In his new book, Deserter, Charles Glass focuses on the AWOL soldiers of WWII:
The British gave deserters an amnesty in 1953, but America never has. Theoretically, deserters who are still missing are still wanted. I was keen to do some comparisons of second-world-war desertion rates with Iraq and Afghanistan but the Ministry of Defence won’t tell me, or anyone else, how many deserters there are. From that point of view it is still taboo.
In his review, Neal Ascherson looks at the punishments doled out for deserting:
In the first world war, the British shot 304 men for desertion or cowardice, only gradually accepting the notion of “shell-shock”. In the United States, by contrast, President Woodrow Wilson commuted all such death
sentences. In the second world war, the British government stood up to generals who wanted to bring back the firing squad (the Labour government in 1930 had abolished the death penalty for desertion). Cunningly, the War Office suggested that restoration might suggest to the enemy that morale in the armed forces was failing. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was persuaded in 1943 to suspend “limitations of punishment”. In the event, the Americans shot only one deserter, the luckless Private Eddie Slovik, executed in France in January 1945. He was an ex-con who had never even been near the front. Slovik quit when his unit was ordered into action, calculating that a familiar penitentiary cell would be more comfortable than being shot at in a rainy foxhole.
His fate was truly unfair, set against the bigger picture. According to Glass, “nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces” during the war.
(Image from Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 
