The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (8 page)

General Montgomery noted in his diary, “
We had on this day the heaviest and most savage fighting we had had since I commanded the 8th Army. Certain localities changed hands several times, my troops fought magnificently.” Neither Monty nor his senior officers referred in their written recollections to the events that followed the battle’s conclusion. John Bain did, but only years afterward.

At the top of the ridge, Bain saw the first corpses from the Seaforth unit that had passed him a few hours earlier. Hughie Black, indicating one dead soldier, said, “There’s one poor bastard’s finished with fuckin’-an-fightin’.” Bain saw no wound; it was as if the man were asleep. B Company moved forward to the Germans’ slit trenches. More dead lay over most of the ground.
The Seaforths had lost more than one hundred men killed and wounded, as one of its officers, Major G. L. W. Andrews, recalled. Black noticed that there were no wounded on the ground, concluding that the “meat wagons” must have removed them. What happened next was unexpected. Bain recorded his impressions, again in the third person:

Then he saw that the other men in his section and from the other platoons must have been given the order to fall out because they were moving among the dead bodies, the Seaforths’ corpses as well as the German, and they were bending over them, sometimes turning them up with an indifferent boot, before they removed watches, rings, and what valuables they could find. They seemed to be moving with unnatural slowness, proceeding from one body to another, stooping, reaching out, methodical and absorbed. Hughie had gone. He must have joined the scavengers.

In a postwar interview, Bain elaborated: “
My own friends went around looting the corpses, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing. Off their own people. Why that is so much worse than taking it off the Germans, I don’t know, but it was somehow.” He stopped thinking, transfixed in a state of “almost trance-like indifference.” A poem he would write at century’s end, “Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit,” made no reference to the looting of the dead:

He sees the shapes of rock, the sand and rubble

on which, at unshaven dawn, the bodies sprawl

or lie with unpurposed and tidy decorum,

all neat in battle-order and KD uniform.

His reaction to the desecration and pillaging of the corpses would change the course of his life.

FIVE

They are longing for those upon whose presence and affection they have long depended. They want their wives or mothers.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 334

P
RIVATE
A
LFRED
W
HITEHEAD
had not married the girl who needed to finish school by the time the 2nd Infantry Division left Texas for Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, in late November 1942. A troop train carried them over a thousand miles north, “as the land changed from sagebrush, then flat barren wheat land, to empty rolling farm country.” It reached Wisconsin, where many of the southern boys saw snow for the first time. An excited soldier from Florida rolled around in the ice, stopping only when he realized how cold it was. Camp McCoy, carved out of fourteen thousand acres of Monroe County in 1909, was the army’s winter warfare training base. In February 1943, the division took part in warfare exercises in northern Michigan. Whitehead remembered, “
We learned there what cold weather really was—the thermometer stayed at a steady forty degrees below zero.” Whitehead coped with the cold by trudging on snowshoes to find alcohol and bring it back to the squad. Although he skirted the rules, he had no objection to discipline. “
Both as individuals and units,” he wrote, “we were put through specific types of combat instruction designed to prepare us for the kinds of fighting we might be expected to run into overseas, until we believed we were the toughest outfit in the whole U.S. Army.”

Whitehead saw himself as one of the toughest in a tough outfit. His readiness to settle arguments with his fists got him into fights, and his weakness for alcohol added to his belligerency. In photographs, he looked brash, small in stature yet full of bravado, with curly chestnut hair parted in the middle and a boyish smile. One snapshot of him at Camp McCoy showed the young GI defiantly astride the hood of his commanding officer’s jeep. His combat helmet’s raffish angle seemed to say that this youngster was not afraid of anyone.

The nearest village to Camp McCoy was Sparta, in Kent County, where Whitehead spent as many off hours as he could getting drunk, shooting craps and courting. “Taverns were plentiful, but money and women were on a strict war-time ration basis, so we had plenty of fights over both,” he remembered. He rented a room in Sparta, “a place I could call my own on my time off,” where he slept off his drinking bouts. Weekends found him spending days in a bar, nights in his room. He was a loner who assumed the only remedy to his loneliness was a bride.

He spotted three young women one afternoon in a Sparta pool hall, and he offered to buy them some Coca-Cola. They turned him down. He asked another GI who the “stuck up girls” were. The soldier said they were his sisters. Whitehead brought three bottles of Coke to the girls, but they still didn’t want them from the cocky southerner. A moment later, Whitehead noticed his wallet was missing and declared that no one could leave the pool hall until he had it back. This led to a brawl that ended with the arrival of MPs. When the other soldier saw that Whitehead had no money left, he invited him home for dinner.

This led to Whitehead’s acquaintance with the soldier’s three sisters and, soon, Whitehead’s proposal of marriage to the oldest. A photograph of Selma Sherpe taken at about this time showed a young woman with buoyant blond hair, tied back like Betty Grable’s, and full lips that would have attracted almost any young man. She resisted his advances and his proposal, but she eventually dated him when he was out on liberty. “Many happy evenings and weekends followed, and I found I was growing very fond of the Sherpe family, who gave a sense of belonging I never had at home.” There were dinners at the Sherpe farm, Pleasant Valley, as well as movies and carnivals. “My Southern accent also provided some amusing moments,” he recalled. “One Sunday, while assisting Mrs. Sherpe with Sunday dinner, I asked where she kept the ‘flare’ (flour), and had the house in an uproar trying to figure out and find whatever ‘flare’ was.” The Sherpes were incredulous when he told them about his childhood diet of “wild onions, poke salad, wild mustard greens” and his career as a moonshiner. They enjoyed his visits, but Selma evaded Alfred’s questions about a date for a wedding she had not agreed to.

