by Hamish Ross
Little was known in the 1940s and 1950s about the emotional and social effects of the experience of combat on soldiers. In both the UK and USA, there were some case studies of work carried out during the First World War, when the term in use was shell shock. Work of this nature continued on both sides of the Atlantic into the Second World War, when it tended to be called combat fatigue; but this, and earlier work, was concerned with clinical cases of breakdown. The longer-term effects of exposure to combat on men generally was not widely understood.
When he was in the SAS, Malcolm Pleydell, for example, recalled his feelings one night under the desert sky, far behind enemy lines. He wondered how Mayne would find a solicitor’s life after the war compared with the joy of comradeship and the thrill of destroying planes; but he felt the problem would apply to himself: how would routine medicine appeal after the life of a medical officer in the Western Desert? Now, that was what he thought at the time he published his book Born of the Desert in 1945. However, what Pleydell actually reported forty-six years later, in the postscript to the second edition of his book, was that it had not been the dullness or boredom of his civilian job – compared with the excitement of the desert war – that troubled him after the war. He married soon after he returned home at the end of the war; and he needed the support of his wife and both their families for years afterwards.
I still found myself avoiding social gatherings years after that, however, because of the [ac]cumulation of my earlier traumatic experiences as a ship’s doctor in Dunkirk harbour, evacuating the wounded from the British Expeditionary Force, then in Tobruk the following year with the Coldstream Guards and the SAS following that . . .1
Even a medical officer, in 1945, had not been prepared for the long-term effects of traumatic experiences. Not only that, though, Pleydell had been decorated with the MC; so highly motivated, highly competent men could develop the disorder.2
This was brought out sometimes in works of art of the period. The American novelist Norman Mailer had been a combat soldier in the Far East; his powerful novel The Naked and the Dead, which was derived from his own experiences, was published in 1948. In it Mailer describes one of his characters – the tough, highly competent and experienced Sgt Croft – suffering from a recurring nightmare. Then a small number of films of the 1940s also dealt – usually obliquely – with the emotional effects that the Second World War had on combatants. One distinguished film, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), follows the homecoming of three war veterans. One of them, Fred Derry (played by Dana Andrews), a highly decorated aircrew officer, is briefly shown suffering from daytime recall of a combat experience which temporarily blots reality of where he is in the present; and there is a scene of him having a nightmare, reliving the event.3 But the same film makes an important point about the after-effects of war experience in the culture of the time: the symptoms were rarely acknowledged and the individual coped by not talking about it.4
It was to be another generation and another war – one in which the UK was not involved – before there was a serious attempt to gather information on the effects of combat on soldiers, when the ‘National Vietnam Veterans’ Readjustment Study’ took place in the USA. There then followed research studies in both the USA and Australia into the longer-term effects of combat. The symptoms a returning combat soldier might experience for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are covered in the official diagnostic criteria of the American Psychiatric Association. They include persistent re-experiencing of the event through intrusive thoughts or dreams. Then there is avoidance of stimuli associated with it, or numbing of responsiveness, for example, by avoiding thoughts or feelings associated with the event, and there is often a detachment or estrangement from others. In addition, there are persistent symptoms of increased arousal, such as difficulty in falling asleep, irritability or anger, difficulty concentrating and hypervigilance.
Australian forces, including the Australian SAS, took part in the Vietnam war; and work involving the longer-term effects of their experiences on veterans of the Vietnam War has continued for three decades. Indeed, the Australian National Centre for War-Related PTSD has been established. The centre describes three groups of symptoms that can affect veterans with combat experience, which are broadly similar to the American categories. One is re-experiencing the trauma through repetitive thoughts, memories or dreams. The second is avoidance of reminders, withdrawal from social interaction and difficulty in responding emotionally to others. Thirdly, heightened arousal, reduced sleep, increased jumpiness and anger. In addition, post-traumatic stress disorder is often associated with other problems such as anxiety, depression and alcohol abuse.
