Desertion: A Long, Proud History
By CJ Hinke
Excerpted from Free Radicals: War
Resisters in Prison by CJ Hinke, forthcoming from
Trine-Day in 2016.
July 20, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
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"World
Beyond War"
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There are as many reasons to desert military service
as there are deserters. All countries’ militaries like to snatch
young men when they are uneducated, inexperienced, and unemployed.
It takes a soldier far greater courage to throw down his weapon than
to kill a stranger.
There are deserters in every country that has an
armed forces. Armies demand blind obedience and human beings crave
liberty.
Why do men desert? Certainly not from cowardice.
It takes far more courage to break from the pack and its reliance
upon rabid nationalism. 36% of men facing battle for the first time
were more afraid of being labeled a coward than of being wounded or
killed.
War-sick has been called by many names by
psychologists. In the US Civil War, DaCosta’s disease or soldier’s
heart; in World War I, shell-shock, conversion disorder or fugue
state, flight response; in World War II, battle fatigue, battle
exhaustion; in Vietnam, combat fatigue, combat exhaustion, combat
stress reaction; to the oh-so-modern post-traumatic stress disorder
shared by Gulf soldiers and drone pilots.
All these diagnoses have at one time been banned
and mentions censored, even in medical journals. The goal of
treatment being, of course, to send soldiers back to war. 600,000
were discharged from the US Army alone for neuropsychiatric
complaints. As noted by Fortune magazine, at the start of
World War II, “25 years after the end of the ‘Great’ War, nearly
half of the 67,000 beds in Veterans Administration hospitals are
still occupied by the neuropsychiatric casualties of World War I.”
More than one-quarter of all World War II casualties were
psychiatric.
Deserters are hardly cowards. Many simply were not
willing to kill after joining the military. Others experienced an
ideological crisis. Some had needy families at home. Country right
or wrong? What nonsense!
“Desertion” is a pejorative term in human society.
We think of them as “returners” from the madness of all war. We’re
waiting for them to come home, proud that they never had to kill
anybody.
Although the US penalty for desertion during
wartime remains death, no American deserter has served more than 24
months since September 11, 2001. The Nuremburg Principles require a
soldier to refuse any orders which may result in the commission of
crimes against humanity. (And what else is war!)
War of 1812 (1812-1815)
12.7% of all American troops deserted in comparison to 14.8% during
peacetime. This was largely due to the death penalty for such
“treason”. Many faced summary execution.
Mexican-American War (1846-1848)
8.3%, 9,200 US soldiers deserted.
US Civil War (1861-1865)
The north’s Union Army faced far greater desertion than the south’s
Confederacy. More than 87,000 deserters were recorded from only
three northern states, 180,000 deserters in total by war’s end. The
south is said to have lost 103,400 to desertion through the war,
including whole units of soldiers. However, as many as 278,000 of
500,000 troops were missing by war’s end. Mark Twain deserted from
both sides. William Smitz of the North’s Pennylvania Volunteers was
the last deserter shot by firing squad in 1865.
World War I (1914-1918)
240,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were court-martialed and
346 were executed for desertion, cowardice, quitting a post,
refusing an order, or casting away arms out of 3,080 death sentences
during the “War to End All Wars”, including 25 Canadians and 22
Irishmen. They are commemorated by the Shot at Dawn Memorial in
Staffordshire. The memorial was modeled on 17-year old Private
Herbert Burden, blindfolded and tied to a stake. Almost all of these
deserters’ names were not added to war memorials. Some, though not
nearly all, have been pardoned posthumously by the British
government. A few refused a blindfold when facing a firing squad,
choosing to look them in the eye. (And these are cowards?!?)
More than 600 French soldiers were executed for
desertion.
15 German soldiers were executed for desertion.
28 New Zealand deserters were sentenced to death
and five were executed. These soldiers were posthumously pardoned in
2000.
The US military recorded 21,282 deserters and
President Woodrow Wilson commuted all 24 death sentences for
deserters.
World War II (1939-1945)
More than 21,000 American deserters were tried and convicted of
desertion during “The Good War”. Although 49 were sentenced to
death, only one, Private Eddie Slovik, a soldier who had volunteered
to clear mine fields, was executed by musketry on January 31, 1945
at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in France. His final declaration was,
“I’ll run away again if I have to go out there.”
Supreme Allied Commander and later US President,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, confirmed Slovik’s death sentence, claiming
“it was necessary to discourage further desertions”. Slovik stated,
“They’re shooting me for the bread and chewing gum I stole when I
was 12 years old.”
Slovik’s execution was hidden from French
civilians. He was bound at arms and torso, knees, and ankles and
hung from a spike on a six-by-six post against the stone wall of a
French farmhouse. 12 soldiers were issued M-1 rifles, only one of
which contained a blank round. After the first volley, Private
Slovik didn’t die; he died as the soldiers were reloading. Eddie
Slovik was the first American deserter to be executed since Lincoln
was President. He was 24.
Slovik was buried in a numbered grave in Row 3,
Grave 65 of Plot “E” alongside 95 US soldiers executed for rape and
murder, until 1987 when President Ronald Reagan ordered the return
of his remains. He is buried in Detroit, next to his wife,
Antoinette. She had petitioned seven US presidents for his return
until she died in 1979, never having received GI medical benefits.
