Execution by Protocol
ROSKOLENKO, HARRY
Execution by Protocol The Execution of Private Slovik. By William Bradford Huie. Little, Brown. 247 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Harry Roskolenko Poet and critic; author, "Black Is a Man" This book...
...Tankey tried to dissuade him, but Slovik ran away, "deserting" for twenty-four hours...
...The next morning, Slovik wrote a confession and turned himself in...
...They rented a basement apartment and bought furniture, building their future upon the instalment plan and Eddie's 4-F classification...
...Slovik refused...
...More than a hundred witnesses saw Slovik shot to death...
...Eisenhower ordered the execution to take place in the regimental area, St...
...He said their was nothing he could do for me so I ran away...
...Slovik addressed a letter to General Eisenhower asking for clemency...
...It was merely a formality...
...They attached themselves to a Canadian outfit, worked in their mess for six weeks, then managed on October 8 to rejoin G Company near Rocherath, Belgium...
...She was his wife, his mother, his womb and his ego...
...While under intense shelling, they detrucked, dug in and lost contact with the other replacements...
...The execution of Private Slovik was an example of military bungling, brutality and stupidity, for Slovik was executed by men who did not believe it would be done...
...All he had to do was volunteer to go into the line...
...When he completed his sentence at the Michigan Reformatory in April 1942, he was automatically a 4-F, not subject to the draft...
...He was put into a truck along with eleven other replacements, and they headed for Elbeauf, where they were to be assigned to G Company...
...Huie is indicting the replacement system and the relaxed requirements for service in the infantry...
...But General McNeil said: "His unfavorable civilian record indicates that he is not a worthy subject for clemency...
...Eddie D. Slovik, the 24-year-old dead-end kid executed for desertion under the 58th Article of War...
...But in January 1944, after 14 months of emotional security, Eddie was reclassified, then drafted...
...Marie aux Mines, on January 31, 1945...
...I said that if I had to go out their [Slovik's spelling] again I'd run away...
...Around her Eddie made his world...
...Colonel Sommers took the view: "I didn't think they would execute a deserter, but I thought that if ever they wanted a horrible example this was one...
...He was not a soldier, but a reform-school product who had reformed in the crucible of mother-love...
...He had spent five years in reformatories and jail by the time he was 22...
...He was hardly material for blood and battle...
...His statement regarding his "desertion" is weird...
...On October 8, an hour after he had rejoined G Company, Slovik asked Captain Grotte, "If I leave now, will it be desertion...
...What Slovik witnessed during the six weeks in the cauldron of death may have been responsible for his future actions...
...In fact, he was only looking for love, a real home, a wife...
...He had indulged in petty thievery, taken a few joy-rides in stolen cars, but he was not a cop-hater...
...So is William Bradford Huie courageous in writing this devastating lesson in military protocol...
...They're shooting me for bread and chewing gum 1 stole when I was 12 years old...
...The moral and political meaning of the war was never evident in his correspondence...
...Major Bertolet, one of the reviewing authorities, commented: "If the Army takes a petty criminal and tells him to fight, it is then unfair and inconsistent to hold his civilian record against him...
...Captain Grotte told Tankey that Slovik was deserting...
...On July 12, 1944, he went home on furlough-to see the wreckage...
...author, "Black Is a Man" This book is a challenging and amazing document, comparable in many respects to Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason...
...But General Eisenhower confirmed it...
...Slovik's case was then reviewed by seven Army lawyers...
...He wrote letters between drills and during meals, while on the march and before going to bed...
...It was refused...
...If he stood court-martial, he would get twenty years or the death penalty...
...He couldn't shoot worth a damn...
...It is a violent attack on a legal, military execution, and the accused is the United States, the officers who participated in the general court-martial, and the various reviewing authorities who allowed the death penalty to be carried out on Pvt...
...Slovik, a Kafkaesque creation in fact, had come up from a bad home and a tough past...
...Slovik, accused of cowardice, said: "They just need to make an example out of somebody, and I'm it because I'm an ex-con...
...But the Army had never shot a man for desertion...
...Two weeks later, Eddie was a replacement bound for the 109th Infantry Regiment, attached to the tough, heroic 28th Division-soon to be the mainstay at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge and a real meat-grinding outfit...
...Who was the boy behind serial number 36896415...
...On November 11, 1944, the men participating in Slovik's court-martial voted three times to give him the death penalty, hardly believing it would be carried out...
...Their story about getting lost was accepted...
...Father Cummings, who comforted Slovik until the end, said after Eisenhower's great contribution to military law, "Slovik was the bravest man in the garden that morning...
...She was behind in the rent, and had even pawned her watch so they could eat...
...Antoinette was ill...
...Eddie Slovik disembarked at Omaha Beach on August 20...
...He had, while in mid-ocean, told Tankey that he would never shoot his rifle...
...Henry P. Sommers, the division's judge advocate, tried to talk Slovik out of standing a court-martial...
...Marie aux Mines...
...His touchingly simple letters to Antoinette-he wrote four times a day-are a study of the simple heart's investment in love in our times...
...The accused can answer to their consciences, if they still have any...
...The "marksmen" were reloading for a second try when the doctor finally pronounced him dead...
...General Cota of the 28th Division approved the death penalty...
...She had epileptic seizures...
...Almost everybody had passed the buck, certain that some higher reviewing authority would not confirm the sentence...
...Grotte's answer was "Yes...
...Pvt...
...Thousands of men have been tried and condemned under the 58th Article in the last hundred years, but only one was ever executed under it...
...Even at the execution, an unconscious sadism seemed to be at work: Eleven bullets hit him, but he did not die...
...Slovik was put in the stockade to stand trial...
...He wanted to get back to Antoinette, to the few pieces of furniture, to feel warm in the womb...
...En route, Slovik and his buddy, Tankey, got lost in the military shuffle...
...The barrel was being scraped," he says, "and Slovik was one of the scrapings...
...that man was Slovik, who faced a firing squad one morning in January 1945 in the little French village of St...
...He found a job, worked very hard, saved his money and married Antoinette Wisniewski, a warm, sensitive woman somewhat older than he...
...What was there in Eddie Slovik's past that led him to such an inglorious end...
...I used to steal things when I was a kid, and that's what they are shooting me for...
...He said in part: "I told my commanding officer my story...
...In camp, he was well liked, but he was not a soldier...
...Slovik was taken to Paris and confined in the Caserne Mortier...
...It was a slaughter of the innocents, the helpless kids in khaki who could not soldier, fight or stand up...
...The winter of 1944 saw Germany's last offensive and the brutal slaughter of raw American recruits who had been rushed into the lines to stop von Rundstedt's break-through...
...And I'll run away again if I have to go out their...
...he tried to get up...
...The former 4-F's "from the bottom of the barrel" were piling up the casualty figures...
...No charges were placed against them...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 18
