The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (45 page)

In a nearby alley, two juvenile delinquents spotted him. He was an obvious target, drunk and, in his own words, “a harmless old Joe with my white mustache and several days snow white beard on my face.” The thieves would not have expected a sixty-four-year-old American tourist to resist, but Whitehead squared off with his back against the wall to avoid an attack from behind. In his imperfect French, he shouted that he had “kicked the shit out of bastards like them in the war, and by God I could do it again!”

When the first youth threw a punch, Whitehead seized his arm, threw him over “commando style” and broke his arm. The second youngster pushed him into the wall. Whitehead grabbed the boy’s face and rammed his knee into his groin. He reached for a pocketknife he usually carried, and the youngsters ran away. Whitehead hid under a van for ten minutes until he was certain they would not be back with reinforcements. He took a taxi to the airport and flew home. It was his last trip to Paris.

Whitehead returned to West Yarmouth on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he had moved Al’s Barber Shop from Tennessee a few years earlier. One of his customers, Thomas Lindsay, remembered meeting him in 1991. “
I listened to his stories while in the chair,” Lindsay wrote, “and bought a copy of his book which he had stacked by the door.” The memoir did not conceal his desertion, his black market career and his prison record from the customers in his shop.

Whitehead died on 26 January 1996 in Cape Cod, five days before his seventy-fourth birthday. His family buried him at Coon Prairie Cemetery in Westby, Wisconsin, not far from the family farm where, as a young recruit, he had courted Selma Sherpe. It was the only place, during his stays with Selma and her family, he had ever known happiness. His son recalled, “
For years Dad just went through the motions of being alive. He never laughed, rarely smiled and was always distant in mood.” The son’s regret for his father was that he “died a long time ago in the fields and hedgerows of France.”

•   •   •

In February 1953, shortly after he was returned to office as prime minister, Winston Churchill declared a general amnesty for wartime deserters as part of the celebrations for the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Deserters hiding in Britain were free to take up legal occupations, and those overseas could at last return home. The postwar “manhunt” that had preoccupied the civil and military police for more than seven years was over.

The amnesty came too late to affect Vernon Scannell, who had been discharged as medically unfit and had returned to Leeds. After nine months of study there, he moved to London and then to various small towns in England. His colorful postwar career took him from boxing with a traveling fair to teaching at minor public schools. At one prep school, Hazelwood in Limpsfield, Surrey, his students included a future editor of the
Times
of London, Simon Jenkins.
Jenkins recalled his teacher with affection, writing that he imparted two important messages: “One was the supremacy of boxing and the other of poetry.” None of his students knew that he had been a professional boxer or a published poet. Jenkins added, “All he communicated was a vague and distant preoccupation, as of a man with much to hide and only a little to give, even if that little was infinitely precious. He was out of John Le Carré.”

Vernon Scannell married Josephine Higson in 1954 and had six children. After one of their infant sons died, the marriage gradually fell apart. His novels, poems, reviews and poetry readings produced barely enough money to provide for his large family. His son John remembered him as a man who enjoyed drinking to excess and having fistfights well into his sixties. His desertion from Wadi Akarit, while known to his wife and children, was something he did not publicize in either his poems or early volumes of memoirs. Then, in 1987, he wrote the full story in
Argument of Kings
. As part of the publicity for the book, BBC Radio’s prestigious
Desert Island Discs
invited him to discuss his work and choose the eight pieces of music he would take to his imaginary isle.

Scannell’s voice in the BBC recording sounded deep and distinctly highbrow, more Oxford don than working-class kid from Buckinghamshire who had spent more time in the ring than the classroom. The vocabulary was redolent of easy familiarity with the classics of prose and poetry. The combination of boxing and poetry was, he admitted, “a bit of an odd mixture or so people think. There were other boxer poets. John Keats, although he wasn’t a boxer, was a considerable fighting lad. Certainly Byron was. He had a bare-fist champion in his entourage and used to spar with him.  . . . T. S. Eliot took it up. And Bernard Shaw.”

Michael Parkinson, one of the BBC’s most astute interviewers, asked him about his desertion. Scannell described the scene at Wadi Akarit the morning the Seaforth Highlanders went through the Gordons’ lines to attack the Roumana Ridge. “They were easy targets for the German machine-gun fire,” he said.

They took the positions, and we moved up. It was by this time light. The sun was up. There were corpses lying all over the place, our own people who earlier had just been going past us and exchanging insults. To my unbelieving horror, I had not seen this before, my own people, my own friends went around looting the corpses, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing. Off their own people. . . . Suddenly, I was sick of the whole thing and just turned around and walked away. And nobody stopped me.

After their eight musical selections, guests on
Desert Island Discs
were asked which books, apart from Shakespeare and the Bible, they would like on their island. Scannell chose a five-volume edition of English poetry and the collected poems of W. H. Auden. The final item permitted on the island was a luxury. For Scannell, there could have been nothing else: “A mass of A-4 writing paper and something to write with.”

Discussing his Wadi Akarit desertion for the first time in public affected him more than he had expected. His son John, with whom he was staying in London, remembered that day:

I was meant to meet him here [in the pub] afterwards, and he didn’t show up. He disappeared for the entire afternoon. My father never dramatized anything. He was absolutely honest. It [discussing his desertion] seemed to trigger off exactly the same event. He walked from the studio, and simply turned up about three hours later at his publisher’s, Jeremy Robson’s, place: “I don’t know how I got here.”

