Just before daybreak, Bain and his Scottish friend Hughie Black were sheltering in a slit trench. Black looked behind and said, “They’re coming Johnny. Here they come. Poor bastards!” As a battalion of Seaforth Highlanders came close, Black said, “All the best mate!” One of them answered, “It’s all right for you Jimmy. . . . Lucky bastard!” Bain recalled the Seaforth’s “tone of voice did not carry true resentment: it was rueful, resigned.”
Although John Bain absorbed every sound and smell of the battle, he was so remote from the experience that he wrote of himself in the third person. Watching the Seaforths pass his trench, “John felt immense relief that he was not one of them but the relief was tainted with guilt.” He told Black that he feared that the Seaforths would reach the ridge at daylight and be “sitting ducks.” “Hughie nodded. ‘Sooner them than me. But let’s hope they chase the bastards out. ’Cos you know what’ll happen if they don’t? It’ll be us in there with the bayonet. And I don’t fancy that one little bit.’”
Gunfire erupted along the ridge. “They [the Seaforths] were easy targets for the German machine-gun fire,” Bain told an interviewer later. Major G. L. W. Andrews of the 5th Battalion of the Seaforths remembered, “Once daylight came, I lay with my glasses fixed on Roumana, but not a man could I see amongst the clouds of slate grey smoke and chestnut dust which cloaked the entire ridge as the German guns and mortars hit back.”
In his memoirs, Bain continued the story: “Twilight was sharpening into the metallic, clearer greyness of early morning but you could not see much of what was happening in the hills. Human figures moved insectile and anonymous in little clusters, forming irregular patterns that kept breaking and coming together again.” A battle was taking place, but B Company’s orders were to stay in the trenches. The commander of D Company of the 5/7th Gordons, Major Ian Glennie, recalled that the advancing battalion fought at the base of cliffs a mile ahead. “We then could do nothing but watch, but couldn’t see very much at all.”
While the Gordons waited, Hughie Black bewailed the army’s failure to provide breakfast or even a cup of tea. He drank some water from his flask, but spat out the “camel’s piss.”
A lieutenant from Headquarters Company brought orders for B Company’s Corporal Jamieson to take the platoon up to the ridge. The men stepped in single file toward the sound of firing. John Bain’s rhythmic plodding along the sand, combined with six months of unrelieved anxiety, induced in him “an almost trance-like indifference to, or unawareness of, his immediate circumstances. It was not that he was mentally elsewhere; rather that his mind was nowhere at all. He had become a kind of automaton.” In that state, he climbed the ridge. When he reached the summit, the battle was over.
General Montgomery noted in his diary, “We had on this day the heaviest and most savage fighting we had had since I commanded the 8th Army. Certain localities changed hands several times, my troops fought magnificently.” Neither Monty nor his senior officers referred in their written recollections to the events that followed the battle’s conclusion. John Bain did, but only years afterward.
At the top of the ridge, Bain saw the first corpses from the Seaforth unit that had passed him a few hours earlier. Hughie Black, indicating one dead soldier, said, “There’s one poor bastard’s finished with fuckin’-an-fightin’.” Bain saw no wound; it was as if the man were asleep. B Company moved forward to the Germans’ slit trenches. More dead lay over most of the ground. The Seaforths had lost more than one hundred men killed and wounded, as one of its officers, Major G. L. W. Andrews, recalled. Black noticed that there were no wounded on the ground, concluding that the “meat wagons” must have removed them. What happened next was unexpected. Bain recorded his impressions, again in the third person:
Then he saw that the other men in his section and from the other platoons must have been given the order to fall out because they were moving among the dead bodies, the Seaforths’ corpses as well as the German, and they were bending over them, sometimes turning them up with an indifferent boot, before they removed watches, rings, and what valuables they could find. They seemed to be moving with unnatural slowness, proceeding from one body to another, stooping, reaching out, methodical and absorbed. Hughie had gone. He must have joined the scavengers.
