The Deserters

Starred review from July 1, 2013
ABC News correspondent Glass is to be commended for his take on WWII through the eyes of those who ran away from it. Nearly 150,000 British and American soldiers deserted the war; Glass follows three of them. Pvt. John Bain's brutal experience in a war-time prison as a deserter will make you question whatever moral authority the allies truly upheld, while Pvt. Steve Weiss's heroics behind German lines with the French resistance is as gripping as any Hollywood war epic. Except Weiss, upon returning to the front, walked away and spent the rest of the war doing hard labor. Finally, Pvt. Al Whitehead, a braggart, bully, and unreliable narrator, leaves battle less from psychological fatigue than for the riches of post-liberation Paris's black market; his gangster-in-uniform life an ignored and fascinating chapter of the period. Well-documented battle details will delight military enthusiasts but slow down the narrative. However, for readers who are not members of this "greatest" generation, 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.

June 15, 2013
Glass (Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under the Nazi Occupation, 2011, etc.) takes on the nearly taboo subject of Allied soldiers who deserted or were said to have displayed cowardice during World War II. Tracking in detail the wartime biographies of three privates in the infantry--Tennessee farm boy Alfred Whitehead, Brooklyner Steve Weiss and Britisher John Bain--the author constructs a frame for his much broader, and quite provocative, discussion of military personnel policy. Each of his subjects was court martialed and sentenced to long-term incarceration. But each had also fought bravely, and continuously, through a series of campaigns in Africa and Europe, including the Anzio landings, the D-Day invasion and its aftermath, and the assault on Nazi Germany itself. Weiss, for example, won medals for bravery and, when separated from his unit, served with paratroops and the French Resistance. Glass situates the men's individual pathways within the context of a personnel policy that failed to fully assimilate lessons from World War I, when it was first acknowledged that there were limits to what combat soldiers could endure, both mentally and physically. Nevertheless, WWII military leaders prioritized combat experience, keeping veteran fighters in the field since raw replacement troops were not as effective; this led to increased pressure on long-serving soldiers that sometimes became intolerable. By the summer of 1944, the Allies' combat units were suffering in excess of 10 percent casualties per month. The command level was divided between supporters of treating desertion as a discipline problem and those who advocated a medical response. Glass shows how deserters established criminal networks in liberated cities like Naples, Marseilles and Paris, diverting military supplies on a significant scale. Using memoirs, correspondence and military records, the author works outward from his three individual protagonists, through their networks of friends and comrades, to their units and larger questions about the war's conduct. A well-written, fast-moving treatment of an issue still relevant today.

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January 1, 2013

Author of the much-praised Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation, Glass can be expected to offer rigorous but accessible history. He explains that many World War II soldiers fought bravely one day, then turned tail the next, to be comforted by their comrades when they returned.

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