• • •
Neither the 51st Division at sea nor the troops in Egypt knew of Auchinleck’s request to reintroduce the death penalty for those among them who might desert. It was kept secret from the public for the same reasons that Grigg opposed the death penalty itself: it would harm military morale, make the public more suspicious of the army command (which was held in low esteem by public and press alike at that time, as Cabinet minutes noted) and give the enemy a propaganda tool. Grigg explained in a memo to Churchill, “If legislation is necessary, the facts and figures must be serious. But if they are serious, we can’t afford to tell them either to our friends or our enemies.” Moreover, Commonwealth troops serving alongside the British were not subject to the death penalty. Changing the law would mean that an Australian and a British soldier deserting together would receive very different punishments: the Australian would receive three to five years in prison, while the Briton would be shot.
The Australian and New Zealand commanders demonstrated more concern for their men’s morale than their British counterparts, who in correspondence complained of their soldiers’ “softness in education and living and bad training.” The first units to establish forward clearing stations for psychiatric cases near the front were the 2nd New Zealand and the 9th Australian Divisions. By allowing the men to sleep and talk over their fears with physicians, the Australian and New Zealand medical staffs helped up to 40 percent of the psychological casualties back into the field. The British followed suit in August, when the Royal Army Medical Corps’ 200th Field Ambulance placed an “Army Rest Centre” near the Alamein Line. Brigadier General G. W. B. James, the psychiatrist who probably originated the term “battle exhaustion,” wrote that of the men treated for it “a fairly constant 30% returned fairly satisfactorily to combatant duty.”
On 18 July, the Highland Division’s convoy dropped anchor at Cape Town. For the first time in a month, the men set foot on dry land. White South Africans in English-speaking Cape Province gave them an enthusiastic welcome. On 19 July, while division bagpipers paraded through the city, Auchinleck sent a second entreaty from Cairo to the Cabinet for help in countering the mass desertions after Tobruk: “Recent desertions show alarming increase even amongst troops of highest category. Present punishments that can be awarded insufficient deterrent. Would stress that cases where deserter takes truck containing food water and means of transport of his comrades are far more serious than similar cases during last war.”
A week later, the Highlanders went ashore again at Durban to the airs of the 7th Black Watch’s kilted pipers. From Durban, the ships cruised north up the coast of East Africa to Aden. In the waters off Britain’s colony on the Yemeni shore, the convoy divided. Some of the ships went east to Iraq and India, the rest north through the Red Sea toward Egypt.
On 14 August, the 51st Highland Division disembarked at Port Tewfik. Bain’s subsequent poem, “Port of Arrival,” recorded the impressions of a foreign soldier landing at the southern gateway to the Suez Canal:
The place we see
Is just as we imagined it would be
Except its furnishings are somehow less
Spectacular, more drab, and we confess
To disappointment, something like a sense
Of loss, of being cheated.
The Highlanders settled into the desert west of the canal city of Ismailia near a village called Qassassin. Their base comprised fifty camps, each a rectangle a thousand yards long and five hundred wide, with identical dug-in tents, latrines and water towers. Here began a period of desert training and acclimatizing men from the highlands of Scotland to the Egyptian summer. The troops learned to navigate the trackless, barren sands with compasses aided at night by the stars and during the day by the sun. For a short period each day, they marched without helmets, caps or shirts for their skins to absorb sunlight without burning.
In his comrades’ interaction with local villagers, Bain observed racial hatreds that he had not until then suspected. Men from Scottish slums, themselves subject to abuse by classes above theirs, humiliated the local population. Bain recalled, “I do remember being very shocked by the attitude to the Egyptians, when we landed in Egypt. This was general all through the army. They were simply called wogs, and they were fair game. They were kicked around, beaten up, reviled.”
