Bravery, brutality, broken soldiers
A veteran correspondent in war zones, Charles 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.
Nearly 50,000 Americans deserted. Gen. George Patton wanted to “shoot the cowards,” but only one was executed, the hapless Private Eddie Slovik, because Gen. Dwight Eisenhower thought it was the wrong moment in the war to show pity.
Glass makes a convincing argument that many of the deserters were men simply broken by war’s brutality, sometimes after conspicuous times of bravery. His thesis is argued with intricate detail, occasional lapses into clunky explanatory dialogue and frequent wit, as in his evocation of his first meeting with Steve Weiss, decorated U. S. hero, French Resistance honoree and deserter.
Glass navigates portraits of the heroic American deserter and a tormented English one, both of them ardent and selfsacrificing, along with evocations of other combat veterans who turned to black-marketing or Mafialike rampaging through an anarchic Europe.
The story of a Tennessee farm boy, winner of the Silver Star, whose enterprising and perhaps psychopathic nature led him into a career as a merciless gangster among the ruins, deserves its own book. The ambiguities of need, duty and desire are murky in times of extreme crisis. “The Deserters” can be read as an argument against simplistic judgments.
Many men filled with fear failed to desert only because they were more afraid of being branded as cowards than of dying. The taboo against killing meant that a high percentage of soldiers, according to research in a book by Gen. S. L. A. Marshall, a delegated Army historian after the “greatest generation’s” war, crouched in the front lines and fired their weapons noisily and futilely into the air.
Glass tells the soldiers’ stories with novelistic vividness and a good historian’s grasp of research detail.