The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (14 page)

Bain returned to the communal cell after his three days’ isolation, secure in the knowledge that he had survived PD One and could do it again.

No news reached the inmates, apart from what little seeped through in censored letters from their families. Bain did not know that his friend Hughie Black and the rest of the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders were fighting that summer in Sicily. After Bain left them at Wadi Akarit, the Gordons had advanced north up the Tunisian coast. Tunis fell on 12 May 1943, ending the North African campaign. The 51st Highland Infantry Division disembarked for Malta on 5 July, spent three days near Valletta and landed unopposed on the Sicilian beaches on 10 July. The British and Americans achieved victory in Sicily on 17 August. But, as in North Africa, they failed to prevent the bulk of the Axis forces from escaping to fight again.

Chalky White, who seemed privy to every rumor circulating in the barracks, told Bain that a second front was about to open in Europe. The army had begun recruiting men for the invasion even from military prisons. Soldiers willing to fight again would have their sentences remitted for the duration. Bain had doubts.

The steady cruelty of the regime persisted. “More days passed, each an ugly replica of the one that had gone before,” Bain wrote. Bain’s friend from the Durham Light Infantry, Bill Farrell, collapsed during drill. The sergeants took him away, and Chalky White told Bain later, “Bill’s kicked the bucket, the bastards killed him. I’ll get one of them fuckers for this, I swear to God.” White and the other SUSs, however, were powerless.

Bain, whose hatred of the guards was growing “like a malignant flower,” wrote,

It was outrageous that the mean, stupid and sadistic staff, not one of whom had ever been within range of any missile more dangerous than a flying cork, should be able to abase, mock and abuse men who were, in many cases, their physical, moral and intellectual superiors or at least had been tested in circumstances of pain and terror beyond the imaginings of their present captors and whose failures surely merited something other than this kind of punishment.

At the daily ten-minute Communication Parades, the men could not speak about Farrell’s death within earshot of the staff sergeants. Instead, they rehearsed the formulaic exchanges of a suburban cocktail party. “
Where do you come from?” Bain asked a man facing him.

“The Midlands. Near Coventry. What’s left of it.”

The man said he had read that American privates in Britain were paid more than British officers. “No wonder they’re fucking all our women.”

Bain asked, “How’d you get anything to read? Who gave it to you?”

The man from Coventry explained that the regulations, “the bit that Babbage never reads out,” allowed any prisoner with more than fifty-six days inside to request a book or magazine. All Bain had to do was ask one of the “screws.” Bain considered which staff sergeant to approach, settling on Brown. Brown, the short sergeant who had advised him how best to use his blankets in solitary, “was probably the least overtly hostile and sadistic.” Bain found a chance two days later, when Brown took charge of the cell. “Excuse me, Staff,” he said. Brown, startled that an inmate would “speak before spoken to,” said, “Well?”

“I wondered if I could get something to read,” Bain dared, with the innocence of Oliver Twist asking, “More.”

“And what put that into your head?” Bain answered that the regulations allowed him books and magazines. Brown demanded to know who had told him that. Bain protected his source, saying only that it was someone he did not know on Communication Parade. Peeved, Brown left to find something for Bain to read. He returned a few minutes later and threw a magazine in Bain’s direction. Bain looked at it in the near-darkness of the cell, suddenly seeing that the letters were in Arabic. Brown grinned. “Satisfied?”

Bain lunged, but Chalky White grabbed him before he got close to Brown in the doorway. Another prisoner, Ron Lewis, held him down. Brown slammed the door behind him, and Bain yelled, “You little shit! I’ll kill you!”

Lewis and White let him up. Lewis warned him that the screws would “have you strapped in a body-belt before your fucking eyes are open. Then they’ll kick the shit out of you.” He said it had happened to a friend of his in the Black Watch. Bain realized he should have kept his temper to avoid more time in solitary and a savage beating. Pondering what awaited him made him so ill that he could not eat the next morning’s breakfast. At the first muster, he waited for his name to be called. Nothing happened. He assumed Brown had not yet had time to submit a charge sheet, so they would come for him later.

