The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (43 page)

Leeds to most Londoners was nothing more than a bleak outpost of the industrial north, uninviting and uninteresting. “At first,” Scannell wrote, “I hated it.” The squalor of its Victorian slums shocked him, and the local accent “seemed harshly alien, not hostile perhaps, but excluding.” The medical student he had met in London let him sleep on his floor, but he soon moved to “a tiny attic room that leaked rain” in the Chapeltown district. The Chapeltown building turned out to house the North Leeds Communist Party, making it less than ideal for avoiding police scrutiny.
In the freezing winter of early 1946, Scannell pictured Leeds as a battle zone with smog “blinding the city in clouds of yellowish gray like poison gas,” northeast winds “waiting to bayonet you at street corners” and “pavements booby-trapped with ice.”

Leeds, though, came to appeal to him more than London. He wrote that “
in a sense I was born there, or should I say I was re-born there.” His rebirth was as a poet. “
I started to write poems on my own,” he recalled, “and singularly bad they were too, though I did not at the time realize how awful. Life was charged with wonder and danger and promise.” He turned twenty-four on 23 January, unemployed, in hiding and without legal identity.

Kenneth Severs, a PhD candidate at Leeds University and editor of the
Northern Review
, met Scannell in a pub. Through Severs, Scannell obtained an introduction to the university’s celebrated professor of English, Bonamy Dobrée. Dobrée took a liking to the twenty-four-year-old aspiring poet and arranged for him to sit in on university courses, including a tutorial with the literary critic George Wilson Knight. Dobrée and Knight gave his reading more direction: “
For the first time I read Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Forster. I discovered Hopkins and was slap-happy with syllables for weeks afterward.” While pursuing in earnest the education his enlistment had interrupted, he wrote poems, many about Leeds, and sent them to literary journals. He garnered the rejections that were every young poet’s rite of passage, until the left-wing
Tribune
magazine published one. John Middleton Murry’s
Adelphi
and the
Chicago Poetry Journal
followed suit, printing two each. Scannell wrote, “
I was delighted to believe, quite mistakenly, that this was the beginning of a successful literary career.”

•   •   •

Meanwhile, at Westminster, pressure to solve the “deserter problem” grew. Labour member of Parliament Woodrow Wyatt planned to table a question in the House of Commons in November 1946: “To ask the Minister without Portfolio whether he will consider making arrangements to offer some inducement to persuade deserters who have been at large for more than nine months to return to their units.” When party whips prevailed upon him to withdraw a question that would highlight governmental failure to deal with the issue, Wyatt wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee: “
The position seems to be that some twenty thousand deserters are loose in the country without Identity Cards, Ration Books, etc., and are therefore virtually outlaws. . . . It is obviously a situation which no society can tolerate indefinitely.”

The Minister of Defense, Albert Alexander, told Parliament on 22 January 1947 that deserters who surrendered before 31 March would have “
any mitigating circumstances taken into account when their cases are determined.”
This fell short of an amnesty, and the War Office was forced to disclose that only 1,158 men out of 20,000 had turned themselves in during the “leniency period.”

Artists Herbert Read and Augustus John, with writer Osbert Sitwell and others, formed the Deserters Amnesty Campaign.
In a letter to the
Times
of London, they reminded readers of “the almost total failure of the ‘surrender scheme’ announced by the Minister of Defense last January.” They appealed for an amnesty: “We are convinced that the only real solution to the deserter problem, from both the practical and the human points of view, is the granting of a general amnesty to these men—before they drift into becoming full-time criminals.”
At this time, the prime minister’s office noted that, far from deserters turning themselves in, more than seven hundred men a month were adding to their numbers with fresh desertions.

•   •   •

Vernon Scannell’s loose arrangement with Leeds University entitled him to membership in the Student Union, where he took advantage of its sports facilities to train and join the boxing team. He became Northern Universities Champion in three weight divisions: welter, middle and cruiser. His status as a professional remained secret, lest he be disqualified from amateur competition.

Although boxing and literature studies took up much of his time, he had little money and led a lonely existence in his attic room. His ever-present fear of capture, “an overshadowing presence that darkened my consciousness,” revealed itself in his poem “On the Run”:

If sleep should come, the stairs might thunder,

The door burst open, boots lam bone

And split the skin, manacles’ anger

Bite wrists and scratch the brain:

It might be fact or dream exploding.

Either way, it could happen.

One Sunday afternoon, while Scannell read
Crime and Punishment
in his attic, it did happen: “There was a sudden banging of heavy feet on the stairs and the next moment my door burst open and two men in plain clothes charged into the room, grabbed me and pulled me to my feet.” One of the policemen said, “We know all about you.” Bain spent the next “five miserable days” in a “cell with lavatorial tiled walls and a wooden bunk and three grimy-looking blankets.” Military guards took him by train to Aberdeen, where he was put back into uniform in a cell with two other deserters.

The junior officer assigned to defend Bain at the court-martial told him his only option was to plead guilty. Bain wrote to Bonamy Dobrée and George Wilson Knight in Leeds. Both teachers sent books and offered to testify in his defense.

When Bain appeared before a court of three officers, his counsel entered a guilty plea and asked the court to take into consideration his client’s combat record in North Africa and Normandy. The court permitted the defendant to speak, and Bain explained that he had found his nearly five years in the army “both in and out of action, totally destructive of the human qualities I most valued, the qualities of imagination, sensitivity and intelligence.” He had no choice, he said, but to escape.

The president of the court, reading in his notes that the defendant hoped to become a writer, asked him what he wrote. “Poetry,” answered the defendant. He later recounted the court’s reaction: “
And they looked at each other with a wild surmise and said, ‘Well, send him to a psychiatrist. He’s clearly mad.’” The psychiatrist’s report led to his transfer to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental asylum, near Birmingham. The confinement would lead to the poem “Casualty—Mental Ward,” which included,

Something has gone wrong inside my head.