Winston Churchill and the chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, had flown to Egypt just ahead of the Highland Division. The day after the Highlanders arrived, Churchill dismissed Major General Auchinleck from his dual posts as commander in chief Middle East and Eighth Army commander. He and Brooke appointed General Sir Harold Alexander C-in-C Mideast and placed General William Gott in command of the Eighth Army. General Gott, however, was killed when two German Messerschmitts attacked the transport plane taking him to Cairo. The officer chosen to replace him was a wiry general with a distinctly unmilitary falsetto voice named Bernard Law Montgomery.
“Monty,” who assumed command on 13 August, made immediate changes to the Eighth Army characterized by his declaration, “There will be no more belly-aching and no more retreats.” Morale improved thanks to Montgomery’s contagious confidence, the delivery of new American tanks and the failure of the Axis to exploit its victory at Tobruk by pushing through Alamein to Alexandria and Cairo.
Many of the post-Tobruk deserters were returning to the army, amid signs that Britain was not losing Egypt after all. There were too many of them to punish at mass courts-martial, which would attract publicity and undermine the myth of the universally brave British Tommy. Moreover, the Eighth Army needed them. Experienced soldiers were more useful at the front than in prison. Privates were taken back without penalty, beyond the abuse their sergeants meted out. Noncommissioned officers were reduced to privates and put back into their units. Some of the more resourceful deserters, who had lived off the land in the delta, went into the newly created Special Air Service (SAS) and Long Range Desert Group, where their survival skills and ingenuity were put to good use. Some deserters held out, as Major Douglas H. Tobler discovered while gathering intelligence in the desert. In September, he met a band of men “who for their own reasons had deserted their units or perhaps made no effort to get back to their own lines after getting lost during an engagement with the enemy.” Tobler, who had not come to arrest them, noted that they were “glad to be out of the fighting, content to live by their wits knowing it was unlikely anyone would check their credentials.”
• • •
While Bain was training at the camp near Qassassin, the division received an unexpected visit from Winston Churchill. The prime minister reviewed the troops and wrote afterward, “The 51st Highland Division was not yet regarded as ‘desert worthy,’ but these magnificent troops were now ordered to the Nile front.”
The “Nile front” was, for the 5/7th Gordons and the rest of the division’s 153rd Brigade, the desert south of the road between Cairo and the pyramids. Bain recalled taking the train there from Alexandria: “An Arab was selling hard boiled eggs and bread, and they simply took his entire stock and threw him off the train.” Near the Mena House, Egyptian khedive Ismail’s nineteenth-century country lodge that had become a fashionable pyramid-side hotel, the 153rd Brigade dug trenches and constructed other defenses to protect Cairo. Their exertions were wasted, because Monty was no longer planning to defend Cairo. The time had come to commit soldiers like John Bain to an all-out offensive.
THREE
On the average the men from the northwestern part of the United States get the highest scores [on the Army General Classification Test], the men from the southeast the lowest.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 189
STEVE WEISS BLACKMAILED HIS FATHER for permission to join the army, but Alfred T. Whitehead of Tennessee claimed that he deceived his widowed mother to achieve the same end. Whitehead asked her to sign papers for his entry into the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),
a New Deal program for the Depression’s unemployed to plant forests and establish state parks. For a penniless youngster like Whitehead, the CCC’s monthly pay of $30 ($25 of which went directly to the parents) made it an attractive option. Or so his mother, who was raising six children in a backwoods cabin, imagined. Whitehead related in his privately printed memoir, Diary of a Soldier, that he waited until she had signed the document before telling her the truth: he was becoming a soldier.
Whitehead had left home before, when he was fourteen. Beatings by his “heavy handed stepfather” forced him to run away. In the town of Lebanon, in Tennessee’s Wilson County, a family of moonshiners took him in and put him to work driving a truck. He learned dice and poker at their gambling den. “Once in a while, they cut a guy’s throat,” Whitehead wrote, “just to keep their reputation for being tough.” Being tough appealed to the young Whitehead, whose upbringing required a thick hide.