Mayne was first in action in the Syrian campaign in 1941; he continued through the North African desert, Sicily, Italy, France and Germany; for five years of battle experience, he operated at a very high level of effectiveness. But what makes even the most effective of soldiers vulnerable – ‘many Victoria Cross winners, for example, also have PTSD’5 – is not the presence or absence of fear: it is something that happens as a result of the bonding and comradeship that exists among men in combat. Jonathan Shay is a psychiatrist who has worked extensively with American combat veterans:
We can never fathom the soldier’s grief if we do not know the human attachment which battle nourishes and then amputates. As civilians we have no native understanding of the soldier’s grief. Combat calls forth a passion of care among men who fight beside each other that is comparable to the earliest and most deeply felt family relationships.6
Now, Pleydell felt that the safest place to be under fire was with Mayne because ‘Paddy . . . took such good care of the people who were under him’. But even the most effective of leaders will lose men, and when this happens deep emotions are then triggered.
Mayne’s great friend in No. 11 Commando and L Detachment was Eoin McGonigal; he was ‘Paddy’s soulmate, as it were’, as Jimmy Storie put it;7 and Mrs McGonigal’s moving letter of thanks to him for trying to find Eoin’s grave would confirm that. David Stirling made a perceptive comment in relation to Mayne’s reaction to McGonigal’s death: ‘Perhaps due to the family friendship, Paddy also felt in some way responsible for Eoin, yes, I’m sure there was a little of that.8’ This of course was irrational, but it is by no means unusual. For, basing his analysis on case histories of veterans, Shay found that grief and guilt come together, and ‘Self-blame seems almost universal after the death of a special comrade, regardless of the presence or absence of a “real basis” for it.’9 McGonigal was his close friend, but, as the years passed, there followed a long list of lost comrades; and there was a cost which Mayne paid. Fraser McLuskey’s calling as a padre alerted him to this.
In addition, he had a natural sensitivity. I’m quite sure he felt with the men he commanded. If they were in trouble, I’m sure if they suffered from a raid, he would suffer with them. Although he was so good and big and strong and apparently fearless, he wasn’t unfeeling – certainly not. So often, people who are very courageous and efficient are somewhat cold, but he wasn’t.10
From time to time, indications of this come through in Mayne’s letters. After the raid on Capo Murro di Porco, where Caton was killed, he wrote, ‘We had only one man killed in our first operation and he, poor chap, had been with me right since the time we started as a Commando in Galashiels. I was very fond of him.’11
However, the earliest reliable evidence that Mayne, years later, may have experienced and re-experienced intrusive recollections of the war came from a colleague in the legal profession. James Lindsay, Probate Registrar, wrote: ‘He had his moments of brooding and strange sensitivity, but to those who knew the depths of his complex character these were understandable and fell into place.’12 Withdrawal and brooding, according to those who have worked with combat veterans, are characteristics of the power of intrusive memories. For the combat veteran who has been through the experiences of loss, grief and pain, as Shay puts it, ‘The experiential quality of reality drains from
the here and now; the dead are more real than the living’.13 At the time, Douglas Mayne felt that Lindsay had accurately expressed what he described as his brother’s complex character.14 In 1960, Marrinan spoke to some of Mayne’s former colleagues and friends and said of Mayne’s emotional state, ‘the transition from guerrilla leader to Law Society official induced a mental complex akin to schizophrenia and at times even his best friends became exasperated’.15 However, Marrinan had been a barrister not a psychiatrist, and while his deductions were wrong, his description of Mayne’s symptoms was probably accurate. For, thirty-six years later, looking back on the development of understanding about combat-related stress, Shay wrote:
Combat veterans in our programme who first made contact with the mental health system in the early 1970s were almost universally diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, if first seen in the late 1970s as manic-depressive or schizo-affective, and if first seen in the mid-1980s as suffering from PTSD.16
So the earliest descriptions of the perceptions of colleagues and friends of Mayne are consonant with later findings on the experiences of combat veterans.
