The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (26 page)

•   •   •

Weiss was far from the 36th and its problems of command, supply and discipline. His life had taken a new turn. The GI was now a
résistant
with dozens of French hill fighters under the command of the mysterious, one-armed Auger. “Auger,” a word meaning “drill bit” for boring into wood or earth, was the code name of Captain François Binoche. The thirty-three-year-old Binoche was a legendary figure in the French war against German occupation. The Germans had captured the then lieutenant Binoche of the French Foreign Legion in June 1940, when France fell. Escaping from a prisoner of war camp near Nancy at the end of July, he reached French Morocco a month later and was assigned to the Foreign Legion at Casablanca. His Gaullist sympathies earned him arrest by Vichy officers, who imprisoned him first in North Africa and then at Clermont-Ferrand in France’s Vichy zone. A court-martial exonerated him of charges of conspiring with the enemy, Great Britain, for lack of evidence. He then joined the Gaullist underground. On 5 July 1944, almost two months before he welcomed the Americans to Alboussière, Binoche lost his right arm in a battle near the village of Désaignes. The nom de guerre “Auger” did little to conceal the unmistakable identity of the handsome regular officer with a missing right arm.

Steve Weiss, whose unconscious need for a surrogate father had not been met by Captain Simmons or any of the other American officers in his battalion, fell under the spell of Captain Binoche. Binoche confided in him more than in the other Americans, and he invited Weiss to sit at his table for meals. Weiss learned about France from the veteran officer, and the two trusted each other. “
I really admired Binoche,” Weiss said. “Making a connection with a father figure, although at the time I couldn’t have put it into words [meant] I wanted to stay with him.” Weiss had little choice. He and the seven other Americans could not reach their division sixty miles away. By default, they joined the French Resistance.

A
maquis
patrol brought intelligence to Binoche that German troops nearby were scouting for escape routes over the river Rhône. Binoche decided to impede the German retreat by destroying a bridge two miles from Alboussière, and he asked the Americans to help. A truck loaded with the eight GIs and a dozen
résistants
set out after dark for the river crossing. At the bridge, Sergeant Scruby and Corporal Reigle guarded the French sappers as they dug explosives deep under the foundations. Weiss and the rest of the squad, armed with old bolt-action Lee-Enfields, took a position south of the bridge to prevent German infiltration.

When the sappers had buried the charges, the men regrouped a safe distance away. The detonator was prepared, and Captain Binoche had the honor of pushing the handle with his only hand. “
The explosion shattered the still August night and reverberated against the steeply sloped mountains and across the valley,” Weiss wrote. “Pieces of the concrete bridge, ripped from its moorings, rose then fell into the chasm below with a whooshing sound.” Another route of German retreat had been severed.

Steve Weiss embraced clandestine warfare more than he had the life of an infantryman. Resistance fighting allowed him his independence, and it usually let him sleep in a bed at night. Such luxuries were denied the ordinary infantryman, who obeyed orders and spent nights outdoors under enemy fire. Weiss trusted his commanding officer, Binoche, as he had never relied on Captain Simmons. Binoche knew all of his men, their names and their families. Their lives were never put at risk needlessly, and he was usually beside them on operations.

•   •   •

On one occasion, though, Binoche was conspicuously absent. Alboussière was one of the villages liberated by the Resistance. With
libération
came
épuration,
the purging of French people believed to have collaborated with the Nazis. These included young women, so-called
collabos horizontales,
accused of having had sexual relations with Germans. The ritual humiliation of these girls took the same form throughout liberated France, much to the country’s shame: their heads were shaved, they were stripped naked, whipped in public and paraded through the streets by members of their own communities. An accusation, even from a thwarted suitor, was usually enough to merit mob justice. Many of those taking part in these near lynchings had themselves collaborated to varying degrees. (Under the German occupation, some Frenchmen had denounced their countrymen to the Nazis for supposed Resistance activity, being Jewish or Roma, belonging to the Freemasons or trading on the black market. When liberation came, some of the denouncers claimed to have been with the Resistance all along.) There were few trials worthy of the appellation.

