Posted on 06/06/2014 12:36:50 PM PDT by DFG
World War II veteran Nick Gozik says that the bravest soldier he encountered during two years of combat was the one he saw executed for desertion.
That soldier proved to be the only one of more than 20,000 convicted deserters during that war to suffer the death penalty. The last deserter to be executed had been during the Civil War. There have been no others.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
How were those who upped with the other side treated?
The press laying the groundwork to hail Bergdahl as a hero and portray him as being ‘brave’.
I seem to remember a made for TV movie about Eddie Slovik the deserter and he was played by Martin Sheen.
You didn’t read the whole story.
The old soldier’s take on Bergdahl:
“I read about it and I think the man wasn’t deserving to be traded for five terrorists,” Gozik said. “I think that was the wrong thing to do. I think that after he’s interrogated he should be tried for desertion.”
The one thing I’ll say is that he never should have been made a combat infantryman. We were scraping the bottom of the barrel at that point and had lowered the standards a couple of times in order to draft guys like Slovik.
There’s a great scene of the Slovik execution in ‘The Victors’ where, in the background, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ is playing.
The left have been whittling away at Western courage and resolve for a hundred years.
Along the sheltered strip of beach between the river bank and the water was a confused mass of humanity—several thousands of men. They were mostly unarmed; many were wounded; some dead. All the camp-following tribes were there; all the cowards; a few officers. Not one of them knew where his regiment was, nor if he had a regiment. Many had not. These men were defeated, beaten, cowed. They were deaf to duty and dead to shame. A more demented crew never drifted to the rear of broken battalions. They would have stood in their tracks and been shot down to a man by a provost-marshal’s guard, but they could not have been urged up that bank. An army’s bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.
- Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh”
i know bout slovik...more than a few years ago now, i was contacted from an old-timer who claimed he had written a book about his having witnessed an informal/unofficalof sorts execution on guadalcanal...i had a makeshift copy of the then op book at that time...anyway, folks didn’t take kindly to it...and, the author dropped away after a few years—as so many do w/years—and i never heard from him again...dunno if it’s still out there in cyberspace now...but it was not that too many years ago...
Dick.G: AMERICAN
*****
Slovik was urged to return to duty and refused, preferring a court-martial to facing combat. He told his captain that he figured at most he would serve a few years, and wanted no more experience of combat. Eisenhower understood he had to reverse that calculation in the minds of any who might be inclined to emulate Slovik.
“They” are continuing to punish him after death. His body was removed from France and moved to Detroit.
A World War II ETO vet told me that after Malmedy they did not take SS prisoners, nor Wehrmacht soldiers who surrendered with an empty clip.
somewhere i read of mass deserions (us) in the last days of germay; so ike, although just a politician, really did have a problem on his hands....also there was a story on line pointing out that when wwii ceased patton would have outranked ike since his promotions wre ra (permanent) and ike’s were us (temp)...we’ll never know now...will we...
glad to see you have cleared up that point!
***
It has been said by some that Marine Private First Class Robert Garwood, who spent some fourteen years first with the Viet Cong and then with the North Vietnamese, was “the nation’s last prisoner in Vietnam.” The label, however, is misleading. Calling Garwood a “prisoner” not only mischaracterizes most of his time with the Communists, but also denigrates those Americans who were bona fide prisoners of war.
We shall see if the POW label applied to Bowe Bergdhal is similarly a mischaracterization.
The Garwood story began with his driving into a nest of Viet Cong guerillas near Da Nang, South Vietnam in late September, 1965. Soon after, he was taken to the first of what would be several primitive Viet Cong prison camps in the jungles of South Vietnam.
Years later, when our prisoners of war were repatriated, those who had survived incarceration in the camps in which Garwood lived were extensively debriefed. “[T]he stories told by the prisoners to their debriefing officers [about Garwood and his conduct] were first-person observations, vehement and detailed. Many of the incidents told by different POWs dovetailed and echoed perfectly. And there was another element. The accusations of malfeasance that came out of the debriefing tapes did not all come from hard-core officers, but from foot-soldiers, a warrant officer; a doctor—from blacks, whites, from Hispanic soldiers. From Monika Schwinn, the German nurse who was unceremoniously dumped into one of the camps where Garwood was installed, came corroboration, even, from a woman. All the voices were united on one point: Garwood had chosen to give his allegiance to the enemy, and in this he was alone, separate from the other prisoners.” (Groom and Spencer, Conversations with the Enemy).
In light of these debriefing reports, it was no surprise that when Garwood finally decided to repatriate himself some fourteen years after his disappearance, the Marine Corps stood him before a general court-martial.
Charged with several serious crimes—among them desertion, punishable by death—somehow Garwood’s lawyers were able to enlist the sympathy of the military judge. After lengthy pre-trial proceedings and days of actual trial, the judge—openly admitting that “I would also say that I have expressed, even publicly on occasion, that I do have a great deal of sympathy for the accused and in fact have some empathy for him”—dismissed, for want of sufficient evidence, he opined, the charges of desertion, soliciting U.S. soldiers to throw down their arms, and verbally abusing a prisoner.
That left Garwood facing two charges: collaboration with the enemy, and physical abuse of an American prisoner. It took the jury only two days to find him guilty on both.
On the collaborating charge—the principal crime based on the equivocal evidence of Garwood’s alleged “desertion,” as compared with his mostly undisputed conduct in the prison camps—he was convicted of literally dozens of acts. They fell into five categories: (1) serving as an interpreter while American prisoners were being forcibly indoctrinated with Communist political propaganda; (2) informing on the prisoners; (3) interrogating the prisoners on such subjects as military matters and escape plans; (4) indoctrinating prisoners with the Communist party line, and suggesting they cross over to the Communists; (5) acting as a guard over his American countrymen to prevent escapes. On the physical abuse charge, Garwood was convicted of striking an American prisoner.
In less than an hour, the military jury imposed sentence.
Although Garwood faced life in prison for his fourteen years of egregious conduct against American prisoners of war and giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies, his fellow Marines sentenced him to reduction in rank to private (from Private First Class!), forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge.
Not a single day of prison time.
By
Henry Mark Holzer
American fighting men do not refuse to fight enmasse or even in small numbers, maybe a few here and there are cowards, but I doubt if Slovik got away with a prison term that “many” men would take that as precedent.
And the reason given for his execution - to discourage other deserters was probably true.
I think though, especially with the kind of military we have today, its FAR better to rid the service of ANYBODY who is unreliable in a combat scenario before they can compromise the safety of their fellow soldiers or the success of the mission. Just dishonorably discharge them and get them out.
And that is precisely what should have been done with Dahlgren the FIRST time he went for a little walk.
Now he is more than just a deserter. He may be a traitor and a collaborator. If his background prior to his desertion was a “normal” one, you could give him the benefit of the doubt for cracking under pressure for so many years in captivity under these savages. But it was NOT apparently a normal one and he had apparently made it quite clear he was a traitor long before he was “captured”.
Still, he should be courtmartialed and dishonorably discharged and probably serve prison time.
And I really, really, really hope they investigate that bearded freak who sired him as he may have been a collaborator in his son's treason.
Furthermore, I really, really, really hope Dahlgren HIMSELF does NOT detract attention from the chief villain in this whole sorry story - Barack Hussein Obama.
My old man was in the Sea Bees in the pacific.
He said the Marines didn’t take prisoners until they started paying a $50 bounty.
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