The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (6 page)

For many relatively well-off young Americans, like Steve Weiss, the army was pure hardship. To Alfred T. Whitehead, it was liberation. The training and discipline were light compared to farm labor. The army supplied three meals a day, regular rations of meat, hot showers, clean clothes, medical care, a bed to himself and, above all, travel beyond the hills where he was born. Such luxuries were unobtainable for a poor rural southerner, white or black, in civilian life.

•   •   •

Whitehead and other young recruits reported early one warm April morning to a restaurant in Carthage, Tennessee. Carthage, originally a trading port where the Cumberland and Caney Fork Rivers met, was known to Whitehead and the other recruits as the town from which the state’s most famous First World War veteran had embarked on his military career. Alvin Cullum York, having conquered alcoholism before the war to become a devout Christian and pacifist, was drafted into the army in 1917 at the age of twenty-nine. Trained at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he served in France with the 82nd Division. On 8 October 1918, York earned the Medal of Honor. His citation, presented to him personally by General John J. Pershing, read:

After his platoon suffered heavy casualties and three other non-commissioned officers had become casualties, Corporal York assumed command. Fearlessly leading seven men, he charged with great daring a machine gun nest which was pouring deadly and incessant fire upon his platoon. In this heroic feat the machine gun nest was taken, together with four officers and 128 men and several guns.

York, about whom a Hollywood movie starring Gary Cooper had been released the year before, set a high standard for the young Tennesseans. Whitehead was proud to set out from the same town York had.

The recruits ate a hot breakfast at the little restaurant and boarded a bus. Driving along the ramshackle road past Whitehead’s family’s cabin at Sulphur Springs, Alfred wondered if he would ever see it again. It did not matter to him either way. While the driver filled the bus with petrol in Lebanon, he slipped away to buy “a jug of moonshine.” He and his companions drank the illegal alcohol before nightfall, when the bus entered the gates of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.

After a few weeks of kitchen duty and barracks cleaning at Fort Oglethorpe, Whitehead was shipped to Camp Wolters, Texas, for basic training. The Infantry Replacement Training Center, where Texan Audie Murphy trained with Company D of the 59th Training Battalion, was then the country’s largest. The nearest town was Mineral Wells, which some of the GIs called “Venereal Wells” for obvious reasons. Whitehead became a buck private with about sixty other youngsters in the 4th Platoon, Company D, 63rd Infantry Training Battalion. His boyhood proficiency with a rifle qualified him as “sharpshooter” and then “expert.” Despite his success and easy adaptation to military life, he hated the Texas heat and burning winds. “
At night,” he recalled, “I had to sleep with my blanket over my head just to breathe and keep the sand from stinging my face.”
Training lasted seventeen weeks. This short time, reduced from the previously standard fifty-two weeks, was necessitated by the urgent need for troops overseas. On completion of the course, Whitehead took a train to Camp Polk, Louisiana.

At Camp Polk, Whitehead was assigned to an “antitank platoon with Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Infantry Division.” On his shoulder was the divisional patch with an American Indian’s head, for which the 2nd was called the Indianhead Division. The assignment gave him many advantages over men who would be sent overseas as replacements for regiments that had lost soldiers in combat. He would train with the men who were going to fight beside him, and his officers would know him.

Both the regiment and the division had honorable records of service. The 38th Regiment was called the “Rock of the Marne” for its stiff resistance during the German offensive of 1918. The “Second to None” Division’s bravery during the Meuse-Argonne offensive had earned it three Croix de Guerre from the French government. By 1942, the division’s main components were the 2nd, 9th and 38th Regiments, together with the 2nd Engineer Battalion, four field artillery battalions and support units.

