The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (42 page)

MPs and gendarmes patrolled the roads. Whenever a jeep approached, Whitehead leapt into a doorway. He found a hiding place near the railway station and waited until morning. At about 7:00, a passenger train readied to depart. Whitehead jumped on, although he had no idea where it was going. As he sat down, he asked a conductor the train’s destination. The man answered, “Paris.” That was good enough.

THIRTY-ONE

Each man, no matter how strong mentally and physically, has his limits beyond which the strongest will cannot drive him.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, pp. 320–21

O
N 25
A
PRIL 1945
, Soviet and American forces linked at the river Elbe. With Germany occupied, Adolf Hitler dead and the Third Reich vanquished, the Wehrmacht high command surrendered unconditionally in a schoolhouse at Rheims at 2:41 on the morning of 7 May. Hostilities officially ended the next night, when mass celebrations erupted throughout Great Britain. The
Daily Express
front page declared, “Songs and Dancing All Night,” while the
Daily Mail
trumpeted, “All Quiet Till 9 P.M.—Then London Crowds Went Mad in the West End.” When Winston Churchill appeared outside the Ministry of Health in Whitehall, revellers sang, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

John Bain did not sing along. The twenty-three-year-old veteran, having served king and country for nearly five years, was recuperating from the wounds that he had suffered in both legs near Caen in Normandy. His bitterness over time lost outweighed his relief that the European war had ended. While many aspiring writers in uniform expected the war to inform their poetry, novels and plays, Bain regretted the utter waste of his youth. Moreover, his two-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for deserting at Wadi Akarit in North Africa hung over him. If he committed another offense, no matter how minor, a court-martial would add it to any prison term it imposed.

During his convalescence at the Winwick Hospital in Cheshire, he had twice gone absent without leave. His first AWOL occurred when, wearing hospital blues and hobbling on crutches, he lingered in Manchester beyond the limit of his one-day pass. The delay resulted from a serendipitous encounter with a young Scottish woman in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, Maxie McCullough. “
All the other girls, they’ve all done it,” she told him. “Lots of times, most of them. I’m the only one. I’m the only virgin. I hate it.” As desperate to dispose of her virginity as Bain was to assist, Maxie tried to sneak the drunk, crippled soldier through her barracks’ perimeter fence. MPs caught him and sent him back to Winwick. The second AWOL was by design, when he kept an assignation with Maxie at a Manchester YMCA. The couple’s quest for a private place to make love, in those days when hotels required proof of matrimony, ended with Bain’s arrest again by MPs. Winwick’s hospital commandant called him a “Bolshie” and locked him for several days in one of the former mental asylum’s padded cells.

Luckily for him, he was not prosecuted for going AWOL. The hospital commandant, tired of dealing with him, transferred Bain to the Cameron Highland Regiment’s “penitential stone barracks” at Hamilton in Scotland. Its convalescent depot, “more military in character than medical,” required him to wear military uniform and perform both physical training and sentry duty. His legs were healing, and he could walk without aid. However, immobility in his left ankle postponed his return to active service.

When VE-Day arrived, all he had to do was remain in the barracks until his discharge erased his suspended sentence. He chose not to wait, convinced that “
if I stayed in the army any longer I would be finished, I would become a brown automaton, a thing without imagination, intelligence, ambition.” Slinging a haversack with his few possessions over his shoulder, he deserted again.

“
I really loathed the army,” he explained years later in a radio interview. “I wasn’t cut out for that sort of life. And I just up and left, because I couldn’t hang around. It meant waiting something like six months to a year, waiting for my de-mob number to come up. And I thought, well, I joined up for the duration, so I’m off.” A truck driver gave him a lift to London’s northern outskirts at Cricklewood. John Bain, no longer the dazed warrior who had “floated” away from Wadi Akarit in 1943, knew what he was doing. He wrote, barely concealing his glee, “I was on the run.”

