Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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to finish school first’.
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
IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1942, John Bain moved west from the bivouac where Winston Churchill had addressed the men 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 recreating the French battlefields of the First World War, the two sides had laid down miles of landmines, 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 ten o’clock, the 8th 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 8th 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 Armoured 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 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 before 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 send him for court martial 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.
‘My first day in action had been eventful enough,’ Douglas wrote. ‘I felt as if I had been fighting for months.’ The tanks, which needed repair and servicing, withdrew for the next four days. Douglas looked forward to getting back into the battle.
The Alamein fighting raged relentlessly for nine days and nights, while the British made steady if unclear gains against an enemy that was unafraid to retake positions it lost. John Bain’s appreciation of objective, strategy and tactics – the lifeblood of the soldier – took second place to comradeship, pain and fear. On 2 November, Rommel cracked and retreated into the desert. Out of what Bain saw as ‘almighty confusion and shambles’, came Britain’s first significant land victory of the war.
The achievement was nothing short of extraordinary for a nation that had been defeated in France and Libya by the Germans and in the Far East by Japan. ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory,’ Churchill would say with characteristic hyperbole. ‘After Alamein we never had a defeat.’ Credit went to the commanders as well as to infantrymen