Posted on 01/31/2005 4:34:39 PM PST by Borges
By Oliver Prichard
Inquirer Staff Writer
On the morning of Jan. 31, 1945, in the French Alsatian village of St. Marie aux Mines, a U.S. Army private in Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry Division was marched into a snowy courtyard, strapped to a post, and shrouded with a black hood.
A general recited the soldier's crimes. A priest gave last rites. A dozen men took a position 20 paces from the accused, leveled their M-1 rifles, and fired.
As the volley spattered blood and flesh, the slight body convulsed, stiffened, and made a last lurch upward. Death was pronounced even as the rifles were being reloaded.
For fleeing combat, a troubled 24-year-old named Eddie Slovik became the only serviceman since the Civil War executed as a deserter. Despite a long, ongoing crusade by a few Philadelphia-area men to win him a posthumous pardon, his rendezvous with a firing squad still stands after 60 years as a forbidding symbol of military justice.
Pvt. Slovik's execution was meant as a warning. Yet it has not deterred thousands of service personnel who every year, in war or peace, go AWOL intending to stay AWOL - the legal definition of desertion.
Last year, more than 5,000 military personnel abandoned their duty, according to the Pentagon, which did not specify how many did so Stateside or overseas, or how many were involved in the Iraq war.
The number sounds startlingly high. However, it is well below the 40,000 who walked away during the four years of World War II. And it is dwarfed by the 33,000 who deserted the Army alone in 1971 during the Vietnam War.
The rate has declined since that era, from about 5 percent to less than 1 percent of the 1.2 million-member armed forces today. The trend is attributable to the volunteer makeup of the military, plus a post-9/11 fervor to fight terrorism.
Recent enlistees "are saying, 'I'm here and I'm willing,' " said Army spokeswoman Kim Henry. "When they come forward, they're committed to helping the U.S. through the war on terror."
On the books, at least, desertion in wartime remains a capital offense. But no one is likely to suffer Slovik's fate, or anything close to it.
The military's zeal for prosecution has all but evaporated.
Two-thirds of Army deserters are caught, often when local police pick them up for unrelated infractions such as speeding. Of those returned to military custody last year, only 7 percent faced courts-martial.
Today's deserters typically are young and poorly educated, with histories of delinquency - much like Slovik - and they are more apt to flee for personal and financial reasons than a moral objection to the mission. Commanders have the latitude to consider the circumstances, usually leading to less-than-honorable discharges, nonjudicial penalties such as cuts in pay or rank - or just a quiet welcome-back for the prodigal.
Even in high-profile desertions, punishment rarely exceeds a year in the brig.
That was the sentence handed Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of the Florida National Guard after his court-martial in May for refusing to return to Iraq after a leave.
In November, former Army Sgt. Charles Jenkins was tried for deserting his post - in South Korea in 1965. Terrified of combat in Vietnam, he had fled to North Korea and hidden for nearly 40 years. His sentence: 30 days in jail.
The climate of leniency is not lost on Robert "Rocky" DeFinis, 77, a retired public relations man from Lansdale, Montgomery County, who never met Eddie Slovik but who has worked three decades to restore some honor to his name.
His most recent recruit to the cause is Matthew Wilkov, 35, a Lansdale lawyer formerly with the Judge Advocate General's Corps. The current request for a pardon for Slovik was filed five years ago; the Justice Department says only that the application is "pending."
"The government made a very quick decision to shoot this man," DeFinis said, "but they can't make a decision after all these years to pardon him."
A pardon would amount to little more than a merciful gesture. But no one believes the military is ready to make it.
•
Rocky DeFinis and Edward Woods met in the checkout line at the Acme supermarket in Lansdale in 1974, just as a television movie starring Martin Sheen as Slovik had thrust the execution into the public eye.
DeFinis was a World War II veteran intrigued by the story. Woods was a retired Army major, with a Bronze Star for heroism in the Battle of the Bulge, who had been appointed to defend Slovik in his court-martial.
The two watched the film at Woods' home, then stayed up half the night talking about the raw deal Slovik had gotten.