Then there is a circumstantial indication that Mayne was troubled and may have suffered from intrusive images or thoughts: he studied hypnosis. The earliest reference to Mayne’s interest in hypnosis came from Marrinan, simply as a statement; he made no attempt to account for it. Basically, Marrinan found little of interest to write about in Mayne’s postwar years. He assumed – as Pleydell had assumed earlier – that the problem after the war would have been boredom, and that Mayne did, ‘anything for kicks’. But Mayne had too active a mind to be bored for long. As he wrote in his journal, ‘I can be lazy enough to enjoy it, or possibly to tolerate is a better word. I don’t think anyone no matter how lazy could enjoy it.’ So Marrinan simply left it that Mayne dabbled in hypnosis. Five years later, one of Mayne’s friends, Jake Auterson, reported that Mayne, ‘had said that he had spent quite some time studying it and wanted to use me a subject’.17 Mayne, of course, gave no clue as to the nature of his interest in hypnosis.
But he was eclectic in his reading. There was discussion with acquaintances and friends on wide-ranging topics. Among Mayne’s papers is a letter from an acquaintance, ‘knowing of your thirst for literary knowledge’, sending an enclosure to him.18 It is quite possible that Mayne learned, through friends in the medical profession, or had read that hypnosis had been practised by medical therapists in the First World War, and to a lesser degree in the Second World War, as part of psychotherapy. Charles Myers, for example, had written in the Lancet of the value of hypnosis in the treatment of shell shock, and again in 1940, in his book Shell Shock in France 1914–18, he wrote of its use, ‘in particular for mental reintegration or re-synthesis of dissociated or repressed memories’. In 1949, Watkins produced a detailed description of the therapeutic use of hypnosis in the treatment of war neurosis. Interestingly, decades later there was a renewed interest in the use of hypnosis in the treatment of trauma with Vietnam veterans. Etzel Cardeña of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Services, in the USA, referred to studies which suggest that there was a degree of efficacy in the use of hypnosis with Vietnam veterans with PTSD.19 Nowadays, relaxation techniques would be commonly known about and practised, but in the 1940s and 1950s specialised knowledge was the only source from which to find ways of self-help. To have read about hypnosis was one thing, to practise it was something else. Present-day practitioners would not recommend self-hypnosis without professional advice. But, apparently, once a person has taken the trouble to learn the elements of self-hypnosis, practice can enable one to achieve a state of deep relaxation.20
Then Mayne’s family had indications that all was not well with him: he and Douglas fell out; and he showed displays of anger, not against individuals, but vented on objects, for example, when working in the grounds of his home. This underlying anger also highlights the difficulty of forming a relationship with a woman. Mark Creamer has carried out a lot of research with Australian combat veterans and he elaborated:
The symptoms of PTSD, of course, militate against a healthy relationship. The numbing and withdrawal make the person seem uncaring, cold, and hard to relate to; the anger is very difficult for partners to deal with: alcohol is often used by the PTSD sufferer as a way of coping with the symptoms, also causing problems for the relationship.21
Then the family were very much aware of another significant change in Mayne’s behaviour since before the war: he had difficulty in sleeping. He was awake at all hours of the night, and he was often very late in going to bed; yet he was never unable to get up for work the following day. Evidence of this wakefulness also comes from some of the entries in his Antarctic journal. But this symptom, in a cruelly ironic way, was a result of his superlative skills on the battlefield continuing into civilian life. This sensitivity to threat in combat, carried on afterwards becomes maladaptive behaviour; the person is hypervigilant all the time and tends to be very sensitive to any outside noises.22 An Australian study of combat veterans suffering from PTSD showed that difficulty in sleeping was one of the most commonly reported problems; and the persistence of the problem is very long-lasting. In the mid-1990s, a survey showed that 36 per cent of Vietnam veterans with PTSD slept less than five hours a night. Then an extended study got under way with a hundred veterans, whose average age was forty-eight years – these middle-aged men had been in their late teens or early twenties when they were in combat. American case studies also confirm the persistence of sleep problems. Shay wrote:
It is difficult, however, for anyone who has never been in combat to grasp the extent to which vigilance invades sleep. . . . Survival skills, such as vigilant sleep, brought back into the civilian worlds of family and employment, are actually more destructive of the veteran’s well-being than the intrusive persistence of the traumatic moment.23
