Cela met en lumière ce que cela signifie pour un homme de conviction et de foi de se retrouver dans une situation infernale… et, au milieu de ce cauchemar, cet homme est en mesure d’approfondir sa spiritualité et d’accomplir quelque chose de plus grand. Mel Gibson
Oscars Poll: 60 percent of Americans can’t name one best picture nominee (…) For most of the best picture nominees, Clinton voters were more likely to have seen the various films when compared to Trump voters. The big exception was Hacksaw Ridge, which Trump voters were considerately more likely (27%) than Clinton voters (18%). The Hollywood Reporter
Après les vives polémiques provoquées par La Passion du Christ (2004) puis Apocalypto (2006) (…) Mel Gibson a choisi de mettre en scène Desmond Doss, objecteur de conscience américain, qui tint à aller au front comme infirmier pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, sans jamais porter d’arme. Les images sanglantes, christiques, cruelles de son film font écho à celles de ses réalisations précédentes. (…) Dans chacun de ses films, Mel Gibson, fervent catholique, explore une figure isolée, prête à soulever les foules, mais aussi à subir les exactions de ses pourfendeurs. Le paroxysme de ce postulat – la cruauté humaine envers ses semblables – est atteint avec La passion du Christ, où la foule déchaînée s’acharne sans relâche pour faire crucifier Jésus. Le film suscitera une immense controverse autour du réalisateur, accusé de véhiculer un message profondément antisémite, les Juifs étant représentés comme un peuple cruel et déicide. Cette foule haineuse, on la retrouve aussi dans Braveheart (1995) avant le sacrifice de William Wallace, torturé puis tué dans d’atroces souffrances. Dans Tu ne tueras point, le choix de Desmond Doss de ne pas porter d’armes déplaît fortement aux autres soldats qui le prennent pour un lâche, le torturent psychologiquement puis le passent lâchement à tabac en pleine nuit. (…) Tu ne tueras point, met en scène la figure ô combien christique de Desmond Doss, adventiste du septième jour, objecteur de conscience qui sauva 75 de ses camarades pendant la bataille d’Okinawa. Le tout, renforcé par des plans sans ambiguïté : Wallace les bras en croix avant la torture, ou Desmond, filmé allongé sur son brancard, en contre-plongée, les bras ouverts, comme appelé par les cieux. Télérama
“Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans,” puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, “but…” “To hell with the Germans,” says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. “It’s what our boys have been doing that worries me.” The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting. “Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier’s pay,” interrupts a red-faced major. (…) A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting. (…) Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of out misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA. (…) The Russians came first. The Viennese tell you of the savagery of the Russian armies. They came like the ancient Mongol hordes out of the steppes, with the flimsiest supply. The people in the working-class districts had felt that when the Russians came that they at least would be spared. But not at all. In the working-class districts the tropes were allowed to rape and murder and loot at will. When victims complained, the Russians answered, “You are too well off to be workers. You are bourgeoisie.” When Americans looted they took cameras and valuables but when the Russians looted they took everything. And they raped and killed. From the eastern frontiers a tide of refugees is seeping across Europe bringing a nightmare tale of helpless populations trampled underfoot. When the British and American came the Viennese felt that at last they were in the hands of civilized people. (…) We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. John Dos Passos (Life, le 7 janvier 1946)
lls sont venus, ils ont vaincu, ils ont violé… Sale nouvelle, les beaux GI débarqués en 1944 en France se sont comportés comme des barbares. Libération (mars 2006)
Oui, les libérateurs pratiquaient un racisme institutionnalisé et ils condamnèrent à mort des soldats noirs, accusés à tort de viols. En son temps, l’écrivain Louis Guilloux, qui fut l’interprète officiel des Américains en 1944 en Bretagne, assista à certains de ces procès en cour martiale. Durablement marqué, il relata son expérience dans OK, Joe !, un récit sobre, tranchant, qui a la puissance d’un brûlot. Loin du mélo. Télérama (décembre 2009)
Sur fond d’histoire d’amour impossible, Les Amants de l’ombre nous transportent dans une période méconnue de la Seconde Guerre mondiale où l’armée américaine, présentée comme libératrice, n’hésitait pas à condamner à mort des soldats noirs accusés à tort de viol. Métro (dec. 2009)
Soviet and German treatment of deserters, a story of pitiless savagery, is not mentioned here. Glass is concerned only with the British and Americans in the second world war, whose official attitudes to the problem were tortuous. In the first world war, the British shot 304 men for desertion or cowardice, only gradually accepting the notion of « shell-shock ». In the United States, by contrast, President Woodrow Wilson commuted all such death sentences. In the second world war, the British government stood up to generals who wanted to bring back the firing squad (the Labour government in 1930 had abolished the death penalty for desertion). Cunningly, the War Office suggested that restoration might suggest to the enemy that morale in the armed forces was failing. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was persuaded in 1943 to suspend « limitations of punishment ». In the event, the Americans shot only one deserter, the luckless Private Eddie Slovik, executed in France in January 1945. He was an ex-con who had never even been near the front. Slovik quit when his unit was ordered into action, calculating that a familiar penitentiary cell would be more comfortable than being shot at in a rainy foxhole. His fate was truly unfair, set against the bigger picture. According to Glass, « nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces » during the war. Some 80% of these were front-line troops. Almost all « took a powder » (as they said then) in the European theatres of war; there were practically no desertions from US forces in the Pacific, perhaps because there was nowhere to go. By the end of the conflict, London, Paris and Naples, to name only a few European cities, swarmed with heavily-armed Awol servicemen, many of them recruited into gangs robbing and selling army supplies. Units were diverted from combat to guard supply trains, which were being hijacked all over liberated Europe. Paris, where the police fought nightly gun battles with American bandits, seemed to be a new Chicago. The Guardian
Thousands of American soldiers were convicted of desertion during the war, and 49 were sentenced to death. (Most were given years of hard labor.) 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 1 percent of manpower,” Mr. Glass writes. “However, it reached alarming proportions among the 10 percent of the men in uniform who actually saw combat.” (…) 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. “High desertion rates in any company, battalion or division pointed to failures of command and logistics for which blame pointed to leaders as much as to the men who deserted,” he says. Mr. Glass adds, “Some soldiers deserted when all the other members of their units had been killed and their own deaths appeared inevitable.” 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.”Mr. Glass provides information about desertions in other American wars. During the Civil War, more than 300,000 troops went AWOL from the Union and Confederate armies. He writes, “Mark Twain famously deserted from both sides.” The NYT
