AWOL American soldiers

[scarecrow]

Is it true that there were some 20 000 AWOL American soldiers during summer 1944?

cédric

[LWD]

Wouldn't be at all surprised. For instance my uncle and a buddy of his went to the market in one of the African cities (Timbukto?). They weren't suppose to be there and were techniclly AWOL. Fortunatly the MP who found them was willing to look the otherway while they left. AWOL just means Absent Without Official Leave. It can cover a multitude of sins and sometimes a soldier will be makred AWOL and it will later be corrected if there is a good explanation.

[scarecrow]

OK. So, how many of the 20 000 were deserters ?

[Carl Schwamberger]

Depends on how deserter is defined. I dont have the offcial US Army definition from 1944 at hand, or statistics. One criteria from those days was intent. If the soldier planned to return to his unit he might not be classified as a deserter. If he intended not to then he definitly fell into that category.

At one level the absent/desertion problem was large for the US Amry in 1944. There were very likely more than 20,000 soldiers adrift across France & Belgium. As a percent of the gross it is fairly small and below average historically. But a large part were from the infantry regiments, and they were often engaged in looting army supplies & selling to the local population. Where this became involved in organized criminal groups it was getting out of hand. Look up the history of the US 29th Regiment in France a for some background on this. Effective measures were haphazard. My take is the problem grew rapidly between October & December 1944, slowed during January-Febuary, then slowly declined into the Spring as the Military Police and units commanders got a grip on it.

Compared to the Germans the US had no serious problem. Picking through the offcial records and eyewitness accounts it apperars losing the battles had its usuall effect on the Germans as on anyone else. While there was a large core of fighters who kept on fighting the number of men slipping away from combat units seems very large. It is hard to pin down as the question includes men who surrendered as a way of excaping the military police who scoured the rear for deserters. Unlike the US Army the Germans were reputed to have regulary shot deserters making surrender preferable to wandering around in the rear. Another grey area in the definition was the practice of retreating from the enemy just a little early. One finds descriptions by German soldiers of situations where as individuals or small groups it was decided to "retreat" from a probable enemy attack, before the shooting started. In the East these problems seem to have been much smaller in 1944.

[gaebelein]

I can speak of American Military terminology and definition as it relates to today, having served ten years as a noncom in the US Army; generally a soldier is considered a deserter after 30 days of being listed as absent without leave. One must also consider the fact that if a war was on either of these labels could prove at the most deadly. Deserters can be shot, this is an infrequent occurance in the US Military, but it is still apossibilty.

[scarecrow]

thanks everybody

[Oracle]

I would be interested to know if some form of amnesty was offered? In the British forces the new Prime Minister Clement Attlee offered an amnesty to deserters around 1947 I think, with an offer to surrender before Scotland Yard rounded you up. There was a (and I wonder if it was staged: it looked it!) pictorial report in a British magazine of the time that showed a man who had got back from France, moved back to hoiw wife and was living as a civvy. When the news came out he thought he would take advantage, and was then delivered to a camp somewhere with the intention of being returned to his unit. My father who was in the RAMC 1946-8 was out in what was then Palestine and Egypt, and as the British were withdrawing from the former the military prisons were closed. These "detention-wallahs", composed of criminals, thugs, and deserters [see the film "The Hill"] were just dumped into any units that could take them such as my Dad's and they proved useless for anything except fighting!

[Carl Schwamberger]

Again I dont have precise details.

In the general rush to demobilize the US military gave a large number of the problem members 'admistrative discharges' . In other words they were not given dishonroable dischages to save any further time & money on court procedings ect... A lot of them were able to leave with honorable discharges simply because once the fighting ceased they returned to their company & caused no further trouble. The company or battalion commander administered whatever administrative punishement he was authorized. Usually fining the man several months partial pay & reductions in rank. I'm unclear on what happned to those already convicted of the equivalent of felonys. Particulary those imprisoned.

[Felix C]

Old thread but to follow it rather than start a new one.

What happened to those who went over to the Axis side? I recall one pilot in a P-38 defected. Any others?

[Carl Schwamberger]

Imprisoned. I should remember a few names, but cant tonight. There was not the same sort of publicity surrounding these men and the subject as with the Korean war 'collaborators'.

[Delta Tank]

To all,

I am currently reading Vol II of Logistical Support of the Armies, by Ruppenthal and under Manpower, he mentions that a lot of soldiers went AWOL from replacement centers back to their original unit, after being discharged from the hospital, because they did not want to be assigned to any other unit. How many did this? He does not state and I don't know.

Mike