Читать книгу Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 9

But for the foolish and the heroic who ignore all physical limitations, nature may have to provide these peculiar forms of escape from pain or emotion too strong to endure.

Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 320

PRIVATE JOHN VERNON BAIN deserted from the British Army in Scotland long before the British Army sent him into combat. He was no coward. The nineteen-year-old volunteer’s record in the boxing ring – finalist at age fourteen in the Schoolboy Championships of Great Britain, Northwest Divisional Junior Champion, Scottish Command Middle Weight Champion in 1941, gold medals and press acclaim – proved as much. Yet, in 1941, he had run away for three weeks from his regimental base at Fort George, which to him was ‘that dark and grey promontory that lay in the Moray Firth like a fossilized Leviathan.’ At the time, he was a corporal in the 70th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highland Regiment. Deserting from relatively easy duty in Scotland as PTI, physical training instructor, made little sense, and his rationale was vague even forty-six years later: ‘I was supposed to be a corporal, and I was no good at this. I had no idea how to conduct drills and mount guard and all that kind of thing. In a kind of disgust or something, I just sort of cleared off. I wasn’t away long, about three weeks.’

Rather than court martial him for desertion, Bain’s commanding officer demoted him to private. ‘If you did revert to the ranks and had been an NCO,’ Bain said, ‘you could then claim for a transfer. And I was transferred to the London Scottish, and they were a sister regiment of the Gordons. And that was how I was sent to the Gordon Highlanders.’ His new unit was the 5/7th Gordons, a union of the old 5th and 7th Battalions of the distinguished regiment that the Duke of Gordon had established in 1794. Its commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel H. W. B. Saunders.

Bain had first volunteered in early 1940 to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, despite his admission that he was ‘singularly ignorant of the political realities’. He knew nothing about the Nazis, the German annexation of Austria or Hitler’s ambition to conquer most of Europe. A physical examination turned up colour-blindness and one punch-damaged eye that disqualified him from flying, so he and his older brother, Kenneth, decided to become merchant mariners. Neither of the Bain brothers, having grown up in the inland Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was an Able Bodied Seaman or had any shipboard experience. Their attempts to sign on before Christmas 1940 at the docks in London, Cardiff and, finally, Glasgow were met with derision. Staying in a rented room that was reducing the meagre hoard of cash they had brought from home, John and Kenneth chanced on a poster: ‘Are you over 18 and under 20? If you are you can join a young soldiers’ battalion.’

John asked his brother, ‘What about that? At least I’d get some shoes without holes.’ Kenneth corrected him, ‘Boots.’ He added the sticking point that, at two years older than John, he was over twenty.

They had a notion that twin brothers could not be separated. ‘The recruiting officer did not show the least disbelief when we gave the same date of birth,’ John wrote. ‘We were medically examined and passed as A1.’ The Army sent them to the 70th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherlands at the Bay Hotel outside Glasgow. ‘The Army was one service I had sworn I would never join,’ Bain wrote, ‘but, I told myself, a Scottish regiment would be different, more glamorous.’ The glamour of the regimental kilt, stylish headgear and bagpipes gave way to recruit training that was disappointingly unglamorous. ‘The object is to turn one into a kind of automaton,’ he said. ‘It works in a way.’

He ‘disliked the Army very much,’ recalling his time in Scotland as ‘nearly two years of boredom, discomfort and misery, relieved by occasional booze ups …’ He resented his ‘early days in the army when he had first stood guard at Duff House in Banff in the cruel winter of 1941 … protecting the old mansion against imaginary German parachutists dressed as nuns’. From the ways that Bain revisited his Army service in letters, books and poems, he appeared to have been pathologically unsuited to soldiering. He wrote, ‘By nature I was impractical, unpunctual, and clumsy, attributes that do not endear themselves to military authority.’ Thirty years after the war, his thoughts turned

… not so much to memories of battle but to the grinding tedium of service in the United Kingdom, training, manoeuvres, guards, courses, discomfort, humiliation, frustration, boredom and – rarely but unforgettably – moments of bizarre comedy, excitement and the joy of extraordinary physical well-being when food, warmth and the rest were not commonplace elements which we had the automatic right to expect in the pattern of our days but pleasure as real intensity, positive blessings.

In common with other British youngsters of the time, Bain had little experience of people from other classes. His own background was what he described as ‘working class but with aspirations of an entirely materialistic kind towards stifling gentility’. His mother read books and kept a piano, and his father worked for himself in a photography studio. Officers, some with no leadership qualifications apart from the right accent, irritated him, but the ‘other ranks’ seemed almost a foreign species. When one of them asked his name, he answered, ‘Vernon,’ his middle name that he had been called all his life. Bain recalled the squaddies’ mocking question: ‘“Vernon? What’s that?” And I’d say, “John”, quickly, which they could handle. So, I became “John” in the army.’