In a postwar interview, Bain elaborated: “My own friends went around looting the corpses, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing. Off their own people. Why that is so much worse than taking it off the Germans, I don’t know, but it was somehow.” He stopped thinking, transfixed in a state of “almost trance-like indifference.” A poem he would write at century’s end, “Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit,” made no reference to the looting of the dead:
He sees the shapes of rock, the sand and rubble
on which, at unshaven dawn, the bodies sprawl
or lie with unpurposed and tidy decorum,
all neat in battle-order and KD uniform.
His reaction to the desecration and pillaging of the corpses would change the course of his life.
FIVE
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
PRIVATE ALFRED WHITEHEAD had not married the girl who needed to finish school by the time the 2nd Infantry Division left Texas for Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, in late November 1942. A troop train carried them over a thousand miles north, “as the land changed from sagebrush, then flat barren wheat land, to empty rolling farm country.” It reached Wisconsin, where many of the southern boys saw snow for the first time. An excited soldier from Florida rolled around in the ice, stopping only when he realized how cold it was. Camp McCoy, carved out of fourteen thousand acres of Monroe County in 1909, was the army’s winter warfare training base. In February 1943, the division took part in warfare exercises in northern Michigan. Whitehead remembered, “We learned there what cold weather really was—the thermometer stayed at a steady forty degrees below zero.” Whitehead coped with the cold by trudging on snowshoes to find alcohol and bring it back to the squad. Although he skirted the rules, he had no objection to discipline. “Both as individuals and units,” he wrote, “we were put through specific types of combat instruction designed to prepare us for the kinds of fighting we might be expected to run into overseas, until we believed we were the toughest outfit in the whole U.S. Army.”
Whitehead saw himself as one of the toughest in a tough outfit. His readiness to settle arguments with his fists got him into fights, and his weakness for alcohol added to his belligerency. In photographs, he looked brash, small in stature yet full of bravado, with curly chestnut hair parted in the middle and a boyish smile. One snapshot of him at Camp McCoy showed the young GI defiantly astride the hood of his commanding officer’s jeep. His combat helmet’s raffish angle seemed to say that this youngster was not afraid of anyone.
The nearest village to Camp McCoy was Sparta, in Kent County, where Whitehead spent as many off hours as he could getting drunk, shooting craps and courting. “Taverns were plentiful, but money and women were on a strict war-time ration basis, so we had plenty of fights over both,” he remembered. He rented a room in Sparta, “a place I could call my own on my time off,” where he slept off his drinking bouts. Weekends found him spending days in a bar, nights in his room. He was a loner who assumed the only remedy to his loneliness was a bride.
He spotted three young women one afternoon in a Sparta pool hall, and he offered to buy them some Coca-Cola. They turned him down. He asked another GI who the “stuck up girls” were. The soldier said they were his sisters. Whitehead brought three bottles of Coke to the girls, but they still didn’t want them from the cocky southerner. A moment later, Whitehead noticed his wallet was missing and declared that no one could leave the pool hall until he had it back. This led to a brawl that ended with the arrival of MPs. When the other soldier saw that Whitehead had
no money left, he invited him home for dinner.
This led to Whitehead’s acquaintance with the soldier’s three sisters and, soon, Whitehead’s proposal of marriage to the oldest. A photograph of Selma Sherpe taken at about this time showed a young woman with buoyant blond hair, tied back like Betty Grable’s, and full lips that would have attracted almost any young man. She resisted his advances and his proposal, but she eventually dated him when he was out on liberty. “Many happy evenings and weekends followed, and I found I was growing very fond of the Sherpe family, who gave a sense of belonging I never had at home.” There were dinners at the Sherpe farm, Pleasant Valley, as well as movies and carnivals. “My Southern accent also provided some amusing moments,” he recalled. “One Sunday, while assisting Mrs. Sherpe with Sunday dinner, I asked where she kept the ‘flare’ (flour), and had the house in an uproar trying to figure out and find whatever ‘flare’ was.” The Sherpes were incredulous when he told them about his childhood diet of “wild onions, poke salad, wild mustard greens” and his career as a moonshiner. They enjoyed his visits, but Selma evaded Alfred’s questions about a date for a wedding she had not agreed to.