In the weeks following liberation from the Nazis, Paris was hit by wave of crime and violence that saw the city compared to Prohibition New York or Chicago. And the cause was the same: American Gangsters. While the Allies fought against Hitler’s forces in Europe, law enforcers fought against the criminals who threatened that victory. Men who had abandoned the ‘greater good’ in favour of self-interest, black-market profits and the lure of the cafes and brothels of Paris: deserters. Highly organised, armed to the teeth and merciless, these deserters used their US uniforms as another tool of their trade along with the vast arrays of stolen weapons, forged passes and hijacked vehicles they had at their disposal. Between June 1944 and April 1945 the US army’s Criminal Investigation Branch (CBI) handled a total of 7,912 cases. Forty per cent involved misappropriation of US supplies. Greater yet was the proportion of crimes of violence – rape, murder, manslaughter and assault which accounted for 44 per cent of the force’s workload. The remaining 12 per cent were crimes such as robbery, housebreaking and riot.Many were afraid. They had reached a point beyond which they could not endure and chosen disgrace over the grave. Some recounted waking, as if from a dream, to find their bodies had led them away from the battelfield. (…) Others, like Weiss, fought until their faith in their immediate commanders disappeared. Was it a form of madness or a dawning lucidity that led them to desert? Glass does not claim to be able to answer that question to which Weiss himself had devoted his latter years to addressing to no avail. Others still deserted to make money, stealing and selling the military supplies that their comrades at the front needed to survive. Opportunists and crooks, certainly, but not cowards – the life they chose was every bit as violent and bloody as battle. 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted during World War II. Yet according to Glass the astounding fact is not that so many men deserted, but that so few did. Only one was executed for it, Eddie Slovik. He was, until that point, by his own assessment the unluckiest man alive.He never fought a battle. He never went on the run as most deserters did. He simply made it clear that he preferred prison to battle. Of the 49 Americans sentenced to death for desertion during the Second World War he was the only one whose appeal for commutation was rejected. His greatest sin, as Glass tells it, was his timing. His appeal came in January 1945 just as the German counter-offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, was at its peak. Allied forces were near breaking point. It was not, Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower decided, time to risk seeming to condone desertion. (…) Led by an ex-paratrooper sergeant, raids were planned like military operations. Whitehead himself admitted, ‘we stole trucks, sold whatever they carried, and used the trucks to rob warehouses of the goods in them.’ They used combat tactics, hijacked goods destined for front-line troops. Their crimes even spread into Belgium. They attacked civilians and military targets indiscriminately. His gangland activities gave Whitehead ‘a bigger thrill than battle.’ Quoting from the former soldier’s memoir Glass recounts his boasts: ‘We robbed every café in Paris, in all sectors except our own, while the gendarmes went crazy.’ They robbed crates of cognac and champagne, hijacked jeeps and raided private houses whose bed sheets and radios were ‘easy to fence.’ They stole petrol, cigarettes, liquor and weapons. Within six months Whitehead reckoned his share of the plunder at $100,000. Little wonder that when Victory in Europe was announced on 7 May 1945, Whitehead admitted, ‘That day and night everyone in Paris and the rest of Europe was celebrating, but I just stayed in my apartment thinking about it all.’ (…) Ultimately Whitehead was captured and court martialled. He was dishonourably discharged and spent time in the Delta Disciplinary Training Barracks in the south of France and in federal penitentiaries in New Jersey. Many years later he had that ‘dishonourable discharge,’ turned into a General one on rather disingenuous legal grounds.
En Allemagne, on dresse depuis 1986 des monuments aux déserteurs allemands de la seconde guerre mondiale. En Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis, personne, jusqu’il y a peu, ne voulait aborder cette thématique historique des déserteurs des armées de la coalition anti-hitlérienne. Charles Glass, ancien correspondant d’ABC pour le Moyen Orient, otage de milices chiites au Liban pendant 67 jours en 1987, vient d’innover en la matière: il a brisé ce tabou de l’histoire contemporaine, en racontant par le menu l’histoire des 50.000 militaires américains et des 100.000 militaires britanniques qui ont déserté leurs unités sur les théâtres d’opération d’Europe et d’Afrique du Nord. Le chiffre de 150.000 hommes est énorme: cela signifie qu’un soldat sur cent a abandonné illégalement son unité. Chez les Américains, constate Glass, les déserteurs ne peuvent pas être considérés comme des lâches ou des tire-au-flanc; il s’agit souvent de soldats qui se sont avérés des combattants exemplaires et courageux, voir des idéalistes qui ont prouvé leur valeur au front. Ils ont flanché pour les motifs que l’on classe dans la catégorie “SNAFU” (“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”). Il peut s’agir de beaucoup de choses: ces soldats déserteurs avaient été traités bestialement par leurs supérieurs hiérarchiques incompétents, leur ravitaillement n’arrivait pas à temps, les conditions hygiéniques étaient déplorables; aussi le fait que c’était toujours les mêmes unités qui devaient verser leur sang, alors que personne, dans la hiérarchie militaire, n’estimait nécessaire de les relever et d’envoyer des unités fraîches en première ligne. Dans une telle situation, on peut comprendre la lassitude des déserteurs surtout que certaines divisions d’infanterie en France et en Italie ont perdu jusqu’à 75% de leurs effectifs. Pour beaucoup de GI’s appartenant à ces unités lourdement éprouvées, il apparaissait normal de déserter ou de refuser d’obéir aux ordres, même face à l’ennemi. (…) Au cours de l’automne 1944, dans l’US Army en Europe, il y avait chaque mois près de 8500 déserteurs ou de cas d’absentéisme de longue durée, également passibles de lourdes sanctions. La situation était similaire chez les Britanniques: depuis l’offensive de Rommel en Afrique du Nord, le nombre de déserteurs dans les unités envoyées dans cette région a augmenté dans des proportions telles que toutes les prisons militaires du Proche Orient étaient pleines à craquer et que le commandant-en-chef Claude Auchinleck envisageait de rétablir la peine de mort pour désertion, ce qui n’a toutefois pas été accepté pour des motifs de politique intérieure (ndt: ou parce que les Chypriotes grecs et turcs ou les Juifs de Palestine avaient été enrôlés de force et en masse dans la 8ème Armée, contre leur volonté?). Les autorités britanniques ont dès lors été forcées