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The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Kindle Edition

by Charles Glass (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 284 ratings

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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.

Editorial Reviews

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“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 Boston Globe

"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." --Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)

“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.'" --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“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." --San Francisco Chronicle

"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." --The New Republic

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

"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?" --Sunday Telegraph (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." --The Guardian (UK)

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

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

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AFPVNQK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (June 13, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 13, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 18583 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 417 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,299,155 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,073 in Biographies of World War II
- #3,663 in WWII Biographies
- #3,906 in Military & Spies Biographies

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4.1 284 ratings

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Heimdal

A Really Good Book on Desertion in World II

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2013

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This is a really well written book that tracks 3 army deserters from their childhood to their desertions and to what happened after their desertion. What I found really amazing is that the army was well aware of what we would now call post traumatic stress and what to do about it. Until about February 1945, deserters were sentenced to long prison terms and or death for desertion. The Generals were worried that if they "went easy" on the soldiers who deserted, it would cause even more soldiers to desert.

The root cause for desertion was a response to the inhumane deprivation that the front line infantry soldiers suffered in the European Theater campaign. They went with cold rations and little or no sleep standing in a fox hole with water and their own waste mixed together up to their waist for days on end. They saw their buddies killed and started to wonder when it would be their turn. It didn't take much for them to just get up and walk away.

I believe that the conditions were so bad for the infantry due to an incredibly inept army chief of staff. George C Marshal, Chief of Staff of the Army, was never a combat officer. He came up up through the quartermaster corps. He never should have been appointed chief of staff. He reduced the size of the divisions to 15,000 men from the 30,000 men of the first world. In order to get maximum combat efficiency out of the smaller divisions, he put replacement soldiers straight into combat from training, never pulling the divisions out of combat. In the first world war, the divisions fought until they got down to a certain level of manpower and were then pulled out of combat to rest and get replacements.

Under this new system, by late 1944 the promised replacement soldiers were not getting to Europe in the numbers that were promised by the War Department. Combat divisions were at 40% to 50% of full strength. Replacements that did get to the line were often dead within 24 hours of arriving. The existing soldiers were too busy trying to survive to take any notice of the newcomers. Officers and non coms often led from the rear. They never showed up on the front lines. Desertions skyrocketed.

Finally, by June, 1945 the Army realized that it would be a pr nightmare if the electorate in the United States found out how many deserters were in detention camps across Europe serving 50 year or life sentences.for desertion. Psychologists and Psychiatrists were sent to the detention camps to interview the men. Sentences were reviewed on the basis of the interviews with the men. Most of the sentences were reversed and the soldiers were honorably discharged and sent home.

3 people found this helpful

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M. G Watson

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.)

12 people found this helpful

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historyguy

Only a few percent of each army carries the actual burden of continuous combat....

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2013

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As many of us know there are not many stories which are one dimensional. For too long the story of desertion from combat has been just that. Cowards, criminals, or less than men are the appellations applied to the soldiers who run (or walk as it may be) from combat. Combat is an unnatural state of being and a fairly recent development as we know it in the modern sense. For ages combat consisted of battles that lasted a few days at the most with huge time gaps filled by marching, mud, and boredom. Starting with WWI, and continuing into WWII and Korea, combat turned into an endless stress filled nightmare which could last for weeks. From days of stress at the most in say the Civil war (except for sieges) to weeks of unending shelling, mines, and machine gun fire in the world wars. No wonder so many men broke under the strain in WWI and WWII. The undeserved criticism and harsh treatment of these cases by men who knew as much about real combat as an armchair quarterback knows about playing in the super bowl is rightfully infuriating. I understand that an army must keep discipline or risk absolute destruction but the fact that so many men and units were kept in the line for so long when even the Germans gave their troops some rest really puts the whole issue in context for me. Charles Glass shows us the three dimensional picture of the deserter. Some are sympathetic, some are brave, and at least one is just plain rotten. He lets us see them as individuals whose motives are made clear in a fair and consistent manner, which often leads the reader to a different conclusion than the military court so hastily came to, back in the hectic days of 1943, 44, and 45.

7 people found this helpful

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doctorrob

Interesting book

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2023

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Just getting started with it. Book appears to have many aspects of history that has been overlooked, which is the biggest reason why I bought it.

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al wright

Very well written!

Reviewed in Canada on May 6, 2017

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Well written in-depth view on deserters. Explains the reasons why most deserted and has interviews with brave men who couldn't take it anymore.

One person found this helpful

SG

Livre bien aimé.

Reviewed in France on July 5, 2018

Verified Purchase

Donne une idée sur le vécu de quelques déserteurs américains (et autres) et explique bien les raisons de leur désertion.

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Amazon Customer

This book deserves a good read.

Reviewed in Brazil on December 28, 2014

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This is an exceptional reading, because it brings to the people of today the idea of how bad things happen, even when you do not want the indiscriminate suffering. That was the concern of the writer to direct the reader to the times sofridospor many people, civilian and military, in Europe, in this terrible world war II.
I strongly recommend this book!

Omar Al-Qattan

The Dark Place that is a Soldier's Mind

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

This is a really original and deeply humane portrait of a number of soldiers who decided, for different reasons, to abandon the fight. I was particularly drawn to it because of its choice of perspective - that of the scared, confused or despairing soldier's mind - which allows the reader to vividly understand the horror and inhumanity of war without the blinding bombast of some war literature. It reminded me also - if anyone needs reminding - that the most radical and important thing one should struggle for is not only peace, but the active prevention of war. Highly recommended!

5 people found this helpful

Jakub Kaminski

Disappointing

Reviewed in Australia on May 24, 2014

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I have read a great review and was very much looking forward to reading this book.
The subject sounds interesting but the book doesn't grip you. Half way through reading I had force myself to continue. If it wasn't for skipping a few pages at a time, I would never finish it.
On a good side, one can open this book on a random page and read happily a dozen pages.

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