The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II (4 page)

Bain had first volunteered in early 1940 to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, despite his admission that he was “
singularly ignorant of the political realities.” He knew nothing about the Nazis, the German annexation of Austria or Hitler’s ambition to conquer most of Europe. A physical examination turned up colorblindness and one punch-damaged eye that disqualified him from flying, so he and his older brother, Kenneth, decided to become merchant mariners. Neither of the Bain brothers, having grown up in the inland Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was an able bodied seaman or had any shipboard experience. Their attempts to sign on before Christmas 1940 at the docks in London, Cardiff and, finally, Glasgow were met with derision. Staying in a rented room that was reducing the meager hoard of cash they had brought from home, John and Kenneth chanced on a poster: “
Are you over 18 and under 20? If you are you can join a young soldiers’ battalion.”

John asked his brother, “What about that? At least I’d get some shoes without holes.” Kenneth corrected him: “Boots.” He added the sticking point that, at two years older than John, he was over twenty.

They had a notion that twin brothers could not be separated. “
The recruiting officer did not show the least disbelief when we gave the same date of birth,” John wrote. “We were medically examined and passed as A1.” The army sent them to the 70th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherlands at the Bay Hotel outside Glasgow. “
The Army was one service I had sworn I would never join,” Bain wrote, “but, I told myself, a Scottish regiment would be different, more glamorous.” The glamour of the regimental kilt, stylish headgear and bagpipes gave way to recruit training that was disappointingly unglamorous. “The object is to turn one into a kind of automaton,” he said. “It works in a way.”

He “
disliked the Army very much,” recalling his time in Scotland as “nearly two years of boredom, discomfort and misery, relieved by occasional booze-ups. . . .” He resented his “
early days in the army when he had first stood guard at Duff House in Banff in the cruel winter of 1941 . . . protecting the old mansion against imaginary German parachutists dressed as nuns.” From the ways that Bain revisited his army service in letters, books and poems, he appeared to have been pathologically unsuited to soldiering. He wrote, “
By nature I was impractical, unpunctual, and clumsy, attributes that do not endear themselves to military authority.” Thirty years after the war, his thoughts turned

not so much to memories of battle but to the grinding tedium of service in the United Kingdom, training, manoeuvres, guards, courses, discomfort, humiliation, frustration, boredom and—rarely but unforgettably—moments of bizarre comedy, excitement and the joy of extraordinary physical well-being when food, warmth and the rest were not commonplace elements which we had the automatic right to expect in the pattern of our days but pleasure as real intensity, positive blessings.

In common with other British youngsters of the time, Bain had little experience of people from other classes. His own background was what he described as “
working class but with aspirations of an entirely materialistic kind towards stifling gentility.” His mother read books and kept a piano, and his father worked for himself in a photography studio. Officers, some with no leadership qualifications apart from the right accent, irritated him, but the “other ranks” seemed almost a foreign species. When one of them asked his name, he answered, “Vernon,” his middle name, which he had been called all his life. Bain recalled the squaddies’ mocking question: “‘
Vernon? What’s that?’ And I’d say, ‘John,’ quickly, which they could handle. So, I became ‘John’ in the army.

“
A lot of the chaps in the 70th Argylls were from the Glasgow slums, the Gorbals,” he recalled, “and had pretty disgusting habits.” In another reflection on his fellow squaddies, he wrote, “
My comrades were mostly sub-literate, embittered children of the general strike, from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh.” One of them pilfered Bain’s gold boxing medal, indicative of the petty thievery rampant in the ranks. Nevertheless, he wrote, “They would happily stick by you, and they were generous.” Paid only two shillings a day, the Jocks gave their last pennies to comrades in need or to stand a friend a pint. The only person Bain trusted was his brother Kenneth, who was transferred to the Royal Engineers a year into their enlistment. That was about the time John ran away for three weeks.

To get along, Bain concealed from his squad mates his passion for books, poetry and classical music. In fact, he gave up reading altogether. “I deliberately suppressed that part of myself that I most valued,” he wrote.