The 2nd Infantry Division was at Camp Polk to take part in war games. The Louisiana Maneuvers had begun the year before as the largest ever on American soil, and they would be staged with new units each year of the war. Their objective was as much to find and correct flaws in American battle strategy, tactics, equipment and organization as to train the inexperienced troops. To Private Whitehead, the 1942 summer maneuvers seemed “like a great game, much like my childhood games of hide-and-seek, where one would surprise the ‘enemy.’” Because there weren’t enough weapons to equip all the troops, Whitehead and some of his comrades carried broomsticks instead of rifles and used empty mortar rounds as antitank guns. In some places, wooden signs saying “foxhole” and “machine gun” substituted for the real thing. The war games pitted “Reds” against “Blues” over 3,400 square miles of rugged swampland, hills and rivers. In the previous year’s exercises, General George Patton’s 2nd Armored had swept across the river Sabine into Texas to come back into Louisiana and trap the “Reds” in Shreveport. The exercises included cavalry charges, relics of an earlier era that would not amount to much against the Wehrmacht.

Whitehead and the rest of his platoon lived rough in the Louisiana woods to hone survival skills, like foraging for food, hiding from the enemy and washing in streams. Some of the men paid local families to cook them fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. Whitehead lit out after a Cajun girl, who responded to his advances by pelting him with stones. Louisiana had two types of weather, as far as Whitehead could judge, “hot and then hotter.” Mosquitoes and snakes proved more menacing than the Blue Army.

On 22 September 1942, the 2nd Division returned to Fort Sam Houston. Whitehead’s days revolved around close-order drill, twentyfive-mile hikes with fifty-pound packs, kitchen police (KP), training films, field inspections and rifle practice. Despite the resilience his hard-laboring childhood gave him, he came into conflict with authority more than once. Officers told him to use his free time to catch up on sleep, but he left the base as often as he could to drink, gamble and chase women. “
I had numerous girlfriends,” he wrote, “but figured anyone could have a girlfriend. What I really wanted was to get married.” His attention focused on a girl with red hair, whom he dated and to whom he proposed. The engagement would be prolonged, because the girl’s mother “wanted her to finish school first.”

FOUR

When he has his first encounter with the immediate threat of death, when he must kill and see men killed, when he must steel himself to hear the unheeded cries of the mortally wounded and endure the stench of battle, a man may become sick to his very vitals.

Psychology for the Fighting Man
, p. 295

I
N LATE
S
EPTEMBER 1942
, John Bain moved from the bivouac where Winston Churchill had addressed the men west to the Alamein Line. His job was to shoulder B Company’s light automatic Bren gun. Yet, despite Monty’s rigorous training, he and most of the other squaddies had little idea what to expect when fighting began. The Allied and Axis armies had reinforced their opposing positions from the Mediterranean shore forty miles south to the Qattara Depression. Almost as if re-creating the French battlefields of the First World War, the two sides had laid down miles of land mines, barbed wire, concrete gun emplacements, tank traps and trenches. Montgomery placed the 51st Highland Division between the veteran 9th Australian and 2nd New Zealand Divisions, reasoning that the novice Scots would benefit from the Dominion soldiers’ battlefield experience. He added that “
the Scottish soldier quickly makes friends with the Dominion soldier. It may be because both of them are slightly uncivilized.” Montgomery set the offensive for 23 October, when he had nearly twice as many troops as his adversary—220,000 to Rommel’s 115,000. For an assault on entrenched positions, however, the minimum recommended was three-to-one.

The Highlanders received General “Tartan Tam” Wimberley’s order of the day as they prepared to set out from their starting positions: “There will be no surrender for unwounded men. Any troops of the Highland Division cut off will continue to fight.” Young troops like John Bain moved forward. General Wimberley recalled, “
I watched my Jocks filing past in the moonlight. Platoon by platoon they filed past, heavily laden with pick and shovel, sandbags and grenades—the officer at the head, his piper by his side. There was nothing more I could do now to prepare for the battle.”