One of Mayne’s officers in 1 SAS, Roy Close, gives some insight into the effects of vigilance invading sleep when the regiment worked in France, and they were hiding in the forest in occupied territory, living with the perpetual fear of being discovered:
I guess that I spent more time awake at night listening for suspicious noises (you realise then how many noises there are in woods at night) than I was asleep. And that went on for weeks; and you didn’t know that at the time you were getting tired, but you were getting tired. Later you get a reaction to that.24
Mayne was one of Britain’s most highly decorated soldiers of the Second World War; and it is interesting to hold up a mirror to his transatlantic counterpart by glancing at an assessment that Roger J. Spiller, US Army Command and General Staff College, made of America’s most highly decorated soldier. On the face of it, Audie Murphy was more of a contrast than a comparison with Mayne. Rejected by the Marine Corps and Airborne units, slight of stature and five feet six inches in height, he enlisted as an infantryman, was promoted to the rank of sergeant in the Italian campaign and came to the notice of his superiors as a soldier who ‘possessed extraordinary combat sense’.25 In France, after his best friend was killed, he carried out an attack which earned him the Distinguished Service Cross. Commissioned in October 1944, he was later wounded in action and in January 1945 gained the Medal of Honor. Feted by the American media after the war, and without educational qualifications, he accepted an invitation from the actor James Cagney, went to Hollywood and became established in the film industry. Murphy later wrote, ‘I did not want to be an actor. It was simply the best offer that came along.’ Spiller traced the later effects of his war experiences: Murphy’s marriage lasted one year; he had an outburst of explosive violence over a trivial incident at traffic lights, attacking two men. Years later he was cleared of attempted murder after a brawl in a bar. However, he did write of his war experiences and put on record what he saw as the failure of society, and the military in particular, to prepare soldiers for postwar life. ‘They took army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians imme
diately and let them sink or swim.’ Spiller summed it up:
Decades after the war, he still could not relax. He had chronic stomach complaints, sensitivity to loud noises, and frequent nightmares. He always kept the bedroom light on at night and a loaded pistol by his bed. Sometimes he carried the pistol.26
The persistency of Murphy’s symptoms continued until his death in an air crash in 1971.
Most veterans who suffered from the after-effects of war experience in the two world wars of the twentieth century coped with it on their own by not talking about it, and also with the support of their families. This is what Mayne appears to have done; and in fact he handled his problems very well. He kept the same job, and while at times it bored him, it gave a structure to his life and often absorbed him.27 Then he developed strategies to help manage intrusive images and memories, for example, by finding ways to induce deep relaxation; and he developed hobbies and interests. Although he did not have a partner, he had the strong support of a large family. In most respects he managed his problems very well. What he did not do – and what he had intended to do when he went on the Antarctic Survey – was to write about the growth of the unit he had commanded.
As the last veterans of the wartime SAS fade away, the lack of a companion to Pleydell’s Born of the Desert is heightened. If Mayne had written (in whatever genre) his account of the growth of the unit, it would have given perspectives from both the policy and operational levels of the SAS that no one else could give. And it would have curbed the tendency to substitute fancy for fact about him. Even if he found that the novel, with its structure, character and plot was not the form for him, he could have written a personal account. Apart from recall, he had written sources in his home: the chronicle of the regiment, ‘Birth, Growth and Maturity of 1st SAS Regiment’, with the accounts of raids and copies of his written reports – material that would not be in the public domain for years – as well as papers and letters. It was unusual for him not to follow up on his intentions. But the reason was probably that to do so, in the early years, would have evoked too much of the past. This is exactly what a former lieutenant-colonel with a lot of combat experience in the United States Special Forces, the Green Berets, found. It took about ten years before, as he put it, his mind was able to give him the information that allowed him to write about his experiences.28 Now, it is the case that, in 1960, Marrinan reproduced in his book what he claimed was an account that Mayne had written of his first raid on Wadi Tamet airfield: ‘Paddy began to write his own so-casual account of this remarkable exploit.’29 Apparently, it is about one thousand words in length. However, no trace of the manuscript exists in Mayne’s papers; so what happened to it, or even if it was Mayne’s work, is unknown.