Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War

James Bain had married Elsie Mabel, a woman three years older than he was and a few notches up the social ladder, just after the Great War. While Bain had left his Scottish regiment as a private, Elsie’s uncle had been an officer. The couple had three children, Kenneth, John Vernon and Sylvia. John was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 23 January 1922, while his father earned a livelihood photographing visitors on the beach at Skegness. When John was three, his father in a chimerical bid to break out of poverty moved the family to Ballaghaderreen in the Irish Free State and opened a photography studio. On the ship to Ireland from Liverpool, James played ‘one of his little jokes’ on three-year-old John, lifting him ‘over the rail with only the black waves below me, leaping and foaming like enormous wolves, hungry for the proffered titbit’. The boy’s cries for help earned only his father’s ‘wild laughter’.

The staff sergeants at the Mustafa Barracks resembled so many omnipotent fathers. Bain’s description of his father’s ‘peculiar half-grin, half-snarl’ came close to the ‘mixture of snarl and smile’ he spotted in Staff Sergeant Henderson. Although he made no direct comparison between his father and the MPs, Bain’s appraisal of his father might have applied to Staff Sergeants Hardy, Henderson and Pickering: ‘I now understood and have understood for many years that he was a sadist. I remember many instances of his grim pleasure derived from inflicting physical or mental pain on my brother or me …’ In Ireland, Kenneth and John survived on a diet of potatoes, porridge and soda bread. Meat appeared rarely. Sweets were unknown. Once, their father called the boys into the kitchen to give them a half-pound chocolate bar. With childish delight, Kenneth unwrapped it. Inside was a block of wood.

Their father kept a leather strop for sharpening straight razors on a hook beside the fireplace; but, Bain reminisced, ‘I do not recall this one being used for any other purpose than flagellation.’ The flagellated, of course, were Kenneth and John. When his business failed in Ireland, James Bain took the family back to England. They settled in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, where James opened another photography shop. When John was seven, he watched his father challenge a Sunday teatime guest, an unassuming man named Bob Linacre, to a fight. While the men’s wives and children squirmed, James forced Bob to don boxing gloves, reduced him to a state of terror and bloodied his nose. ‘What I felt was disgust and shame and hatred,’ Bain wrote. ‘Until then I think that I had known nothing but a simple fear of him. Now I hated him.’

For reasons left unexplained, John went to live with his father’s parents in Eccles, Lancashire, for two years. Then, in 1931, when John was nine, the family moved together to that ‘dream of rural sweetness and light’, Aylesbury. Living in a dingy flat above the photo studio in Market Square was, in Bain’s own account, anything but sweet. Their father continued to beat the boys, once knocking twelve-year-old John flat with a punch to the head. Their mother, whose hard-drinking husband was brazenly unfaithful to her, took refuge in her conversion to what John called ‘that quasi-religion called Christian Science’.

While life with their father in Aylesbury was hardly ‘sweetness and light’, the Bain brothers retreated into a world of books and music that was. Kenneth taught himself to play his mother’s piano, and John borrowed a wide range of books from the library – Dickens, T. S. Eliot, John Buchan and the lowbrow crime novels of Edgar Wallace. The boys wandered together into the meadows with armfuls of works by their favourite poets. Literature gave Bain his ‘only distraction from the fairly grim present’. From the age of fourteen, he wrote poems that he did not show to anyone. The boys bought a gramophone, but they waited until their father was out of the house before playing Liszt, Debussy, Schubert and the great mezzo-soprano Marian Anderson. James Bain, detesting his sons’ ‘sissy’ interest in music and books, enrolled them in the Aylesbury and District Boxing Club. Within two years, John made the final round of the British Schoolboy Championship.

James Bain told his sons he had enlisted in the army at fourteen and been wounded at Mons. His endless stories of Great War escapades, in which he invariably played a heroic role, made John suspicious: ‘I began to wonder about their historical veracity, until his boasting became something of a secret joke between Kenneth and me.’ To avoid a thrashing, they kept that joke to themselves. Yet his childhood was awash with reverence for a war he knew only through hearsay. John later told an interviewer, ‘I also remember very vividly Armistice Days when I was a child, because I actually wore my father’s medals. He got his medals out, and I would have them on my jersey, my jacket, whatever I was wearing.’ He would turn out in the town square, while old soldiers observed silence for comrades who had died in France. ‘It was a very militaristic occasion, in fact. I still feel uneasy. There was a kind of glorification of war itself.’

