“The Deserters: A Hidden

History of World War II” by Charles Glass (The Penguin Press, 380 pgs., $27.95)

Stories about cowardice can be as gripping as those about courage. One tells us about who we’d like to be; the other tells us about who we fear we are.

Nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces during World War II. (The British were in the war much longer.) Some fell into the arms of French or Italian women. Some became black-market pirates. Many more simply broke under the strain of battle.

These men’s stories have rarely been told. During the war, newspapers largely abstained from writing about desertions. The topic was bad for morale and could be exploited by the enemy. In more recent decades the subject has been essentially taboo, as if to broach it would dent the halo around the Greatest Generation.

“The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II,” by the historian and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass, thus performs a service. It is the first book to examine at length the sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it presents are frequently revealing and heartbreaking.

Gen. George Patton wanted to shoot the men, whom he considered “cowards.” Other commanders were more humane. “They recognized that the mind — subject to the daily threat of death, the concussion of aerial bombardment and high-velocity artillery, the fear of land mines and booby traps, malnutrition, appalling hygiene and lack of sleep — suffered wounds as real as the body’s,” Glass writes. “Providing shattered men with counseling, hot food, clean clothes and rest was more likely to restore them to duty than threatening them with a firing squad.”

Thousands of U.S. soldiers were convicted of desertion during the war, and 49 were sentenced to death. (Most were given years of hard labor.) Only one soldier was actually executed, an unlucky private from Detroit named Eddie Slovik. This was early 1945, at the moment of the Battle of the Bulge. Glass observes: “It was not the moment for the supreme Allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, to be seen to condone desertion.”

The book focuses almost exclusively on three individual soldiers, men who respectively abandoned their posts in France, Italy and Africa.

These men’s stories are not uninteresting, but Glass tells them at numbing length in bare, reportorial prose that rarely picks up much resonance. On the rare occasions the author reaches for figurative language, he takes a pratfall: “Combat exhaustion was etched into each face as sharp as a bullet hole.” The lives and times of Glass’ three soldiers slide by slowly, as if you were scanning microfilm. We lose sight of this book’s larger topic for many pages at a time. The men’s stories provide limited points of view. From the author we long for more synthesis and sweep and argument and psychological depth.