The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (18 page)

The squad went ahead to reconnoiter the woods up to the nearest hilltop. First scout Weiss led the way. An American Piper Cub overhead was spotting artillery targets. As it circled, one of the more experienced veterans said the pilot probably took them for Germans and would direct artillery to their position. The platoon sergeant picked up a walkie-talkie to ask Captain Simmons to call off the barrage, but the walkie-talkie wasn’t working. “
Of all the lousy fuckin’ luck,” the sergeant said. “All right, let’s get off this hill right now and fast!” The squad ran down at top speed. Shells exploded behind them, spreading shrapnel and earth in their wake. A minute longer, and their war would have been over.

The next few days saw a tedious slog north toward Siena through what Weiss called “Italy’s interminable hills.” Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead described the Italian campaign’s frustrations: “
All advanced—a thousand, two thousand miles—there was always the enemy in front, always another thousand miles to go.” Weiss and Sheldon Wohlwerth dug a foxhole in a valley, where the Germans lobbed an artillery shell each time either of them moved. Weiss feared the Germans were targeting them, but Wohlwerth was pleased to see Germans wasting precious ammunition on two infantrymen. “
If they keep this up,” he said, “there will be an earlier end to the war.”

In the field, the squad’s most dependable member was Corporal Bob Reigle. Weiss recalled, “
He was in every major operation the 36th was in, and the only thing that I remember was that eventually he didn’t want to share a hole with anybody. It was, why get to know somebody when they are going to get killed soon?” Although kept out of Reigle’s foxhole, Weiss stayed close to him.

Charlie Company fought more skirmishes, took more prisoners and conquered more territory. In three weeks, they moved 240 miles from their launch point near Rome. The 36th Division’s three regiments—the 141st, 142nd and Weiss’s 143rd—slowly converged on the walls of Siena, when orders came to pull back. On 29 June, nine months after the 36th Division landed in Italy and twenty-three days after Steve Weiss became one of them, the Texans were relieved at Piombino by the 34th Iowa Division.
The Italian campaign had cost the 36th about 75 percent of its men and officers dead, wounded, captured or missing. It had earned some time off.

•   •   •

Deloused in showers of DDT and dressed in fresh uniforms, Weiss, Wohlwerth and some of the Charlie Company GIs headed into Rome on a one-day pass. Their mission: to eat and drink well.

Rome lay in a shambles from months of German occupation and Allied assault. Many inhabitants had fled to the provinces for safety and food. Most of the city’s businesses, including its restaurants, were closed even a month after liberation. Weiss asked some children in pidgin Italian where they could have lunch. The kids led them to a shuttered trattoria, whose owners opened immediately for the GIs and their youthful followers. The conquering heroes sat down to generous helpings of the first real food they had tasted since they arrived in Italy. Having been reduced to army K rations (Norman Lewis thought K rations were “
so despised by the Americans, and so adored by everyone else”), they gorged on pasta, meat, fruit and cheese. They also bought lunch for the children, who were hungrier than the soldiers. The Americans finished five courses at one restaurant and proceeded to repeat the experience in another. “Liter after liter of ordinary vino from the nearby slopes, although red and raw, trickled down our throats,” Weiss recalled. He was in a soldier’s paradise, having survived three weeks of combat against a formidable enemy. A song came to him that Italian-Americans in Greenpoint, near his neighborhood in Brooklyn, used to sing.

Oh Marie! Oh Marie!

In your arms I’m longin’ to be

Uhm, baby

Tell me you love me

Kiss me once, while the stars shine above me. 

The children accompanied him in Italian:
“Uhe Marie! Uhe Marie! Quanta suonno aggio perzo per te. . . . ”
Hearing the familiar tune, the cook rushed from the kitchen to dance with the proprietor’s wife. The Romans, despite shortages, were generous to the young men who had expelled the Germans.

“Our tastes were basic,” Weiss wrote. “We roamed about on full stomachs and waved at the local girls, who only smiled and playfully thwarted our seductive advances with Roman sophistication, knowing we were harmless as butterflies.” In common with many teenage Americans before they went overseas during the war, Steve Weiss was a sexual innocent. His passionate fumbling with a girlfriend named Jeannie in Brooklyn in the weeks before his induction, despite the earnest intentions of them both, had come to nothing. His twenty-four-hour Roman holiday in June 1944 was so taken up with his stomach that he left himself no time for romance. In this, he was in a minority of the GIs in liberated Rome.

