The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (16 page)

One of the deserters had so convincingly impersonated an officer, in full uniform with medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross, that, in
Time
’s words, “he made the MPs who questioned him stand at attention.”

In May 1944, the British and American military police conducted joint mass raids on London’s West End. On 16 May, MPs fixed bayonets to their rifles for a roundup of Soho’s seamier nightspots. The
Chicago Daily Tribune
reported that police apprehended forty-two suspected deserters. “
They also trapped a one-star general, but his papers were in order,” the paper added.
Five nights later, on 21 May, the MPs together with the Metropolitan Police targeted restaurants, hotels and the Astoria Cinema and Ballroom on Charing Cross Road in their drive to return deserters to their units in time for the invasion of France.

In Liverpool, Military Police lieutenant Timothy Sharland recalled that the city’s military court was in permanent session during the war. Most defendants were charged with desertion. “
An awful lot of soldiers just didn’t like the idea of the war and they’d just push off,” he said. “Or they’d use the excuse that their wife was playing around with someone else. But in a place like Liverpool, there were some pretty rough people about the place. Around Bootle and Seaforth and Riverland and places like that, not exactly places I’d choose to go and live. A lot of chaps [were] deserting and hiding out in places like that.”

•   •   •

Something more than fear of prison kept John Bain from deserting a third time. He could not bear to prove Captain Babbage right. Babbage’s words, spoken on his first day at Mustafa Barracks, haunted him: “You’re all cowards! You’re all yellow!” Hughie Black, having seen Bain in the boxing ring and beside him at Alamein and Wadi Akarit, protested, “
For crying out loud, Johnny, you’re no fucking coward!” Black tried again to persuade Bain to desert. As they smoked during a break in training, Bain repeated, “I’m not going to take a powder. I’ve got to have another go. And I don’t mind telling you, I’m shit scared. But if I fucked off now, I’d never know, would I? And I don’t know why, but somehow I’ve got to know. I’ve got to find out if those bastards in the nick were right or wrong.”

Three days later, on 25 May 1944, desertion became impossible. MPs encircled the Gordons’ camp near Grays with a triple ring of Dannert barbed wire and mounted round-the-clock patrols. “Unlike conventional security measures these were aimed not at frustrating penetration from outside but at preventing the escape of those within the camp,” Bain wrote. Throughout southern England, military encampments with British, Canadian, American and other Allied soldiers were “sealed” from the outside world.
On the perimeter of the 5th Cameron Highlanders’ camp at Snaresbrook, east London, bemused Italian prisoners of war noticed that they had more freedom to roam than their captors.

•   •   •

The 21st Army Group, primarily the Second British and First Canadian Armies, was under the command of Bernard Law Montgomery. Promoted the previous September to field marshal, Monty worked furiously to bring to full strength divisions and regiments that had lost men in battles from Dunkirk to Anzio. The Second Army had gone so far as to recruit convicted deserters like John Bain, as well as to overlook the civilian crimes of men willing to take the King’s shilling as an alternative to prison. Britain was running out of good men. After the RAF, the Royal Navy, military intelligence and other branches of the armed forces, as well as vital civilian sectors like arms production and coal mining, claimed their shares, the infantry received the rest. Some infantry commanders doubted the quality of their recruits. Major General Harold Freeman-Attwood, commanding the British 46th Infantry Division, summed up the view of many senior infantry officers in May 1943: “
The men we get in the infantry are to a great extent those not required by the RAF or with insufficient brains for technical employment.”

While the infantry was taking all the men it could find, it was weeding others out. “
The resistance to be expected by our landing forces at the beaches is far greater than anything we have yet encountered in the European War,” General Eisenhower had written to Chief of Staff George Marshall in February 1944.
That meant not sending men the army believed were likely to break down or desert. In preparation for the French invasion, unfit men in the infantry were sent to support units. Overweight troops were the first to go. Those whose psychological profile disposed them, in the opinion of psychiatrists, to mental collapse were also reassigned. A May 1943 British Army pamphlet, “Casualty Report,” explained, “
We can do very little in an actual battle area to limit the stresses and strains or to alter the adverse environment; and, given sufficient stress and sufficient strain, any person may break down. We can, however, sift out those who are likely to break down early.”

Because most of Monty’s formations lacked combat experience, “battle-hardened” divisions like the 51st Highland Infantry and the 7th Armored Division were expected to set examples for units that had yet to be “blooded.” John Bain was skeptical that there was such a thing as “battle-hardened.” He compared veterans like himself to eighteen-year-old boys who had yet to see action: “
But the truth was that we were little better prepared than they were for the coming assault on the beaches of Normandy.”

General Montgomery’s dictum, “THE MORALE OF THE SOLDIER IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SINGLE FACTOR IN WAR,” applied, if not necessarily to all wars, certainly to the one Allied commanders were contemplating in 1944. In March of that year, Monty wrote, “
We have got to try and do this business with the smallest possible casualties.”
Believing the war would be won by the autumn of 1944, the government decided in late 1943 to limit the number of recruits to 150,000 men. That left too few men in Britain’s armed forces for commanders to squander their lives as they had in the First World War. The loss of large numbers of men to enemy fire, ill health, mental breakdown, self-wounding, desertion and surrender would doom the enterprise.

To avoid the levels of desertion that had plagued Allied operations in North Africa and Italy, each corps in the British Second Army was assigned a military psychiatrist. Every field dressing station included a Combat Exhaustion Centre, recognition that mental wounds were as inevitable as physical. The centers’ function, as with treatment for bullet and shrapnel injuries, was to return men to their units as soon as they could fight again. Efficiency, not compassion, was the prime consideration.

