The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

STORMS 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.

  Heavy surf dragged Whitehead, burdened with pack and ammunition, down. His feet could not find bottom. Bobbing to the surface, he gasped for air. “Bodies and pieces of bodies were floating in the water and flying through the air,” he wrote. “Mines were exploding, men screamed and yelled, and those who couldn’t swim sank in that bloody sea.” He scrambled ashore, but land was no safer than water. American dead and wounded lay everywhere. One soldier’s body “had been shot in the back by our own troops who were so scared they were shooting wildly at the enemy and hitting each other.” Whitehead became convinced he too would die.

  The irreligious Tennessean found himself praying. Amid the relentless explosions, prayer gave him “a strange feeling of calm.” Something inside, “an unseen presence,” told him, “Wait . . . wait . . . I’ll tell you when to move.” But he did not see anywhere safe. “It looked like the end of the world,” he wrote. “There were knocked out German bunkers and pillboxes, cast-off life preservers and lost gas masks, plus piles of all kinds of equipment.” He thought the Americans were losing the battle and would be driven off the beach.

  One German 88-millimeter artillery piece in a bunker above the beach was “slaughtering our men.” Everyone coming near it was cut down. A Sherman amphibious tank appeared. Firing from the crest of a small rise in the sand, it missed the bunker twice. The third round went straight through the gun slit in the concrete and exploded inside, silencing the 88. The battle raged for the rest of the day, although Whitehead’s memoir omitted the assault at 8:30 that morning by the 116th Regiment, with a detachment of army Rangers, on the heights of Les Moulins. The Rangers went on to destroy German gun empla
cements beyond the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. Whitehead wrote that, of the twelve men from his division attached to the 116th, only he and two others survived. His memoir did not state their names.

  After nightfall, German planes strafed Allied ships. Whitehead recalled, “Big naval barrage balloons burst into flaming pillars as flak fell like hail on the ship decks. German bombs and American ack-ack fire turned night to day on every explosion, while creating a constant deafening thunder.” Whitehead tried to sleep in the bunker the Sherman had taken out, but the dead German gun crew, one of whom had been decapitated, spooked him. He lay down outside and waited for dawn.

  • • •

  The 2nd Infantry Division landed in Normandy the next afternoon, when Whitehead claimed to have rejoined his company outside the town of Trévières. The official history of the 38th Regiment stated that the 2nd Division was in the English Channel when it received its invasion orders early on 6 June. It continued,

  The following afternoon, June 7, 1944—D-Day-plus-one—leading elements of the 38th Infantry Regiment rode landing barges to Omaha Beach, near St. Laurent-sur-Mer. Some barges hung up on reefs and obstacles and men from the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Battalion, and the regimental command group waded and swam ashore to the debris-strewn beach still under enemy fire. The first Command Post of “Impressive”—tactical code name of the regiment—was in a sunken road. For two days the regiment probed forward between the 1st and 29th Divisions.

  Whitehead somehow detached himself from the 116th and moved off the beach. “I was waiting beside an old, shot up farmhouse when I caught sight of Indianhead-patched soldiers moving along the road,” he wrote. “I was worn out and sat there until my own company came by, and I joined them.” He added, “They asked how the landing had been. All I could say was that it was just like what it looked like, and they didn’t ask anymore.” The 2nd Division troops would have had little reason to ask him about the D-Day landing, because they saw its carnage and met its survivors the next day when they struggled ashore near Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer under German fire. Four of 2nd Division’s lieutenant colonels were killed in the initial stages of the Normandy invasion, hardly an indication of an easy arrival. Moreover, Whitehead’s 38th Regiment was not before Trévières, its initial objective in Normandy, until 9 June. If he landed on 6 June, as he wrote, three days would have been unaccounted for. He may have been AWOL, as many men were, and chose not to mention the fact to either his comrades or the readers of his memoir.

  Whitehead’s account of the war from the time he rejoined the 38th Regiment coincided more closely with divisional and regimental histories than his version of D-Day did. Records indicated that he was in combat with the 38th Regiment throughout the war in France. His memoir and the official history agree that, for lack of transport, the 2nd Battalion of the 38th Regiment marched four miles inland to Trévières on 9 June. Whitehead wrote, “Moving ahead through the green, flowered countryside, I was in a big field when someone opened fire on me—a low rifle crack sounded in the distance.” The shot came from one of many German snipers, who stayed behind American lines, hidden in trees or behind hedges, to harass the advancing GIs.

  The 2nd Battalion attacked Trévières, a town with a German headquarters ten miles south of the beachhead, from the north. The 3rd Battalion forded the river Aure to penetrate the town from the south and west. One platoon inside Trévières engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. The divisional history described the contest for the division’s first objective on the road south to the Forêt de Cerisy:

  Only a limited number of hand grenades was available. Not until the closing stages of the battle were machine guns brought up from the beach area. To replenish the meager supply of ammunition, a French two-wheel cart was commandeered. But the ammunition still had to be hand-carried across the river. Wounded were hand-carried on the return trip across the stream.

  The 38th fought without rest all night. Whitehead wrote of his German opponents,

  They doggedly defended the town, house by house, yard by yard, and we literally had to dig them out with a savage bayonet assault before they would surrender. I saw one soldier ahead of me empty a carbine clip in the chest of a charging German, until finally knocking him down with the butt of his gun.

