OPINION:
Seventy years ago tomorrow, Private Eddie Slovik (1920-1945) became the first and only soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion, a military offense that has recently surfaced in the news about Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
Whatever one may think about the status of Sgt. Bergdahl with respect to whether his disappearance from his Afghanistan battlefield unit on June 30, 2009 was an act of desertion and may have led to the deaths of comrades looking for him, one fact is clear: It’s been more than six months since the Pentagon completed its investigation of the Bergdahl matter, and no report has been issued to the public. Indeed, there may never be transparency of any sort in this instance — an amazing turnabout from military history in general and Slovik’s case in particular.
To be sure, desertion was not uncommon in World War II, with 21,049 cases brought before military authorities. Of these, 57 servicemen received death sentences, but Slovik’s was the only one carried out, the rest downgraded to prison terms. Of course, there were executions for murder and rape during the war, but Slovik was the only soldier convicted for a strictly military offense.
Slovik grew up in a Polish-American family in Detroit, his life before military service punctuated by frequent run-ins with the law, beginning at age 12. A high school dropout at age 15, he spent time in the Michigan reform schools, went to prison at age 17 for theft, was paroled a year later, then was jailed for more stealing. When World War II broke out, Slovik was ineligible for the draft because of his criminal record. He got a job with a plumbing firm, married and lived with his wife’s parents for a while and eventually rented a duplex. By November 1943, draft regulations were eased, and Slovik’s 4-F status changed to 1-A. By January 1944 he was in basic training, and eight months later he was shipped out as a rifleman to France.
En route to his 28th Infantry Division, Slovik and a companion he met during basic training allegedly got lost in France during an artillery attack and hooked up with a Canadian military unit for six weeks. Then on Oct. 7, 1944, they were returned to their division, which didn’t press charges because such incidents were not uncommon. A day later, however, Slovik told his superiors that he didn’t like guns, was “too scared and nervous” to fight and if assigned to battle, he would run away again. He penned a lengthy, 180-word note to this effect:
“I, Pvt. Eddie Slovik, confess to desertion of the United States Army. I told my commanding officer my story. I said that if I had to go out again, I’d run away. He said there was nothing he could do for me .”
The more Slovik put in writing, the more he condemned himself to a death sentence. His commanding officer urged him to tear up his confession and return to battle duty and no penalties would be exacted. At each legal phase over the next few weeks before his trial on Nov. 11, the offer of recanting and returning to his assigned duties was made and rejected, conceivably because Slovik believed that, like in other cases of desertion, he would still end up in the brig.
That may well have been the case, except for the context in which these final months of the war in Europe was testimony. From the time of D-Day, the Normandy invasion by the Allies in June, and during the next several months, fighting and loss of life raged, especially after Hitler’s last, all-out gambit in the Battle of the Bulge was initiated in mid-December. To ease a death sentence of an unrepentant deserter in these circumstances clearly met the standard, as one military judge put it, of directly challenging the authority of the government and jeopardizing future discipline.
Even in his trial, in which testimony was offered by another soldier as to Slovik’s actions, Slovik was offered the choice of retracting his confession and returning to the battlefield. He refused. Still, there were reviews of the matter after his trial, first by a general review board, then by a review panel determining whether the trial had met legal requirements and, finally, by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Before Ike approved the penalty on Dec. 23, Slovik again was given the choice of serving in his company “honorably until this war is over,” thereby garnering an honorable discharge and avoiding the death sentence. The offered was rejected once more. Eisenhower made his final order on Jan. 23, and Slovik was executed by a 12-man firing squad on the morning of Jan. 31.
• Thomas V. DiBacco is professor emeritus at American University.
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