The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (19 page)

Hughie Black’s chest was gone, leaving “
a great dark cave of blood and slivers of bone.” Bain tried not to look, but he had already seen Hughie’s face, “like the face of all the dead. The eyelids were not shut but the pupils had swivelled up beneath them so that the eyes looked like those of a blind man.”

Bain staggered back to the hole he had dug with Hughie three days before. He sat in the mud and “stared across at the space where Hughie should have been.” Gordon Rennie dived into Bain’s trench, saving him from his thoughts. “It was quick, Johnny,” he said. “He wouldna felt a thing. If you got to go that’s the best way.” Gordon arranged for two of their friends to dig Hughie’s grave in a row with five other Highlanders, and he assigned Alec Stevenson to replace Hughie on the Bren gun. Stevenson was next into the trench. He offered to wash the blood from Black’s ammunition bags, but Bain insisted on doing it himself. As the sun was setting, they buried Hughie. Bain could not watch. He felt almost as he had at Wadi Akarit, when he fled a reality he refused to accept. This time, though, he fled only in his mind. It was not grief, but a departure from “hope or love, anger or sadness.”

Stretcher bearers soon transported sixteen seriously wounded men to the casualty clearing station near the beachhead. “
The lucky bastards,” Stevenson told Bain. “It’s a funny old world where you call somebody lucky because they’ve had their foot blown off.”

The surviving Gordons left Touffréville that night. A regimental history noted, “
They were confident they could hold on to Touffréville, and felt disgusted when ordered to withdraw later in the day.” Bain, in his memoir, evinced no regret at leaving the village where his friend Hughie Black died.

•   •   •

By this time, Bain was “floating,” as in North Africa, his mind elsewhere in another “fugue.” But he was not the only demoralized soldier in the 51st Division. The Highlanders had been divided into elements under airborne or Canadian command. They occupied and abandoned a series of villages around Caen to no identifiable object and were not driving forward in a coherent manner. Commanders sent companies or regiments to dislodge fortified positions that needed ten times the number of men. “
The fact must be faced that at this period the normal very high morale of the Division fell temporarily to a low ebb,” wrote a division historian. “A kind of claustrophobia affected the troops, and the continual shelling and mortaring from an unseen enemy in relatively great strength was certainly very trying.”

Diaries kept by Highland Division officers noted a loss of energy at all levels. Major David F. O. Russell of the 7th Black Watch, who had earned a Military Cross at El Alamein, wrote that “
during the whole of this period, the morale of the battalion was at its lowest ebb which made the task of competing with day to day troubles and worries even more difficult.” The 5th Cameron Highlanders’ captain Fraser Burrows echoed Russell’s conclusion:

The private soldier had nothing to think about except where the next hostile bullet or shell was coming from. Nothing was easier in a night attack, but to stop, tie a bootlace and disappear. In Normandy this became more and more prevalent. . . . I had one Jock in Normandy who was marched into battle with a bayonet up his backside.

Lieutenant Hugh Temple Bone noted, in a letter from Normandy to his mother, an increase in desertions as the campaign progressed: “
People get lost all over the place in battle, some deliberately, most quite by accident.”

Bain was not thinking about desertion. He was not thinking at all. The march from Touffréville took all night. At sunup, they halted. Bain and Stevenson dug a slit trench for themselves and the Bren gun. As soon as Bain tried to sleep, they were on the march again. For three hours that morning, they proceeded in single file on either side of a country road toward Escoville. When they stopped beside a hedgerow, Bain lit a cigarette and fell immediately to sleep. Alec woke him a few minutes later to say they had to dig new trenches beside a field of summer corn. Night came and with it German artillery fire that somehow missed the Gordons. In the morning, they moved into the deserted town of Escoville.

B Company dug in behind a church that had become its headquarters. It was so quiet that day, 14 June, that the Gordons shaved and washed themselves and their clothes for the first time since they left England. While they braced for a German counterattack, there was little more than desultory artillery fire. On the evening of 16 June, the Germans escalated the bombardment, showering B Company with Moaning Minnies and artillery. Alec Stevenson, who was outside taking a piss when it began, ran back to the trench. His foot bashed Bain’s chin as he fell beside him, and both men hunkered down. As many as thirty mortar shells exploded at the same instant, gashing and tearing at the earth around the church. Bain wrote, “
The fury of artillery is a cold, mechanical fury, but the intent is personal.”