The sappers have left mines and wires behind,

I hold long conversations with the dead.

He remained there for many weeks, during which he twice saw a young captain serving as the unit’s psychiatrist. At their second session, the psychiatrist told him, “If you are ill—and I don’t think you are—then this is the last place to get well.” He referred Bain to a medical board, which would probably release him. The captain advised him to “keep your nose clean in the meantime.” He did as he was told and waited. “
After a short spell,” he wrote, “I was discharged, quite honourably, suffering from ‘an anxiety neurosis.’”

His freedom, so long sought, was tinged with guilt. He wrote,

The shades of all those men who had done nothing worse than I and were now serving long prison sentences rose to accuse me. But they were not my only accusers. I had survived a war in which many men, some of them my friends, and all with as much to live for as I, had been killed; they lay in the sands of Libya or in the orchards and meadows of Normandy and, however clean they kept their noses, no Board would give them their discharge. They, too, accused, and they accuse me still.

A former army colleague told him about the captain they had seen desert from the Mareth Line in 1943. During an artillery barrage, John Bain as company runner had “looked to see how he [the captain] was getting on, and he wasn’t there. He deserted. He’d gone back. He ran away in the middle of an attack. I never knew what happened to him.” Now, he learned that the captain had been promoted to major and was still serving. If he had any qualms about the inequities of military justice that sent privates to the Mustafa Barracks and awarded promotions to officers, they vanished.

THIRTY-TWO

They may not realize it, but often the truth is they have become homesick. They are longing for those upon whose presence and affection they have long depended. They want their wives or mothers.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 334

W
HEN
A
LFRED
W
HITEHEAD’S TRAIN ARRIVED
from Fontainebleau at the Gare de Lyon on 24 July 1945, he took the Metro, which he called the “underground streetcar,” to his apartment in the avenue de la Motte Picquet. In a full-dress uniform and with stolen passes from the prison office, he had little to fear from military police in postwar Paris. He did not know, however, what to expect from Lea. When she opened the door, they stared at each other in silence. Something had changed in the month since he left. It took him a moment to realize what it was. Another American soldier had moved in.

She whispered to him to wait in the bathroom, while she told her new lover to leave because her husband was coming home. Whitehead considered killing them both. His mind, as already evidenced by his contradictory decisions to surrender and escape, was confused. Jealousy demanded revenge, but murder would send him back to the stockade and probably the gallows. He waited in the bathroom. When the other GI left, Lea gave Al a glass of wine. He had nothing to say to her. “I hadn’t been faithful to my wife,” he thought, “so I had no room to talk. But I never did forgive her.” After downing more wine, he fell asleep in her bed.

The summer of 1945 saw Paris gradually returning to normal. Although the black market provided some illegal bounty to the city’s residents, regular supplies of basics were reaching the city from the country and harbors. Bands of deserters were still on the run, but the army had more men available to hunt them down. Whitehead, although he carried concealed weapons, avoided his old gang. He drank more, gambled and sought the company of other women. His dissolute life made him consider, as other deserters had, joining the French Foreign Legion. The Legion asked no questions and, at the end of five years’ service, allowed its veterans to resume life with a new identity.
“But,” he wrote, “I had grown to hate war and was tired of killing.”

•   •   •

On 12 December 1945, a freezing day in Paris, Whitehead was drunk again. He missed Selma, pitied himself and wanted to go home. Walking back to the apartment, he made a decision. He changed out of his civilian clothes, put on his U.S. Army dress uniform and wrote a farewell letter to Lea. Outdoors, he attracted a policeman’s attention by shooting out streetlights with two ivory-handled .25 automatics. The gendarme approached with weapon drawn and ordered the American to raise his hands. “I never put my hands up for the goddamned German Army,” Whitehead claimed to have shouted, “and I sure as hell am not going to put them up for a two-bit French cop.” The policeman attempted to disarm him, but Whitehead claimed he turned over only one pistol. They could negotiate for the other at the station.

The gendarme took him to the police post at 69 rue de Fondary in the Fifteenth Arrondissement. American MPs arrived soon afterward. Whitehead’s account of his arrest differed significantly from that of the MPs who took custody of him. He contended that he had asked the French police to call for the MPs, who came and offered to release him. The MPs’ report stated clearly that the French police apprehended him and called the American authorities on their own initiative. Whitehead contended that he gave a third .25-caliber pistol to the MPs as a souvenir. While driving in the jeep with them to their headquarters, he said he produced two more pistols from his boots. He wrote, “I can still see their shocked faces.” Nothing in their report mentioned the additional weapons. Whitehead went further, claiming he produced yet one more .25 automatic for the “desk sergeant” when he arrived. By Whitehead’s count, he had given over six automatic pistols to French and American police. The official police report said he had only one pistol with three bullets.

Whitehead said he told the gendarmes his name was Joe Givodan, but identified himself immediately to the MPs as Corporal Whitehead. Corporal Richard S. Capone, Company C, 787th MP Service Battalion, provided another version:

I questioned the soldier and he said his name was George and handed me a pass (class “B”) which read George Wasko. The French police turned over to me a 25 Cal. Pistol, Werk Erfurt, Serial No. 2993 and a clip with 3 rounds of ammunition.

I frisked the soldier and found dog tags bearing the name of Alfred T. Whitehead and also a set of Officers dog tags bearing the name of Nixon. I asked him how long he was AWOL and he continued to lie and to say that Whitehead was his buddy. When I asked the soldier his serial number he seemed at a loss of an explanation.