d’entourer tous les camps militaires britanniques d’une triple rangée de barbelés pour réduire le nombre de “fuites”. Le cauchemar du commandement allié et des décideurs politiques de la coalition anti-hitlérienne n’était pas tellement les déserteurs proprement dits, qui plongeaient tout simplement dans la clandestinité et attendaient la fin de la guerre, mais plutôt ceux d’entre eux qui se liguaient en bandes et se donnaient pour activité principale de piller la logistique des alliés et de vendre leur butin au marché noir. La constitution de pareilles bandes a commencé dès le débarquement des troupes anglo-saxonnes en Italie, où les gangs de déserteurs amorcèrent une coopération fructueuse avec la mafia locale. Parmi elles, le “Lane Gang”, dirigé par un simple soldat de 23 ans, Werner Schmeidel, s’est taillé une solide réputation. Ce “gang” a réussi à s’emparer d’une cassette militaire contenant 133.000 dollars en argent liquide. A l’automne 1944, ces attaques perpétrées par les “gangs” a enrayé l’offensive du Général Patton en direction de l’Allemagne: des déserteurs américains et des bandes criminelles françaises avaient attaqué et pillé les véhicules de la logistique amenant vivres et carburants. La situation la plus dramatique s’observait alors dans le Paris “libéré”, où régnait l’anarchie la plus totale: entre août 1944 et avril 1945, la “Criminal Investigation Branch” de l’armée américaine a ouvert 7912 dossiers concernant des délits importants, dont 3098 cas de pillage de biens militaires américains et 3481 cas de viol ou de meurtre (ou d’assassinat). La plupart de ces dossiers concernaient des soldats américains déserteurs. La situation était analogue en Grande-Bretagne où 40.000 soldats britanniques étaient entrés dans la clandestinité et étaient responsables de 90% des délits commis dans le pays. Pour combattre ce fléau, la justice militaire américaine s’est montrée beaucoup plus sévère que son homologue britannique: de juin 1944 à l’automne 1945, 70 soldats américains ont été exécutés pour avoir commis des délits très graves pendant leur période de désertion. La masse énorme des déserteurs “normaux” était internée dans d’immenses camps comme le “Loire Disciplinary Training Center” où séjournait 4500 condamnés. Ceux-ci y étaient systématiquement humiliés et maltraités. Des cas de décès ont été signalés et attestés car des gardiens ont à leur tour été traduits devant des juridictions militaires. En Angleterre, la chasse aux déserteurs s’est terminée en pantalonnade: ainsi, la police militaire britannique a organisé une gigantesque razzia le 14 décembre 1945, baptisée “Operation Dragnet”. Résultat? Quatre arrestations! Alors qu’à Londres seulement, quelque 20.000 déserteurs devaient se cacher. Au début de l’année 1945, l’armée américaine se rend compte que la plupart des déserteurs condamnés avaient été de bons soldats qui, vu le stress auquel ils avaient été soumis pendant de trop longues périodes en zones de combat, auraient dû être envoyés en clinique plutôt qu’en détention. Les psychologues entrent alors en scène, ce qui conduit à une révision de la plupart des jugements qui avaient condamné les soldats à des peines entre 15 ans et la perpétuité. En Grande-Bretagne, il a fallu attendre plus longtemps la réhabilitation des déserteurs malgré la pression de l’opinion publique. Finalement, Churchill a cédé et annoncé une amnistie officielle en février 1953. Wolfgang Kaufmann
C’est Dos Passos qui avait raison !
Combattants exemplaires et courageux, voire idéalistes qui craquent, bandes de charognards sans scrupule pillant la logistique de vivres et de carburants des Alliés et les revendant au marché noir, violeurs notamment noirs ou assassins …
A la veille d’une cérémonie des Oscars …
Où face à des films nombriliste (La la land) ou très marqués minorités (Hidden figures, Fences) voire minorités/homosexualité (Moonlight) ou étranger (Lion) ou la chronique sociale d’une communauté de marins prolétaires (Manchester by the sea), la science fiction classique (Arrival/Premier contact) ou le néo-western (Hell or high water/Comancheria) …
Emerge notamment du côté des électeurs républicains, avec quand même six nominations, par le réalisateur controversé de la Passion du Christ …
L’étrange ovni (souligné par ailleurs par son titre français tiré tout droit du décalogue) du film de guerre religieux (Hacksaw ridge/Tu ne tueras point) …
Avec cette histoire vraie mais ô combien christique du seul objecteur de conscience américain à recevoir la médaille d’honneur …
Ce guerrier sans armes qui tout en s’en tenant à sa volonté de ne pas porter d’armes parvint à sauver des dizaines de soldats (ennemis compris !) …
Retour, avec le livre du journaliste-historien Charles Glass d’il y a quatre ans …
Sur ces oubliés des oubliés de notre dernière grande guerre …
A savoir les déserteurs !
Une étude sur les déserteurs des armées alliées pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale
Wolfgang Kaufmann
Snerfies
16 janvier 2014
En Allemagne, on dresse depuis 1986 des monuments aux déserteurs allemands de la seconde guerre mondiale. En Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis, personne, jusqu’il y a peu, ne voulait aborder cette thématique historique des déserteurs des armées de la coalition anti-hitlérienne. Charles Glass, ancien correspondant d’ABC pour le Moyen Orient, otage de milices chiites au Liban pendant 67 jours en 1987, vient d’innover en la matière: il a brisé ce tabou de l’histoire contemporaine, en racontant par le menu l’histoire des 50.000 militaires américains et des 100.000 militaires britanniques qui ont déserté leurs unités sur les théâtres d’opération d’Europe et d’Afrique du Nord. Le chiffre de 150.000 hommes est énorme: cela signifie qu’un soldat sur cent a abandonné illégalement son unité.
Chez les Américains, constate Glass, les déserteurs ne peuvent pas être considérés comme des lâches ou des tire-au-flanc; il s’agit souvent de soldats qui se sont avérés des combattants exemplaires et courageux, voir des idéalistes qui ont prouvé leur valeur au front. Ils ont flanché pour les motifs que l’on classe dans la catégorie “SNAFU” (“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”). Il peut s’agir de beaucoup de choses: ces soldats déserteurs avaient été traités bestialement par leurs supérieurs hiérarchiques incompétents, leur ravitaillement n’arrivait pas à temps, les conditions hygiéniques étaient déplorables; aussi le fait que c’était toujours les mêmes unités qui devaient verser leur sang, alors que personne, dans la hiérarchie militaire, n’estimait nécessaire de les relever et d’envoyer des unités fraîches en première ligne.
Dans une telle situation, on peut comprendre la lassitude des déserteurs surtout que certaines divisions d’infanterie en France et en Italie ont perdu jusqu’à 75% de leurs effectifs. Pour beaucoup de GI’s appartenant à ces unités lourdement éprouvées, il apparaissait normal de déserter ou de refuser d’obéir aux ordres, même face à l’ennemi. Parmi les militaires qui ont réfusé d’obéir, il y avait le Lieutenant Albert C. Homcy, de la 36ème division d’infanterie, qui n’a pas agi pour son bien propre mais pour celui de ses subordonnés. Il a comparu devant le conseil de guerre le 19 octobre 1944 à Docelles, qui l’a condamné à 50 ans de travaux forcés parce qu’il avait refusé d’obéir à un ordre qui lui demandait d’armer et d’envoyer à l’assaut contre les blindés allemands des cuisiniers, des boulangers et des ordonnances sans formation militaire aucune.