TWELVE

Sometimes the soldier’s troubles cannot be attributed to any one person.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 329

D
URING HIS FIRST WEEK
with the Gordon Highland Regiment in Normandy, John Bain “felt himself becoming absorbed and obliterated as an individual by the familiar process of combat.” Normandy was another North Africa, apart from the “superficial”: hedgerows rather than sand dunes, orchards in place of palm trees. “
The smell of war,” he wrote, “was the same everywhere: that sweet yet pungent odour of cordite and fear and putrescence.” Both war theaters engendered

the sense of being dehumanised, reduced to little more than an extension of your equipment and weaponry, the constant feeling of being used as an object, manipulated by blind, invisible hands, controlled by a force that was either malignant or stupid, the sense of being exhausted in a metaphorical and quite often literal darkness, of being exhausted, frightened, sick, sometimes so weary that you slept while on your feet like a horse. And ignorance, stupefying, brutalising ignorance.

After their landing on D-Day, the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders moved into a bridgehead that the British 6th Airborne Division had captured. It consisted of the area around two bridges (one dubbed “Pegasus” for the airborne unit’s winged horse insignia) spanning the Caen Canal and river Orne. Bain’s battalion, part of the 153rd Brigade, as it had been in Egypt, moved into the bridgehead on 10 June, four days after its D-Day landing. The brigade crossed to the east bank of the Orne and advanced toward a triangle of rural villages northeast of Caen: Ranville, Touffréville and Bréville. Part of the brigade, the Black Watch, went to Bréville with the 6th Airborne. On the evening of 11 June, Captain Urquhart commanded the 5/7th Gordons in their first large assault of the campaign. The objective was Touffréville, which first received a battering from division artillery. The Germans responded with Nebelwerfers and Spandau MG42 machine guns. While Bain and Hughie Black crouched low with the Bren gun, Sergeant Thom called out, “Right lads! Up you get! We’re moving in!”

Bain threw the Bren gun over his shoulder and went straight toward the enemy’s Spandau fire. Hundreds of other men were risking their lives with him, but Bain felt a terrifying loneliness. Multiple mortar rockets exploded nearby, followed by the cries of the wounded that had sickened him in North Africa. Yet he went forward, part of the military machine, while Hughie Black uttered endless profanities.

A green flare shot up, the signal that Corporal Gordon Rennie interpreted for his mates: “Jerry must be pulling out!” Hughie Black answered, “Who’s firing them fucking guns then?” Rennie led the platoon into the village, where Bain and Black saw he was right. Jerry had pulled out. So had the inhabitants, who had already endured a failed D-Day attack by paratroopers of the 6th Airborne against the German 125th Panzer Grenadiers. While the 1st Gordons moved into a brick factory on the outskirts of Touffréville, the 5/7th Battalion approached the village square. Bain recalled,

In the middle of the place was a small public garden with trees and from many of these hung dead British paratroopers, suspended by their harnesses, who had evidently been picked off by small arms fire as they hung helplessly there. On the lawns and flower beds of the garden, too, were more dead soldiers wearing flashes of the Sixth Airborne Division, and others lay on the cobbled stones outside the little park. None was alive.

The Germans had pulled their lines back to the forest, where their artillery kept the British troops within range.

Captain Urquhart commandeered an empty farmhouse to use its cellar as B Company’s headquarters and kitchen. The troops dug bivouacs in the ground outside, where they sheltered all night from the incessant shelling. Just before dawn, German patrols infiltrated their lines. “
B and C Companies, in front and on the left, were drawn back to better defensive positions, but no one knew where the Germans would appear next,” wrote a regimental historian. Squads of Spandau machine gunners shot up Urquhart’s headquarters, while German riflemen attacked the British defenders in their trenches.
By the time the Germans pulled back at noon, they had inflicted twenty-eight casualties on the Gordons.
They also took prisoners, including B Company’s Sergeant Aitkenhead. Aitkenhead used a hidden knife to stab his guard and escape, but his own side’s artillery nearly hit him on his run back to base.