The
épuration
was an aspect of newly reacquired French liberty that Steve Weiss had yet to experience, because the 36th Infantry Division had passed through the towns it liberated so quickly that it missed the kangaroo courts. A few days after Weiss left Grenoble, CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid witnessed the execution of six French members of Vichy’s version of the Gestapo, the Milice. The Milice had earned a reputation for ruthlessness that outdid its German model, and many French men and women died in its torture chambers. Hundreds of Grenoble’s citizens, who turned up for the execution of several
miliciens
, screamed for the youngsters’ blood. When the firing squad had done its duty, boys spat on the corpses and adults laughed.
“A mob?” Sevareid wrote. “The people were citizens of Grenoble, who had always raised families, gone to church, taken pride in their excellent university of higher culture and done no general hurt to humanity before. Was the important thing the way they had behaved or
why
they had so behaved?” Sevareid did not provide an answer to his question, and many American commanders looked the other way when French mobs meted out instant justice.

Alboussière’s turn came one day, when two
maquisards
led a young man into the village. Weiss, standing outside a café with some of his Resistance comrades, observed the prisoner: “
Of medium height and build, he wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt, open at the throat, khaki shorts with large military pockets, a black belt, white socks and black shoes. His hands and legs were bound in chains.” An old
résistant
invited Weiss to join him on the firing squad that would take the boy’s life. “What’s the fella done?” Weiss asked. The old man said that he was a traitor.

Weiss wanted to explain his American faith in “trial by jury, justice for all, due process and equality before the law.” Unfortunately, his French vocabulary was inadequate. He asked whether there had been a real trial. The aged Resistance fighter believed
miliciens
did not deserve trials, and he repeated more forcefully his invitation for the American to participate in the execution. “If Binoche wants me on the firing squad,” Weiss said, “he can ask me himself.” He walked away, but he did not seek out Binoche to plead for a fair trial. He regretted this lapse, writing, “
I rationalized that, as [I was] an American, the man’s fate was none of my concern.”

The townspeople and
résistants
waited outside the café in the main square for the ritual to begin at 2:00. Captain Binoche, who blew up bridges and fought Germans with gusto, did not appear in the square. Ferdinand Mathey, a major in the national gendarmerie, assumed command of the firing squad. “
Stocky, with square features, a Belgian .45-caliber pistol strapped to the side of his blue gendarme uniform, he reminded me of the French movie idol, Jean Gabin,” Weiss wrote. Mathey called out the firing squad’s members, who “disengaged from the crowd and shuffled into line, but not before placing their glasses, some half-filled with wine, into the hands of eager spectators.” Like the rest of the mob, the executioners had drunk too much.

The square went abruptly still, the only sound that of the
milicien
’s shoes shuffling over cobblestones beside the boots of two guards. The guards left him standing alone with his back to a high stone wall. Major Mathey offered the condemned prisoner a blindfold, which he declined with a contemptuous gesture. When Mathey asked for his final words, the youth flicked his head to indicate he had nothing to say to people he despised. Mathey marched back to the executioners and ordered them to prepare their rifles. The crowd watched intently from behind the riflemen. The death detail raised their weapons, took aim and, when Mathey gave the command, fired. Some of the bullets found the boy’s chest, and others ricocheted off the wall behind him. The boy collapsed, knelt for a few seconds and fell to his side. As he writhed on the ground, it was obvious the fusillade had not killed him. Mathey rushed over, looked down at the bleeding form and unholstered his .45-caliber. Weiss described the scene: “He stood over the man, aimed at his head and pulled the trigger. No explosion followed, only a click; he aimed again and pulled the trigger, another click, one surely heard for miles around.” The boy was still breathing. The old man who had invited Weiss to take part ran from his place in the firing squad, stuck his rifle into the
milicien
’s ear and shot. Bits of skull spattered the ground, and the body went still.

Early that evening, Weiss walked alone through Alboussière. He suddenly came upon the condemned man’s corpse, twisted and blood-drenched on an old wagon of hay. His shoes had been stolen. The execution, thought Weiss, had been a “bungled and repugnant affair.” He hoped never to see another.

•   •   •

Weiss did not come across Captain Binoche until the next morning, when the officer asked the eight Americans to teach his men to use the new weapons dropped by U.S. Navy and Army Air Forces planes. Binoche took the Americans and ten French trainees to an abandoned farm outside the village for a short course on bazookas, heavy machine guns and other specimens of the growing
maquis
armory. The first weapon was the bazooka, a shoulder-mounted tube that fired three-and-a-half-pound rockets to a distance of about three hundred feet. Weiss recalled, “
Scruby described it as a simple if inefficient anti-tank weapon, bordering on the useless.”