His coal miner father, Artie Whitehead, had been crushed to death in an underground accident. Alfred wrote that he shed tears at his father’s funeral, which he remembered as taking place when he was four years old. In fact, he was older. His Social Security and service records give his date of birth as 31 January 1922, which made him four in 1926. Artie Whitehead had a daughter in 1927, when Alfred was five. And the U.S. Census reported him as living with his family in Putnam County, Tennessee, in 1930. Alfred T. Whitehead was at least eight, if not older, when his father died. This was the first of many inconsistencies between Whitehead’s memory and the historical record.
Artie Whitehead was interred in “the family cemetery” at Silver Point, Tennessee, “with generations of relatives: Whitehead, Hatfield, Sadler, and Presley.” Alfred’s mother returned by train to Buffalo Valley with her children to live near “the one room, stone chimney, log house where I was born.” Young Whitehead’s rural upbringing was typical for the impoverished southern hills of the time. His family sent him to school only a few weeks a year, “just enough to keep the authorities off their backs.” Even by the standards of the Depression-era South, his was a brutal childhood. Alfred’s great- grandfather, Wily Whitehead, who was “as old as the hills and senile,” lived in a henhouse with a rope tied around his waist to keep him in. Their stepfather treated the six Whitehead children still living at home so harshly that the county assumed custody of them for a time. Young Alfred enjoyed rare moments of freedom, usually alone fishing or shooting in the woods. For the most part, he wrote, his mother and stepfather robbed him of his youth:
They had me working in the fields from sunup to sundown: plowing, clearing land, and helping to make moonshine whiskey by the time I was nine. Other times, my stepfather would hire me out as a laborer to other farmers for fifty cents a day. Then he’d take all the money I made and drink it up, gamble it away, or spend it whoring around South Carthage, depending on the mood he was in.
The wartime army offered an escape from backwoods poverty and abuse. It was unlikely Whitehead needed his mother’s permission, though, to join it. His service records put his enlistment date at 11 April 1942. At that time, he was twenty. Parental consent was required only for volunteers younger than eighteen. Just as he must have been older than four at his father’s funeral, he was more than eighteen in 1942. Yet depicting himself as underage stressed his role as victim in the saga he was making of his life. He portrayed his departure from his mother in poignant terms: “She followed me all the way out to the front gate by the road, crying, and telling me that I had better get a good insurance policy in the Army. I couldn’t help remembering how she and my stepfather had squandered my dead father’s insurance money and property.”
For many relatively well-off young Americans, like Steve Weiss, the army was pure hardship. To Alfred T. Whitehead, it was liberation. The training and discipline were light compared to farm labor. The army supplied three meals a day, regular rations of meat, hot showers, clean clothes, medical care, a bed to himself and, above all, travel beyond the hills where he was born. Such luxuries were unobtainable for a poor rural southerner, white or black, in civilian life.
• • •
Whitehead and other young recruits reported early one warm April morning to a restaurant in Carthage, Tennessee. Carthage, originally a trading port where the Cumberland and Caney Fork Rivers met, was known to Whitehead and the other recruits as the town from which the state’s most famous First World War veteran had embarked on his military career. Alvin Cullum York, having conquered alcoholism before the war to become a devout Christian and pacifist, was drafted into the army in 1917 at the age of twenty-nine. Trained at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he served in France with the 82nd Division. On 8 October 1918, York earned the Medal of Honor. His citation, presented to him personally by General John J. Pershing, read:
After his platoon suffered heavy casualties and three other non-commissioned officers had become casualties, Corporal York assumed command. Fearlessly leading seven men, he charged with great daring a machine gun nest which was pouring deadly and incessant fire upon his platoon. In this heroic feat the machine gun nest was taken, together with four officers and 128 men and several guns.
York, about whom a Hollywood movie starring Gary Cooper had been released the year before, set a high standard for the young Tennesseans. Whitehead was proud to set out from the same town York had.
The recruits ate a hot breakfast at the little restaurant and boarded a bus. Driving along the ramshackle road past Whitehead’s family’s cabin at Sulphur Springs, Alfred wondered if he would ever see it again. It did not matter to him either way. While the driver filled the bus with petrol in Lebanon, he slipped away to buy “a jug of moonshine.” He and his companions drank the illegal alcohol before nightfall, when the bus entered the gates of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.
