The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II

by Glass, Charles

  FOUR

  When he has his first encounter with the immediate threat of death, when he must kill and see men killed, when he must steel himself to hear the unheeded cries of the mortally wounded and endure the stench of battle, a man may become sick to his very vitals.

  Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 295

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1942, John Bain moved from the bivouac where Winston Churchill had addressed the men west to the Alamein Line. His job was to shoulder B Company’s light automatic Bren gun. Yet, despite Monty’s rigorous training, he and most of the other squaddies had little idea what to expect when fighting began. The Allied and Axis armies had reinforced their opposing positions from the Mediterranean shore forty miles south to the Qattara Depression. Almost as if re-creating the French battlefields of the First World War, the two sides had laid down miles of land mines, barbed wire, concrete gun emplacements, tank traps and trenches. Montgomery placed the 51st Highland Division between the veteran 9th Australian and 2nd New Zealand Divisions, reasoning that the novice Scots would benefit from the Dominion soldiers’ battlefield experience. He added that “the Scottish soldier quickly makes friends with the Dominion soldier. It may be because both of them are slightly uncivilized.” Montgomery set the offensive for 23 October, when he had nearly twice as many troops as his adversary—220,000 to Rommel’s 115,000. For an assault on entrenched positions, however, the minimum recommended was three-to-one.

  The Highlanders received General “Tartan Tam” Wimberley’s order of the day as they prepared to set out from their starting positions: “There will be no surrender for unwounded men. Any troops of the Highland Division cut off will continue to fight.” Young troops like John Bain moved forward. General Wimberley recalled, “I watched my Jocks filing past in the moonlight. Platoon by platoon they filed past, heavily laden with pick and shovel, sandbags and grenades—the officer at the head, his piper by his side. There was nothing more I could do now to prepare for the battle.”

  Just before 10:00 A.M., the Eighth Army unleashed the full force of its artillery batteries. Shells from more than a thousand British guns lashed the German positions with what two leading historians of Alamein called “the biggest artillery barrage the British army had laid on since the First World War.” The heaviest artillery pieces fired more than twenty-five rounds a minute, aiming their first salvos at the enemy’s artillery. “For all the manoeuvres you’d done, there is no preparation for an artillery barrage,” Bain recalled. “The barrage itself is enough to send you mad with terror. Our own barrage, I’m talking about, the twenty-five pounders, a deafening, terrible noise.” In the poem “Baptism of Fire,” Bain would later write about the initiation of a young soldier (“He is no kid. He’s nineteen and he’s tough”):

  And, with the flashes, swollen thunder roars

  as, from behind, the barrage of big guns

  begins to batter credence with its din

  and, overhead, death whinnies for its feed

  while countering artillery shakes and stuns

  with slamming of a million massive doors.

  It did not take long for the Germans to match the British fire. Exploding shells crashed into the earth around him, but explosions were less terrifying to Bain than the sounds made by human beings: “One of the most memorable and nightmarish things is hearing the voices of the wounded, who have been badly wounded, the voices raised in terror and pain.” Shrapnel hit the company sergeant, “a kind of father figure” ten years older than Bain. “Hearing his voice sobbing and in fact calling for his mother was so, I don’t know, demeaning,” Bain said. “I felt a kind of shock that I cannot fully understand even now, because he had been reduced to a baby.” He would later write in “Remembering Alamein”:

  And the worst sound in a battle

  The noise that I still hear

  The voices of comrades raised

  In agony and fear.

  After the artillery came the infantry offensive, when the soldiers of the Eighth Army emerged from their underground lairs to charge into the enemy guns. The Highland Division marched forward, many falling to German machine-gun and mortar fire when they were barely out of their trenches, while the bagpipes played. “When you’re in action, you have no idea what’s happening,” Bain said. “You haven’t the foggiest idea of where you are, where the enemy is, what’s happening or anything else.”

  • • •

  Six days into the battle, one young officer deserted from the 10th Armored Division’s headquarters well behind the lines. Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Keith Douglas was not avoiding combat. He was running straight to it. “I enlisted in September 1939,” he wrote, “and during two years or so of hanging about I never lost the certainty that the experience of battle was something I must have.” He was a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers, which arrived in the Middle East a year before the Gordon Highlanders in August 1941. He was also a poet, who as an undergraduate had edited Oxford’s literary magazine Cherwell. To his distaste, the regiment assigned him to the division as a camouflage trainer. The army neglected to include camouflage equipment in its exercises, leaving Douglas in Cairo with nothing to do. It demoralized a young soldier yearning to be atop a tank with his men.

  When Douglas told his batman, Private Lockett, they were leaving to find their regiment somewhere on the Alamein battlefield, Lockett replied, “I like you, sir. You’re shit or bust, you are.” Lockett drove at speed across the desert until they found a rear echelon of the regiment four miles behind the lines, just north of John Bain and the Highlanders. A captain Douglas knew asked, “Have you come back to us?” Douglas said that depended on the colonel of the regiment. “Oh, he’ll be glad to see you. I don’t think ‘A’ Squadron’s got many officers left.” At that, Douglas and Lockett rushed forward. They found the colonel, whom Douglas called “Piccadilly Jim,” sitting in a truck.