“Many of the boys were getting married and had someone to come home to and live for,” Whitehead wrote. As the day for shipping out approached, he asked his sergeant for a pass to get married. The army gave him three days off, on the understanding he would return with a marriage certificate. Whitehead bought a ring and hitchhiked to the Sherpes’ house, twelve miles from town. He gave the ring to Selma. The next morning, 9 August 1943, Mr. and Mrs. Sherpe drove the couple to a justice of the peace in Caledonia, Minnesota, where there was no waiting period for marriages. Their honeymoon was spent at the Sherpes’ farm. The idyll did not last long.
At the end of September, Whitehead told his bride the division was going overseas. He reassured her he would win the war quickly and be home soon, but she responded gravely, “It will be very hard for you, and it will be many years before you return.” On their last morning together, Selma wept. On 3 October, the newly minted troops of the 2nd Infantry Division boarded a train bound for New York. There, on 8 October, the USS Florence Nightingale was waiting to take the young soldiers in convoy across the Atlantic. As Whitehead approached the gangplank, he noticed a squad of MPs armed with rifles, bayonets and machine guns. They were there to ensure no one tried to desert.
SIX
Such a sufferer from war shock is not a weakling, he is not a coward. He is a battle casualty.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 353
A FEW MILES INTO THE EGYPTIAN DESERT east of Alexandria, the prison at Britain’s Mustafa Barracks was the final destination for soldiers convicted of crimes from desertion and disobedience to rape and murder. The base had stood, since the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, beside the Roman camp that Octavian erected after his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 24 B.C. For the British, it had additional resonance: in 1801, they had defeated Napoleon’s forces there, and the barracks was an assembly point for many of the regiments sent on the disastrous Gallipoli campaign against Turkey in 1915. Like Rome, Britain used the base primarily to cow the natives in Alexandria. The prison to punish wayward troops was a later addition.
The military detention center at Mustafa was notorious. Allan Campbell McLean based a novel, The Glasshouse, on his fifty-six days confined within its walls. A character in his book recalled that the “old sweats” who had done time in many prisons reserved a special hatred for Mustafa Barracks:
Their talk always came round to the one in the desert near Alexandria. The Alex one was the worst of the lot, they said, the screws there egged on by a mad bastard of a commandant, who would have stuck the boys in front of a firing squad if he hadn’t reckoned on Rommel doing the job for him when they had done their time and got back to their units.
One blazing afternoon in the early summer of 1943, an army truck dumped John Bain and five other prisoners at, in Bain’s words, “the great iron-studded door that looked almost jet-black against the high white walls.” The door to No. 55 Military Prison and Detention Barracks opened, and the shackled convicts marched into a square formed by two-story detention barracks and rows of solid steel cell doors. While the men stood at attention, a military policeman named Staff Sergeant Hardy informed them of their new status: “From now on, you are S.U.S.’s—Soldiers Under Sentence. You will do everything at the double. You understand? Everything. You do not move unless it’s at the double.” So confident were the guards that escape was impossible that they removed the men’s chains. Staff Sergeant Hardy then marched them double-time into the middle of the square, where he turned them over to Staff Sergeant Henderson.
Hardy and Henderson dressed in identical starched khaki drill clothes, peaked caps and shining boots. In common with the other MPs guarding prisoners behind the lines, they had not been to the battlefront or faced the enemy in combat. This did not, however, deter them from playing tough with men who had. Henderson ordered each SUS to answer to his name and serial number. When the first, Private Morris, answered, “Sarnt,” the sergeant’s face seemed to Bain to contort into “a mixture of snarl and smile.” Henderson went into a rage: “Not Sarnt, you dozy man! Staff! You call us Staff. . . . Understand? Staff’s what you call us. All except the RSM [regimental sergeant major] and the commandant. You call them Sir.”
Reading out Bain’s name and number, he said, “I see you’re in the Gordon Highlanders. What’s your regimental motto?”
Bain answered, “Bydand.”