After a few weeks of kitchen duty and barracks cleaning at Fort Oglethorpe, Whitehead was shipped to Camp Wolters, Texas, for basic training. The Infantry Replacement Training Center, where Texan Audie Murphy trained with Company D of the 59th Training Battalion, was then the country’s largest. The nearest town was Mineral Wells, which some of the GIs called “Venereal Wells” for obvious reasons. Whitehead became a buck private with about sixty other youngsters in the 4th Platoon, Company D, 63rd Infantry Training Battalion. His boyhood proficiency with a rifle qualified him as “sharpshooter” and then “expert.” Despite his success and easy adaptation to military life, he hated the Texas heat and burning winds. “At night,” he recalled, “I had to sleep with my blanket over my head just to breathe and keep the sand from stinging my face.” Training lasted seventeen weeks. This short time, reduced from the previously standard fifty-two weeks, was necessitated by the urgent need for troops overseas. On completion of the course, Whitehead took a train to Camp Polk, Louisiana.
At Camp Polk, Whitehead was assigned to an “antitank platoon with Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division.” On his shoulder was the divisional patch with an American Indian’s head, for which the 2nd was called the Indianhead Division. The assignment gave him many advantages over men who would be sent overseas as replacements for regiments that had lost soldiers in combat. He would train with the men who were going to fight beside him, and his officers would know him.
Both the regiment and the division had honorable records of service. The 38th Regiment was called the “Rock of the Marne” for its stiff resistance during the German offensive of 1918. The “Second to None” Division’s bravery during the Meuse-Argonne offensive had earned it three Croix de Guerre from the French government. By 1942, the division’s main components were the 2nd, 9th and 38th Regiments, together with the 2nd Engineer Battalion, four field artillery battalions and support units.
The 2nd Infantry Division was at Camp Polk to take part in war games. The Louisiana Maneuvers had begun the year before as the largest ever on American soil, and they would be staged with new units each year of the war. Their objective was as
much to find and correct flaws in American battle strategy, tactics, equipment and organization as to train the inexperienced troops. To Private Whitehead, the 1942 summer maneuvers seemed “like a great game, much like my childhood games of hide-and-seek, where one would surprise the ‘enemy.’” Because there weren’t enough weapons to equip all the troops, Whitehead and some of his comrades carried broomsticks instead of rifles and used empty mortar rounds as antitank guns. In some places, wooden signs saying “foxhole” and “machine gun” substituted for the real thing. The war games pitted “Reds” against “Blues” over 3,400 square miles of rugged swampland, hills and rivers. In the previous year’s exercises, General George Patton’s 2nd Armored had swept across the river Sabine into Texas to come back into Louisiana and trap the “Reds” in Shreveport. The exercises included cavalry charges, relics of an earlier era that would not amount to much against the Wehrmacht.
Whitehead and the rest of his platoon lived rough in the Louisiana woods to hone survival skills, like foraging for food, hiding from the enemy and washing in streams. Some of the men paid local families to cook them fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. Whitehead lit out after a Cajun girl, who responded to his advances by pelting him with stones. Louisiana had two types of weather, as far as Whitehead could judge, “hot and then hotter.” Mosquitoes and snakes proved more menacing than the Blue Army.
On 22 September 1942, the 2nd Division returned to Fort Sam Houston. Whitehead’s days revolved around close-order drill, twentyfive-mile hikes with fifty-pound packs, kitchen police (KP), training films, field inspections and rifle practice. Despite the resilience his hard-laboring childhood gave him, he came into conflict with authority more than once. Officers told him to use his free time to catch up on sleep, but he left the base as often as he could to drink, gamble and chase women. “I had numerous girlfriends,” he wrote, “but figured anyone could have a girlfriend. What I really wanted was to get married.” His attention focused on a girl with red hair, whom he dated and to whom he proposed. The engagement would be prolonged, because the girl’s mother “wanted her to finish school first.”
The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Page 4