Book review: The Deserters, by Charles Glass

by Charles Glass
Penguin

Nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces during the second world war. 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.

Historian and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass thus performs a service: his is the first book to examine at length the sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it presents are revealing and heartbreaking.

US General George 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," Glass writes.

Thousands of US 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, a private from Detroit named Eddie Slovik. This was early 1945, at the moment of the Battle of the Bulge. "It was not the moment for the supreme Allied commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, to be seen to condone desertion," Glass writes.

There were far more desertions in Europe than in the Pacific theatre. In the Pacific, there was nowhere to disappear to. "In Europe, the total that fled from the front rarely exceeded 1 per cent of manpower," Glass writes. "However, it reached alarming proportions among the 10 per cent of the men in uniform who actually saw combat."