Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War. Charles Glass
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British Empire sensed that the Axis was not, after all, invincible.
The 8th Army lost 13,500 soldiers killed, wounded or missing in action, almost 10 per cent of the number who started. The toll was particularly high among the Highland Division’s bagpipers. Until El Alamein, pipers played the Scottish regiments into battle. Bain recalled,
After Alamein they didn’t, because they virtually all got killed. The pipers actually played you into battle. They were there at the entrance to minefields, playing the pipes as the Highland Division went in. There was something mad and heroic, I suppose, about it, but something terribly sad too. After that, they became stretcher bearers.
In Bain’s poem ‘Remembering Alamein’, a Kiplingesque ‘old sweat’ recalled,
And at the gap one piper
Played Highland Laddie for
Our comfort and encouragement,
Like a ghost from another war.
Of course that brave young piper
Did not stand there long;
Shrapnel or a Spandau-burst
Ended that brief song.
From Alamein, the 8th Army pursued the Germans and Italians along the Mediterranean shore towards Italian Libya. The New Zealand Division, which correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote was ‘by common consent the finest infantry formation in the Middle East’, drove the Germans out of the small Egyptian port of Mersa Matruh on 8 November. That morning, on the other side of North Africa in Vichy-controlled Morocco and Algeria, the United States armed forces entered the war against Germany at the head of an Anglo-American invasion. The Americans provided some relief to Montgomery by diverting German resources to the west.
After the conquest of Mersa Matruh, when the 10th Armoured Division moved its headquarters closer to the front, Keith Douglas had to face his commanding officer. The colonel, who was playing poker in the officers’ mess tent, made Douglas wait for a break in the game. When he put his cards down, he said to the young lieutenant, ‘Just step outside with me awhile.’
While the colonel smoked his pipe under the African stars, Douglas feared immediate arrest. ‘This business of your running away,’ his commander asked Douglas. ‘Why did you do it?’ Douglas noticed that the old officer seemed more hurt than angry, and he answered that he did not know why he left. He thought that it may have been that he had nothing to do in the rear. ‘That’s absurd, of course,’ the colonel said. ‘If you’d asked me, I should have given you permission to go back while the battle was on, willingly.’ Douglas had the tact not to remind him he had made a request and was refused. Instead, he said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry, sir.’ The colonel told him not to be unmilitary again. He would not court martial him. In fact, he let him remain with his regiment at the front where he saw more combat.
A short time later, Douglas wrote the poem ‘Dead Men’, which included the stanza,
Then leave the dead in the earth, an organism
not capable of resurrection, like mines,
less durable than the metal of a gun,
a casual meal for a dog, nothing but the bone
so soon. But tonight no lovers see the lines
of the moon’s face as the lines of cynicism.
Like John Bain, Douglas interpreted his experience through poetry in which the dead emerged as more important actors than the living. Their deaths reminded both soldiers that, at any moment, they too might become the object of others’ reflections on mortality.
On 11 November, the 8th Army expelled the last Germans and Italians from Egypt. Two days later, it recaptured Tobruk, whose fall the previous June had demoralized the British with a humiliating retreat and mass desertions. A week later, Benghazi fell. Three more weeks of marching, fierce fighting, armour battles and artillery exchanges brought the 8th Army back to El Agheila. Finally, after the loss of thousands of lives and many battles, the British were back in the Roman fortress they had captured in February 1941. Of that first British conquest of El Agheila in the Libyan province of Cyrenaica, Alan Moorehead had written,
The ancient law of the desert was, in fact, coming into play. Once more the British had proved you can conquer Cyrenaica. Now unwillingly they began to prove that you cannot go on. It had been the same for both sides. Tripoli and Cairo were equidistant from Cyrenaica … The trouble was that the farther you got away from your base the nearer the retreating enemy got to his. Consequently as you got weaker, the enemy got stronger.
This time, though, the British did not weaken. They solved some of the supply problems by rebuilding the shore ports that Rommel’s sappers had destroyed. The British assaulted El Agheila on 11 December and battled for a week to expel the Germans. The chase continued from Libya’s Cyrenaica province into Tripolitania. On 23 January, the 8th Army captured the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It was John Bain’s twenty-first birthday. At the victory parade, Montgomery praised his soldiers for advancing 1,300 miles in three months. Their achievement, he said, was ‘probably without parallel in history’. Winston Churchill, in Libya to share the glory, declared, ‘Let me then assure you, soldiers and airmen, that your fellow-countrymen regard your joint work with admiration and gratitude, and that after the war when a man is asked what he did it will be quite sufficient for him to say, “I marched and fought with the Desert Army.”’
The desert war moved to Tunisia, where the Axis received fresh reinforcements from Germany to block the Americans in the west and the British from the east. Taking advantage of the Mareth Line defences the French had built years earlier against a potential Italian thrust from Libya, the German and Italian forces dug in again to meet the British onslaught.
The 5/7th Gordons had endured searing daylight heat, freezing nights, rainstorms and long spells without cooked food or rest. Many had won battle honours, more lost their lives. Replacement troops were sent to the front to fill the missing men’s places. One was a Scotsman from Banffshire named Bill Grey, who had volunteered from ‘a cushy pen pushing job in Palestine’ to go into combat. Bain thought he was brave, having been seen to stand up to a tough, drunken sailor and to play football well. Yet, when he and Bain became friends, Grey admitted having made ‘a colossal blunder’ in joining a frontline unit. Battle terrified him.
The deaths and wounding of the men around him affected John Bain more than the valour and the medals. Although he claimed not to be brave, he did not run from combat. He recalled that a captain in his company did, during a ‘a mock attack on the Mareth Line’. The feint involved walking through a minefield to draw German fire that would allow the 2nd New Zealand Division to make ‘a flanking movement called a left hook’. Bain, at that time the company runner, stayed beside the captain ready to transmit his orders.
We were going through this minefield. Our artillery was what they call a creeping barrage, so the range is gradually increased as the infantry goes in. Somehow it went wrong. Either the creeping barrage wasn’t creeping fast enough, or we were advancing too quickly. We were under our own twenty-five pounders, and the German 88s were coming the other way. In the middle of this minefield, somehow we had wandered off the track, and the German machine guns, Spandaus, seemed to have a fixed line on the gap, everything seemed to be coming at us. I remember crouching down, because all this stuff was coming over. Without warning to us, the artillery centre put down smoke as well. Someone thought it was gas. I was crouching down with my head down, and the company commander on my right, not looking at anything. All you’re doing is your teeth are chattering. And you’re praying and you’re swearing. I looked to see how he was getting on, and he wasn’t there. He deserted. He’d gone back. He ran away in the middle of an attack. I never knew what happened to him. That was the last time I saw him.
The Tunisian fighting became so fierce that an officer in the Scots Guards Regiment wrote, ‘I have seen strong men crying like children.’
General George Patton’s II Corps drew the German 10th Panzer Division away from the Mareth Line, and Montgomery’s offensive dislodged the rest of the German forces on 27 March. The Germans