Chalky White said, “You scared the shit out of the little bugger. He’s not put you on a fizzer ’cos he’s so bloody scared.” Lewis reminded him that, while Brown might be afraid to go against Bain one to one, he had “the whole fucking army behind him.” Whether White was right or wrong, he had saved Bain from a beating. In his poem “Compulsory Mourning,” Bain wrote,

But I’ll get out and then I’ll drink to you

Chalky and Jim—and this I hope is true:

As long as I am able to survive,

While I still breathe, I’ll keep you two alive.

A few days passed without Bain being placed on a charge. When Staff Sergeant Brown took the rotation over Bain’s cell one evening, he came in and gave him a book. Before Bain could speak, he left and bolted the door. The book was in English: George Moore’s
Esther Waters,
which Bain told Chalky was a novel. Chalky said it proved Brown was “shit-scared.” Bain did not believe it. Thinking that Brown was making amends for his cruelty with the Arabic magazine, he wrote, “He was capable of remorse and of compassion.”

Some of the prisoners noticed “three strange officers” coming out of Captain Babbage’s office one day, further igniting the rumor that the army was preparing to reprieve those who would fight in Europe. A few weeks later, Bain was called in to meet the Sentence Review Board. A colonel and two majors interrogated him in Captain Babbage’s office, without Babbage. The colonel explained that a second front was about to open “somewhere in Europe.” Many soldiers lacked combat experience, and “battle-hardened” troops were needed. Bain’s division, then training in Britain for the invasion, was understrength. The colonel said, “We need every battle-experienced man we can find, and so we’ve been taking a look around various punishment establishments to see if we can find chaps who’ve learnt their lesson and are prepared to soldier on.”

With Bain’s file in front of him, the colonel said he deserved his punishment: “It was a damned bad show. Your let your comrades down.” Then he asked the important question: would Bain return to his battalion and fight?

“Yessir.”

Later, Bain would say, “
I’d have promised to be a human torpedo or anything to get out.” Having served only six months of his three-year sentence, Bain left the Mustafa Barracks that afternoon.

After Bain’s release, Scottish Labour member of parliament Thomas Hubbard asked the secretary of war in the House of Commons whether he was “
satisfied with the living conditions obtaining at Mustafa Detention Barracks, Alexandria.” The war secretary, Sir Percy Grigg, responded, “I am not aware of any grounds for complaint.”

NINE

Although most of the mentally and emotionally unfit men are weeded out before they get into the Army or in their early days at training camp, severe advanced training conditions and combat itself can put new strains upon any man.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, pp. 294–95

S
TORMS MADE MANY
of the U.S. 2nd Infantry’s troops, including Alfred T. Whitehead, seasick on the USS
Florence Nightingale
as she made her way from New York to Ireland. The 2nd Infantry Division had been fortunate in one respect: German U-boats that patrolled the North Atlantic to sink Allied shipping had not attacked their convoy. At midnight on 21 October 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the 38th Infantry Regiment disembarked and took a train to their new bivouac in the County Down town of Newry.

Whitehead, whose ancestors had come from Ulster, discovered an affinity with the Irish. He made friends easily, and he enjoyed drinking with local men in the pubs. Accommodation was primitive, straw mattresses on wooden planks for beds and chamber pots for body waste. A diet of cabbage, turnips and sprouts disappointed most of the men, but it satisfied Whitehead. He enjoyed dark beer in Ireland’s pubs, and he happily ate fish and chips. As self-appointed barber and tailor to his Headquarters Company, he earned extra cash to spend on drink and women.

While most GIs got on well with the Irish, the Americans were not universally cordial to one another. Fights broke out between men of the 2nd and 5th Divisions. After some 5th Division soldiers attacked a youngster from the 2nd, Whitehead went as part of a forty-eight- man platoon to clear the 5th Division troops out of town. Marching from one pub to another, they told the men of the 5th, “We’ve had enough of your bullshit, and if we catch any more of you assholes in this town, we’ll kill you.”

Training included aircraft identification, map reading, hand-to-hand fighting and the construction of booby traps. Whitehead took some of his leaves in Belfast, where he tried and failed to pick up Irish girls. Among the few diversions from the interminable Irish rain were touring United Services Organizations (USO) troupes with singers the soldiers recognized from radio shows at home.

