Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War

Whitehead and the rest of his platoon lived rough in the Louisiana woods to hone survival skills, like foraging for food, hiding from the enemy and washing in streams. Some of the men paid local families to cook them fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. Whitehead lit out after a Cajun girl, who responded to his advances by pelting him with stones. Louisiana had two types of weather, as far as Whitehead could judge, ‘hot and then hotter’. Mosquitoes and snakes proved more menacing than the Blue Army.

On 22 September 1942, the 2nd Division returned to Fort Sam Houston. Whitehead’s days revolved around close order drill, twenty-five-mile hikes with fifty-pound packs, kitchen police (KP), training films, field inspections and rifle practice. Despite the resilience his hard-labouring childhood gave him, he came into conflict with authority more than once. Officers told him to use his free time to catch up on sleep, but he left the base as often as he could to drink, gamble and chase women. ‘I had numerous girlfriends,’ he wrote, ‘but figured anyone could have a girlfriend. What I really wanted was to get married.’ His attention focused on a girl with red hair, whom he dated and to whom he proposed. The engagement would be prolonged, because the girl’s mother ‘wanted her to finish school first’.

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