While their father made them wary of the army, the boys shared a fascination with the Great War’s poetry, novels and films. To John, the conflict in the trenches was a ‘tragic and mythopoeic event’. He became ‘haunted by its imagery, its pathos, the waste, the heroism and futility’ via the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Ernest Hemingway.

The 1938 Munich Crisis, when the British and French ceded western Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany, affected him less than ‘two momentous discoveries: D. H. Lawrence and beer’. Having left school at the age of fourteen in 1936, he was working as a junior clerk in an accountant’s office. In his free time, he read James Joyce, courted young women and drank Younger’s Scotch Ale at the pub. He and Kenneth were not above getting into trouble, once drunkenly climbing the roof of a hotel to break into it. After their arrest and trial, the local newspaper called them ‘the boxing Bain brothers’. Their two-year probation was less notable than the newspaper’s disclosure that John was eighteen. Until then, his twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, Sally, thought they were the same age. She accepted the age difference, but John’s father disapproved of the girl. He ordered John to leave her, backing up the command by throwing a punch. For the first time, John fought back and gave his father a black eye. It was the last time his father would strike him, but they stopped speaking to each other.

John’s response to the declaration of war in September 1939 was ‘one mainly of puerile excitement’. He did not, however, rush to the colours. When the German bombing raids known as the Blitz began in September 1940, Bain’s mother and sister were evacuated to the Cotswolds for safety. The three men of the family stayed on in uncomfortable silence in Aylesbury. Having lost his job with the accountants after his arrest, John went to work selling spare parts for the Aylesbury Motor Company at thirty-five shillings a week. His attempted enlistment in the Royal Air Force faltered over the medical exam that discovered his bad eye. He wrote later in ‘The Unknown War Poet’,

He enlisted among the very first

Though not from patriotic motives, nor

To satisfy the spirit of adventure …

In December, he and Kenneth decided to enlist in the Merchant Marine. While their motives were unclear, merchant service offered two advantages: a way out of an intolerable life at home and the opportunity, provided the Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine did not sink their ship, to cruise around the world. With £400 that they stole from a hidden store of cash their father kept to avoid income tax, they fled to London. They spent lavishly, taking a room at the Regent Palace Hotel and buying tickets for Donald Wolfit’s production of King Lear and Myra Hess’s lunchtime recitals. They got drunk in one Soho pub after another. Finally, they went to the Shipping Federation to sign on as merchant seamen. ‘Our interview with the uniformed officer at the Federation was brief and humiliating,’ Bain wrote. They tried the docks in Cardiff and Glasgow, where the recruiting poster drew them into the infantry that Christmas.

The journey from Scotland to El Alamein to Wadi Akarit to the Mustafa Detention Barracks seemed to follow a grim logic. The conflict between his contempt for his father and his love of war literature led to his flight from home and enlistment in the army. That Bain ended up, however much by chance, in a Scottish regiment as his father had in the First World War seemed more than coincidental. He had, after all, followed his father into boxing, boozing and womanizing. Having escaped paternal cruelty by standing up to it, he took the one action – desertion – that would imprison him even more surely than he had been at home under his father’s oppressive control. A system of gratuitous bullying confronted him now.

His poem ‘Love and Courage’, though written years later, captured his predicament:

… He could conceal

his terror till his Company was called

to face real battle’s homicidal storm.

He chose desertion, ignominy and jail.

That is, if any choice existed, which I doubt.

SEVEN (#u37e40da0-1303-54c8-9430-5cf02a79a713)

On him – the average, free soldier – victory depends.

Psychology for the Fighting Man, p. 365

IN LOWER MANHATTAN on Thanksgiving Day 1943, Stephen J. Weiss took the oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.’ At the end of the induction ceremony, similar to his own only twenty-five years before, William Weiss told his son, ‘If you need me, just say the word.’ The older man’s reserve, an effect of wartime trauma, had denied Steve a functioning father since childhood. Neither father nor son knew the full psychological toll of America’s previous war in Europe. Fortune magazine reported at the time of Steve’s induction, ‘Today, twenty-five years after the end of the last war, nearly half of the 67,000 beds in Veterans Administration hospitals are still occupied by the neuropsychiatric casualties of World War I.’ Steve was going where his father had been, to unlock secrets long concealed from him. He did not plan to ‘say the word’. It was his time to experience war, and paternal guidance would have to come from the army.

Steve and the other recruits boarded a train bound for the army’s transit camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey. The army issued him a serial number, 12228033, and ordered him to commit it to memory. If he were captured, that number, his name and his rank were all that he was permitted to tell the enemy. Fort Dix began the transformation of youngsters into soldiers. The previous year’s hit song by Irving Berlin might have been written there:

This is the Army, Mister Green,

We like the barracks nice and clean,

You had a housemaid to clean your floor,

But she won’t help you out any more.