At noon on 4 June, the LCI carrying John Bain and Hughie Black cruised out of Tilbury a few hours behind schedule. Secrecy surrounding each unit’s objectives did not permit commanders to unseal their orders until they were out at sea.
When the flotilla passed Dover’s white cliffs that afternoon, Captain Forbes read that his company would land at Courseulles-sur-Mer with the objective of seizing Caen, the capital of Lower Normandy, on D-Day. A ferocious downpour was still lashing the ships. Bain recalled that “
the LCI circled around in the Channel waiting for the weather to improve. It was a good 48 hours of brutal discomfort and stress before the storm abated.” It was hardship they shared with more than 200,000 other men on the invasion fleet of five thousand vessels. Not knowing their destination, biding their time in the rough waters, they waited for something they dreaded.

By the morning of 6 June, the Highland Division had used most of its army-issue vomit bags as their landing craft bobbed up and down on the waves. Bain remembered that time as “two whole days of wretched discomfort and strain, with no easing of wind and high seas and a large proportion of all ranks repeatedly sick.” Bain, one of the few to avoid throwing up, was nevertheless so ill he could not eat. Captain Forbes addressed his haggard and unshaven company under a cloudy sky to give them their orders. He added that, while the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division would go before them, they had the honor of being “the first battalion of the Highland Division to land on French soil.” Bain would write later,

What I with many others that day shared

was pre-traumatic stress disorder, or,

as specialists we might say, we were “shit-scared.”

The LCI had trouble finding Juno Beach, the 51st Division’s designated landing area near Courseulles. (The British landing beaches, on the east of the invasion zone, were designated “G,” “J” and “S” for Gold, Juno and Sword. To the west were the American beaches, “O” for Omaha and “U” for Utah.) When the LCI came to within a hundred yards of shore, B Company’s sergeant major ordered, “Stand by for landing!”

So much debris littered the shallows that the landing craft could not reach dry land. Sailors lowered ramps, dropping the Highlanders into the rolling surf. The waves beat the chests of taller men like John Bain but swamped Hughie Black and others of average height. The regiment took its first casualty, when a Glaswegian soldier’s heavy equipment dragged him under one of the landing craft. Hughie Black clung to Bain’s backpack to stay afloat as they waded to the sand. Once ashore, they sheltered from German shell fire and moved inland. A regimental history recorded,

There was only one exit from the beach, for mines had yet to be cleared from the dunes and from the marshland beyond; and the defile was congested by vehicles of the 3rd Canadian Division, one of the leading formations in the assault landing. However, by 8 p.m. the Gordons were all ashore and moving in detachments to Banville, four miles inland, where they concentrated for the night.

The Germans had only just abandoned the hamlet of Banville, where uneaten rations in a farmhouse tempted the hungry men of B Company. Lieutenant Mitchell ordered the men not to touch food and wine that might have been poisoned or open drawers and cupboards that were potentially booby-trapped. Bain would later write a poem with traces of the warning:

We seized the city like a promised toy,

The most inviting doors were booby-trapped,

The wine was sour, they’d burned all the gold;

The dogs and children snarled and cursed and snapped,

And every woman was gun-hard and cold.

The difference was that Banville’s women and children, along with all the other civilians, had abandoned the village.
During the night, the Gordons dug trenches in a field to sleep. They resumed their advance early the next morning, D-Day plus 1, toward the objective the Second Army had failed to seize on D-Day, Caen. They established defensive positions at Bénouville, moved to Ranville and dug in again along the Caen Canal. Mortars hit them all night. In the morning, Bain was surprised the heavy barrage had not caused more casualties than three men killed and five wounded. One of the dead was a young soldier from Aberdeen named Robbie, who had only recently joined the regiment and received only twelve weeks’ training. Mortars did not kill him. “
He had managed to get the muzzle of his own rifle into his mouth and had blown away most of his head.”

Robbie’s death would stay with Bain for years, as his poem “Robbie” made clear:

It seemed impossible that anyone would live

But when the morning came things weren’t too bad.

They checked their losses—only three were dead,

Among them, Robbie. Clever for once, he had

Sucked on his rifle-muzzle like a straw

And somehow blown away most of his head.

A pattern was emerging. The Gordons stopped to dig in, chased the retreating Germans before they could rest and dug in again. Bain wearied of digging, marching and digging without sleep. On the third day, Caen seemed as distant as when they landed.

The Germans hit the Highlanders day and night. From the treetops, snipers took out men one at a time. On the ground, land mines and trip wires killed and mangled. The feared multiple mortar launcher, the Nebelwerfer, whose projectiles the men called Moaning Minnies for the screech they made before they hit, caused a large share of casualties. Among them was Captain Forbes, B Company’s young commander. Shrapnel lacerated his throat, forcing his evacuation to the beach for emergency surgery. Forbes, although he had what Bain called a “plummy accent” and was part of a class he despised, had been one of the few officers to earn his praise. Forbes’s deputy, Captain Urquhart, assumed command.

Their first week in Normandy left the 5/7th Battalion of Gordon Highlanders with 98 dead and 209 wounded from their original contingent of about 850 men.
At first, the wounds were physical. Medical clearing stations reported no cases of battle exhaustion on D-Day and D-Day plus 1. As Allied soldiers slogged through hedgerows, orchards and minefields, some of them broke down.
The percentage of British casualties from mental causes was only 3 percent in the first week of the invasion, rising to 13 percent the next. Within a month, almost a quarter of all injuries were battlefield trauma. Doctors put them to sleep with injections of Nembutal, hoping to return them to the line when they woke.

As casualties, physical and mental, mounted, Hughie Black told his trench mate, “I’d fuck off if there was anywhere to run to.” Bain, suppressing his fear, refused to consider running away. There were moments, however, when the storm of German artillery and machine guns made Mustafa Barracks look inviting.