Au cours de l’automne 1944, dans l’US Army en Europe, il y avait chaque mois près de 8500 déserteurs ou de cas d’absentéisme de longue durée, également passibles de lourdes sanctions. La situation était similaire chez les Britanniques: depuis l’offensive de Rommel en Afrique du Nord, le nombre de déserteurs dans les unités envoyées dans cette région a augmenté dans des proportions telles que toutes les prisons militaires du Proche Orient étaient pleines à craquer et que le commandant-en-chef Claude Auchinleck envisageait de rétablir la peine de mort pour désertion, ce qui n’a toutefois pas été accepté pour des motifs de politique intérieure (ndt: ou parce que les Chypriotes grecs et turcs ou les Juifs de Palestine avaient été enrôlés de force et en masse dans la 8ème Armée, contre leur volonté?). Les autorités britanniques ont dès lors été forcées d’entourer tous les camps militaires britanniques d’une triple rangée de barbelés pour réduire le nombre de “fuites”.
Le cauchemar du commandement allié et des décideurs politiques de la coalition anti-hitlérienne n’était pas tellement les déserteurs proprement dits, qui plongeaient tout simplement dans la clandestinité et attendaient la fin de la guerre, mais plutôt ceux d’entre eux qui se liguaient en bandes et se donnaient pour activité principale de piller la logistique des alliés et de vendre leur butin au marché noir. La constitution de pareilles bandes a commencé dès le débarquement des troupes anglo-saxonnes en Italie, où les gangs de déserteurs amorcèrent une coopération fructueuse avec la mafia locale. Parmi elles, le “Lane Gang”, dirigé par un simple soldat de 23 ans, Werner Schmeidel, s’est taillé une solide réputation. Ce “gang” a réussi à s’emparer d’une cassette militaire contenant 133.000 dollars en argent liquide. A l’automne 1944, ces attaques perpétrées par les “gangs” a enrayé l’offensive du Général Patton en direction de l’Allemagne: des déserteurs américains et des bandes criminelles françaises avaient attaqué et pillé les véhicules de la logistique amenant vivres et carburants.
La situation la plus dramatique s’observait alors dans le Paris “libéré”, où régnait l’anarchie la plus totale: entre août 1944 et avril 1945, la “Criminal Investigation Branch” de l’armée américaine a ouvert 7912 dossiers concernant des délits importants, dont 3098 cas de pillage de biens militaires américains et 3481 cas de viol ou de meurtre (ou d’assassinat). La plupart de ces dossiers concernaient des soldats américains déserteurs. La situation était analogue en Grande-Bretagne où 40.000 soldats britanniques étaient entrés dans la clandestinité et étaient responsables de 90% des délits commis dans le pays. Pour combattre ce fléau, la justice militaire américaine s’est montrée beaucoup plus sévère que son homologue britannique: de juin 1944 à l’automne 1945, 70 soldats américains ont été exécutés pour avoir commis des délits très graves pendant leur période de désertion. La masse énorme des déserteurs “normaux” était internée dans d’immenses camps comme le “Loire Disciplinary Training Center” où séjournait 4500 condamnés. Ceux-ci y étaient systématiquement humiliés et maltraités. Des cas de décès ont été signalés et attestés car des gardiens ont à leur tour été traduits devant des juridictions militaires. En Angleterre, la chasse aux déserteurs s’est terminée en pantalonnade: ainsi, la police militaire britannique a organisé une gigantesque razzia le 14 décembre 1945, baptisée “Operation Dragnet”. Résultat? Quatre arrestations! Alors qu’à Londres seulement, quelque 20.000 déserteurs devaient se cacher.
Au début de l’année 1945, l’armée américaine se rend compte que la plupart des déserteurs condamnés avaient été de bons soldats qui, vu le stress auquel ils avaient été soumis pendant de trop longues périodes en zones de combat, auraient dû être envoyés en clinique plutôt qu’en détention. Les psychologues entrent alors en scène, ce qui conduit à une révision de la plupart des jugements qui avaient condamné les soldats à des peines entre 15 ans et la perpétuité.
En Grande-Bretagne, il a fallu attendre plus longtemps la réhabilitation des déserteurs malgré la pression de l’opinion publique. Finalement, Churchill a cédé et annoncé une amnistie officielle en février 1953.
Wolfgang KAUFMANN.
(article paru dans “Junge Freiheit”, n°49/2013; http://www.jungefreiheit.de ).
Charles GLASS, The Deserters. A hidden history of World War II, Penguin Press, New York, 2013, 380 pages, ill., 20,40 euro.
In the weeks following liberation from the Nazis, Paris was hit by wave of crime and violence that saw the city compared to Prohibition New York or Chicago.
And the cause was the same: American Gangsters.
While the Allies fought against Hitler’s forces in Europe, law enforcers fought against the criminals who threatened that victory. Men who had abandoned the ‘greater good’ in favour of self-interest, black-market profits and the lure of the cafes and brothels of Paris: deserters.
Glass’s study of the very different stories and men grouped together under the label, Deserters
Highly organised, armed to the teeth and merciless, these deserters used their US uniforms as another tool of their trade along with the vast arrays of stolen weapons, forged passes and hijacked vehicles they had at their disposal.
Between June 1944 and April 1945 the US army’s Criminal Investigation Branch (CBI) handled a total of 7,912 cases. Forty per cent involved misappropriation of US supplies.
Greater yet was the proportion of crimes of violence – rape, murder, manslaughter and assault which accounted for 44 per cent of the force’s workload. The remaining 12 per cent were crimes such as robbery, housebreaking and riot.
Former Chief Middle East correspondent for ABC News, the book’s author Charles Glass had long harboured an interest in the subject. But it was only truly ignited by a chance meeting with Steve Weiss – decorated combat veteran of the US 36th Infantry Division and former deserter.
Glass was giving a talk to publicise his previous book, ‘Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation’ when the American started asking questions. It was clear, Glass recounts, that the questioner’s knowledge of the French Resistance was more intimate than his own.
Tested beyond endurance: This official US Army photograph taken in Pozzuoli near Naples in August 1944, captured Private First Class Steve Weiss boarding a British landing craft. He is climbing the gangplank on the right-hand side of the photograph. The Deserters, A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass
Hero or Coward? Steve Weiss receives the Croix de Guerre in July 1946 yet 2 years earlier the US army jailed him as a deserter
They met for coffee and Weiss asked Glass what he was working on. Glass recalls: ‘I told him it was a book on American and British deserters in the Second World War and asked if he knew anything about it.
