to reply: f*** you. Unless you're a combat veteran yourself, you should think three times before presuming to judge men in whose boots you ain't walked. That is for their comrades to do. (It is worth noting that the Indianhead Division refused Whithead admittance to the unit reunion in 1970 on the grounds of his desertion. There. They did it for you.)
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