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Charles Glass

The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Hardcover – June 13, 2013

by Charles Glass (Author)

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“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts.” --The Boston Globe

A groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines, The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War. Charles Glass—renowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation—delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history.

Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass’s arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers.

With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier. Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy—yet became a gangster in liberated Paris, robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens. Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain, who deserted three times but never fled from combat—and who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him. The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss, an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his father—a disillusioned First World War veteran—to sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen. On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest, as an infantryman with the 36th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance, Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commanders.

Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported—to the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Press
Publication date

June 13, 2013
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10

1594204284
ISBN-13

978-1594204289
See all details

Charles Glass
137
Hardcover
89 offers from $1.75

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Boston Globe:
“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts… This is a stripped down, unromanticized, intimate history of battle in all of its confusion, chaos, terror, and moral ambiguity. Intricately structured — the author deftly juggles three narrative strands — and beautifully paced to build suspense, this tightly focused account, which draws on memoirs, archives, police files, psychiatric records, is neither reverent nor disapproving.”

The Wall Street Journal:
“By focusing on the stories of three deserters—two Americans, one Briton—Mr. Glass argues persuasively that deserters weren't the cowards of popular assumption but rational men making a natural choice to stay alive… Mr. Glass has conscientiously trawled through court-martial records and U.S. and British files, and he has spent many hours tape-recording interviews with deserters, but he has also been lucky enough to be allowed access to the unpublished memoirs of one deserter, Steve Weiss, as well as the correspondence of several others. Such material gives the author an intimate view into the mind of the wartime deserter.”

The Washington Post:
“[The Deserters] does provide an intimate look at the whys and wherefores of three men who opted out of the front lines. At a time when the ravages of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have made the general public more aware than ever of the price too many soldiers pay for their service, that helps.”

Dwight Garner, The New York Times:
“The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II, by the historian and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass, thus performs a service. It’s the first book to examine at length the sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it presents are frequently revealing and heartbreaking… The Deserters has much to say about soldiers' hearts. It underscores the truth of the following observation, made by a World War II infantry captain named Charles B. MacDonald: 'It is always an enriching experience to write about the American soldier in adversity no less than in glittering triumph.'"

San Francisco Chronicle:
“A veteran correspondent in war zones, Glass is richly credentialed to write The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. He is qualified by talent, by the good fortune of finding surviving veterans, and by exploring their lives with diligence and, most crucially, a deep compassion… Glass tells the soldiers' stories with novelistic vividness and a good historian's grasp of research detail."

The New Republic:
"Glass brings something new to the table by going deep with desertion, an overlooked aspect of the wartime experience. The result is an impressive achievement: a boot-level take on the conflict that is fresh without being cynically revisionist... [Glass] pulled off something special here: showing respect to what the deserters endured while acknowledging that the war—gruesome and unfair and nonsensical though it was—had to be won, and that this happened because enough men somehow found the will to keep going."

Publishers Weekly (starred):
"Glass is to be commended for his take on WWII through the eyes of those who ran away from it... Glass's history might be one of the best ways of relaying the experience of war: through the eyes of the young men who charged into the line of fire, gave up the ghost, and whose only reward was living to tell the tale."

Kirkus Reviews
"[Q]uite provocative... A well-written, fast-moving treatment of an issue still relevant today."

Sunday Telegraph (UK):
"Sensitive and thought-provoking … As this compelling and well-researched book shows, the battlefield was not a place for heroes, but a place where young men were dehumanised and killed … Given such conditions who among us would not also have considered walking away?"

The Guardian (UK):
"[These] stories of individual human beings who eventually cracked under the strain of hardly imaginable fear and misery – are wonderful, unforgettable acts of witness, something salvaged from a time already sinking into the black mud of the past."

Times (UK):
"Gripping … painstaking … sympathetic … Glass reveals just how inglorious war really is."

Sunday Times (UK):
"Remarkable."