‘He answered, « I was a deserter. »‘
This once idealistic boy from Brooklyn who enlisted at 17, had fought on the beachhead at Anzio and through the perilous Ardennes forest, he was one of the very few regular American soldiers to fight with the Resistance in 1944. And he had deserted.
His story was, Glass realised, both secret and emblematic of a group of men, wreathed together under a banner of shame that branded them cowards. Yet the truth was far more complex.
Many were afraid. They had reached a point beyond which they could not endure and chosen disgrace over the grave. Some recounted waking, as if from a dream, to find their bodies had led them away from the battelfield.
Others, like Weiss, fought until their faith in their immediate commanders disappeared. Was it a form of madness or a dawning lucidity that led them to desert? Glass does not claim to be able to answer that question to which Weiss himself had devoted his latter years to addressing to no avail
Others still deserted to make money, stealing and selling the military supplies that their comrades at the front needed to survive. Opportunists and crooks, certainly, but not cowards – the life they chose was every bit as violent and bloody as battle.
50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted during World War II. Yet according to Glass the astounding fact is not that so many men deserted, but that so few did.
Only one was executed for it, Eddie Slovik. He was, until that point, by his own assessment the unluckiest man alive.
The Unluckiest Man: Eddie Slovik, left, was the only American executed for desertion as his trial fell at a time when General Dwight Eisenhower, right, decided he could not risk appearing lenient on the crime
He never fought a battle. He never went on the run as most deserters did. He simply made it clear that he preferred prison to battle.
Of the 49 Americans sentenced to death for desertion during the Second World War he was the only one whose appeal for commutation was rejected. His greatest sin, as Glass tells it, was his timing.
His appeal came in January 1945 just as the German counter-offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, was at its peak. Allied forces were near breaking point. It was not, Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower decided, time to risk seeming to condone desertion.
Slovik was shot for his crime on the morning of 31 January 1945.
He was dispatched in the remote French village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and the truth concealed even from his wife, Antoinette.
She was informed that her husband had died in the European Theatre of Operations.
His identity was ultimately revealed in 1954 and twenty years later Martin Sheen played him in the television film, The Execution of Private Slovik.
In it Sheen recites the words Slovik spoke before the firing squad shot him.
‘They’re not shooting me for deserting the United States Army,’ he said.
‘They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con.
‘I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that’s what they are shooting me for.
‘They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old.’
Private Alfred T Whitehead’s was a very different story.
He was a farm boy from Tennessee who rushed to join up to escape a life of brutalising poverty and violence at the hands of his stepfather.
He ended up a gangster tearing through Paris.
Whitehead fought at Normandy and claims to have stormed the beaches on the D-Day landings.
He considered himself a battle-hardened professional soldier and bit by bit the small reserve of mercy that had survived his childhood evaporated in the heat of war.
He had been in continuous combat with them from D-Day to 30th December 1944. He had earned the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, Combat Infantry Badge and Distinguished Unit Citation.
When he was invalided out to Paris with appendicitis and assumed that he would rejoin his unit, the 2nd Division, on his recovery.
Instead he was sent to the 94th Reinforcement Battalion, a replacement depot in Fontainebleau.
When a young lieutenant presented Whitehead with a First World War vintage rifle for guard duty, he told the officer to take the ‘peashooter’ and ‘shove it up his ass.’
Loyalties Lost: Before deserting Alfred T Whitehead was decorated for bravery he has identified himself as the third soldier on the right, visible in profile, at the front of this D-Day landing craft approaching Normandy 6 June 1944
He demanded the weapons he was used to – a .45 pistol, a Thompson sub-machine gun and a trench knife.
His actual desertion was unspectacular. Whitehead was looking for a drink. The American Service Club refused him entrance because he didn’t have a pass and so he wandered on ‘in search of a bed in a brothel.’
He found one. By morning he was officially AWOL. The next day a waitress in a café took pity on him and added fried eggs and potatoes to his order of soup and bread. When Military Police came in and started asking questions she gave Whitehead the key to her room in a cheap hotel and told him to wait for her there.
From decorated soldier he moved seamlessly into life as a criminal in the Paris underworld.
A chance meeting led to him taking his place as a member of one of the many gangs of ex-soldiers terrorizing Paris.
Led by an ex-paratrooper sergeant, raids were planned like military operations. Whitehead himself admitted, ‘we stole trucks, sold whatever they carried, and used the trucks to rob warehouses of the goods in them.’
They used combat tactics, hijacked goods destined for front-line troops.
Their crimes even spread into Belgium. They attacked civilians and military targets indiscriminately.
His gangland activities gave Whitehead ‘a bigger thrill than battle.’ Quoting from the former soldier’s memoir Glass recounts his boasts: ‘We robbed every café in Paris, in all sectors except our own, while the gendarmes went crazy.’
They robbed crates of cognac and champagne, hijacked jeeps and raided private houses whose bed sheets and radios were ‘easy to fence.’ They stole petrol, cigarettes, liquor and weapons.
Within six months Whitehead reckoned his share of the plunder at $100,000.
Little wonder that when Victory in Europe was announced on 7 May 1945, Whitehead admitted, ‘That day and night everyone in Paris and the rest of Europe was celebrating, but I just stayed in my apartment thinking about it all.’
Because Private Whitehead’s desertion did not end his war – it was a part of it. As it was a part of many soldiers’ wars that has long gone unrecorded.
Ultimately Whitehead was captured and court martialled. He was dishonourably discharged and spent time in the Delta Disciplinary Training Barracks in the south of France and in federal penitentiaries in New Jersey.
Many years later he had that ‘dishonourable discharge,’ turned into a General one on rather disingenuous legal grounds.
In peacetime appearances mattered more to Whitehead than they ever had in war.
Back then, he admitted: ‘I never knew what tomorrow would hold, so I took every day as it came. War does strange things to people, especially their morality.’
Those ‘strange things’ rather than the false extremes of courage and cowardice are the truths set out in this account of the War and its deserters.
The Deserters: A Hidden History of world War II by Charles Glass is published by The Penguin Press, 13 June, Price $27.95. Available on Amazon by clicking here.
Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War by Charles Glass: review
Nearly 150,000 Allied soldiers deserted during the Second World War – some through fear and some for love. Nicholas Shakespeare uncovers their story, reviewing Deserter by Charles Glass.