With at least twenty thousand troops “on the trot,” Britain’s major cities teemed with more deserters than during the war itself. Many had escaped their units at home, while others returned from hiding in France, Italy, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Most were British, but among them were Americans, Canadians and other Allied troops. The British government’s decision to prolong wartime rationing and national identity cards well into the peace left men without documents ineligible for legal employment, food, petrol and clothing. Inevitably, they lived outside the law and turned to professional criminals for forged papers. Capture meant years in the “glasshouse,” military prison, for them and potential fines or up to six months’ imprisonment for anyone who aided them.
Among the many deserter “accomplices” were Mr. and Mrs. W. Mackie of rural Devonshire, who received fines of $80 (around £20) each for harboring two American soldiers in a stable near their cottage. The county magistrates’ court imposed a $40 (£10) fine and two years’ probation on the Mackies’ nineteen-year-old daughter, Dorothy, who had a child by one of the Americans.
The seventy-year-old father of a British deserter was placed on probation in 1945 for having hidden his son at home since the Dunkirk evacuation of June 1940.

Bain’s eighteen-year-old-sister, Sylvia, had moved to London from the family’s house in Aylesbury. He went to her flat in Shepherd’s Bush, where she was living with her boyfriend and another young couple. Her young man was a painter named Cliff Holden, whom she had met at the house of another painter, Lucian Freud. The couple were Peter Ball, a nineteen-year-old English lad with a thick beard, and a pretty French girl named Yvonne, who had escaped from occupied France to work in London as an artist’s model. Sylvia introduced her brother to them as “Vernon,” the name by which he was known before he enlisted. It was a benediction of his return to civilian life.

Vernon ate macaroni and cheese in the kitchen with Sylvia, Cliff, Peter and Yvonne. When Vernon and his sister were on their own, he confided to her that he had deserted. His immediate need was for civilian clothes and a place to sleep. Sylvia offered both, but he worried that her boyfriend might object to harboring a deserter. “Oh, Cliff won’t mind,” she said. “He’s on the run himself. So is Peter.”

Bain was propelled into a vast network of anarchists, conscientious objectors and deserters. Underground London in the summer of 1945 included Bakunin-reading anarchists like Cliff, as well as criminal deserters living off stolen military supplies and robbery. Cliff burned Bain’s Gordon Highlander uniform in the kitchen fireplace and lent Bain a dark blue shirt, “a useful color since it would not show the dirt.” Peter gave him a pair of sandals that would be good until autumn. He used Sylvia’s clothing coupons and a little money he had to buy thick corduroy trousers. “And so began the first summer of my desertion, a time of excitement, anxiety and tentative growth,” he wrote. He frequented the pubs of Notting Hill, Soho and Fitzrovia, most of them hangouts for other deserters and literary bohemians like Dylan Thomas. His reading, abandoned when he entered the ranks, resumed. It was as catholic and undirected as before: Rilke, Kafka, Baudelaire, Yeats and Auden.

Cliff got him a job at an unlicensed factory in a shed off Euston Road, where they both worked for cash making dolls’ heads for a former merchant marine named Pat. With his earnings, Bain rented a small flat in Chalk Farm. The companies that Pat supplied suddenly stopped paying him, leaving him unable to meet his wage bill. To compensate, he gave Cliff and Vernon two hundred dolls’ heads each. Without a job, Vernon could no longer afford his rent and, in his slang for running off without paying, “did a bunk.” Pat invited him to lodge at his family’s house in exchange for chores that included looking after his two small children.

His London life became aimless, public houses providing him with companionship of sorts. A man in a Charlotte Street pub helped him to find work as an electrician at the Coliseum Theatre. This required checking the bulbs in lanterns for the chorus to carry onstage and shining a spotlight on the lead performer during a crucial scene. One night, Bain’s failure to remove a crimson filter from the beam gave the star “a distinctly diabolical appearance.” No more adept with electricity than he had been with the safety of his Bren gun in Normandy, he fumbled with the light until it toppled over. Rather than wait to be fired, he slipped away.

It was not long before he moved in with a girl named Jackie in Covent Garden’s Monmouth Street. She suggested his dolls’ heads could earn him a little money, if she sewed bodies and dresses onto them. Bain the deserter could not approach reputable toy shops, so they sold a few dolls in a pub. Their takings paid for drinks, but not much else. Another money-making scheme that Cliff introduced him to was selling Indian perfume in a street market, again raising enough for beer rather than rent. One evening in a pub with Jackie, he had a better idea. He would take up boxing again, as a professional.