  The contest for Trévières cost the 2nd Battalion of the 38th Regiment nine men killed and three officers and thirty-five enlisted men wounded. The battalion’s official history noted, “The attack had taken twelve and one half hours; made without benefit of any substantial heavy weapons and featured tough bayonet fighting and extensive use of grenades which were available only in the latter part of the fighting.” When the fighting ended, the 38th Regiment, together with the 9th, left on trucks heading south toward Saint-Georges-d’Elle. “Then,” Whitehead wrote as the convoy approached the Forêt de Cerisy, “all hell broke loose. We’d driven head-long into a waiting ambush!” Soldiers ran from the trucks to dig in against a mortar barrage, which set some of the vehicles alight. Whitehead sprinted to a house and leapt under a bed. The two 2nd Division regiments dug in for the night, and the men watched U.S. bombers hit German ammunition dumps in the forest. When the Luftwaffe bombed later in the night, Whitehead jumped over a wall into a cemetery. He whispered to himself amid the graves of generations of French dead, “Damned if I’m not going to end up in one of these places before my time.”

  TEN

  There is, first, the fear of death.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 347

  ON THE MORNING OF 3 JUNE 1944, rain lashed the tents of the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders’ camp at the town of Grays, Essex, beside the river Thames east of London. Reveille woke the men, at least those who could sleep through the storm, a half hour earlier than usual at 5:30 A.M. Breakfast was at 6:00. Forty-five minutes later, the men assembled outdoors in full battle order: seventy pounds of rations, ammunition and other equipment, with an extra twenty pounds for those, like Private John Bain, carrying their sections’ Bren guns. To make matters worse, Bain and most of the others were hungover from a final night’s drinking. Trucks collected them at their tent camp. The men rode somberly in the back through dawn’s drizzle to Tilbury, a few miles away. “The machinery had been set in motion and there was nothing much to be done about it,” Bain wrote. “Cigarettes were lit but nobody said much.” At the docks, the Gordons and the other regiments of the 51st Highland Infantry Division reassembled. Eventually, they boarded a Landing Craft, Infantry (LCI), the same type of vessel that had dropped many of them on the shore of Sicily almost a year before. Veterans were familiar with the spartan accommodation, while young replacements and former deserters, like John Bain, were experiencing its discomfort for the first time. Once the men were belowdecks, they threw off their packs and lit cigarettes.

  Bain and Private Hughie Black, his five-foot-six Glaswegian mate from the North African campaign, inhaled and waited for the flotilla to cruise through the Thames estuary. Bain and Black, as their platoon’s two-man Bren-gun team, shared the twenty-two pound automatic rifle and its .303-caliber ammunition. At 8:00 the next morning, when the 51st Division was due to embark, Captain Forbes, commander of B Company, called the men up to the deck to tell them they were to wait a few more hours for better weather. As rough as conditions were on board, the news was not unwelcome. No one was in a hurry to meet death on a French beach.

  Bain was back in his old platoon, his old company, his old regiment, among friends like Bill Grey and Hughie Black. Black introduced him to a new man named Alec Stevenson. Mustafa Barracks was forgotten. Captain Forbes had told Bain on his return to the regiment five months earlier, “I want you to know that nothing is going to be held against you. You know what I mean, what? It’s a completely fresh start. So carry on and good luck to you.” Gordon Rennie, another friend from North Africa, grabbed his hand the moment he saw him. “Johnny Bain!” he said. “How are you, man? It’s great to see you.” In one poem, Bain would refer to “Gordon Re
nnie, the world’s pet uncle.” Rennie, who had been promoted to corporal, arranged for Bain to serve with him in 1st Section of the 2nd Platoon and to shoulder the Bren gun with Hughie Black. Neither the platoon commander, Lieutenant Mitchell, nor his platoon sergeant, Sergeant Thom, referred to Bain’s desertion or made him feel different from anyone else. This institution that Bain detested had become more of a home than his family’s house in Aylesbury, which he had not bothered to visit between his arrival from Egypt and reporting to the regiment.

  The only man in B Company to withhold an unqualified welcome was his closest friend, Hughie Black. Noticing his old friend’s reserve, Bain asked whether he was angry with him for deserting. “Jesus Christ, no!” Black said. “I was just mad you’d gone off without me.” If Bain had taken him along, he said, he would not have been caught.

  In March, the Highland Division transferred from Vache Camp in Buckinghamshire to Halstead, near Sevenoaks, Kent. Intensive training began then. The Scottish regiments practiced urban street fighting in the bomb-devastated streets of east London. In Harlington, Bedfordshire, the 5/7th Gordons learned to deploy the new “Wasp” flamethrowers, with a one-hundred-yard range, against simulated German pillboxes. The Highland Division conducted exercises on Salisbury Plain, Larkhill and the Thetford battle area. These were followed by river crossings, reconnaissance patrols and night fighting on the featureless rural plains of East Anglia. The Suffolk Broads coastal town of Lowestoft was the scene of their final and crucial maneuver, a dress rehearsal called Operation Fabius, on 10 and 11 May: unloading men and supplies on a beach under fire.

  The Scottish regiments of the Highland Division moved in mid-May to a string of purpose-constructed bases along the Thames between Southend and London. When the 5/7th Gordons reached a tent encampment near Grays on 17 May, Hughie Black was ready to “fuck off” and pleaded with Bain to desert with him. They could go to Glasgow, where Black had friends. Bain refused, saying he would rather go back into battle than return to prison. “It’s no’ a straight choice between the two,” Black argued. “We don’t have to get caught. I know some that’s been on the run for bloody years.”