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Into the lives of three deserters

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Dwight Garner
Stories about cowardice can be as gripping as those about courage. One tells us about who we'd like to be; the other tells us about who we fear we are.

Nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces during World War II. (The British were in the war much longer.) Some fell into the arms of French or Italian women. Some became black-market pirates. Many more simply broke under the strain of battle.

These men's stories have rarely been told. During the war, newspapers largely abstained from writing about desertions. The topic was bad for morale and could be exploited by the enemy. In more recent decades the subject has been essentially taboo, as if to broach it would dent the halo around the Greatest Generation.

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.

General George S Patton wanted to shoot the men, whom he considered "cowards". Other commanders were more humane. "They recognised that the mind - subject to the daily threat of death, the concussion of aerial bombardment and high-velocity artillery, the fear of land mines and booby traps, malnutrition, appalling hygiene and lack of sleep - suffered wounds as real as the body's," Mr Glass writes.

Thousands of American soldiers were convicted of desertion during the war, and 49 were sentenced to death. (Most were given years of hard labour.) Only one soldier was actually executed, an unlucky private from Detroit named Eddie Slovik. This was early 1945, at the moment of the Battle of the Bulge. Mr Glass observes: "It was not the moment for the supreme Allied commander, Gen Dwight Eisenhower, to be seen to condone desertion."

There were far more desertions in Europe than in the Pacific theater. In the Pacific, there was nowhere to disappear to. "In Europe, the total that fled from the front rarely exceeded one per cent of manpower," Mr Glass writes. "However, it reached alarming proportions among the 10 per cent of the men in uniform who actually saw combat."

It is among this book's central contentions that "few deserters were cowards". Too few men did too much of the fighting during World War II, the author writes. Many of them simply cracked at the seams. Poor leadership was often a factor. The essential unfairness of so few men seeing the bulk of the combat was undergirded by other facts. Many men never shipped out. Mr Glass cites a statistic that psychiatrists allowed about 1.75 million men to avoid service for "reasons other than physical".

This special treatment led to bitterness. Mr Glass quotes a general who wrote, "When, in 1943, it was found that 14 members of the Rice University football team had been rejected for military service, the public was somewhat surprised." Nearly all of the information I have provided about The Deserters thus far comes from its excellent introduction. The rest of the book is not nearly so provocative or rending.

Mr Glass abandons his textured overview of his topic to focus almost exclusively on three individual soldiers, men who respectively abandoned their posts in France, Italy and Africa.

One was a young man from Brooklyn who fought valiantly with the 36th Infantry Division in Italy and France before coming unglued. Another is the English poet Vernon Scannell, who suffered in Mustafa Barracks, the grim prison camp in Egypt. The third was a Tennessee farm boy who fought with the 2nd Infantry Division before becoming a criminal in post-liberation Paris.

These men's stories are not uninteresting, but Mr Glass tells them at numbing length in bare, reportorial prose that rarely picks up much resonance. On the rare occasions the author reaches for figurative language, he takes a pratfall: "Combat exhaustion was etched into each face as sharp as a bullet hole." The lives and times of Mr Glass' three soldiers slide by slowly, as if you were scanning microfilm. We lose sight of this book's larger topic for many pages at a time. The men's stories provide limited points of view. From the author we long for more synthesis and sweep and argument and psychological depth.

Terminology changes. Before we had post-traumatic stress disorder we had battle fatigue, and before that, in World War I, there was shell shock. In her lovely book Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (2007), Elizabeth D Samet reminds us that "soldier's heart" was another and quite resonant term for much the same thing.

At its best, The Deserters has much to say about soldier's 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."

©2013 The New York Times News Service
 
THE DESERTERS
A Hidden History of World War II
Charles Glass
The Penguin Press; 380 pages; $27.95

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First Published: Jun 20 2013 | 9:25 PM IST

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