While Fort Dix’s officers and non-commissioned officers feasted on Thanksgiving turkey, a freshly sheared Steve Weiss spent all of that Thursday, as well as Friday, on his hands and knees scrubbing barracks floors. One week later, the army shipped him south to the Infantry Replacement Training Center (IRTC) at Fort Blanding, Florida. Weiss’s General Classification Test score qualified him for Officer Candidate School and a shot at the Psychological Warfare Branch. But the army, he quickly realized, ‘needed infantry replacements, not junior officers, in late 1943’.

The army posted Weiss to Combat Intelligence (CI), which a second lieutenant defined for him as ‘specialized C.I. infantry probing beyond the front line, patrolling and observing either on foot or by jeep …’ Weiss wrote, ‘Although seemingly glamorous, I felt that C.I. missions would be more dangerous than those assigned to the regular infantry.’ Whether glamorous or dangerous, it was still the infantry. Weiss applied for transfer to Psychological Warfare. In the meantime, the army put him through seventeen weeks of Basic Training, ‘map reading, aerial photographic interpretation, enemy identification, prisoner interrogation, infantry tactics, use of weapons, and small group cohesion’. Propaganda films screened at Fort Blanding, like director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, did not impress him. He thought the documentaries ‘gave a false impression of modern war’ and ‘added little to my reasons for enlisting’. Many aspects of life at Fort Blanding grated on the trainees, especially the swamps, the chow and what the GIs called ‘chickenshit’, rigid enforcement of petty rules. Incompetence was rife in an army that had expanded from its 1939 level of 227,000 regular soldiers (with another 235,000 National Guardsmen) to a total of 7,482,434 personnel by the end of 1943. Health care suffered along with everything else in the military’s rapid growth. One medic gave Weiss stomach tablets for his athlete’s foot, and another injected him with so many vaccines at the same time that he spent five days in the base hospital with a dangerously high fever.

Weiss experienced no anti-Semitic bullying or slurs at Fort Blanding, but the only other Jewish recruit he knew there did. This youngster, nicknamed Philly, was short and as religious as Weiss was secular. When a Southern redneck insulted Philly in anti-Semitic terms, Weiss warned the Southerner to lay off his friend or he would ‘stomp his ass’. One day in the kitchen, Philly and the Southerner had a punch-up. The sergeant broke it up and ordered them to settle it in the boxing ring. The other trainees watched as Philly took punch after punch, but the Jewish kid did not go down. Philly was losing on points, until he smashed his opponent’s jaw and knocked him out. The sergeant told the loser, ‘If you don’t change your attitude, I’ll have you court-martialed.’ To Weiss, ‘this was an object lesson in human rights connected to the war itself.’

While Weiss underwent Basic Training at Fort Blanding, other recruits were deserting or suffering severe psychological problems. Time magazine reported that 300 trainees each week were succumbing to nervous breakdowns. Dr Edward Strecker, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychiatry Department and an adviser to the Secretary of War, bemoaned ‘the cold hard facts that 1,825,000 men were rejected for military service because of psychiatric disorders, that almost another 600,000 had been discharged from the Army alone for neuropsychiatric reasons or their equivalent, and that fully 500,000 more attempted to evade the draft …’

The army Adjutant General alerted commanding generals in his letter of 3 February 1943, ‘Absences without leave and desertion especially from units which have been alerted for movement overseas, have reached serious proportions.’ Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson proposed a more punitive solution to the desertion problem. On 22 October 1943, he wrote to the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Harold D. Smith, ‘Absence without leave in time of war is under any circumstances a serious offense … sufficiently grave to warrant serious punishment which cannot be imposed under the present limitations.’ Stimson recommended that President Franklin D. Roosevelt issue an Executive Order suspending the limits on punishments in the Table of Maximum Punishments of the Manual for Courts-Martial of 1928. Roosevelt duly signed Executive Order 9367 on 9 November 1943, ‘Suspending until further orders the maximum limitations of punishment for violations of Article of War 61.’

A letter from Brigadier General M. G. White, the army’s Assistant Chief of Staff, informed army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall that ‘in May, 1942, there were 2,822 desertions …’ The overall number of deserters grew as the Army expanded, but the percentage remained low at less than 1 per cent of the total number of personnel in uniform. However, most of the desertions were coming from the small percentage of soldiers serving or about to serve as combat infantry troops.