  “Good evening, sir,” Douglas said. “I’ve escaped from Division for the moment, so I wondered if I’d be any use to you up here.” Piccadilly Jim, who could have had him court-martialed on a desertion charge, pondered the enthusiastic officer’s fate. Because A Squadron had only one officer left alive and unwounded, the colonel gave Douglas command of two tanks. Douglas reflected, “Best of all, I had never realized how ashamed of myself I had been in my safe job at Division until with my departure this feeling was suddenly gone.”

  Soon, Douglas was facing German tanks in his Mark II Crusader: “Every gun was now blazing away into the twilight, the regiment somewhat massed together, firing with every available weapon.” As his gunner took aim at the Germans, Douglas “tossed out empty cases, too hot to touch with a bare hand.” The tank filled with smoke, but Douglas did not care: “I coughed and sweated; fear had given place to exhilaration.” His impression of the battlefield contrasted with infantry private John Bain’s. He liked the action, while Bain detested the suffering.

  “My first day in action had been eventful enough,” Douglas wrote. “I felt as if I had been fighting for months.” The tanks, which needed repair and servicing, withdrew for the next four days. Douglas looked forward to getting back into the battle.

  • • •

  The Alamein fighting raged relentlessly for nine days and nights, while the British made steady if unclear gains against an enemy that was unafraid to retake positions it lost. John Bain’s appreciation of objective, strategy and tactics—the lifeblood of the soldier—took second place to comradeship, pain and fear. On 2 November, Rommel cracked and retreated into the desert. Out of what Bain saw as “almighty confusion and shambles” came Britain’s first significant land victory of the war.

  The achievement was nothing short of extraordinary for a nation that had been defeated in France and Libya by the Germans and in the Far East by Japan. “Before Alamein we never had a victory,” Churchill would say with characteristic hyperbole. “After Alamein we never had a defeat.” Credit went to the
commanders as well as to infantrymen like John Bain and tankers like Keith Douglas. Soldiers in the field and hard-pressed civilians throughout the British Empire sensed that the Axis was not, after all, invincible.

  The Eighth Army lost 13,500 soldiers killed, wounded or missing in action, almost 10 percent of the number who started. The toll was particularly high among the Highland Division’s bagpipers. Until El Alamein, pipers played the Scottish regiments into battle. Bain recalled,

  After Alamein they didn’t, because they virtually all got killed. The pipers actually played you into battle. They were there at the entrance to minefields, playing the pipes as the Highland Division went in. There was something mad and heroic, I suppose, about it, but something terribly sad too. After that, they became stretcher bearers.

  In Bain’s poem “Remembering Alamein,” a Kiplingesque “old sweat” recalled,

  And at the gap one piper

  Played “Highland Laddie” for

  Our comfort and encouragement,

  Like a ghost from another war.

  Of course that brave young piper

  Did not stand there long;

  Shrapnel or a Spandau-burst

  Ended that brief song.

  From Alamein, the Eighth Army pursued the Germans and Italians along the Mediterranean shore toward Italian Libya. The New Zealand Division, which correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote was “by common consent the finest infantry formation in the Middle East,” drove the Germans out of the small Egyptian port of Mersa Matruh on 8 November. That morning, on the other side of North Africa in Vichy-controlled Morocco and Algeria, the United States armed forces entered the war against Germany at the head of an Anglo-American invasion. The Americans provided some relief to Montgomery by diverting German resources to the west.

  After the conquest of Mersa Matruh, when the 10th Armored Division moved its headquarters closer to the front, Keith Douglas had to face his commanding officer. The colonel, who was playing poker in the officers’ mess tent, made Douglas wait for a break in the game. When he put his cards down, he said to the young lieutenant, “Just step outside with me awhile.”

  While the colonel smoked his pipe under the African stars, Douglas feared immediate arrest. “This business of your running away,” his commander asked Douglas. “Why did you do it?” Douglas noticed that the old officer seemed more hurt than angry, and he answered that he did not know why he left. He thought that it may have been that he had nothing to do in the rear. “That’s absurd, of course,” the colonel said. “If you’d asked me, I should have given you permission to go back while the battle was on, willingly.” Douglas had the tact not to remind him he had made a request and was refused. Instead, he said, “Well, I’m very sorry, sir.” The colonel told him not to be unmilitary again. He would not court-martial him. In fact, he let him remain with his regiment at the front, where he saw more combat.

  A short time later, Douglas wrote the poem “Dead Men,” which included the stanza,

  Then leave the dead in the earth, an organism

  not capable of resurrection, like mines,

  less durable than the metal of a gun,

  a casual meal for a dog, nothing but the bone

  so soon. But tonight no lovers see the lines

  of the moon’s face as the lines of cynicism.

  Like John Bain, Douglas interpreted his experience through poetry in which the dead emerged as more important actors than the living. Their deaths reminded both soldiers that, at any moment, they too might become the object of others’ reflections on mortality.

