Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War

The ships refuelled at Freetown, Sierra Leone, but the men were not permitted ashore lest they contract malaria. As the convoy cruised further south along the African coast, the soldiers on board remained unaware that in Egypt their comrades had succumbed to panic that the British called ‘the flap’.

In Cairo, on 1 July, burning documents at Britain’s embassy and military headquarters sent up billows of smoke so thick that the day became known as ‘Ash Wednesday’. Trains leaving the Cairo station for British Palestine overflowed with passengers and baggage. British subjects queued outside Barclay’s Bank to withdraw their money. A mood of defeat prevailed, as Alan Moorehead, whose wife and baby had taken a train to Palestine, observed on the road between Cairo and Alexandria. It was, he wrote ‘a full scale retreat. Guns of all sorts, R.A.F. wagons, recovery vehicles, armoured cars and countless lorries crammed with exhausted and sleeping men, were pouring up the desert road into Cairo … The road on our side – the side that carried vehicles up to the front – was clear …’

Worst of all for the British, about 20,000 soldiers vanished from the ranks. Many took refuge in the Nile Delta, some living through brigandry and others surviving on the charity of the Egyptian peasantry, the fellahin. Many hid with girlfriends in Cairo. British Military Police, known as ‘redcaps’ for the colour of their headgear, established a checkpoint at El Deir on the road between Alamein and Amariya. ‘Every vehicle was checked, and personnel travelling eastwards as passengers had to satisfy the military police as to the authority of their journey,’ wrote Major S. F. Crozier of the Royal Military Police (RMP) and Provost Service. ‘Written orders had been given to this post to fire on any person failing to halt when called upon to do so.’ When some deserters drove off-road to avoid the checkpoint, the MPs placed the desert on both sides of the road under ‘continuous observation’.

The Middle East Commander-in-Chief, General Claude Auchinleck, believed the solution was for courts martial to impose exemplary death sentences. As early as April of that year, Auchinleck had written to the War Office requesting ‘that His Majesty’s Government may be pressed to give urgent consideration to the immediate introduction of legislation necessary to restore into the Army Act the punishment of death for the offences of Desertion in the Field and of Misbehaving in the face of the Enemy in such manner as to show cowardice’. Unlike the United States, Britain had abolished the death penalty for desertion. During the First World War, when the Americans had not executed any deserters, the British had put to death 304 soldiers for desertion, cowardice, disobedience and quitting their posts. Post-war revulsion at the firing squads had led the Labour Government in 1930 to override objections from military chiefs and prohibit the execution of deserters.

‘With the increase of number of troops in Egypt and Palestine, following the entry of Italy into the war [in June 1940], crime increased proportionately,’ wrote RMP Major Crozier. ‘Conscription had brought into the army a percentage of soldiers with criminal antecedents or tendencies. Many of these were drafted to the Middle East.’ Major Crozier, who believed there were too few military policemen to deal with criminal soldiers in Egypt, continued:

On arrival in Egypt they found that a number of soldiers had decided that the delights of Cairo and Alexandria were infinitely preferable to the monotony, discomforts and dangers of the Western Desert and East African campaigns. These deserters combined to form troublesome and dangerous gangs which were to become very familiar to the [Special Investigation] Branch [SIB] under the names of ‘The Free British Corps’ and ‘The Dead End Kids’.

Even before the fall of Tobruk, Major Crozier noted, ‘Not a day passed without many arrests being made.’ The RMP sent extra officers and men, many of them formerly with Scotland Yard, from Britain and the colonies, to deal with the caseload. It also recruited men locally from regular service battalions. Private Wilf Swales of the Green Howards transferred to the RMP in Egypt on the promise of ‘a shilling a day extra’.

Particularly worrying for the MPs were the theft and sale of British arms and ammunition. Zionist settlers in Palestine, planning their own war against the British, were major buyers of the looted Allied weapons. Two leaders in the Jewish Haganah defence force, Abraham Rachlin and Lieb Sirkin, were sentenced to seven and ten years respectively, for purchasing stolen arms. Their accomplices in the Royal Sussex and Royal East Kent Regiments received fifteen years penal servitude. Major Crozier wrote, ‘The number of thefts of arms of all types and ammunition was appalling, and the “Dead End Kids” were responsible for many of them.’ This deserter band befriended legitimate soldiers to gain access to bases and canteens, where they stole weapons, food, fuel and other supplies. The SIB shot and killed several of them. Another deserter gang calling itself the ‘British Free Corps’ survived by selling stolen military supplies, until its members too were caught.

Auchinleck argued in his letter of 7 April that nothing less than the death penalty would provide a ‘salutary deterrent in a number of cases, in which the worst example was set by men to whom the alternative of prison to the hardships of battle conveyed neither fear nor stigma’. In a memorandum of 14 June to the rest of the War Cabinet, War Secretary Sir Percy James Grigg appeared to support Auchinleck. He wrote:

My military advisers are unanimous in their opinion that the abolition of the death penalty for desertion in the field and cowardice in the face of the enemy was a major mistake from the military point of view. They hold that the penalty was a powerful deterrent against ill-discipline in the face of the enemy, which might so easily mean a lost battle and a lost campaign. In this connection it may be noted that the U.S. Army retain the death penalty for practically the whole range of offences to which it applied in the British Army in 1914–18 …

Grigg, a career civil servant whom Churchill had appointed Secretary of State for War the previous February, then turned from the purely military to political factors:

It is a subject on which there are strong feelings, and to justify a modification of the present law we should have to produce facts and figures as evidence that the British soldiers’ morale in the face of the enemy is so uncertain as to make the most drastic steps necessary to prevent it breaking. Any such evidence would come as a profound shock to the British public and our Allies and as a corresponding encouragement to our enemies.

He concluded, ‘Nevertheless, if military efficiency were the sole consideration, I should be in favour, as are my military advisers, of the reintroduction of the death penalty for the offences in question. But the political aspects are, at any rate, in present circumstances, as important, if not more important, than the military.’ Grigg asked Auchinleck for exact figures on the scale of desertions before the Cabinet could reach a decision.

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 the 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 per cent of the psychological casualties back into the field. The British followed suit in August, when the Royal Army Medical Corps’ 200 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 towards 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 8th Army commander. He and Brooke appointed General Sir Harold Alexander C-in-C Mideast and placed General William Gott in command of the 8th Army. General Gott, however, was killed when two German Messerschmitts attacked a 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 8th 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 court martials, which would attract publicity and undermine the myth of the universally brave British Tommy. Moreover, the 8th 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. Non-commissioned 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 afterwards, ‘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 defences 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 programme 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 direct 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 US 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 labour. 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 Indian Head 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 honourable 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 Engineers 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 manoeuvres seemed ‘like a great game, much like my childhood games of hide-and-seek, where one would surprise the “enemy”’. Without enough weapons to equip all the troops, Whitehead and some of his comrades carried broomsticks instead of rifles and used empty mortar rounds as anti-tank 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.