The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  A green flare shot up, the signal that Corporal Gordon Rennie interpreted for his mates: “Jerry must be pulling out!” Hughie Black answered, “Who’s firing them fucking guns then?” Rennie led the platoon into the village, where Bain and Black saw he was right. Jerry had pulled out. So had the inhabitants, who had already endured a failed D-Day attack by paratroopers of the 6th Airborne against the German 125th Panzer Grenadiers. While the 1st Gordons moved into a brick factory on the outskirts of Touffréville, the 5/7th Battalion approached the village square. Bain recalled,

  In the middle of the place was a small public garden with trees and from many of these hung dead British paratroopers, suspended by their harnesses, who had evidently been picked off by small arms fire as they hung helplessly there. On the lawns and flower beds of the garden, too, were more dead soldiers wearing flashes of the Sixth Airborne Division, and others lay on the cobbled stones outside the little park. None was alive.

  The Germans had pulled their lines back to the forest, where their artillery kept the British troops within range.

  Captain Urquhart commandeered an empty farmhouse to use its cellar as B Company’s headquarters and kitchen. The troops dug bivouacs in the ground outside, where they sheltered all night from the incessant shelling. Just before dawn, German patrols infiltrated their lines. “B and C Companies, in front and on the left, were drawn back to better defensive positions, but no one knew where the Germans would appear next,” wrote a regimental historian. Squads of Spandau machine gunners shot up Urquhart’s headquarters, while German riflemen attacked the British defenders in their trenches. By the time the Germans pulled back at noon, they had inflicted twenty-eight casualties on the Gordons. They also took prisoners, including B Company’s Sergeant Aitkenhead. Aitkenhead used a hidden knife to stab his guard and escape, but his own side’s artillery nearly hit him on his run back to base.

  The next day, 13 June, RAF planes accidentally bombed the Gordons, wounding ten of them. This was followed by another German infantry assault. When the Germans pulled back, they resumed their shelling of the Gordon trenches. Venturing above ground even to defecate could have been fatal. Hughie Black complained to Bain, “It’s no’ right to keep us here. It’s all right for Urquhart in his fucking cellar.” Around noon, the cooks were ready with a hot lunch of stew and potatoes. To ferry food to the trenches, one man from each two-man team fetched it from the kitchen and brought it back to his comrade. They usually took turns, and this lunchtime Bain made the run to the farmhouse.

  In the cellar, cooks stirred the stew in one corner and Captain Urquhart attempted to radio battalion headquarters in another. The company bagpiper, who was also a medic, was in between ministering to a “huddled figure whose sobbing and choking voice was unrecognizable.” It took Bain a moment to realize the soldier had no wounds. “The neatly-shaped, alert features had melted and blurred,” Bain wrote, “the mouth was sagging and the whole face, dirty and stubbled, seemed swollen and was smeared with tears and snot.” The boy was crying like a baby for his mother. The cook, filling Bain’s mess tins with stew, looked at the babbling soldier with disgust and said, “I know what I’d do with the fucker, and it wouldn’t be send him back to Blighty.”

  Bain crawled back into the trench to eat, but he did not tell Hughie about the sobbing soldier. The young man was Private Victor Denham, a replacement whom Black already detested. Denham had joined the battalion in England a few months earlier. He obeyed all the rules, kept his uniform pristine and exhibited a naïve enthusiasm for combat. Black had physically attacked him before embarkation and persuaded Gordon Rennie to transfer him to another section. Denham’s breakdown had shaken Bain “in a way that was more difficult to contend with than anything else that had happened in Normandy.” The trembling boy haunted him for hours, because he shared the cook’s contempt and felt “even a stab of sadistic hatred.” A more frightening thought was the “intolerable suspicion that he was witnessing something of himself.”

  Shelling persisted most of the afternoon, and Bain huddled with Hughie in the soft earth. During a lull, Black offered to wash out his and Bain’s mess tins at a pump near the farmhouse. Bain said they could scrub them clean with grass, but Hughie reminded him that they needed water anyway. He would also bring back some “Callow doss.” “Calvados,” Bain corrected him, handing over his mess tin and water bottle.