“Staff!”
“Bydand, Staff.”
“Bydand. Aye. And what does that mean, Private Bain?”
“Stand fast, Staff.”
“Stand fast. That’s the motto of the Gordon Highlanders and they’ve always lived up to it. Till now. They never retreated. Not in the whole history of the regiment. But you didn’t stand fast, Private Bain, did you! You horrible man. You took a powder. You got off your mark. You’re a disgrace to a great regiment. My father fought with the Gordon Highlanders in the Great War. He stood fast, Bain. He didna take a powder. So I’m going to keep a special eye on you, Bain.”
Henderson detailed the daily regimen: reveille at 6:00 A.M., inspection, daily assignment of tasks, back into the cells at 5:00 P.M., lights out at 9:30. Speaking was forbidden. “If you’re caught talking at any time you’ll be on a charge and you’ll get punished,” he said. “Three days solitary on PD One. That’s Punishment Diet Number One. Bread and water.” Bain noticed Henderson’s lips curl to expose a “mad, ferocious grin” as he ordered the new SUSs to strip and throw their clothes and belongings onto blankets. Henderson made a demonstration of examining item after item, then instructed them to wrap everything in the blankets and raise them over their heads.
When Henderson barked the order for the naked and sweating men to run back and forth across the square, humiliation gave way to physical pain. The weight pressing on Bain’s arms was almost impossible to bear, although he was a physically strong twenty-one-year-old with a prizefighter’s physique. For those with less stamina, it was worse. Henderson shouted, “Get them knees up! Straighten them arms! Left-right, left-right, left. . . . Right . . . wheel!” This went on relentlessly until the sun had nearly set, when Henderson ordered a halt and marched them to their cell.
Three other prisoners were already inside, squatting against the far wall and scouring a rusty bucket. The airless space, fifty feet long and only eight feet wide, reeked of urine. Henderson told the men to dress and take two blankets each from a pile in the corner. A diagram on the wall explained how the blankets were to be folded for inspection. Each man was issued a “chocolate pot” for body waste. When Henderson locked them inside, each convict claimed a portion of the floor as his bed. Bain and two others, “Chalky” White of the Middlesex Regiment and Bill Farrell from the Durham Light Infantry, whispered to one another in violation of the rules. Bain was afraid that s
omeone was watching through a small hole in the door, although he did not hear anything. “Of course you didn’t,” Chalky whispered. “The bastards wear gym shoes at night.” Farrell said their guards were worse than those in civilian prisons.
Chalky asked him, “You been in civvy nick then?”
“Aye. Armley in Leeds. Six months.”
“What was that for?”
“Minding my own business.”
The first lesson of prison, Farrell explained, was never to ask a man his crime. He admitted, though, that his offense was stealing lead from a church roof. Chalky said he had served fifty-six days in the military “glasshouse” at Aldershot, but he did not say what he had done. Suddenly, the door opened and a new voice shouted, “SUS’s . . . stand by your beds!” This was Staff Sergeant Pickering, who introduced himself as “a proper bastard.” Lights out was in three minutes, Pickering shouted, after which he would be listening at the door. “If I hear as much as a whisper I’ll put the whole lot of you on the peg. That understood?”
Bain lay on one blanket and pulled the other two over his aching body. From a corner of the cell, a man with diarrhea squatted noisily over his “chocolate pot.” All Bain could do was wait for “the brief mercy of sleep.”
• • •
Bain had not had a peaceful sleep since he witnessed his friends’ looting their comrades’ corpses at Wadi Akarit. In his mind, he had not run away, because he was no longer there. “I seemed to float away,” he recalled. A psychiatrist later told him he had suffered a “fugue.” From the Latin for flight, it meant a sudden escape from reality.
No one noticed his departure from the Roumana Ridge, until some minutes later a jeep stopped him. Still dazed, Bain stared at a lieutenant. The lieutenant asked him, “Are you going back to rear echelon?” It was as simple as that. Bain got in, and the lieutenant took him to a camp in the rear.
The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II Page 6