The Telegraph
09 Apr 2013
In 1953, Winston Churchill gave an amnesty for wartime deserters as part of the celebrations for the coronation. According to Charles Glass, nearly 100,000 British and 50,000 American soldiers had deserted the armed forces during the Second World War, but only one was executed for this (theoretically) capital offence: a 25-year-old US infantryman who preferred to go to prison than into battle, and was condemned “to death by musketry” in January 1945. His story was finally told, a year after Churchill’s amnesty, in William Bradford Huie’s The Execution of Private Slovik, which remains, according to Glass, “almost the only full-length discussion of the subject”.
Who were the other deserters, why did they desert – and what happened to them? The absence of readily available material is a blood-red rag to a bullish reporter like Glass. Following his masterful study into the activities of his compatriots in Nazi-occupied France, Americans in Paris (2009), Glass has unearthed a shameful and inconvenient cluster of tragedies, which history – unreliably narrated by the victors – has whitened over.
At the opposite end to Pte Slovik was Pte Wayne Powers, an army truck driver from Missouri who absconded for love and was one of a few convicted deserters to get off scot-free. Buried in Glass’s introduction, and casually discarded, is the account of Powers’s elopement with a dark-haired French girl in November 1944. Hiding in her family house near the Belgian border, the couple had five children. For the next 14 years, Powers stayed a wanted man but undetected – until 1958, when a car crashed into the house, and a policeman, taking down details, noticed a face peering through the curtains. Court-martialed, Powers was released after 60,000 letters appealed for clemency; but his haunted gaze in the window is what lingers, and unites him with each deserter: an ever-present fear of capture, “an overshadowing presence that darkened my consciousness”, in the words of John Bain, a 23-year-old British soldier finally run to ground in Leeds.
Neither the conscientious objector Slovik nor the love-struck Powers were emblematic of the vast majority who deserted from the ranks. John Bain, the only British example explored by Glass, is a more satisfying representative. A boxer-poet like Byron, Bain is known today by the cover name that he adopted when on the run, Vernon Scannell (“a name picked from a passport in a brothel”). He had wandered away from his post in Wadi Akarit, trance-like, in “a kind of disgust”, after seeing his friends loot the corpses of their own men. His punishment was consistent both with US Gen George Patton’s remedy for malingerers – in Sicily, Patton famously slapped a shell-shocked soldier – and with US Brig Gen Elliot Cooke’s suspicion of “psychiatricks”.
Bain was imprisoned in Mustafa Barracks near Alexandria, snarled at by officers (“You’re all cowards. You’re all yellow”) and brutalised by guards, not one of whom had been within range “of any missile more dangerous than a flying cork” writes Glass. Captured in Leeds after going awol a third time, Bain told his interrogators that he wished to write poetry. Only then was his condition recognised. “We’ll send him to a psychiatrist. He’s clearly mad.”
Bain, who would go on to write some of the best poetry of the war, observed that “the dramatically heroic role is for the few”. He had left the battlefield to preserve his humanity, his time in the Army “totally destructive of the human qualities I most valued, the qualities of imagination, sensitivity and intelligence”.
With his own skill and sensitivity, Glass recreates the inhuman scenes that pummel the other soldiers he examines. Almost all of them were brave men like Bain. They knew what it was to be bombed by your own side. Slog through minefields littered with bloated, blackened bodies. Sit in foxholes knee-deep in your own excrement. Listen to the rising screams of the wounded. Struggle to obey orders that were impossible to carry out.
All too frequently, as in William Wharton’s memorable novel A Midnight Clear, your own commanders posed the greatest danger. Bain’s captain deserted from the Mareth Line in 1943, only to bob up as a major. Conversely, in the US 36th Division, which boasted the highest number of deserters, Lt Albert Homcy, already singled out for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” in Italy, was sentenced to 50 years of hard labour after he refused to lead untrained men to certain death.
Glass displays an unusual degree of empathy and kinship with these men. It causes him to focus on those he senses to have been misjudged or misdiagnosed, and whose condition cried out for treatment rather than punishment. There is a deficit in his book of more flagrant, less nuanced absconders. With a slight air of duty and disdain, one feels, he tracks the fate of Sgt Al Whitehead from Tennessee, who deserted for reasons of avarice and goes “to live it up” in Paris, where he became part of a GI gang that stole Allied supplies and shot at military policemen. Glass leaves us thirsty for details about these gangsters (also observed in Naples, with exemplary dry comedy, by Norman Lewis) and their British equivalents in Egypt.
Given the author’s knowledge of Paris – “home to deserters from most of the armies of Europe” – the absence of any French, German or Italian examples is also a curious omission. Deserter is unashamedly an Anglo-American story. In its selection of hitherto suppressed voices, it is refreshing and stimulating – history told from the loser’s perspective. But if I have a quibble, it is that the author concentrates too much on too few.
Even so Glass’s principal guide, on whom the narrative depends, is a compelling choice to lead the author’s project of rehabilitation. Pte Steve Weiss, who after the war became (of all things) a psychiatrist, is perhaps not your typical deserter, but if anyone deserves a sympathetic hearing, it is Weiss. Enlisting against his father’s wishes at 18, and determined to play a meaningful part in the war, Weiss joined the French Resistance after being separated from the 36th Division near Valence; for his courage, he would earn the Légion d’honneur. Eventually reunited with his company, he was treated like just another round of ammunition. After one earth tremor too many, he stumbled off into a forest during an artillery barrage. Discovered in a shell-shocked state by American troops, having slept for six days, Weiss was tried before a court-martial that lasted a mere five hours, including one hour for lunch, and condemned to hard labour for life.
His father complained: “This is the thanks he received for giving his all to his country.” Later interviewed by a military psychiatrist in the Loire Disciplinary Training Camp, Weiss was told: “You don’t belong here. You belong in a hospital.” It is altogether fitting that when Glass accompanies 86-year-old Weiss back to Bruyères to look for the courtroom in which the US Army delivered its ludicrous sentence, they cannot find it.
Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War
by Charles Glass
400pp, Harperpress, t £23 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £25, ebook £12.50)
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Deserter: The Untold Story of WWII by Charles Glass – review
The shocking stories of three young men who fled the battlefield leave Neal Ascherson wondering why more soldiers don’t go awol
Neal Ascherson
The Guardian
28 March 2013
Desertion in war is not a mystery. It can have contributory motives – « family problems » at home, hatred of some officer or moral reluctance to kill are among them. But the central motive is the obvious one: to get away from people who are trying to blow your head off or stick a bayonet through you. Common sense, in other words. So the enigma is not why soldiers desert. It is why most of them don’t, even in battle and even in the face of imminent defeat (remember the stubborn Wehrmacht in the second world war). They do not run away, but stand and fight. Why?