"Woods looked at me and said, 'What do you think, Rock? Should we do something to help this guy?' " DeFinis recalled. "And I said, 'Let's go.' "
It was hard not to feel sorry for Slovik. Raised by a violent father and alcoholic mother in Depression-era Detroit, he was in and out of jail for petty theft and joyriding in a stolen car. But by 22, he had a steady job as a shipping clerk and a wife, Antoinette, whom he described as the only good thing that happened to him.
In 1942, Slovik was classified 4-F, unfit because of his criminal record. As Allied casualties mounted in Europe, however, the military began casting a wide net for replacements. Slovik was reclassified and inducted into the Army on Jan. 3, 1944.
At basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas, it became clear that he would embody none of the heroism for which his generation is remembered. He was 5-foot-6 and skinny, and had trouble walking because of a series of childhood operations to straighten his bowed legs. He so missed Antoinette, whom he called "Mommy," that during his 372 days in uniform he wrote 376 lovesick letters to her.
More debilitating, he abhorred violence. The booms of heavy artillery terrified him.
Slovik showed "total inability as a combat soldier," Col. Arnold Shaw, his commander, once wrote.
No matter. Slovik was promptly dispatched to Europe.
He was assigned to the 109th regiment of Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry, dubbed the "Bloody Bucket Brigade" for its red insignia. Arriving in August 1944, Slovik was trucked to Elbeuf, France, where the 28th had engaged the Germans.
Coming under mortar attack, Slovik and 14 other replacements dug a trench for the night. Later, in a confession filled with a ninth-grade dropout's fractured spelling, he recalled: "I was so scared, nerves and trembling, that at the time the other replacements moved out I couldn't move. I stayed their... till it was quite."
His platoon gone, he latched onto a unit of Canadian military police, cooking and doing odd jobs. After six weeks, they returned him to his regiment, which by then was in Brussels.
Facing combat again, Slovik deserted again. The next day he walked into a U.S. Army mess hall in Belgium with a confession he had written on a flower-delivery invoice for his wife: "I ran away again, AND ILL RUN AWAY AGAIN IF I HAVE TO GO OUT THEIR."
Slovik was arrested and charged with two counts of desertion. The Army offered to drop the case if he would report to the front, but he refused.
On Nov. 11, 1944, Slovik was tried in Roetgen, Germany, by a court-martial of 12 officers. The hearing took an hour and 40 minutes. Up against Slovik's own confession, Woods made no opening or closing statement and called no witnesses in his client's defense.
Found guilty on both counts, Slovik was sentenced "to be shot to death with musketry."
There was little reason to think it would happen. He was one of 2,864 deserters tried in World War II; 48 already had been sentenced to death, and each of those executions was stayed.
The time was right, though, for one bloody exception.
By late 1944, the war's outcome was in the balance, and desertion a problem that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower couldn't afford. While Slovik was refusing to fight, 6,000 members of the 28th died in the horrific Hurtgen Forest campaign.
On Dec. 16, Adolf Hitler counterattacked. Of 500,000 GIs who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, 19,000 were killed and 40,000 wounded. Thousands more fled to the rear.
"If you look at that dark time and the things Dwight Eisenhower was facing, they wanted to make it very clear desertion was not an option," said Sam Newland, a professor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Cumberland County, who has extensively researched the 28th. Slovik, "so blatant and unrepentant in his desertion," was the perfect object lesson.
The condemned man wrote to Eisenhower asking for mercy. He explained his fear of battle and that he "didn't realize at the time what I was doing, or what the word desertion meant."
He signed it, "I Remain Yours for Victory."
Eisenhower's only response came on Dec. 23, when he approved the first execution for military desertion since 1864.
•
Witnesses reported that Slovik was stoic at the end, his only show of bravery as a soldier.
Nick Gozik is one of the few still alive who saw it.
"It was very unnerving," said Gozik, 84, of Pittsburgh. "I had been through the Battle of the Bulge; there were things I don't even want to talk about. But the reason this was so bad was that the Germans didn't do it. We had executed one of our own."
Slovik was buried in a numbered grave in the criminals' section of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France, among 95 American soldiers who had been hanged for violent crimes such as rape and murder.
Although he was to be an example, the Army did not publicize his execution, for reasons never divulged. Antoinette Slovik was told merely that her husband had been killed in the European Theater.