General Marshall established a committee to study desertions and their relationship to nervous disorders. Among those he appointed to the committee was a First World War veteran, Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke. Cooke assumed he was selected because ‘if a guy like me could understand such a subject, anybody could’. Cooke had no fixed view of the problem, its causes or its solution. He noted in early 1943 that ‘nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations’. This was before most of them had been shipped overseas. General Cooke, a bluff and self-effacing soldier, wrote that he had not heard the word ‘psychoneurosis’ before this time and had no idea how to spell it. He also admitted to sharing a common military suspicion of ‘psychiatricks’.

Cooke visited Fort Blanding during Weiss’s training period. The camp commandant gave him access to one ‘locked’ and three ‘open’ wards for psychoneurosis patients. In an open ward, not all of the patients seemed genuine.

A hundred or more patients were loafing around in hospital suits, talking, reading, or playing games. They didn’t act any sicker than I did. As a group, they seemed just about like any other collection of soldiers. I spoke to one of the more intelligent looking ones.

‘What’s wrong with you, soldier?’

He stared at me defiantly.

‘I’m queer,’ he stated flatly, meaning he was homosexual.

Another patient complained of back pain, and a black soldier said simply, ‘I’se got the misery.’

At the Officers’ Club, Cooke had a drink with the camp psychiatrist to discuss the malingerers he had met. The psychiatrist told him,

Whether you believe it or not, I can assure you those men suffer with the pains they complain about. You say they are malingerers and merely pretend to be sick. But, after ten years of practicing psychiatry, I am confident I can tell the difference between a person who is suffering from pain and one who isn’t.

Pain with a psychological cause was still pain. Cooke said he did not understand, but he resolved to continue his investigation with an open mind.

At Fort Blanding, Steve Weiss gravitated to older soldiers, as if seeking a reliable father or older brother. Sheldon Wohlwerth, a twenty-eight-year-old trainee from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, became a friend. Wohlwerth was ‘ungainly, artistic and bright’ and had ‘sound common sense’. Weiss said, ‘I liked him a lot.’ On completion of their seventeen weeks’ Basic Training, Weiss and Wohlwerth went to Fort Meade, Maryland, for rifle training. To his surprise, Weiss qualified as a marksman. At Fort Meade, a recruit named Hal Sedloff befriended him. In civilian life, Sedloff had been a butcher. Weiss looked up to Sedloff, who like Wohlwerth was ten years his senior. The older man’s extreme yearning for his wife and baby daughter, however, left him miserable. In April 1944, the army shipped Sedloff overseas from Newport News, Virginia. A week later, it was Steve Weiss’s turn.

Not every soldier assigned to overseas duty made it as far as the ships. General Cooke interviewed doctors and recruits at induction stations, hospitals and army stockades to discover why so many were refusing to serve. Some of his discoveries undermined his faith in the young generation’s patriotism. Special treatment by civilian Selective Service Boards had created resentment among draftees. ‘When, in 1943, it was found that fourteen members of the Rice University football team had been rejected for military service, the public was somewhat surprised,’ he wrote. They were not the only athletes whose talents spared them military service early in the war, and General Cooke sympathized with those who believed that local Selective Service Boards were unfair.

So urgent had the problem of desertion within the United States become that the Adjutant General’s Office circulated a memo on 3 February 1943 to ‘Commanding Generals, Army Ground Forces, Amy Air Forces, Services of Supply, the commanders of all ports of embarkation, all officers exercising general court martial jurisdiction in the United States’ and commanders of most continental bases. The memo began, ‘Absences without leave and desertion, especially from units which have been alerted for movement overseas, have reached serious proportions.’ So many men had deserted it was impossible to put them on trial, ‘except in aggravated circumstances’. Because many deserters preferred prison to overseas duty, the Adjutant General’s Office wrote, ‘The intent of the new regulations is that the shirker’s purpose will be frustrated instead of assisted … He must find that after early apprehension, a vigorous administration expedites his return to duty with his unit if it is still in the United States, or to an active overseas theater if his unit has gone.’

The memo painted a gloomy picture of draftees’ willingness to take part in the war. Because the stockades were overflowing with captured deserters and others Absent Without Leave (AWOL), ‘it has been necessary to encroach upon the barracks area for staging in order to house, feed and detain deserters and AWOL’s [sic] apprehended’. The Adjutant General advised commanders to beware of the ‘various tricks and ruses used to avoid being assigned to a task force or placed in a group for overseas shipment …’ The deserters’ ‘tricks’ were:

a. They maim themselves, necessitating hospitalization.