  Black ran to the pump, and Bain lit a cigarette. He had no idea why they were at Touffréville, how long they would stay there or where they were going next. Life was little more than a series of freshly dug pits with the ever-present fear of ending up in one for- ever. A few weeks earlier, Hughie had complained that the sealing of their transit camp on the Thames robbed them of their last chance of running to Glasgow. Bain pointed out to Hughie that he could have deserted on his own. “I told you,” Black replied. “I wasna going without you.”

  “That puts a big responsibility on me, doesn’t it?” Bain answered. Hughie absolved his friend, “It’s my decision. I’m a big lad. It’s what I decided. If anything happens to me, it’s no’ your fault. I could’ve gone but I decided to stay. Me. I decided. Not you or anyone else. Okay?” He added, “Any case, nothing’s going to happen to me, son.”

  To commanders, decisive moments came with the capture or loss of high ground, offensives, retreats and massive battles. To infantry soldiers like John Bain, significant events were personal: surviving a mortar barrage, finding shelter in a building or a ditch, eating hot food and losing a friend. The war itself meant nothing to Bain, who did not hate the Germans. Friends like Gordon Rennie, Alec Stevenson, Bill Grey and especially Hughie Black had come to mean everything.

  A close bond formed between two-men trench teams. “They would live, eat, work and sleep together,” one infantry platoon commander wrote. “If one of them was killed or wounded the other was quite lost.”

  Bain’s cigarette smoke floated upward into the strangely tranquil Norman sky, when all of a sudden cluster after cluster of Moaning Minnies screeched to the earth. The Gordons cowered in their trenches, until, as abruptly as it began, the mortaring stopped. Bain took the risk of putting his head up to look around. Hughie Black lay on the ground halfway to the farmhouse. Bain ran from his trench. He and Gordon Rennie reached their friend at the same moment. Rennie put his hand on Hughie’s shoulder, gently rubbing as if to wake him. When Hughie did not respond, he slowly rolled him onto his back and blurted, “Jesus Christ.”

  Hughie Black’s chest was gone, leaving “a great dark cave of blood and slivers of bone.” Bain tried not to look, but he had already seen Hughie’s face, “like the face of all the dead. The eyelids were not shut but the pupils had swivelled up beneath them so that the eyes looked like those of a blind man.”

  Bain staggered back to the hole he had dug with Hughie three days before. He sat in the mud and “stared across at the space where Hughie should have been.” Gordon Rennie dived into Bain’s trench, saving him from his thoughts. “It was quick, Johnny,” he said. “He wouldna felt a thing. If you got to go that’s the best way.” Gordon arranged for two of their friends to dig Hughie’s grave in a row with five other Highlanders, and he assigned Alec Stevenson to replace Hughie on the Bren gun. Stevenson was next into the trench. He offered to wash the blood from Black’s ammunition bags, but Bain insisted on doing it himself. As the sun was setting, they buried Hughie. Bain could not watch. He felt almost as he had at Wadi Akarit, when he fled a reality he refused to accept. This time, though, he fled only in his mind. It was not grief, but a departure from “hope or love, anger or sadness.”

  Stretcher bearers soon transported sixteen seriously wounded men to the casualty clearing station near the beachhead. “The lucky bastards,” Stevenson told Bain. “It’s a funny old world where you call somebody lucky because they’ve had their foot blown off.”

  The surviving Gordons left Touffréville that night. A regimental history noted, “They were co
nfident they could hold on to Touffréville, and felt disgusted when ordered to withdraw later in the day.” Bain, in his memoir, evinced no regret at leaving the village where his friend Hughie Black died.

  • • •

  By this time, Bain was “floating,” as in North Africa, his mind elsewhere in another “fugue.” But he was not the only demoralized soldier in the 51st Division. The Highlanders had been divided into elements under airborne or Canadian command. They occupied and abandoned a series of villages around Caen to no identifiable object and were not driving forward in a coherent manner. Commanders sent companies or regiments to dislodge fortified positions that needed ten times the number of men. “The fact must be faced that at this period the normal very high morale of the Division fell temporarily to a low ebb,” wrote a division historian. “A kind of claustrophobia affected the troops, and the continual shelling and mortaring from an unseen enemy in relatively great strength was certainly very trying.”