On 1 April 1944, the 2nd Division assembled in the Mall at Armagh for a major address. The speaker turned out to be the Third U.S. Army commander, General George S. Patton. “Old Blood and Guts” (or, in the troops’ words, “Our blood, his guts”) gave a rousing speech: “Remember this. If you can’t stick the son of a bitch in the ass, shoot him in the ass as he runs away.” Whitehead liked Patton’s “colorful command of four letter words.” The general’s admonitions about the hazards ahead, though, hinted to Whitehead that he might be killed.

From Northern Ireland, on 17 May, Whitehead was shipped along with the rest of his division to a marshaling camp in Wales, where his company lived in wooden huts beside a cheese factory whose fumes sickened the Americans. Mornings were for calisthenics, afternoons for combat instruction. British-trained American commandos taught raiding skills, including use of the garrote for slicing off heads. The lessons were nothing if not realistic. One young soldier was killed in a not-so-mock bayonet charge. “
As rough as we were,” Whitehead wrote, “and as dangerous as the training was, I could see that we would need it all in the days ahead.”

Whitehead began an affair with a Welsh redhead whose husband was fighting the Japanese in Asia. “
I never knew what tomorrow would hold,” he wrote, “so I took every day as it came. War does strange things to people, especially their morality.” For Whitehead, though, the war had yet to begin.

On 3 June 1944, the training and the waiting came to an end. The 2nd Infantry Division boarded invasion craft and cruised from ports in Wales into the English Channel. While they hovered with thousands of other ships in the waters between England and France, rough weather postponed the invasion. Naval commanders stood ready for the order to shell the coast and deliver the young warriors to the edge of Adolf Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

•   •   •

Every Allied soldier who survived the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 took home unique memories of the “longest day.” Many recorded their impressions in diaries, letters, audiotapes and books. Alfred T. Whitehead would write his recollections thirty-seven years later, in 1981. Although his 2nd Division landed at Omaha Beach on 7 June, D-Day plus 1, his memoir stated that he took part in the D-Day invasion itself. He wrote that he and eleven other soldiers from the 2nd Division “
wound up joining the 116th Regimental Combat Team of the Big Red One.”
The 116th Regimental Combat Team, part of the 29th Infantry Division, had been loaned to the 1st Division to give it extra strength on D-Day and to provide fire cover for engineers clearing the beaches and roads inland for troops and equipment.

The Big Red One had already fought in North Africa and Sicily, making its men who were not replacements America’s most experienced fighters. Many 1st Division troops were resentful at being selected to fight again, when men who had never fired a shot were kept in reserve. The 1st and the inexperienced 29th would spearhead the American assault on Omaha Beach on 6 June.

Whitehead wrote a lengthy account of his participation in the invasion. At 2:30 on the morning of 6 June, he claimed, he was on board a troopship in the English Channel, when a loudspeaker announced the invasion. The men assembled their packs, each of which contained “
a raincoat, gas mask, K-rations and a few other odds and ends.” Whitehead equipped himself with an arsenal: five hand grenades, a trench knife, a .45-caliber pistol and a Thompson submachine gun. “
We were instructed to rip off all patches and military insignia of rank,” he wrote. “Non-coms could be recognized only be [
sic
] a horizontal strip of white across the back of their helmet, while the officers’ mark was vertical. Other then [
sic
] that, we all looked the same—just one long wave of drab olive green fatigues.”

Whitehead hoped that the B-17 Flying Fortresses overhead would destroy German defenses before he landed. They didn’t. German shore batteries unleashed the fury of their guns on the first wave of Americans. Whitehead, part of the second wave aboard a wooden-decked Landing Craft, Assault (LCA), saw his comrades slaughtered in the water and on the beach. Company A of the 116th Regiment lost more than 90 percent of its men, killed or wounded, within ten minutes. That was at 6:30 in the morning. An hour later, Whitehead’s LCA cruised toward the beach. “Onward our wave rushed past rows of wrecked and burning landing craft, with underwater obstacles and mines jutting out above the water all over,” he wrote. German 88-millimeter shells exploded along the beach and on the LCA’s line of approach. As the navy crew maneuvered as close as it dared, a sergeant ordered the men off. The bow ramp descended and the men jumped.