Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
to cross. However, the winter rains had stopped and the ground was drying. To its left, away from the sea, was high ground along the Roumana Ridge. While waiting for the British to arrive, German engineers reinforced the wadi and the ridge with entrenchments, observation posts, mines and barbed wire.
The assault at Wadi Akarit began on the night of 5/6 April. Bain, whose recollection of earlier battles was sketchy, recorded with a poet’s eye almost every detail of the brutal but relatively minor engagement. ‘The ridge of hills was a dull grey dusty shade like the hide of an elephant,’ he wrote.
After the sun had set, the surface darkened to a smoky blue which gradually melted into the gathering darkness. But, although the ridge was not physically discernible, there was not a man in the battalion who was not aware of its menacing bulk as they moved as quietly as they could to the area at the foot of the hill where they were to dig in and wait for the dawn when the other battalions in the brigade would pass through their positions and attack the enemy in the hills.
Just before daybreak, Bain and his Scottish friend Hughie Black were sheltering in a slit trench. Black looked behind and said, ‘They’re coming Johnny. Here they come. Poor bastards!’ As a battalion of Seaforth Highlanders came close, Black said, ‘All the best mate!’ One of them answered, ‘It’s all right for you Jimmy … Lucky bastard!’ Bain recalled the Seaforth’s ‘tone of voice did not carry true resentment: it was rueful, resigned.’
Although John Bain absorbed every sound and smell of the battle, he was so remote from the experience that he wrote of himself in the third person. Watching the Seaforths pass his trench, ‘John felt immense relief that he was not one of them but the relief was tainted with guilt.’ He told Black that he feared that the Seaforths would reach the ridge at daylight and be ‘sitting ducks’. ‘Hughie nodded. “Sooner them than me. But let’s hope they chase the bastards out. ’Cos you know what’ll happen if they don’t? It’ll be us in there with the bayonet. And I don’t fancy that one little bit.”’
Gunfire erupted along the ridge. ‘They [the Seaforths] were easy targets for the German machine gun fire,’ Bain told an interviewer later. Major G. L. W. Andrews of the 5th Battalion of the Seaforths remembered, ‘Once daylight came, I lay with my glasses fixed on Roumana, but not a man could I see amongst the clouds of slate grey smoke and chestnut dust which cloaked the entire ridge as the German guns and mortars hit back.’
In his memoirs, Bain continued the story: ‘Twilight was sharpening into the metallic, clearer greyness of early morning but you could not see much of what was happening in the hills. Human figures moved insectile and anonymous in little clusters, forming irregular patterns that kept breaking and coming together again.’ A battle was taking place, but B Company’s orders were to stay in the trenches. The commander of D Company of the 5/7th Gordons, Major Ian Glennie, recalled that the advancing battalion fought at the base of cliffs a mile ahead. ‘We then could do nothing but watch, but couldn’t see very much at all.’
While the Gordons waited, Hughie Black bewailed the army’s failure to provide breakfast or even a cup of tea. He drank some water from his flask, but spat out the ‘camel’s piss’.
A lieutenant from Headquarters Company brought orders for B Company’s Corporal Jamieson to take the platoon up to the ridge. The men stepped in single file towards the sound of firing. John Bain’s rhythmic plodding along the sand, combined with six months of unrelieved anxiety, induced in him ‘an almost trance-like indifference to, or unawareness of, his immediate circumstances. It was not that he was mentally elsewhere; rather that his mind was nowhere at all. He had become a kind of automaton.’ In that state, he climbed the ridge. When he reached the summit, the battle was over.
General Montgomery noted in his diary, ‘We had on this day the heaviest and most savage fighting we had had since I commanded the 8th Army. Certain localities changed hands several times, my troops fought magnificently.’ Neither Monty nor his senior officers referred in their written recollections to the events that followed the battle’s conclusion. John Bain did, but only years afterwards.
At the top of the ridge, Bain saw the first corpses from the Seaforth unit that had passed him a few hours earlier. Hughie Black, indicating one dead soldier, said, ‘There’s one poor bastard’s finished with fuckin’-an-fightin’.’ Bain saw no wound, as if the man were asleep. B Company moved forward to the Germans’ slit trenches. More dead lay over most of the ground. The Seaforths had lost more than one hundred men killed and wounded, as one of its officers, Major G. L. W. Andrews recalled. Black noticed that there were no wounded on the ground, concluding that the ‘meat wagons’ must have removed them. What happened next was unexpected. Bain recorded his impressions, again in the third person,
Then he saw that the other men in his section and from the other platoons must have been given the order to fall out because they were moving among the dead bodies, the Seaforths’ corpses as well as the German, and they were bending over them, sometimes turning them up with an indifferent boot, before they removed watches, rings, and what valuables they could find. They seemed to be moving with unnatural slowness, proceeding from one body to another, stooping, reaching out, methodical and absorbed. Hughie had gone. He must have joined the scavengers.
In a post-war interview, Bain elaborated, ‘My own friends went around looting the corpses, taking watches and wallets and that sort of thing. Off their own people. Why that is so much worse than taking it off the Germans, I don’t know, but it was somehow.’ He stopped thinking, transfixed in a state of ‘almost trance-like indifference’. A poem he would write at century’s end, ‘Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit’, made no reference to the looting of the dead:
He sees the shapes of rock, the sand and rubble
on which, at unshaven dawn, the bodies sprawl
or lie with unpurposed and tidy decorum,
all neat in battle-order and KD uniform.
His reaction to the desecration and pillaging of the corpses would change the course of his life.
They are longing for those upon whose presence and affection they have long depended. They want their wives or mothers.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 334
PRIVATE ALFRED WHITEHEAD had not married the girl who needed to finish school by the time the 2nd Infantry Division left Texas for Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, in late November 1942. A troop train carried them over a thousand miles north, ‘as the land changed from sagebrush, then flat barren wheat land, to empty rolling farm country.’ It reached Wisconsin, where many of the Southern boys saw snow for the first time. An excited soldier from Florida rolled around in the ice, stopping only when he realized how cold it was. Camp McCoy, carved out of 14,000 acres of Monroe Country in 1909, was the army’s winter warfare training base. In February 1943, the division took part in warfare exercises in northern Michigan. Whitehead remembered, ‘We learned there what cold weather really was – the thermometer stayed at a steady forty degrees below zero.’ Whitehead coped with the cold by trudging on snowshoes to find alcohol and bring it back to the squad. Although he skirted the rules, he had no objection to discipline. ‘Both as individuals and units,’ he wrote, ‘we were put through specific types of combat instruction designed to prepare us for the kinds of fighting we might be expected to run into overseas, until we believed we were the toughest outfit in the whole U.S. Army.’
Whitehead saw himself as one of the toughest in a tough outfit. His readiness to settle arguments with his fists got him into fights, and his weakness for alcohol added to his belligerency. In photographs, he looked brash, small in stature yet full of bravado, with curly chestnut hair parted in the middle and a boyish smile. One snapshot of him at Camp McCoy showed the young GI defiantly astride the hood of his commanding officer’s jeep. His combat helmet’s raffish angle seemed to say that this youngster was not afraid of anyone.
The nearest village to Camp McCoy was Sparta, in Kent County, where Whitehead spent as many off hours as he could getting drunk, shooting