  Diaries kept by Highland Division officers noted a loss of energy at all levels. Major David F. O. Russell of the 7th Black Watch, who had earned a Military Cross at El Alamein, wrote that “during the whole of this period, the morale of the battalion was at its lowest ebb which made the task of competing with day to day troubles and worries even more difficult.” The 5th Cameron Highlanders’ captain Fraser Burrows echoed Russell’s conclusion:

  The private soldier had nothing to think about except where the next hostile bullet or shell was coming from. Nothing was easier in a night attack, but to stop, tie a bootlace and disappear. In Normandy this became more and more prevalent. . . . I had one Jock in Normandy who was marched into battle with a bayonet up his backside.

  Lieutenant Hugh Temple Bone noted, in a letter from Normandy to his mother, an increase in desertions as the campaign progressed: “People get lost all over the place in battle, some deliberately, most quite by accident.”

  Bain was not thinking about desertion. He was not thinking at all. The march from Touffréville took all night. At sunup, they halted. Bain and Stevenson dug a slit trench for themselves and the Bren gun. As soon as Bain tried to sleep, they were on the march again. For three hours that morning, they proceeded in single file on either side of a country road toward Escoville. When they stopped beside a hedgerow, Bain lit a cigarette and fell immediately to sleep. Alec woke him a few minutes later to say they had to dig new trenches beside a field of summer corn. Night came and with it German artillery fire that somehow missed the Gordons. In the morning, they moved into the deserted town of Escoville.

  B Company dug in behind a church that had become its headquarters. It was so quiet that day, 14 June, that the Gordons shaved and washed themselves and their clothes for the first time since they left England. While they braced for a German counterattack, there was little more than desultory artillery fire. On the evening of 16 June, the Germans escalated the bombardment, showering B Company with Moaning Minnies and artillery. Alec Stevenson, who was outside taking a piss when it began, ran back to the trench. His foot bashed Bain’s chin as he fell beside him, and both men hunkered down. As many as thirty mortar shells exploded at the same instant, gashing and tearing at the earth around the church. Bain wrote, “The fury of artillery is a cold, mechanical fury, but the intent is personal.”

  The trenches afforded little protection from the relentless downpour. As in past engagements, Bain heard the wounded screaming in agony and begging for help. During a pause in the onslaught, Gordon Rennie dived into Bain and Stevenson’s trench. “We’re pulling out,” he said. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Mitchell, was dead. Stevenson asked whether Mitchell had been the man they heard screaming. “Aye,” Rennie said. “He was hit bad. Thom had to finish him off.”

  Bain said, “Fucky Nell.”

  “You sound like Hughie,” Rennie told him.

  Captain Urquhart called the company into the church, where wounded men lay everywhere. He told them to regroup within the church’s graveyard and use its wall for cover in case the Germans advanced. He ordered all the Bren guns onto the west wall facing the forest. Bain kept watch with the Bren gun, while Alec Stevenson shoveled deep to make another trench. When Bain heard a Spandau burst, he fired back with the Bren gun. “You hit anything?” Stevenson asked.

  “I hope not.”

  German tanks approached Escoville at 7:30 that evening. An hour later, infantry units attacked battalion headquarters. The opposing forces clashed in and around the hedgerows and the churchyard until almost midnight. The Gordons pushed the Germans back, but they lost thirty-eight men killed, wounded and missing. German mortar and artillery fire resumed at 4:25 A.M.

  At first light, Sergeant Thom, who had replaced Lieutenant Mitchell in command of the platoon, led Bain, Stevenson, Rennie and another man on patrol through the Norman hedgerows. Thom slashed through the foliage of a hedge with wire cutters and squeezed through. The other four followed him into a field enclosed on all sides by tall, thick hedgerows. As Thom cut into another hedge at the far corner, a German patrol spotted him and opened fire. Thom, with his Sten gun on full automatic, shot back.

