![]() Led by an ex-paratrooper sergeant, raids were planned like military operations. 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.įrom decorated soldier he moved seamlessly into life as a criminal in the Paris underworld.Ī chance meeting led to him taking his place as a member of one of the many gangs of ex-soldiers terrorizing Paris. 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. 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.’ 45 pistol, a Thompson sub-machine gun and a trench knife. He demanded the weapons he was used to – a. Steve Weiss, left, pictured with author Charles Glass in Paris where he was court martialled for desertion. 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.’ Instead he was sent to the 94th Reinforcement Battalion, a replacement depot in Fontainebleau. When he was invalided out to Paris with appendicitis and assumed that he would rejoin his unit, the 2nd Division, on his recovery. He had earned the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, Combat Infantry Badge and Distinguished Unit Citation. He had been in continuous combat with them from D-Day to 30th December 1944. 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. Whitehead fought at Normandy and claims to have stormed the beaches on the D-Day landings. He ended up a gangster tearing through Paris. 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. Private Alfred T Whitehead's was a very different story. 'They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old.’ 'I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that’s what they are shooting me for. ‘They just need to make an example out of somebody and I’m it because I’m an ex-con. ‘They’re not shooting me for deserting the United States Army,’ he said.Įddie Slovik and his wife Antoinette on their wedding day in Detroit. In it Sheen recites the words Slovik spoke before the firing squad shot him. His identity was ultimately revealed in 1954 and twenty years later Martin Sheen played him in the television film, The Execution of Private Slovik. She was informed that her husband had died in the European Theatre of Operations. He was dispatched in the remote French village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and the truth concealed even from his wife, Antoinette. Slovik was shot for his crime on the morning of 31 January 1945. ![]() It was not, Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower decided, time to risk seeming to condone desertion. His appeal came in January 1945 just as the German counter-offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, was at its peak. His greatest sin, as Glass tells it, was his timing. 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. He simply made it clear that he preferred prison to battle. He never went on the run as most deserters did. 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 ![]() 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, like Weiss, fought until their faith in their immediate commanders disappeared. Some recounted waking, as if from a dream, to find their bodies had led them away from the battelfield. They had reached a point beyond which they could not endure and chosen disgrace over the grave. 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. 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. 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. They met for coffee and Weiss asked Glass what he was working on. ![]() 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
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