Only nine years later did she learn the truth, after journalist William Bradford Huie wrote The Execution of Private Slovik, the book that inspired the film that inspired Woods and DeFinis.
At first, the two men thought that in the process of pressing their cause, they could land book deals, too. They combed Slovik's trial record for errors and blanketed Washington with letters. They also formed an unlikely alliance with Antoinette Slovik after seeing her on TV.
Destitute and decrepit, she was living under an assumed name in a Detroit nursing home. As the widow of a dishonored veteran, she had been denied about $70,000 in GI death benefits. DeFinis and Woods resolved to help her get the benefits.
In 1977, she moved into an upstairs bedroom in DeFinis' home, and they began a circuit of news shows, winding up outside the White House in a well-covered protest. That prompted an Army review board to consider amending Eddie Slovik's record, which would have released his benefits to his widow.
The board ruled against it, issuing the military's only official comment since the execution.
Slovik had fled combat in hopes of spending the war in "the relative safety of the stockade," the panel wrote. "There must be a fatal deterrent to those who would desert the field of battle in the face of the enemy."
On Sept. 7, 1979, two weeks before Congress was to vote on a bill to award her the money, Antoinette Slovik died at 64.
DeFinis and Woods kept up their fight to rehabilitate Eddie Slovik's memory, approaching every president since Gerald Ford (1974-77) and spending about $100,000, DeFinis says.
When Woods died last year at 86, he was no closer to winning Slovik's case than in 1944.
"I think the government is afraid that if they do right by Eddie Slovik, it will lessen their ability to keep order and discipline," said attorney Wilkov. "By refusing to approve or reject the pardon, it will hang out there forever as an example of what could happen to you."
Military experts agree it is likely Slovik will never be pardoned and deserters will continue to face a theoretical death.
"On a personal level, you might say, 'Who cares? Just do it for the family,' " said Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired Army colonel. The larger concern, though, is "the signal it sends."
Scott Silliman, a Duke University law professor and former Air Force lawyer, points out that legions of World War II prosecutions seem unfair today - but "trying to go back to right all the legal wrongs would be impossible," he said.
"If you start with Slovik, where do you end?"
High-Profile Desertions
Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia
In May, Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia of the Florida National Guard was sentenced to a year in prison for desertion despite his pending objector application. Mejia filed his claim after refusing to return to his unit in Iraq while home on leave.
Sgt. Charles Jenkins
After his trial in November, former Army Sgt. Charles Jenkins served 25 days in jail for deserting his post in South Korea in 1965. Jenkins, who was terrified of being sent to combat in Vietnam, spent 39 years living in North Korea. He is now living on a Japanese island with his wife, whom he met in the Hermit Kingdom.
Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun
In a bizarre desertion incident, Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun failed to report in June to his unit near war-torn Fallujah, then said he had been abducted by Islamic terrorists. Hassoun later was charged with desertion, but he didn't show up this month at his court proceeding. The Marines recently declared him a "most wanted fugitive."
If the United States government can bring itself to compensate Japanese-Americans from that era for the time they spent in interment camps here in the U.S. (by reaching into my wallet to pay that compensation, BTW), it can certainly issue a pardon in this case and restore Private Slovik's rank and posthumously provide him an honorable discharge.
For the life of me, I can't understand why they should pardon the guy. I don't think there was any question about his guilt. We may not have the taste for executing deserters nowadays, but someday, who knows, we might face a grave national emergency, and that kind of harsh military justice might be necessary.
I wouldn't waste one minute on this guy,,
If everyone felt that way, then John Kerry might be President of the United States today.
If nothing else, a message ought to be sent here simply on principle: This country had no business executing a man for desertion after it had previously determined he was unfit to serve in the military in the first place. Let's be honest here: out of the 2,800+ deserters who were tried during World War II, Eddie Slovik was basically singled out because he was borderline retarded and "wouldn't be missed."
**While Slovik was refusing to fight, 6,000 members of the 28th died in the horrific Hurtgen Forest campaign.
On Dec. 16,(1944) Adolf Hitler counterattacked. Of 500,000 GIs who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, 19,000 were killed and 40,000 wounded.**
Enough said as to why the Euroweenies do not speak German today.