An ad in the
Boxing News
asked good amateurs who wanted to turn pro to contact a trainer named Willie Dalkin. Bain went to Bill Klein’s Gymnasium in Fitzroy Square in search of Dalkin, who arranged a test bout for the eleven-stone, six-pound (160-pound) middleweight. Bain turned up at Klein’s basement gym the next day, with trunks, shoes and a mouth guard he’d bought with borrowed money, to face a tough Irishman. Although out of shape from drinking and smoking, he deployed a strong left jab and a right cross that nearly sent his opponent to the mat. Dalkin took him on.

Bain cut down his alcohol consumption and trained hard, sparring regularly at Klein’s gym. “
Very good fighters trained there,” he recalled, “but not the top rank. I sparred with Freddie Mills a couple of times, a painful experience.” (Mills became world light-heavyweight champion in 1948.) Bain fought his first professional match at Ipswich, a six-rounder against a more seasoned boxer from Romford. The bout began badly for Bain, who was knocked down in the first round. In the second and third, however, he took control. He won by a knockout in the fourth. The Boxing Control Board certified John Bain’s professional status with a ten-shilling license. Dalkin arranged two more six-round bouts that he won, admittedly “against pretty poor opposition,” and began grooming him for eight-rounders against better fighters.

One night in Charlotte Street’s Fitzroy Tavern, Bain confessed to someone he had just met, “probably boastfully,” that he was on the run. His drinking companion warned him that London was a dangerous place for deserters. The police were on the lookout for them. He had just seen a whole café full of men in Soho dragged into the police’s Black Marias.

•   •   •

About half of Britain’s twenty thousand deserters lived in London. Another twenty thousand men conscripted to work in the coal mines had also deserted, a crime then equal to desertion from the army. One Labour member of Parliament, Captain John Baird, appealed to the government to grant an amnesty to deserters. “These young men had been failures in the war,” the
Times
of London summarized his Commons speech on 29 November 1945, “but he was convinced that many of them would ‘make a better job of it’ in peace-time.” His was a lone voice.

Police and some newspapers blamed deserters for what the
Daily Telegraph
called “
one of the greatest outbreaks of gangsterism since the end of the 1914–1918 war.”
London’s commissioner of Metropolitan Police reported an increase of 34 percent in indictable crimes over 1938, the last year before the war. Deserters were responsible for 9 percent of crimes solved, a significantly high proportion for twenty thousand men in a population of forty-seven million.
A prominent criminal from Seven Dials, near Covent Garden, Billy Hill, recalled that there was never a shortage of deserters for armed robberies. The violent crimes of a minority of deserters, rather than the postwar army’s need for soldiers, forced the police to take action.

Police in late 1945 and early 1946 blocked off sections of London to trap deserters by picking up men with suspect documents. On 14 December 1945, more than two thousand London policemen, supported by British, American and Canadian MPs, launched Operation Dragnet.
While they cordoned off four square miles of London to check identity cards, burglars broke into a shop and “hauled away a safe containing $800.”
Of the 15,161 men dragged in for questioning, only four turned out to be deserters: an American officer and three enlisted men. London’s
Evening Star
newspaper condemned police for using “Gestapo” tactics.

•   •   •

If Bain had been in the West End during Operation Dragnet or in the Soho café during the police raid, it would have meant a second court- martial and two terms in military prison. The man in the pub who had witnessed the Soho raid suggested Bain leave London. He was studying medicine in Leeds, which, he said, had fewer deserters and fewer police dragnets. Its cost of living was lower, and it offered an unexpectedly rich cultural life—theater, opera, a good university and public lectures. Thinking it over later, Bain decided to move. It meant giving up professional boxing and his girlfriend. Jackie cried when he told her, but she refused to go with him.

Knowing that British Army desertion files listed a Gordon Highlander private named John Bain, he changed his name to Vernon Scannell. His memoirs provided no reason for the choice of Scannell. His son, John Scannell, explained over beer in one of his father’s regular Fitzrovia pubs, “
He told me the name Scannell was pinched from a passport in a brothel just around the corner from here.” Vernon Scannell liked his new name, not least because it severed another tie to his father.