That is the most interesting thing in Charles Glass‘s new book. He takes three young men – boys, really – who were drafted into the infantry in the last European war, who fought, deserted, and yet often fought again. Steve Weiss was from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; his father had been wounded and gassed in the first world war. Alfred Whitehead came from the bleakest rural poverty in Tennessee. John Bain was English (and after the war became famous as the poet Vernon Scannell); he was desperate to get away from his sadistic father, another veteran of the trenches.
All three quit their posts for solid and obvious reasons. Two of them deserted several times over. They saw heartbreaking horrors, or were tempted by women, booze and loot in a liberated city, or were shattered by prolonged artillery barrages, or realised – suddenly, and with cold clarity – that they would almost certainly be killed in the next few days.
The common sense of desertion was plain to almost anyone who had actually been under fire. Again and again, Glass’s book tells how these men on the run were fed, sheltered, comforted and transported by soldiers close to the front line. But the further away from the guns they got, entering the reposeful regions of pen-pushing « rear echelons », the more wary, disapproving and uncomprehending their compatriots became. Ultimately they would end up in the hands of the military police, and then in some nightmare « stockade » or military prison where shrieking, muscle-bound monsters who had never been within miles of a mortar « stonk » devoted themselves to breaking their spirit.
Soviet and German treatment of deserters, a story of pitiless savagery, is not mentioned here. Glass is concerned only with the British and Americans in the second world war, whose official attitudes to the problem were tortuous.
In the first world war, the British shot 304 men for desertion or cowardice, only gradually accepting the notion of « shell-shock ». In the United States, by contrast, President Woodrow Wilson commuted all such death sentences. In the second world war, the British government stood up to generals who wanted to bring back the firing squad (the Labour government in 1930 had abolished the death penalty for desertion). Cunningly, the War Office suggested that restoration might suggest to the enemy that morale in the armed forces was failing. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was persuaded in 1943 to suspend « limitations of punishment ». In the event, the Americans shot only one deserter, the luckless Private Eddie Slovik, executed in France in January 1945. He was an ex-con who had never even been near the front. Slovik quit when his unit was ordered into action, calculating that a familiar penitentiary cell would be more comfortable than being shot at in a rainy foxhole.
His fate was truly unfair, set against the bigger picture. According to Glass, « nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces » during the war. Some 80% of these were front-line troops. Almost all « took a powder » (as they said then) in the European theatres of war; there were practically no desertions from US forces in the Pacific, perhaps because there was nowhere to go. By the end of the conflict, London, Paris and Naples, to name only a few European cities, swarmed with heavily-armed Awol servicemen, many of them recruited into gangs robbing and selling army supplies. Units were diverted from combat to guard supply trains, which were being hijacked all over liberated Europe. Paris, where the police fought nightly gun battles with American bandits, seemed to be a new Chicago.
But none of Glass’s three subjects left the front as soon as fighting began. They tried to do their duty for as long as they could. Steve Weiss first encountered battle in Italy, posted to the 36th infantry division near Naples after the Salerno and Anzio landings. He was 18 years old. At Anzio he saw for the first time deserters in a stockade yelling abuse at the army, found that a friend had collapsed with « battle fatigue », and was bombed from the air.
Soon he was fighting his way up Italy with « Charlie Company », facing artillery and snipers by day and night. Once, exhausted, rain-drenched and on his own, he broke down in tears of fatigue and terror and cried out for his mother. Next day he was street-fighting in the ruins of Grosseto. What kept him going? Not ideals about the war. He had seen Naples, now run by the Mafia boss Vito Genovese in cahoots with the Americans, and the notion that Roosevelt’s « Four Freedoms » could matter to starving Italians was a joke. What kept him and the other two going was comradeship: trust in a friend, or in some older and more experienced member of the squad. For Weiss in Italy, it was Corporal Bob Reigle, and later in France, a Captain Binoche in the resistance. For the truculent Alfred Whitehead, who survived Omaha Beach and the murderous battles of the Normandy « Bocage », it was his fellow-Tennessean Paul « Timmiehaw » Turner; staying drunk helped too. For John Bain, with the 51st Highland Division in North Africa and Normandy, it was his foul-mouthed, loyal pal Hughie from Glasgow.
The war was crazy, the army was brainless and callous, but there were these men who would never let you down, and for whose sake you bore the unbearable. When Weiss rejoined his company in the Vosges and found how many comrades were dead, when « Timmiehaw » was killed by a mine near St-Lo and Hughie by a mortar barrage near Caen, the psychic exhaustion all three young men had been suppressing finally kicked in.
Whitehead left to become a gangster in liberated Paris. Weiss and a few mates ran away from the winter battles in the Vosges hills; he did time in a military prison and eventually became a psychiatrist in California. Bain had already deserted once before, in Tunisia, and served a sentence in the appalling Mustafa Barracks « glasshouse » near Alexandria. Badly wounded in Normandy, he deserted again after the war was over because he couldn’t wait to be demobbed, and vanished into London to become poet and boxer Scannell.
Not much of this book, it should be said, is about deserting. Most of it consists of the three men’s own narratives of « their war », published or unpublished, and – because they are the stories of individual human beings who eventually cracked under the strain of hardly imaginable fear and misery – they are wonderful, unforgettable acts of witness, something salvaged from a time already sinking into the black mud of the past. I’ll certainly remember Bain watching his mates rifling the pockets of their own dead, Weiss witnessing the botched hanging of black soldiers for rape, Whitehead hijacking an American supply truck in the middle of the Paris traffic.
Memorable, too, is the astonishing Psychology for the Fighting Man, a work of startling empathy and humanity, produced in 1943 and distributed to American forces. Glass posts extracts at the outset of each chapter. « Giving up is nature’s way of protecting the organism against too much pain. » Or « There are a few men in every army who know no fear – just a few. But these men are not normal. » Statements of the obvious? Maybe. But in the madness of war, the right to state the obvious becomes worth fighting for.
• Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea is published by Vintage.
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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.
Gen. George S. Patton wanted to shoot the men, whom he considered “cowards.” Other commanders were more humane. “They recognized 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. “Providing shattered men with counseling, hot food, clean clothes and rest was more likely to restore them to duty than threatening them with a firing squad.”
Thousands of American soldiers were convicted of desertion during the war, and 49 were sentenced to death. (Most were given years of hard labor.) 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 1 percent of manpower,” Mr. Glass writes. “However, it reached alarming proportions among the 10 percent of the men in uniform who actually saw combat.”
It is among this book’s central contentions that “few deserters were cowards.” Mr. Glass also observes, “Those who showed the greatest sympathy to deserters were other front-line soldiers.”
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. “High desertion rates in any company, battalion or division pointed to failures of command and logistics for which blame pointed to leaders as much as to the men who deserted,” he says.