Daily Telegraph (UK):"With his own skill and sensitivity, Glass recreates the inhuman scenes that pummel the other soldiers he examines… refreshing and stimulating—history told from the loser’s perspective."

About the Author

CHARLES GLASS was the chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He is the author of Americans in Paris, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, and The Northern Front. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Independent, and The Spectator. Born in Los Angeles, Glass divides his time among Paris, Tuscany, and London.

www.charlesglass.net

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; 1st. edition (June 13, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594204284
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594204289
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.58 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,535,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15,390 in World War II History (Books)
- #74,253 in United States History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
189 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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A Taboo Subject

Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2020

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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.)

6 people found this helpful

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me

Not so much a history..,

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

but the author's narration on some WW2 Deserters' memoirs with a little historical background; consequently, the book misses it titles aim. It left me wondering if it was written to vindication some desertion or somethings else the author failed to express or explore; for example, how living in a democracy doesn't prepare citizen soldiers for real horror of battlefield or giving your life for country...etc..

6 people found this helpful

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Jeffrey Swystun

Different Impression

Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2014

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The book's description, cover and reviews provide an impression that is much different than the actual content. Rather than being exposed to a study of desertion we receive verbose accounts of just three deserters. While I can see this is a way to humanize the subject it drastically reduces the scope and impact. It bounces back and forth between these three men with the surprising result being a growing lack of interest (at least that was my experience). While well written it just did not engage on an emotional level nor did it give comfort in the degree of research conducted. The best part were the quotes takes from Psychology for the Fighting Man that appeared at the start of each chapter. These soundbites told a better story than the larger book.

9 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A difficult subject to write about

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2013

Verified Purchase

While attending summer school in Mexico when I was 16, I made the acquaintance of an older American man who had been commander of a regiment that, he said, Had been the first to crack the Siegfried line in 1945. He told me of the desertion rate among the combat troops, and how whole units, up to company size, had often just dropped their weapons and run, seized with panic, to the rear. This was the first I had ever heard of such a thing, having been raised on war movies of heroic soldiers who fought the enemy and never ran from danger. Then I learned that my own father had been a stress casualty while fighting in the Pacific. Because he was an officer, most likely, he was given a medical discharge and a stipend check that he got from the government every month for the next 56 years. Then as a Texas National Guard medic, I was told that, if we went to war some day, we could expect to see 25% or more of our patient load to be stress casualties and we were trained to treat them. There is nothing surprising in this book except that someone wrote on the subject. Americans like to view all soldiers as heroes these days, rather than human beings, and fawning on people in uniform is all the rage. This book is a good read on a hard subject. I recommend it highly.

8 people found this helpful

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Bill Deef

The War From the Ground Level

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book complements any number of books on the "big picture" of WWII (like those by Beevor and Hastings) by being the depiction of the War from the points of view of three soldiers. They are from different countries and different social classes and more interestingly they have different ultimate fates after the war. The author uses diaries, letters and books written by the main characters themselves and the effect is riveting. He doesn't hesitate, though, to point out inconsistencies when the main characters embellish their accounts.
The main premise of the book (desertion) is really set in the background because it becomes evident, from the statistics, that many, if not most, of the grunts who really saw action on numerous occasions, "deserted". They wouldn't have been human if they hadn't, and I know from frank conversations with real veterans that after seeing a lot of front-line action, normal men become sick and tired and are driven insane by the "action".
This is one of those books that you can read fast but which you nurse because it is fascinating.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Paul O.

no problems

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

good book

Mr. Rm Brooker

I would love to see someone write a book about what happened ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book changed my atitidude to desertion in time of war, not all deserters were cowards and crooks. I would
love to see someone
write a book about what happened to those guards in that military prison, did they get their just deserts after the war?

Mike H

Quick shipment, great service

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2019

Verified Purchase

Excellent book

Jerry Hamilton

Deserter: A Hidden History of the Second World. ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2015

Verified Purchase

Deserter: A Hidden History of the Second World...

Chris and Wendy . Alexander

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

great book about something that is never mentioned when talking about the war

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