  • • •

  On 11 November, the Eighth Army expelled the last Germans and Italians from Egypt. Two days later, it recaptured Tobruk, whose fall the previous June had demoralized the British with a humiliating retreat and mass desertions. A week later, Benghazi fell. Three more weeks of marching, fierce fighting, armor battles and artillery exchanges brought the Eighth Army back to El Agheila. Finally, after the loss of thousands of lives and many battles, the British were back in the Roman fortress they had captured in February 1941. Of that first British conquest of El Agheila in the Libyan province of Cyrenaica, Alan Moorehead had written,

  The ancient law of the desert was, in fact, coming into play. Once more the British had proved you can conquer Cyrenaica. Now unwillingly they began to prove that you cannot go on. It had been the same for both sides. Tripoli and Cairo were equidistant from Cyrenaica. . . . The trouble was that the farther you got away from your base the nearer the retreating enemy got to his. Consequently as you got weaker, the enemy got stronger.

  This time, though, the British did not weaken. They solved some of their supply problems by rebuilding the shore ports that Rommel’s sappers had destroyed. The British assaulted El Agheila on 11 December and battled for a week to expel the Germans. The chase continued from Libya’s Cyrenaica province into Tripolitania. On 23 January, the Eighth Army captured the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It was John Bain’s twenty-first birthday. At the victory parade, Montgomery praised his soldiers for advancing 1,300 miles in three months. Their achievement, he said, was “probably without parallel in history.” Winston Churchill, in Libya to share the glory, declared, “Let me then assure you, soldiers and airmen, that your fellow-countrymen regard your joint work with admiration and gratitude, and that after the war when a man is asked what he did it will be quite sufficient for him to say, ‘I marched and fought with the Desert Army.’”

  The desert war moved to Tunisia, where the Axis received fresh reinforcements from Germany to block the Americans in the west and the British in the east. Taking advantage of the Mareth Line defenses the French had built years earlier against a potential Italian thrust from Libya, the German and Italian forces dug in again to meet the British onslaught.

  • • •

  The 5/7th Gordons had endured searing daylight heat, freezing nights, rainstorms and long spells without cooked food or rest. Many had won battle honors, more lost their lives. Replacement troops were sent to the front to fill the missing men’s places. One was a Scotsman from Banffshire named Bill Grey, who had volunteered from “a cushy pen pushing job in Palestine” to go into combat. Bain thought he was brave, having been seen to stand up to a tough, drunken sailor and to play football well. Yet, when he and Bain became friends, Grey admitted having made “a colossal blunder” in joining a frontline unit. Battle terrified him.

  The deaths and wounding of the men around him affected John Bain more than the valor and the medals. Although he claimed not to be brave, he did not run from combat. He recalled that a captain in his company did, during a “a mock attack on the Mareth Line.” The feint involved walking through a minefield to draw German fire, which would allow the 2nd New Zealand Division to make “a flanking movement called a left hook.” Bain, at that time the company runner, stayed beside the captain ready to transmit his orders.

  We were going through this minefield. Our artillery was what they call a creeping barrage, so the range is gradually increased as the infantry goes in. Somehow it went wrong. Either the creeping barrage wasn’t creeping fast enough, or we were advancing too quickly. We were under our own twenty-five pounders, and the German 88s were coming the other way. In the middle of this minefield, somehow we had wandered off the track, and the German machine guns, Spandaus, seemed to have a fixed line on the gap, everything seemed to be coming at us. I remember crouching down, because all this stuff was coming over. Without warning to us, the artillery centre put down smoke as well. Someone thought it was gas. I was crouching down with my head down, and the company commander on my right, not looking at anything. All you’re doing is your teeth are chattering. And you’re praying and you’re swearing. I looked to see how he was getting on, and he wasn’t there. He deserted. He’d gone back. He ran away in the middle of an attack. I never knew what happened to him. That was the last time I saw him.

  The Tunisian fight
ing became so fierce that an officer in the Scots Guards Regiment wrote, “I have seen strong men crying like children.”

  General George Patton’s II Corps drew the German 10th Panzer Division away from the Mareth Line, and Montgomery’s offensive dislodged the rest of the German forces on 27 March. The Germans established their next line of resistance about twenty miles to the north in Wadi Akarit, a deep sand gulley four miles long and normally impossible for vehicles to cross. However, the winter rains had stopped and the ground was drying. To its left, away from the sea, was high ground along the Roumana Ridge. While waiting for the British to arrive, German engineers reinforced the wadi and the ridge with entrenchments, observation posts, mines and barbed wire.

  The assault at Wadi Akarit began on the night of 5 April. Bain, whose recollection of earlier battles was sketchy, recorded with a poet’s eye almost every detail of the brutal but relatively minor engagement. “The ridge of hills was a dull grey dusty shade like the hide of an elephant,” he wrote.

  After the sun had set, the surface darkened to a smoky blue which gradually melted into the gathering darkness. But, although the ridge was not physically discernible, there was not a man in the battalion who was not aware of its menacing bulk as they moved as quietly as they could to the area at the foot of the hill where they were to dig in and wait for the dawn when the other battalions in the brigade would pass through their positions and attack the enemy in the hills.