  In the ensuing skirmish, Bain suddenly found himself staring over the hedge into the eyes of a German soldier. Alec Stevenson urged, “For fuck’s sake Johnny shoot! Shoot the fucker!” The German raised his Schmeisser machine pistol. Bain snapped out of his daze and pulled the Bren gun’s trigger. Nothing happened. He knew then he was dead. His legs gave way, as if a sledgehammer had smashed into them. Stevenson jumped on top of him. Taking the Bren gun out of his hands, Stevenson unleashed an automatic burst that felled the German. The battleground went silent, and Alec called out, “Hey Gordon! Johnny’s been hit! Gie’s a hand.”

  Bain’s mates carried him through the brush, while he writhed in agony. Both legs were bleeding from the Schmeisser’s 9-millimeter parabellum cartridges, fired at five hundred rounds a minute. “By now he had become the wound itself,” Bain wrote of himself. “It was not a part of his body that was suffering pain. It was all of it.”

  A medical orderly at battalion headquarters injected him with morphine and dressed his wounds. Bain recovered sufficiently to thank Alec Stevenson for saving his life, but he could not understand why his Bren gun would not fire. Stevenson told him the truth: “Of course it wouldn’t. You had the bloody safety catch on.”

  His incompetence, the technical maladroitness for which he often chastised himself, had taken him out of the war. From France, doctors sent him back to Britain for a series of operations and a long recuperation. He would have many months to reflect on soldiering, violence and death, while his comrades fought on toward Germany. This would lead to some of the finest poetry of the war.

  THIRTEEN

  The second great issue of the flesh is sex.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 365

  BY THE TIME THE 36TH INFANTRY DIVISION came off the line at Piombino on 29 June, six of its members had won the Medal of Honor. It retired from the line with a record second to none among the Allied forces in Italy, although the “hard luck” reputation from its early reverses persisted. When the army posted the 36th, alongside the 45th, to the Invasion Training Center on the Bay of Salerno, the T-Patchers found themselves back on the beach beside the Roman ruins at Paestum, where they had begun the Italian invasion on 9 September 1943.

  They pitched their pup tents and were issued boxes of twenty-four Clark Bars. Steve Weiss finished off the chocolate–and–peanut butter confections in a few minutes. Hunger still gnawed at him, as it did in Rome before his five-course lunches. He walked off the base, climbed a fence into an orchard, picked four large peaches—as many as he could fit into his helmet—and devoured them. All that food, he reflected, must have been “a prize for surviving combat.” What he needed, though, was a woman.

  Many of the Italian women around Paestum had already attached themselves to rear echelon soldiers, who had been there for months and were li
kely to linger. The “pencil pushers,” as the infantrymen called them, had access to regular supplies that they dispensed to their girlfriends. Rivalry between frontline troops and those in the rear led to fights, and the two sides shouted insults at one another whenever Charlie Company drove through town in open trucks. The sight of clerks and quartermasters in fresh, summer-weight khaki uniforms roused a sense of injustice in frontline troops sweating out the July heat in winter olive drab.

  Combat troops turned to prostitutes, whose numbers in southern Italy had grown in proportion to the level of starvation. Weiss got his chance one day when a roving brothel stopped near his bivouac. From a small group of unkempt, unattractive girls, he paired off with a short, black-haired ingénue. She warned him it was her time of the month, but the eighteen-year-old soldier had waited too long to be deterred. Unbuckling his belt and dropping his trousers, he began an impromptu coupling. “Stop that!” shouted the battalion’s medical officer, whose unexpected appearance was as welcome as the chaplain’s. Medical officers had frequently lectured the men on the dangers of venereal disease. “Stay where you are,” came the officer’s command. Weiss fled, pulling up his trousers as he ran.

  The military’s efforts to separate soldiers from prostitutes had no effect. Films and lectures on hygiene did not impress young men whose normal impulses were intensified by the prospect of imminent death. A British soldier in Italy at this time prayed as he came under German machine-gun fire, “Dear God! Please don’t let me die until I’ve had a woman!” Syphilis and gonorrhea were no deterrents, when all they brought were a few days in a hospital bed. One self-defeating measure was a leaflet in Italian for soldiers to give to pimps saying, “I am not interested in your syphilitic sister.” Norman Lewis, the British intelligence officer, wrote in his diary, “Whoever dreamed this one up clearly had no idea of some of the implications or the possible consequences. Remarks about sisters are strictly taboo to Southern Italians . . . there are bound to be casualties.”