The trenches afforded little protection from the relentless downpour. As in past engagements, Bain heard the wounded screaming in agony and begging for help. During a pause in the onslaught, Gordon Rennie dived into Bain and Stevenson’s trench. “We’re pulling out,” he said. The platoon commander, Lieutenant Mitchell, was dead. Stevenson asked whether Mitchell had been the man they heard screaming. “Aye,” Rennie said. “He was hit bad. Thom had to finish him off.”

Bain said, “Fucky Nell.”

“You sound like Hughie,” Rennie told him.

Captain Urquhart called the company into the church, where wounded men lay everywhere. He told them to regroup within the church’s graveyard and use its wall for cover in case the Germans advanced. He ordered all the Bren guns onto the west wall facing the forest. Bain kept watch with the Bren gun, while Alec Stevenson shoveled deep to make another trench. When Bain heard a Spandau burst, he fired back with the Bren gun. “You hit anything?” Stevenson asked.

“I hope not.”

German tanks approached Escoville at 7:30 that evening. An hour later, infantry units attacked battalion headquarters. The opposing forces clashed in and around the hedgerows and the churchyard until almost midnight. The Gordons pushed the Germans back, but they lost thirty-eight men killed, wounded and missing. German mortar and artillery fire resumed at 4:25
A.M.

At first light, Sergeant Thom, who had replaced Lieutenant Mitchell in command of the platoon, led Bain, Stevenson, Rennie and another man on patrol through the Norman hedgerows. Thom slashed through the foliage of a hedge with wire cutters and squeezed through. The other four followed him into a field enclosed on all sides by tall, thick hedgerows. As Thom cut into another hedge at the far corner, a German patrol spotted him and opened fire. Thom, with his Sten gun on full automatic, shot back.

In the ensuing skirmish, Bain suddenly found himself staring over the hedge into the eyes of a German soldier. Alec Stevenson urged, “For fuck’s sake Johnny shoot! Shoot the fucker!” The German raised his Schmeisser machine pistol. Bain snapped out of his daze and pulled the Bren gun’s trigger. Nothing happened. He knew then he was dead. His legs gave way, as if a sledgehammer had smashed into them. Stevenson jumped on top of him. Taking the Bren gun out of his hands, Stevenson unleashed an automatic burst that felled the German. The battleground went silent, and Alec called out, “Hey Gordon! Johnny’s been hit! Gie’s a hand.”

Bain’s mates carried him through the brush, while he writhed in agony. Both legs were bleeding from the Schmeisser’s 9-millimeter parabellum cartridges, fired at five hundred rounds a minute. “By now he had become the wound itself,” Bain wrote of himself. “It was not a part of his body that was suffering pain. It was all of it.”

A medical orderly at battalion headquarters injected him with morphine and dressed his wounds. Bain recovered sufficiently to thank Alec Stevenson for saving his life, but he could not understand why his Bren gun would not fire. Stevenson told him the truth: “Of course it wouldn’t. You had the bloody safety catch on.”

His incompetence, the technical maladroitness for which he often chastised himself, had taken him out of the war. From France, doctors sent him back to Britain for a series of operations and a long recuperation. He would have many months to reflect on soldiering, violence and death, while his comrades fought on toward Germany. This would lead to some of the finest poetry of the war.

THIRTEEN

The second great issue of the flesh is sex.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 365

B
Y THE TIME THE 36TH
I
NFANTRY
D
IVISION
came off the line at Piombino on 29 June, six of its members had won the Medal of Honor. It retired from the line with a record second to none among the Allied forces in Italy, although the “hard luck” reputation from its early reverses persisted. When the army posted the 36th, alongside the 45th, to the Invasion Training Center on the Bay of Salerno, the T-Patchers found themselves back on the beach beside the Roman ruins at Paestum, where they had begun the Italian invasion on 9 September 1943.