Just before 10:00
A.M.
, the Eighth Army unleashed the full force of its artillery batteries. Shells from more than a thousand British guns lashed the German positions with what two leading historians of Alamein called “
the biggest artillery barrage the British army had laid on since the First World War.” The heaviest artillery pieces fired more than twenty-five rounds a minute, aiming their first salvos at the enemy’s artillery. “For all the manoeuvres you’d done, there is no preparation for an artillery barrage,” Bain recalled. “The barrage itself is enough to send you mad with terror. Our own barrage, I’m talking about, the twenty-five pounders, a deafening, terrible noise.” In the poem “Baptism of Fire,” Bain would later write about the initiation of a young soldier (“He is no kid. He’s nineteen and he’s tough”):

And, with the flashes, swollen thunder roars

as, from behind, the barrage of big guns

begins to batter credence with its din

and, overhead, death whinnies for its feed

while countering artillery shakes and stuns

with slamming of a million massive doors.

It did not take long for the Germans to match the British fire. Exploding shells crashed into the earth around him, but explosions were less terrifying to Bain than the sounds made by human beings: “
One of the most memorable and nightmarish things is hearing the voices of the wounded, who have been badly wounded, the voices raised in terror and pain.” Shrapnel hit the company sergeant, “a kind of father figure” ten years older than Bain. “Hearing his voice sobbing and in fact calling for his mother was so, I don’t know, demeaning,” Bain said. “I felt a kind of shock that I cannot fully understand even now, because he had been reduced to a baby.” He would later write in “Remembering Alamein”:

And the worst sound in a battle

The noise that I still hear

The voices of comrades raised

In agony and fear.

After the artillery came the infantry offensive, when the soldiers of the Eighth Army emerged from their underground lairs to charge into the enemy guns. The Highland Division marched forward, many falling to German machine-gun and mortar fire when they were barely out of their trenches, while the bagpipes played. “
When you’re in action, you have no idea what’s happening,” Bain said. “You haven’t the foggiest idea of where you are, where the enemy is, what’s happening or anything else.”

•   •   •

Six days into the battle, one young officer deserted from the 10th Armored Division’s headquarters well behind the lines. Twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Keith Douglas was not avoiding combat. He was running straight to it. “
I enlisted in September 1939,” he wrote, “and during two years or so of hanging about I never lost the certainty that the experience of battle was something I must have.” He was a tank commander in the Sherwood Rangers, which arrived in the Middle East a year before the Gordon Highlanders in August 1941. He was also a poet, who as an undergraduate had edited Oxford’s literary magazine
Cherwell
. To his distaste, the regiment assigned him to the division as a camouflage trainer. The army neglected to include camouflage equipment in its exercises, leaving Douglas in Cairo with nothing to do. It demoralized a young soldier yearning to be atop a tank with his men.

When Douglas told his batman, Private Lockett, they were leaving to find their regiment somewhere on the Alamein battlefield, Lockett replied, “
I like you, sir. You’re shit or bust, you are.” Lockett drove at speed across the desert until they found a rear echelon of the regiment four miles behind the lines, just north of John Bain and the Highlanders. A captain Douglas knew asked, “Have you come back to us?” Douglas said that depended on the colonel of the regiment. “Oh, he’ll be glad to see you. I don’t think ‘A’ Squadron’s got many officers left.” At that, Douglas and Lockett rushed forward. They found the colonel, whom Douglas called “Piccadilly Jim,” sitting in a truck.

“Good evening, sir,” Douglas said. “I’ve escaped from Division for the moment, so I wondered if I’d be any use to you up here.” Piccadilly Jim, who could have had him court-martialed on a desertion charge, pondered the enthusiastic officer’s fate. Because A Squadron had only one officer left alive and unwounded, the colonel gave Douglas command of two tanks. Douglas reflected, “Best of all, I had never realized how ashamed of myself I had been in my safe job at Division until with my departure this feeling was suddenly gone.”

Soon, Douglas was facing German tanks in his Mark II Crusader: “Every gun was now blazing away into the twilight, the regiment somewhat massed together, firing with every available weapon.” As his gunner took aim at the Germans, Douglas “tossed out empty cases, too hot to touch with a bare hand.” The tank filled with smoke, but Douglas did not care: “I coughed and sweated; fear had given place to exhilaration.” His impression of the battlefield contrasted with infantry private John Bain’s. He liked the action, while Bain detested the suffering.