‘A lot of the chaps in the 70th Argylls were from the Glasgow slums, the Gorbals,’ he recalled, ‘and had pretty disgusting habits.’ In another reflection on his fellow squaddies, he wrote, ‘My comrades were mostly sub-literate, embittered children of the general strike, from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh.’ One of them pilfered Bain’s gold boxing medal, indicative of the petty thievery rampant in the ranks. Nevertheless, he wrote, ‘They would happily stick by you, and they were generous.’ Paid only two shillings a day, the Jocks gave their last pennies to comrades in need or to stand a friend a pint. The only person Bain trusted was his brother Kenneth, who was transferred to the Royal Engineers a year into their enlistment. That was about the time John ran away for three weeks.

To get along, Bain concealed from his squad mates his passion for books, poetry and classical music. In fact, he gave up reading altogether. ‘I deliberately suppressed that part of myself that I most valued,’ he wrote.

I became ashamed of my interest in literature, ideas and the arts. I consciously adopted a mask with forehead villainous low. I was already, at eighteen, greedily addicted to beer, so no acting ability was needed to play the part of boozer. My interest in boxing was genuine and my skill was respected, so it was not difficult for me to flex my muscles and roar with the roaring boys. But it was not good for me either. It was shameful and brutalizing.

After the transfer to B Company of 5/7th Gordon Highlanders, Bain made one good friend. Private Hughie Black was a working-class Scotsman of roughly his age and with a more profound contempt for officers. Black’s cynicism about the military had a hard class edge to it, and he would have stayed out of the war if it had been possible. The six-foot boxer from Buckinghamshire and the five-foot six-inch Glaswegian made an odd if comradely pair. Like most Scotsmen, Black said ‘aye’ for ‘yes’ and expressed himself in a rich vocabulary of profanities including ‘Fucky Nell.’ He called Bain ‘china’, as in ‘china plate’, rhyming slang for ‘mate’. If Bain had a friend to replace his brother in B Company, it was streetwise Hughie Black.

The tedium of training and guard duty came to an end on 20 June 1942, when the Gordons with the rest of their Highland Division regiments boarded the Spirit of Angus and other ships on the Clyde estuary and at Liverpool and Southampton. Their destination, in common with most other troop embarkations during the war, was withheld from the soldiers. The convoy of twenty-two troopships, escorted by eight destroyers, headed south through the Bay of Biscay towards Africa. For most of the youngsters, it was their first time out of Britain.

The 5/7th Gordons were part of the 51st Highland Division, commanded by forty-three-year-old Major General Douglas ‘Tartan Tam’ Wimberley. Wimberley stood six-foot-three, usually wore a kilt and waged a futile struggle with the high command to exclude English and Lowland Scots regiments from his division. His predecessor in command of the Highland Division was Major General Victor Morven Fortune. Fortune and the original division were then languishing in German prisoner of war camps, following their surrender to German General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux during the Battle of France in June 1940. The lucky units that managed to escape to Britain formed the core of the reconstituted Highland Division. The glorious histories of the 51st Division and its component regiments, like the Black Watch with its legacy in Egypt dating to the original British conquest of 1882, held no allure for Bain. Then and later, he refused to sentimentalize either war or the army.

Bain and his fellow Gordon Highlanders lived in confined quarters at sea, resenting the privacy and better rations afforded the officers. Bain said later of his comrades, ‘They had no respect for their officers.’ They amused themselves with cards and boxing. To cheers from his mates in the 5/7th Gordons, Bain defeated a sergeant from the Cameron Highlanders.

On 21 June, the day after the convoy set sail, Britain suffered a major defeat, its fourth of the war after the loss of France, Singapore and Burma. Rommel, who had captured the original 51st Division in France, conquered the Libyan port town of Tobruk and inflicted a casualty toll on British and Commonwealth forces of 35,000. The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, who covered the North African campaign for Britain’s Daily Express, wrote, ‘It was defeat as complete as may be.’ Britain’s Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Forces, General Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, pulled his troops back well into Egypt to the coastal railhead at El Alamein. The thinly defended Alamein Line, running between the Mediterranean in the north and the impassable Qattara Depression in the south, lay only sixty miles in front of Alexandria. The Royal Navy had meanwhile evacuated Alexandria’s harbour to avoid capture by the advancing Axis forces. This news, hardly a boost to morale, reached the Highland Division while it was far out at sea. Some of the men guessed that they were on their way to reinforce Britain’s battered desert defences, but officially they were told nothing.

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.