World War II saw 1.7 million US courts-martial,
one-third of all American prosecutions. In May 1942 alone, there
were 2,822 desertions from duty.
More than 1,500 Austrian soldiers deserted the
German Wehrmacht. A campaign to remember them was started in 1988
with the theme, “Desertion is not reprehensible, war is”. In 2014,
they were honoured by a monument, the Memorial for the Victims of
Nazi Military Justice. The sculpture sits in Vienna opposite the
Austrian Chancellory and President’s office. It is inscribed simply
with just two words, “all alone”.
In Germany, more than 15,000 soldiers were
executed for desertion by the Nazi regime. They were commemorated in
2007 by the Deserteur Denkmal in Stuttgart. It is dedicated “To the
deserters from all wars”.
War on Vietnam (1955-1975)
At least 50,000 US soldiers deserted, including many who fled to
Canada, France, and Sweden.
The Soviet Union, throughout its history
1917-1991, executed 158,000 deserters and jailed 135,000 Red Army
officers. A further 1.5 million Soviet prisoners of war under the
Nazis were sent to Siberian gulags on their repatriation due to
disaffection in the ranks.
60,000-80,000 ethnic Soviet border troops from the
Muslim Central Asian regions deserted during the Afghan
Civil War 1979-1989. 85,000 Afghan troops also deserted
during this period.
Wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, and many more
(2001-present)
Since 2000, the Pentagon estimates more than 40,000 troops have
deserted from all branches of military service. In 2001 alone, 7,978
deserted.
More than 5,500 American troops deserted in
2003-2004. In 2005, 3,456 soldiers deserted. By 2006, that number
had reached 8,000.
In 2006, the UK military reported over 1,000
deserters.
US Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was charged with
desertion and “misbehavior” before the enemy after abandoning his
post in Afghanistan in 2009. He was held captive by the Taliban for
five years before being exchanged in 2014 for six high-ranking
Afghans held by the US in their extrajudicial prison base at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. One died before the exchange so five Taliban
were released by the US, the army chief of staff, deputy minister of
intelligence, a former minister of the interior, and two senior
commanders. The Taliban originally demanded $1 million and the
release of 21 Afghan prisoners along with a Pakistani scientist who
killed US soldiers. (President Obama actually does ‘negotiate with
terrorists’. The Commander-in-Chief took a publicity photo-op with
Bergdahl’s parents in the Rose Garden.)
It appears the young sergeant is being prosecuted
because, were he not, he could demand compensation from the US
government due a prisoner of war. (The US can spend trillions on
wars, and pay for a court-martial but refuses to compensate one
soldier!) Bergdahl faces a life sentence at court-martial.
So what was this home-schooled Idaho boy who
studied fencing and ballet, never owned a car and rode everywhere by
bicycle doing in the military, anyway? Hint: the military maw will
take any cannon fodder it can get! Bowe went from a year-long
retreat at a Buddhist monastery direct to infantry school at Fort
Benning. Like Pvt. Slovik, Sgt. Bergdahl, announced his intention to
“walk away into the mountains of Pakistan”., taking only his
compass.After he began to learn Pashto, Bergdahl spent more times
with Afghans than the soldiers of his ‘counterinsurgency’ unit. He
wrote his parents he was “ashamed to be an American” and considered
renouncing his US citizenship, a small detail buried by the White
House. His parents wrote back, “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”
64% of Canadians were polled to ask their
government to accept US military refugees after two motions for
compassion were passed in Parliament in 2008 and 2009. Hundreds of
American deserters have fled to Canada.
However, these legislative efforts were
non-binding. The Canadian government has adopted a harsh policy of
deporting deserters to the US, in marked contrast to the Vietnam
period, and many young Americans simply go underground in Canada.
The BBC commented on the precedent-setting case of
Iraq war resister Jeremy Hinzman in 2004: “Americans in trouble have
been running to Canada for centuries… in the wake of the American
Revolution…[and in the] Underground Railroad that spirited escaped
American slaves to freedom…”.
Although I counselled, aided and abetted hundreds
of Vietnam draft refusers throughout the 1960s as part of the
Student Peace Union, The Resistance, and the Central Committee for
Conscientious Objectors, I had little contact with American
deserters. I first advocated desertion in a large, public Gensuikin
demonstration in front of the huge US military base deploying troops
to Vietnam in Naha, Okinawa, in 1969. I arrived by ship and left in
a private plane.
I still advocate, counsel, aid and abet desertion
by anyone in military service anywhere. Deserters are not only
national heroes. They are global heroes who have refused to kill
civilians and soldiers on foreign soil.
You can do no greater good than refusing to kill.
If you are in the military, anybody’s military, do the right thing:
RUN AWAY!
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References
Wikipedia, “Desertion”
Charles Glass, Deserters: The Last Untold Story of the Second World
War, 2013.
William Bradford Huie, The Execution of Private Slovik, 1954. A 1974
movie of the same name based on the book and starring Martin Sheen.
Benedict B. Kimmelman, “The Example of Private Slovik”, American
Heritage, September/October 1987. http:/www.americanheritage.com/node/55767
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.
Ray Rigby, The Hill, New York: John Day, 1965.
Copyright © 2015 —
World
Beyond War