I became ashamed of my interest in literature, ideas and the arts. I consciously adopted a mask with forehead villainous low. I was already, at eighteen, greedily addicted to beer, so no acting ability was needed to play the part of boozer. My interest in boxing was genuine and my skill was respected, so it was not difficult for me to flex my muscles and roar with the roaring boys. But it was not good for me either. It was shameful and brutalizing.

After the transfer to B Company of the 5/7th Gordon Highlanders, Bain made one good friend. Private Hughie Black was a working-class Scotsman of roughly his age and with a more profound contempt for officers. Black’s cynicism about the military had a hard class edge to it, and he would have stayed out of the war if it had been possible. The six-foot boxer from Buckinghamshire and the five-foot-six Glaswegian made an odd if comradely pair. Like most Scotsmen, Black said “aye” for “yes” and expressed himself in a rich vocabulary of profanities including “Fucky Nell.” He called Bain “china,” as in “china plate,” rhyming slang for “mate.” If Bain had a friend to replace his brother in B Company, it was streetwise Hughie Black.

The tedium of training and guard duty came to an end on 20 June 1942, when the Gordons with the rest of their Highland Division regiments boarded the
Spirit of Angus
and other ships on the Clyde estuary and at Liverpool and Southampton. Their destination, in common with most other troop embarkations during the war, was withheld from the soldiers. The convoy of twenty-two troopships, escorted by eight destroyers, headed south through the Bay of Biscay toward Africa. For most of the youngsters, it was their first time out of Britain.

The 5/7th Gordons were part of the 51st Highland Division, commanded by forty-three-year-old Major General Douglas “Tartan Tam” Wimberley. Wimberley stood six foot three, usually wore a kilt and waged a futile struggle with the high command to exclude English and Lowland Scots regiments from his division. His predecessor in command of the Highland Division was Major General Victor Morven Fortune. Fortune and the original division were then languishing in German prisoner of war camps, following their surrender to German General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux during the Battle of France in June 1940. The lucky units that managed to escape to Britain formed the core of the reconstituted Highland Division. The glorious histories of the 51st Division and its component regiments, like the Black Watch, with its legacy in Egypt dating to the original British conquest of 1882, held no allure for Bain. Then and later, he refused to sentimentalize either war or the army.

Bain and his fellow Gordon Highlanders lived in confined quarters at sea, resenting the privacy and better rations afforded the officers. Bain said later of his comrades, “
They had no respect for their officers.” They amused themselves with cards and boxing. To cheers from his mates in the 5/7th Gordons, Bain defeated a sergeant from the Cameron Highlanders.

On 21 June, the day after the convoy set sail, Britain suffered a major defeat, its fourth of the war after the loss of France, Singapore and Burma. Rommel, who had captured the original 51st Division in France, conquered the Libyan port town of Tobruk and inflicted a casualty toll on British and Commonwealth forces of thirty-five thousand. The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, who covered the North African campaign for Britain’s
Daily Express,
wrote, “
It was defeat as complete as may be.” Britain’s commander in chief of Middle East forces, General Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, pulled his troops back well into Egypt to the coastal railhead at El Alamein. The thinly defended Alamein Line, running between the Mediterranean in the north and the impassable Qattara Depression in the south, lay only sixty miles in front of Alexandria. The Royal Navy had meanwhile evacuated Alexandria’s harbor to avoid capture by the advancing Axis forces. This news, hardly a boost to morale, reached the Highland Division while it was far out at sea. Some of the men guessed that they were on their way to reinforce Britain’s battered desert defenses, but officially they were told nothing.

The ships refueled at Freetown, Sierra Leone, but the men were not permitted ashore lest they contract malaria. As the convoy cruised farther south along the African coast, the soldiers on board remained unaware that in Egypt their comrades had succumbed to panic, which the British called “the flap.”

In Cairo, on 1 July, burning documents at Britain’s embassy and military headquarters sent up billows of smoke so thick that the day became known as “Ash Wednesday.” Trains leaving the Cairo station for British Palestine overflowed with passengers and baggage. British subjects queued outside Barclay’s Bank to withdraw their money. A mood of defeat prevailed, as Alan Moorehead, whose wife and baby had taken a train to Palestine, observed on the road between Cairo and Alexandria. It was, he wrote “
a full scale retreat. Guns of all sorts, R.A.F. wagons, recovery vehicles, armoured cars and countless lorries crammed with exhausted and sleeping men, were pouring up the desert road into Cairo. . . . The road on our side—the side that carried vehicles up to the front—was clear.”

