deserters

deserters were commonplace on both sides, and women deserted as well as men. Those men who deserted while in combat theatres mostly came from the ground forces, as those fighting in the air or at sea had less opportunity to abscond. They were often prisoners-of-war (POW) as these were especially vulnerable to pressure to join the opposing side. Whole formations—the Indian National Army and the contingent led by General Vlasov, for example—were largely composed of deserters.

During the German–Soviet war desertion was rife in the Red Army. One in sixteen Soviet POW were found to be deserters. The American, British, and French figure was one in 4,962. But deserters joined the Red Army, too. Much of the Hungarian Army deserted to it around Budapest towards the end of 1944, and before the Kursk battle in July 1943, 186 ‘hiwis’ (auxiliary helpers drawn from Soviet POW) defected back to the Soviet side with valuable intelligence.

Another formation which deserted en masse was the Burma National Army (seeBurma Independence Army) when, in March 1945, it abandoned the Japanese to fight under British command. Even Japanese soldiers, taught to die rather than surrender, deserted and did so in increasing numbers as the war progressed. The authors of Soldiers of the Sun ( M. Harries and S. Harries, London, 1991, p. 359) give the figures of 669 desertions in 1939, when the Japanese were fighting in the China incident, which by the first half of 1944 had increased to 1,085.

Men mostly deserted alone or with a few companions. Some of the 3,000 Poles who deserted from Anders' Army when it arrived in Palestine subsequently joined Jewish resistance organizations (see Stern gang and Irgun) which fought the British, but American and British deserters, with the exception of the British Free Corps, did not generally take up arms against their own side. But they often preyed on it and in the Middle East and Italy they formed gangs which survived by hijack, hold-ups, and pilfering from Allied transport and supply dumps.

In the American and British armies deserters were almost always infantrymen. Most of them were very young and a high percentage had psychological problems (see medicine) or low intelligence. More than 100,000 deserted from the British Army in the course of the war. In May 1942, General Auchinleck, disturbed by the number of deserters during the Western Desert campaigns, recommended the reintroduction of the death penalty, which was refused. One British divisional general, Maj-General James Elliot, remarked on the very high level of what he called battle absenteeism. This was higher than the numbers killed in certain actions and sometimes even higher than those wounded. ‘It was at times,’ he wrote, ‘common for some 20 men in a battalion to become Battle Absentees in a given section. About 400 men were Battle Absentees in the average division in 1943–4 in a period of six months. When it is realized that these men came almost entirely from the rifle companies of infantry battalions, the numbers became serious’ (quoted in A. Millett and M. Williamson (eds.), Military Effectiveness, Vol. 3, London, 1988, p. 100).

The US Army, which had a total of 40,000 deserters, did have the death penalty but it was only enforced on one occasion. The Americans preferred if possible to charge deserters with the lesser offence of being absent without leave which is why, along with the fact that the US Army saw no fighting until mid-1942, US Army figures for desertion were lower than the British ones.

In Germany desertion was regarded as an offence against both the Führer and the Volksgemeinschaft (national community) and it also sometimes involved the offence of Wehrkraftzersetzung (subversion of the war effort). In April 1940 Hitler issued guidelines which prescribed death as being the normal punishment (see Germany, 3). It has been estimated that about 35,000 members of the Wehrmacht were accused of desertion during the war, resulting in about 22,750 death sentences of which at least 15,000—perhaps many more—were carried out. This astonishingly high figure can be largely explained by the extreme measures imposed by German commanders on their troops during the last months of the war. For example, the commander in Courland, General Lothar Rendulic ‘ordered “flying courts-martial” created to scour the rear areas. Every soldier not wounded, picked up outside his unit area, was to be tried and shot’ ( E. Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin, Washington, DC, 1968, p. 433).