See #6.
'provide him an honorable discharge'
Yeah, his record shows he earned it!
Well, OK. You're right -- an honorable discharge is out of bounds here.
Wrong. You need to look at the historical context to see what really happened to Slovak. Eisenhower signed the death warrant on December 23, while the Germans were still winning the Battle of the Bulge and thousands of American troops were running, rather than fighting. If the paperwork had come up the ladder two months earlier or two months later, the results would likely have been different.
It was timing, not the criminal's mental state that earned him the ultimate penalty.
An honorable discharge for desertion in time of war? You obviously have no concept of what the word "Honor" means. You mock the service of all those who did serve honorably.
The military got their pound of flesh, now be manly enough to give a pound of mercy. We were all cowards, most dealt with it.
Rudder became famous for leading his team of Rangers up Pointe du Hoc on D-Day. Later he became President of Texas A&M University and is the man many credit with turning A&M into the successful and leading institution it is today.
This action was undertaken during a moment of extreme urgency for the US Army. The casualties (particularly the aforementioned Huertegen and Ardennes campaigns) were so severe that it was undertaking a wholesale comb out of rear echlon troops and former members of the Army Specialized Training Program to find men for the horribly attrited infantry and armor units. (Consider this in light of the considerable number of women in today's similar units who would be non-deployable to such duty)
It may have been brutal, but hard times breed such measures. If it happens again, than you KNOW things are desperate.
"GENERAL ORDERS
Head Quarters, Middle Brook (NJ)
Thursday, April 22, 1779
...At a division General Court Martial held in the Maryland line by order of Major General Baron DeKalb, Lieutenant Colonel Adams, President: Thomas Hall of the 7 th Maryland Regiment, and James Tarrel of the 4 th, were tried on the 15 th instant, “On suspicion of intended desertion” found guilty and sentenced to suffer Death. At the same Court, Henry McManus of the 6 th Maryland regiment was tried for, “Deserting to the enemy and attempting to carry off several soldiers with him”. He claimed the benefit of the Commander in Chiefs Proclamation. The Court are unanimously of the opinion that he is guilty of a breach of the 1 st Article, 6 th section of the Articles of war and do sentence him to suffer Death.
His Excellency the Commander in Chief confirms the sentence of death. Hall and Tarrel to the atrocious crime of attempted desertion added that of mutiny and McManus not only deserted himself but became a pilot and leader to others in the same crime, and was on a design of robbery when taken, therefore not entitled to the benefit of the Commander in Chiefs late proclamation: These men are to be hanged tomorrow morning at II oclock in the field near the new Provost at which time and place John Williams of the I st Maryland Regiment and Richard Hollowell of the 9 th Pennsylvania Regiment now under sentence of death are to be executed."
Dr. James Thatcher of the Virginia Division left an account of this execution.
“April 1779 - Five soldiers were conducted to the gallows, according to their sentence, for the crimes of desertion and robbing the inhabitants. A detachment of troops and a concourse of people formed a circle around the gallows, and the criminals were brought in a cart, sitting on their coffins, and halters around their necks. While in this awful situation, trembling on the verge of eternity, three of them received a pardon from the commander in chief (Gen. Washington), who is always tenderly disposed to spare the lives of his soldiers. They acknowledged the justice of their sentence, and expressed the warmest thankfulness and gratitude for their merciful pardon. The two others were obliged to submit to their fate; one of them was accompanied to the fatal spot by an affectionate and sympathizing brother, which rendered the scene uncommonly distressing, and forced tears of compassion from the eyes of numerous spectators. They repeatedly embraced and kissed each other, with all the fervor of brotherly love, and would not be separated till the executioner was obliged to perform his duty, when with a flood of tears, and mournful lamentations, they bade each other an eternal adieu - the criminal trembling under the horrors of an untimely and disgraceful death - and the brother, overwhelmed with sorrow and anguish for one whom he held most dear.”
I had to think about this for a bit...and I keep thinking about it, so I have to reply.
Having never served, I can only imagine the horror of combat.
That single sentence hit home hard.
But there appears to be no doubt as to his guilt, thereby qualifying for the punishment.
What purpose -- noble or practical -- would be served by pardoning him?
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