Private Settimo Gualandi lifted the bazooka onto his shoulder to demonstrate the correct way to hold it. Corporal Reigle loaded a rocket into the back. Gualandi fired at the target, an empty farmhouse sixty feet away. The French students were astounded to see the projectile miss the house, soar over its roof and explode a few seconds later in a meadow. The commotion brought out a frantic shepherd, who shouted at the GIs not to murder his flock. Chagrined, the American experts gave a French peasant fighter a chance at the weapon. His first shot went straight into the house and blew up inside, as it was designed to do.

It fell to Private Weiss to demonstrate the Browning M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun. Like Gualandi, he missed his target. When a young
résistant
took three turns, he hit the house every time. Weiss, who “had been outdone by a wily Frenchman,” was no longer sure who was teaching and who learning. The two sides laughed about the role reversal, and Weiss reflected that the
maquisards
probably “knew more about fighting than we did.”

In his room at the Hôtel Serre, M. Haas, the banker, recorded steady Allied gains on his wall map. The Germans officially surrendered Marseilles and Toulon to the Free French on 28 August. Once engineers had repaired the two harbors, supplies would flow to the Seventh Army in the south and help it connect to General Eisenhower’s armies in the north. Weiss watched M. Haas’s strings stretch to take in more and more Allied territory. On 31 August, when Valence finally fell to the Americans and Free French, M. Haas adjusted the map.
Weiss did not know that Ferdinand Lévy, the intelligence officer to whom he had given a pack of Camels for saving him, had lost his own life liberating the town.

In between missions for the Resistance that included guarding the ground for Allied airdrops, Weiss gathered his nerve to invite the hotel’s “theatrical” redheaded girl for an afternoon stroll. Walking into the countryside, they struggled to communicate in broken French and English. Giving up on conversation, they fell onto the grass. Weiss remembered, “
She dug her heels into the ground for leverage and pressed hard against me, whispering, ‘
Prenez-moi, cheri, prenez-moi.
’” The French girl waited for the eighteen-year-old American to take the initiative, but Weiss lost courage. As they were about to quit in frustration, Royal Air Force planes streaked overhead and strafed German positions in the Rhône valley. The interruption gave them the excuse to return to the hotel, where they went to their separate rooms.

•   •   •

The American GIs, the
résistants
and the Parisian refugees shared convivial dinners under the Serres’ impeccable supervision at the hotel. Weiss enjoyed evenings with Binoche and his deputy, Lieutenant Paul Goichot, who chided him about his American naïveté. The two French officers felt the teenager had much to learn about wine, women and war. One evening, Binoche, in a playful mood, asked Weiss if he liked to shoot rabbits. Weiss, whose Brooklyn boyhood had afforded no such opportunity, said he didn’t know. Binoche invited him “rabbit hunting” the next morning, and Weiss was too timid to refuse. He went to bed wondering why Binoche had not asked one of the country-bred Americans like Scruby or Garland.

In the morning, Weiss turned up outside the village ready for rabbits. Two things surprised him. Binoche was not among the group of about twenty hunters, and the weapons were 9-millimeter Sten submachine guns and Lee-Enfield rifles. Weiss asked, “Why do we need all this heavy artillery for hunting rabbits?”

Ferdinand Mathey, the gendarme major who had commanded the firing squad in Alboussière, laughed. “Rabbits?
Cher
Stéphane, the only rabbits we are hunting today are Germans.”

Weiss already had doubts about Mathey, and the policeman’s joke at his expense did nothing to remove them. Mathey’s handling of the
milicien
’s execution had left a bad taste, and a day hunting Germans with him was something Weiss would rather have avoided.
Mathey, outfitted in his gendarme tunic with kepi and cavalry boots, announced that their objective was a farm in the valley below. Informants had told him German troops were hiding there. Without explanation, Mathey and the other
résistants
began the operation by firing their weapons into the air as if in celebration. “What a fuck-up,” thought Weiss. Any Germans in the farmhouse would be alerted. If this was how Mathey fought a guerrilla war, Weiss did not like it. While the men marched down the hillside in a column behind Mathey, Weiss imagined the forewarned Germans preparing their defenses. Silently, Weiss conceived his sharpest criticism of Mathey’s strategy, “It smacks of a Simmons-planned operation.”