Mr. Glass adds, “Some soldiers deserted when all the other members of their units had been killed and their own deaths appeared inevitable.”
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.”Mr. Glass provides information about desertions in other American wars. During the Civil War, more than 300,000 troops went AWOL from the Union and Confederate armies. He writes, “Mark Twain famously deserted from both sides.” 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 bravely with the 2nd Infantry Division before deserting and 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’s 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.”
THE DESERTERS
A Hidden History of World War II
By Charles Glass
Illustrated. 380 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
En 1995, dans Braveheart, Mel Gibson se mettait en scène sous les traits et les peintures de guerre de William Wallace. Soumis à la torture à la fin du film, le héros du peuple écossais rendait l’âme en hurlant : « Liberté ! » Pouvait-on se douter que ce dénouement aussi sanglant qu’exalté placerait toute la carrière du réalisateur – jusqu’à Tu ne tueras point aujourd’hui – sous le signe du sacrifice ?
Le lien avec La Passion du Christ (2004) et Apocalypto (2006) semble évident, le premier sur la crucifixion de Jésus, le second sur les sacrifices humains au crépuscule de la civilisation maya. Les deux sont des hécatombes. Pas de sacrifice, chez Gibson, sans tripes ni hémoglobine. Si cette vision a été critiquée pour son simplisme, elle n’en témoigne pas moins d’une conviction de réalisateur : montrer dans le détail la réalité charnelle de la passion du Christ aide à en saisir la dimension spirituelle. Gibson semble friand de ce paradoxe catholique voulant que le salut puisse passer par le spectacle ou le récit de la déchéance. Ce qu’il illustrera d’ailleurs jusque dans sa vie privée par ses frasques et sa traversée du désert après 2006 : problèmes d’alcool, violence, propos antisémites…
L’histoire de Tu ne tueras point (Hacksaw Ridge en VO) ne dépareille pas dans ce tableau : pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, un objecteur de conscience qui s’est engagé comme infirmier dans l’armée américaine, se retrouve propulsé dans la boucherie de la bataille d’Okinawa. Le champ de bataille que le héros Desmond Doss foule du pied est littéralement tapissé de corps déchiquetés. À un moment du film, un blessé se cache dans la terre pour échapper à la vigilance de ses ennemis, offrant la vision saisissante d’une terre humanisée et, inversement, d’une humanité rabaissée à sa seule condition terrestre. Mais à ces corps rampants répond à la fin du film un plan sur le corps suspendu de Doss, sur fond de nuages radieux. Le héros de Gibson est un saint, c’est-à-dire un trait d’union entre la terre et le ciel. Une idée qui pourra être diversement prise au sérieux, mais dont l’évidence esthétique ne peut que frapper ici.
Gibson semble friand de ce paradoxe catholique voulant que le salut puisse passer par le spectacle ou le récit de la déchéance.
De Braveheart à Tu ne tueras point, l’idée de sacrifice permet à Mel Gibson de faire le pont entre plusieurs idées contradictoires. Le rapport entre la force et la justice, par exemple : tous les héros gibsonniens, victimes d’une injustice initiale, s’interrogent en retour sur l’usage de leur puissance. L’Écossais, après avoir fédéré la rébellion, donne sa mort en exemple. L’Amérindien capturé par des guerriers mayas devient un héros parce qu’il doit sauver sa famille. Et bien sûr Jésus, pourtant le plus puissant de tous, laisse s’abattre sur lui une violence inouïe. Au-delà même de la question de la foi, ces personnages se distinguent par leur capacité à tracer leur propre chemin dans des vallées de sang et de larmes.
Rien d’étonnant, dans ce contexte, à ce que Gibson s’intéresse cette fois-ci à un objecteur de conscience. La représentation de la violence dans le film pose évidemment un certain nombre de problèmes, qui sont intéressants dans la mesure où ils répondent aux questions que se pose Doss sur la guerre. La position de ce dernier est compliquée : adventiste, il ne veut pas toucher à une arme mais veut bien aller au combat. Il y a très vite un écart entre la radicalité de sa position et la casuistique qu’elle finit par impliquer. Ne pourrait-on pas considérer qu’en se battant au côté des soldats, il contribue tout de même à tuer ?
Il y a une ambiguïté équivalente dans la manière dont Gibson représente le déchaînement de la puissance de feu des Américains. C’est comme si le sacrifice de Doss (faire la guerre, mais avant tout pour sauver ses camarades blessés) était augmenté et sublimé par la vision de l’enfer même qu’il est censé avoir refusé. Toujours ce rapport contourné de Gibson à la force, que l’on retrouve chez un autre des personnages du film : le père de Desmond Doss, un pacifiste paradoxalement violent et tourmenté par la vision des boyaux de ses amis morts au combat lors de la Première Guerre mondiale.
Au-delà même de la question de la foi, les personnages de Mel Gibson se distinguent par leur capacité à tracer leur propre chemin dans des vallées de sang et de larmes.
Le sacrifice est enfin, pour Mel Gibson, une sorte de pivot entre les religions païennes et la religion chrétienne, qu’il aime mettre en regard. Apocalypto racontait la fin de la civilisation maya et la manière dont un sacrifice héroïque pouvait prendre le pas sur les sacrifices humains. En toute logique, la fin ouvrait sur l’arrivée des colons chrétiens. Dans Tu ne tueras point, la confrontation avec l’altérité religieuse, tournant à nouveau autour du sacrifice, vient de l’affrontement avec les Japonais, qui ont des kamikazes en guise de héros. La scène de hara kiri d’un général japonais, typiquement gibsonnienne, est une sorte de version négative du sacrifice de Doss.
Tu ne tueras point est à bien des égards un film naïf – ne serait-ce que dans son portrait d’un héroïsme conciliant gaiement la guerre à l’objection de conscience –, mais il l’est de manière audacieuse. La simplicité est un trait de personnalité de Doss, qui est présenté de la même manière étrange que les personnages d’Apocalypto, sans abuser des ficelles canoniques de l’identification. Ce côté très entier du personnage est à l’image d’un film qui va jusqu’au bout de son système : au bord du ridicule sans jamais y basculer totalement, portant la violence jusqu’au grotesque et l’héroïsme jusqu’à la sainteté.
Passé par plusieurs années de purgatoire à Hollywood, essentiellement en raison de ses dérapages personnels, Mel Gibson a-t-il choisi à dessein ce sujet ? Difficile de ne pas se poser la question, tant c’est au cœur des visions infernales et des pulsions bellicistes que le cinéaste semble vouloir ménager pour ses héros – et pour lui-même ? – un horizon pacifique.
jcdurbant 