They pitched their pup tents and were issued boxes of twenty-four Clark Bars. Steve Weiss finished off the chocolate–and–peanut butter confections in a few minutes. Hunger still gnawed at him, as it did in Rome before his five-course lunches. He walked off the base, climbed a fence into an orchard, picked four large peaches—as many as he could fit into his helmet—and devoured them. All that food, he reflected, must have been “a prize for surviving combat.” What he needed, though, was a woman.

Many of the Italian women around Paestum had already attached themselves to rear echelon soldiers, who had been there for months and were likely to linger. The “pencil pushers,” as the infantrymen called them, had access to regular supplies that they dispensed to their girlfriends. Rivalry between frontline troops and those in the rear led to fights, and the two sides shouted insults at one another whenever Charlie Company drove through town in open trucks. The sight of clerks and quartermasters in fresh, summer-weight khaki uniforms roused a sense of injustice in frontline troops sweating out the July heat in winter olive drab.

Combat troops turned to prostitutes, whose numbers in southern Italy had grown in proportion to the level of starvation. Weiss got his chance one day when a roving brothel stopped near his bivouac. From a small group of unkempt, unattractive girls, he paired off with a short, black-haired ingénue. She warned him it was her time of the month, but the eighteen-year-old soldier had waited too long to be deterred. Unbuckling his belt and dropping his trousers, he began an impromptu coupling. “Stop that!” shouted the battalion’s medical officer, whose unexpected appearance was as welcome as the chaplain’s. Medical officers had frequently lectured the men on the dangers of venereal disease. “Stay where you are,” came the officer’s command. Weiss fled, pulling up his trousers as he ran.

The military’s efforts to separate soldiers from prostitutes had no effect. Films and lectures on hygiene did not impress young men whose normal impulses were intensified by the prospect of imminent death. A British soldier in Italy at this time prayed as he came under German machine-gun fire, “
Dear God! Please don’t let me die until I’ve had a woman!” Syphilis and gonorrhea were no deterrents, when all they brought were a few days in a hospital bed. One self-defeating measure was a leaflet in Italian for soldiers to give to pimps saying, “I am not interested in your syphilitic sister.” Norman Lewis, the British intelligence officer, wrote in his diary, “
Whoever dreamed this one up clearly had no idea of some of the implications or the possible consequences. Remarks about sisters are strictly taboo to Southern Italians . . . there are bound to be casualties.”

Weiss did not give up. He went to Naples, about fifty miles up the coast, on leave. A long line of troops “that seemed to include everyone serving in the Mediterranean” had beaten him to one backstreet bordello. Waiting his turn, he asked the soldier in front of him, “What’s the babe like?”

“Never seen her. S’posed to be a beaut though.”

When Weiss went in, the girl behind the door was no beaut, but “a skinny urchin, as Mediterranean as a flannel cake, wearing a faded cotton dress.” He could not go through with it.

The Psychological Warfare Branch, which Weiss longed to join, was operating out of an office in Naples on the Via Roma. A billboard advertised Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms—“
freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear”—in Italian. Vincent Sheean, a prominent author and journalist in Italy as an Army Air Forces lieutenant colonel, commented, “
The sheer irony of the display can seldom have been equaled in recent times, for none of the four—except the freedom of religion, which is the least difficult and least valued in this era—existed in our part of Italy.” By this time, Weiss was siding with his frontline comrades against the “pencil pushers,” including the bureaucrats in Psychological Warfare. Like most of the other guys in his squad, he was becoming too cynical to sell the Italians ideals in which his faith was diminishing.

•   •   •

General Mark Clark relieved General Fred Walker, whom he blamed for the 36th Division’s bad luck, of command at the end of June. Walker’s soldiers believed their misfortunes were Clark’s fault for consistently assigning them impossible missions like the river Rapido crossing. Walker reluctantly accepted the post of camp commandant of Fort Benning, Georgia. The men requested a division parade to honor the old man. Weiss recalled watching General Walker from the ranks on 7 July:

His face was furrowed, his expression, grim, sad. He loved the 36th. Fifteen thousand men stood in the bright sunshine and listened to the general’s closing remarks; quoting from a letter he had received from the widow of a captain killed on the Rapido River, he read, “The next time you meet the Germans, give it to them.”