The Deserters by Charles Glass

Author:Charles Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

The Army is organized throughout for one single purpose—fighting.

Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 325

BY THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1944, the U.S. military in the European Theater of Operations found itself waging war on an unexpected front. While its divisions battled the Wehrmacht in eastern France, American service personnel, in league with French criminals, were plundering Allied supplies. This too was a shooting war, in which Americans fought one another. Victory over the Nazis depended on defeating the criminals. Soldiers at the front could not fight without weapons, ammunition, rations, petrol, boots and blankets. Some couldn’t survive without cigarettes. A front-page story in the Washington Post reported, “This was demonstrated most forcibly last September when Patton’s tanks reached the Siegfried Line and ran dry, while ‘Army trucks were backed up the whole length of the Champs Elysees with GIs selling gas by the canful and cigarettes by the carton.’” An army study of the problem admitted,

The organization of the Military Railway Service in Northern France did not provide for adequate protection of freight in transit. In Southern France, Military Police units were assigned to the Military Railway Service for this purpose. Almost from the beginning of operations on the Continent, the problem of protecting supplies in transit was of major magnitude, particularly in Northern France during the first five months of operation.

Allied use of the railways expanded as troops pushed back the German lines. By 15 August, one functioning line carried supplies from the port of Cherbourg to Le Mans. By 1 September, Allied rail services reached Paris and its network of lines to most of the country. From July’s daily total of only 1,520 tons of freight, shipments increased to 11,834 tons a day by September. All that bounty in war-starved France, unguarded by military police, tempted black market merchants who had flourished under the German occupation. Allied deserters, as well as serving officers and men, cooperated with the criminal underworld to drain the lifeblood of the frontline soldier. Many of the thieves were former infantrymen, as the army weekly magazine, Yank, noted.

They went AWOL from their units, which were mostly moving on beyond Paris, and stayed behind where the market and the money were. They moved into the upper brackets and became racketeers. Some of these men had minor criminal records in civilian life. When the opportunity for profitable crime came into their Army life they seized it. The biggest profits were in gasoline and trucking rather than rations, so most GI gangsters switched to these rackets.

Yank added that some combat soldiers were “temporarily AWOL from the front, who came back to Paris looking for a brief fling at the bright lights, liquor and women, and found things so pleasant they forgot about going back to their units.” In late September 1944, the U.S. Army Provost Marshal’s Office arrested twenty-seven American deserters working on the black market in Paris. One of them, who had been a truck driver, had 51,000 francs (about $1,000) from illegal sales of petrol.

Lacking

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