“Many of the boys were getting married and had someone to come home to and live for,” Whitehead wrote. As the day for shipping out approached, he asked his sergeant for a pass to get married. The army gave him three days off, on the understanding he would return with a marriage certificate. Whitehead bought a ring and hitchhiked to the Sherpes’ house, twelve miles from town. He gave the ring to Selma. The next morning, 9 August 1943, Mr. and Mrs. Sherpe drove the couple to a justice of the peace in Caledonia, Minnesota, where there was no waiting period for marriages. Their honeymoon was spent at the Sherpes’ farm. The idyll did not last long.

At the end of September, Whitehead told his bride the division was going overseas. He reassured her he would win the war quickly and be home soon, but she responded gravely, “It will be very hard for you, and it will be many years before you return.” On their last morning together, Selma wept.
On 3 October, the newly minted troops of the 2nd Infantry Division boarded a train bound for New York. There, on 8 October, the USS
Florence Nightingale
was waiting to take the young soldiers in convoy across the Atlantic. As Whitehead approached the gangplank, he noticed a squad of MPs armed with rifles, bayonets and machine guns. They were there to ensure no one tried to desert.

SIX

Such a sufferer from war shock is not a weakling, he is not a coward. He is a battle casualty.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 353

A
FEW MILES INTO THE
E
GYPTIAN DESERT
east of Alexandria, the prison at Britain’s Mustafa Barracks was the final destination for soldiers convicted of crimes from desertion and disobedience to rape and murder. The base had stood, since the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, beside the Roman camp that Octavian erected after his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 24
B.C.
For the British, it had additional resonance: in 1801, they had defeated Napoleon’s forces there, and the barracks was an assembly point for many of the regiments sent on the disastrous Gallipoli campaign against Turkey in 1915. Like Rome, Britain used the base primarily to cow the natives in Alexandria. The prison to punish wayward troops was a later addition.

The military detention center at Mustafa was notorious. Allan Campbell McLean based a novel,
The Glasshouse
, on his fifty-six days confined within its walls. A character in his book recalled that the “old sweats” who had done time in many prisons reserved a special hatred for Mustafa Barracks:

Their talk always came round to the one in the desert near Alexandria. The Alex one was the worst of the lot, they said, the screws there egged on by a mad bastard of a commandant, who would have stuck the boys in front of a firing squad if he hadn’t reckoned on Rommel doing the job for him when they had done their time and got back to their units.

One blazing afternoon in the early summer of 1943, an army truck dumped John Bain and five other prisoners at, in Bain’s words, “the great iron-studded door that looked almost jet-black against the high white walls.” The door to No. 55 Military Prison and Detention Barracks opened, and the shackled convicts marched into a square formed by two-story detention barracks and rows of solid steel cell doors. While the men stood at attention, a military policeman named Staff Sergeant Hardy informed them of their new status: “
From now on, you are S.U.S.’s—Soldiers Under Sentence. You will do everything at the double. You understand? Everything. You do not move unless it’s at the double.” So confident were the guards that escape was impossible that they removed the men’s chains. Staff Sergeant Hardy then marched them double-time into the middle of the square, where he turned them over to Staff Sergeant Henderson.

Hardy and Henderson dressed in identical starched khaki drill clothes, peaked caps and shining boots. In common with the other MPs guarding prisoners behind the lines, they had not been to the battlefront or faced the enemy in combat. This did not, however, deter them from playing tough with men who had. Henderson ordered each SUS to answer to his name and serial number. When the first, Private Morris, answered, “Sarnt,” the sergeant’s face seemed to Bain to contort into “
a mixture of snarl and smile.” Henderson went into a rage: “Not Sarnt, you dozy man! Staff! You call us Staff. . . . Understand? Staff’s what you call us. All except the RSM [regimental sergeant major] and the commandant. You call them Sir.”

Reading out Bain’s name and number, he said, “I see you’re in the Gordon Highlanders. What’s your regimental motto?”

Bain answered, “Bydand.”

“Staff!”

“Bydand, Staff.”

“Bydand. Aye. And what does that mean, Private Bain?”

“Stand fast, Staff.”

“Stand fast. That’s the motto of the Gordon Highlanders and they’ve always lived up to it. Till now. They never retreated. Not in the whole history of the regiment. But you didn’t stand fast, Private Bain, did you! You horrible man. You took a powder. You got off your mark. You’re a disgrace to a great regiment. My father fought with the Gordon Highlanders in the Great War. He stood fast, Bain. He didna take a powder. So I’m going to keep a special eye on you, Bain.”

Henderson detailed the daily regimen: reveille at 6:00
A.M.
, inspection, daily assignment of tasks, back into the cells at 5:00
P.M.
,
lights out at 9:30. Speaking was forbidden. “If you’re caught talking at any time you’ll be on a charge and you’ll get punished,” he said. “Three days solitary on PD One. That’s Punishment Diet Number One. Bread and water.” Bain noticed Henderson’s lips curl to expose a “mad, ferocious grin” as he ordered the new SUSs to strip and throw their clothes and belongings onto blankets. Henderson made a demonstration of examining item after item, then instructed them to wrap everything in the blankets and raise them over their heads.

When Henderson barked the order for the naked and sweating men to run back and forth across the square, humiliation gave way to physical pain. The weight pressing on Bain’s arms was almost impossible to bear, although he was a physically strong twenty-one-year-old with a prizefighter’s physique. For those with less stamina, it was worse. Henderson shouted, “Get them knees up! Straighten them arms! Left-right, left-right, left. . . . Right . . . wheel!” This went on relentlessly until the sun had nearly set, when Henderson ordered a halt and marched them to their cell.