The next day, 13 June, RAF planes accidentally bombed the Gordons, wounding ten of them. This was followed by another German infantry assault. When the Germans pulled back, they resumed their shelling of the Gordon trenches. Venturing above ground even to defecate could have been fatal. Hughie Black complained to Bain, “It’s no’ right to keep us here. It’s all right for Urquhart in his fucking cellar.” Around noon, the cooks were ready with a hot lunch of stew and potatoes. To ferry food to the trenches, one man from each two-man team fetched it from the kitchen and brought it back to his comrade. They usually took turns, and this lunchtime Bain made the run to the farmhouse.

In the cellar, cooks stirred the stew in one corner and Captain Urquhart attempted to radio battalion headquarters in another.
The company bagpiper, who was also a medic, was in between ministering to a “huddled figure whose sobbing and choking voice was unrecognizable.” It took Bain a moment to realize the soldier had no wounds. “The neatly-shaped, alert features had melted and blurred,” Bain wrote, “the mouth was sagging and the whole face, dirty and stubbled, seemed swollen and was smeared with tears and snot.” The boy was crying like a baby for his mother. The cook, filling Bain’s mess tins with stew, looked at the babbling soldier with disgust and said, “I know what I’d do with the fucker, and it wouldn’t be send him back to Blighty.”

Bain crawled back into the trench to eat, but he did not tell Hughie about the sobbing soldier. The young man was Private Victor Denham, a replacement whom Black already detested. Denham had joined the battalion in England a few months earlier. He obeyed all the rules, kept his uniform pristine and exhibited a naïve enthusiasm for combat. Black had physically attacked him before embarkation and persuaded Gordon Rennie to transfer him to another section. Denham’s breakdown had shaken Bain “in a way that was more difficult to contend with than anything else that had happened in Normandy.” The trembling boy haunted him for hours, because he shared the cook’s contempt and felt “even a stab of sadistic hatred.” A more frightening thought was the “intolerable suspicion that he was witnessing something of himself.”

Shelling persisted most of the afternoon, and Bain huddled with Hughie in the soft earth. During a lull, Black offered to wash out his and Bain’s mess tins at a pump near the farmhouse. Bain said they could scrub them clean with grass, but Hughie reminded him that they needed water anyway. He would also bring back some “Callow doss.” “Calvados,” Bain corrected him, handing over his mess tin and water bottle.

Black ran to the pump, and Bain lit a cigarette. He had no idea why they were at Touffréville, how long they would stay there or where they were going next. Life was little more than a series of freshly dug pits with the ever-present fear of ending up in one for- ever. A few weeks earlier, Hughie had complained that the sealing of their transit camp on the Thames robbed them of their last chance of running to Glasgow. Bain pointed out to Hughie that he could have deserted on his own. “
I told you,” Black replied. “I wasna going without you.”

“That puts a big responsibility on me, doesn’t it?” Bain answered. Hughie absolved his friend, “It’s my decision. I’m a big lad. It’s what I decided. If anything happens to me, it’s no’ your fault. I could’ve gone but I decided to stay. Me. I decided. Not you or anyone else. Okay?” He added, “Any case, nothing’s going to happen to me, son.”

To commanders, decisive moments came with the capture or loss of high ground, offensives, retreats and massive battles. To infantry soldiers like John Bain, significant events were personal: surviving a mortar barrage, finding shelter in a building or a ditch, eating hot food and losing a friend. The war itself meant nothing to Bain, who did not hate the Germans. Friends like Gordon Rennie, Alec Stevenson, Bill Grey and especially Hughie Black had come to mean everything.

A close bond formed between two-men trench teams. “
They would live, eat, work and sleep together,” one infantry platoon commander wrote. “If one of them was killed or wounded the other was quite lost.”

Bain’s cigarette smoke floated upward into the strangely tranquil Norman sky, when all of a sudden cluster after cluster of Moaning Minnies screeched to the earth. The Gordons cowered in their trenches, until, as abruptly as it began, the mortaring stopped. Bain took the risk of putting his head up to look around. Hughie Black lay on the ground halfway to the farmhouse. Bain ran from his trench. He and Gordon Rennie reached their friend at the same moment. Rennie put his hand on Hughie’s shoulder, gently rubbing as if to wake him. When Hughie did not respond, he slowly rolled him onto his back and blurted, “Jesus Christ.”