The ex-deserter received official vindication as he grew older. The Royal Society of Literature elected him a fellow in 1960, and he won the Heinemann Award for Literature a year later. The Queen granted him a civil list pension in 1981 for services to literature, and the Imperial War Museum sponsored a ceremony for the launch of
Argument of Kings
. His was never an easy life. He moved frequently and battled the British Inland Revenue over unpaid taxes on income from readings of his poems. He spent a few months in Brixton Prison for drunk driving, a severe sentence that was especially harsh because the magistrate did not like him stating that his profession was poet.

Vernon Scannell, who had run three times from the armed forces and wrote often of the military’s dehumanizing impact, never let go of his war years. He relived them in his poems and became a champion of other Second World War poets, who were in his view as good as those who emerged from the First. The finest of them, he wrote in
Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War
, was Keith Douglas. Douglas was the young officer who had deserted
to
the front at El Alamein and died in Normandy at about the time Bain was wounded.

In Scannell’s own poetry, as well as in his memoirs, his favorite motif was violence, sometimes in the boxing ring, often in war and, most of all, in the battles of the human heart. It was no coincidence that one of the finest collections of his poetry was titled
Of Love and War.

On 11 May 1970, he wrote from his cottage in Dorset to his friend James Gibson about a new poem, “Walking Wounded.” The image of soldiers, whose injuries did not require stretchers, making their way through the North African desert had haunted him for years. He told Gibson that “it was so damned hard to write”:

I think I had to wait so long to write the poem because the merely descriptive poem does not greatly interest me: I had to see what allegorical or symbolic meaning the image possessed. And slowly I came to see that the Walking Wounded represented the common human condition: the dramatically heroic role is for the few. Most of us have to take the smaller wounds of living and we have to return again and again to the battlefield, and perhaps in the long run this is the more important, even the more heroic role.

The poem conjured an image of bandaged soldiers that John Singer Sargent had captured in his First World War masterpiece,
Gassed
:

And then they came, the walking wounded

Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,

Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair.

Their heads were weighed down by last night’s lead,

And eyes still drank the dark . . .

 . . . And when heroic corpses

Turn slowly in their decorated sleep

And every ambulance has disappeared

The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,

And when recalled they must bear arms again.

Vernon Scannell, born John Vernon Bain, died on 17 November 2007 at the age of eighty-five. Just before his death, he posted an entry on a Gordon Highlander war veteran website: “
Would like to know what happened to Gordon Rennie and William ‘Bill’ Grey.” The site did not post a response.

•   •   •

Steve Weiss was living in California in 1991 when former lieutenant Russell Darkes finished writing his unpublished manuscript, “Twenty-five Years in the Military.” The memoir, which circulated among veterans of the 36th Division, mentioned an incident that had occurred in Italy a few months before Weiss joined the division near Rome. The commander of Company C at that time, Captain Horton, called his officers together to discuss a planned assault up Mount Sammucro. Company C, like most other American rifle companies in the Second World War, had six officers, of whom one was a captain and five were lieutenants. One of the five lieutenants, named Greenly, had recently been killed. Darkes wrote,

Captain Horton immediately called all platoon leaders to assemble at the very crest of the mountain to issue his attack order before darkness approached. It was to be a night attack. Suddenly, there was a sharp crack with a light “thud.” After several seconds trying to determine what happened, Lt. Simmons from Belfast, Maine, and I, Lt. Russell Darkes, noticed that Captain Horton and the other two lieutenants were lying very still and bleeding profusely from their heads. All three of them were killed instantly by one lone bullet fired by a German sniper from the “A” Company area.

Command of the company fell to Lieutenant Allan Simmons, who was promoted to captain. The other survivor of that freak rifle round, Lieutenant Darkes, became company executive officer.

Reading about this event for the first time, Weiss was shocked. It made him consider that there was a reason for Captain Simmons’s caution and distance. To witness three of his comrades felled by a single bullet must have had a traumatic impact. Weiss, by 1991 a practicing psychologist, had studied trauma and the way it could drive a man into himself. It had happened to his father during the First World War, and it seemed to have affected Simmons in the Second. Steve Weiss, who felt he had an excuse for deserting, suddenly thought that Simmons had an excuse for not taking risks, not getting close to the men and not providing moral support. By 1991, however, this lesson had no use.

Weiss made many postwar trips to France, where he found people who had helped him during his time with the Resistance and the OSS. He renewed his friendship with Free French commander François Binoche and the couple who had given him a room in Lyons, Ronnie and Olga Dahan. In the spring of 2011, he returned to Bruyères, where the 36th Division had sentenced him to hard labor for the rest of his “natural life.” To anyone who did not know his story, he might have been any other American octogenarian on vacation. But Americans of his generation in French villages were rarely tourists. Men old enough to have fought in the mountains and villages of the now-prosperous French countryside were searching for the youth and laughter they left there.

Weiss is a thin, elegant man, who carries himself with dignity. His demeanor makes him seem like a retired officer, back upright and eyes that look straight at everyone he speaks to. We were in Bruyères to find the courtroom where the army had tried him for “Misbehavior before the enemy.” Despite his eighty-six years, he needed no more help to march through Bruyères than when he was nineteen.

Steve Weiss let me explore the town, which had once been the front line between the Wehrmacht and the United States Army, with him. A few hours earlier, he had been to the military cemetery at Epinal to see the grave of his friend Sergeant Harry Shanklin. It was the only time he cried, he told me, during his entire trip. Shanklin was twenty-two when he died near the river Moselle. It bothered Weiss that Shanklin did not live to have a wife, children, a career or a chance to reflect on what happened during the war. The thought weighed on Weiss, who saved his own life by doing something he could not help—running away.