Worst of all for the British, about twenty thousand soldiers vanished from the ranks. Many took refuge in the Nile delta, some living through brigandry and others surviving on the charity of the Egyptian peasantry, the fellahin. Many hid with girlfriends in Cairo. British military police, known as “redcaps” for the color of their headgear, established a checkpoint at El Deir on the road between Alamein and Amariya. “
Every vehicle was checked, and personnel traveling eastwards as passengers had to satisfy the military police as to the authority of their journey,” wrote Major S. F. Crozier of the Royal Military Police (RMP) and Provost Service. “Written orders had been given to this post to fire on any person failing to halt when called upon to do so.” When some deserters drove off-road to avoid the checkpoint, the MPs placed the desert on both sides of the road under “continuous observation.”

The Middle East commander in chief, General Claude Auchinleck, believed the solution was for courts-martial to impose exemplary death sentences. As early as April of that year, Auchinleck had written to the War Office requesting “
that His Majesty’s Government may be pressed to give urgent consideration to the immediate introduction of legislation necessary to restore into the Army Act the punishment of death for the offences of Desertion in the Field and of Misbehaving in the face of the Enemy in such manner as to show cowardice.” Unlike the United States, Britain had abolished the death penalty for desertion.
During the First World War, when the Americans had not executed any deserters, the British had put to death 304 soldiers for desertion, cowardice, disobedience and quitting their posts. Postwar revulsion at the firing squads had led the Labour government in 1930 to override objections from military chiefs and prohibit the execution of deserters.

“
With the increase of number of troops in Egypt and Palestine, following the entry of Italy into the war [in June 1940], crime increased proportionately,” wrote RMP major Crozier. “Conscription had brought into the army a percentage of soldiers with criminal antecedents or tendencies. Many of these were drafted to the Middle East.” Major Crozier, who believed there were too few military policemen to deal with criminal soldiers in Egypt, continued:

On arrival in Egypt they found that a number of soldiers had decided that the delights of Cairo and Alexandria were infinitely preferable to the monotony, discomforts and dangers of the Western Desert and East African campaigns. These deserters combined to form troublesome and dangerous gangs which were to become very familiar to the [Special Investigation] Branch [SIB] under the names of “The Free British Corps” and “The Dead End Kids.”

Even before the fall of Tobruk, Major Crozier noted, “Not a day passed without many arrests being made.” The RMP sent extra officers and men, many of them formerly with Scotland Yard, from Britain and the colonies to deal with the caseload. It also recruited men locally from regular service battalions. Private Wilf Swales of the Green Howards transferred to the RMP in Egypt on the promise of “
a shilling a day extra.”

•   •   •

Particularly worrying for the MPs were the theft and sale of British arms and ammunition. Zionist settlers in Palestine, planning their own war against the British, were major buyers of the looted Allied weapons.
Two leaders in the Jewish Haganah defense force, Abraham Rachlin and Lieb Sirkin, were sentenced to seven and ten years, respectively, for purchasing stolen arms. Their accomplices in the Royal Sussex and Royal East Kent Regiments received fifteen years’ penal servitude. Major Crozier wrote, “
The number of thefts of arms of all types and ammunition was appalling, and the ‘Dead End Kids’ were responsible for many of them.”
This deserter band befriended legitimate soldiers to gain access to bases and canteens, where they stole weapons, food, fuel and other supplies. The SIB shot and killed several of them. Another deserter gang calling itself the “British Free Corps” survived by selling stolen military supplies, until its members too were caught.

Auchinleck argued in his letter of 7 April that nothing less than the death penalty would provide a “salutary deterrent in a number of cases, in which the worst example was set by men to whom the alternative of prison to the hardships of battle conveyed neither fear nor stigma.” In a memorandum of 14 June to the rest of the War Cabinet, War Secretary Sir Percy James Grigg appeared to support Auchinleck. He wrote: