On 18 July, the Highland Division’s convoy dropped anchor at Cape Town. For the first time in a month, the men set foot on dry land. White South Africans in English-speaking Cape Province gave them an enthusiastic welcome. On 19 July, while division bagpipers paraded through the city, Auchinleck sent a second entreaty from Cairo to the Cabinet for help in countering the mass desertions after Tobruk: ‘Recent desertions show alarming increase even amongst troops of highest category. Present punishments that can be awarded insufficient deterrent. Would stress that cases where deserter takes truck containing food water and means of transport of his comrades are far more serious than similar cases during last war.’
A week later, the Highlanders went ashore again at Durban to the airs of the 7th Black Watch’s kilted pipers. From Durban, the ships cruised north up the coast of east Africa to Aden. In the waters off Britain’s colony on the Yemeni shore, the convoy divided. Some of the ships went east to Iraq and India, the rest north through the Red Sea towards Egypt.
On 14 August, the 51st Highland Division disembarked at Port Tewfik. Bain’s subsequent poem, ‘Port of Arrival’, recorded the impressions of a foreign soldier landing at the southern gateway to the Suez Canal:
The place we see
Is just as we imagined it would be
Except its furnishings are somehow less
Spectacular, more drab, and we confess
To disappointment, something like a sense
Of loss, of being cheated.
The Highlanders settled into the desert west of the canal city of Ismailia near a village called Qassassin. Their base comprised fifty camps, each a rectangle a thousand yards long and five hundred wide, with identical dug-in tents, latrines and water towers. Here began a period of desert training and acclimatizing men from the highlands of Scotland to the Egyptian summer. The troops learned to navigate the trackless, barren sands with compasses aided at night by the stars and during the day by the sun. For a short period each day, they marched without helmets, caps or shirts for their skins to absorb sunlight without burning.
In his comrades’ interaction with local villagers, Bain observed racial hatreds that he had not until then suspected. Men from Scottish slums, themselves subject to abuse by classes above theirs, humiliated the local population. Bain recalled, ‘I do remember being very shocked by the attitude to the Egyptians, when we landed in Egypt. This was general all through the army. They were simply called wogs, and they were fair game. They were kicked around, beaten up, reviled.’
Winston Churchill and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, had flown to Egypt just ahead of the Highland Division. The day after the Highlanders arrived, Churchill dismissed Major General Auchinleck from his dual posts as Commander-in-Chief Middle East and 8th Army commander. He and Brooke appointed General Sir Harold Alexander C-in-C Mideast and placed General William Gott in command of the 8th Army. General Gott, however, was killed when two German Messerschmitts attacked a transport plane taking him to Cairo. The officer chosen to replace him was a wiry general with a distinctly unmilitary falsetto voice named Bernard Law Montgomery.
‘Monty’, who assumed command on 13 August, made immediate changes to the 8th Army characterized by his declaration, ‘There will be no more belly-aching and no more retreats.’ Morale improved thanks to Montgomery’s contagious confidence, the delivery of new American tanks and the failure of the Axis to exploit its victory at Tobruk by pushing through Alamein to Alexandria and Cairo.
Many of the post-Tobruk deserters were returning to the army, amid signs that Britain was not losing Egypt after all. There were too many of them to punish at mass court martials, which would attract publicity and undermine the myth of the universally brave British Tommy. Moreover, the 8th Army needed them. Experienced soldiers were more useful at the front than in prison. Privates were taken back without penalty, beyond the abuse their sergeants meted out. Non-commissioned officers were reduced to privates and put back into their units. Some of the more resourceful deserters, who had lived off the land in the Delta, went into the newly created Special Air Service (SAS) and Long Range Desert Group, where their survival skills and ingenuity were put to good use. Some deserters held out, as Major Douglas H. Tobler discovered while gathering intelligence in the desert. In September, he met a band of men ‘who for their own reasons had deserted their units or perhaps made no effort to get back to their own lines after getting lost during an engagement with the enemy’. Tobler, who had not come to arrest them, noted that they were ‘glad to be out of the fighting, content to live by their wits knowing it was unlikely anyone would check their credentials’.
While Bain was training at the camp near Qassassin, the division received an unexpected visit from Winston Churchill. The prime minister reviewed the troops and wrote afterwards, ‘The 51st Highland Division was not yet regarded as “desert worthy”, but these magnificent troops were now ordered to the Nile front.’
The ‘Nile front’ was, for the 5/7th Gordons and the rest of the division’s 153rd Brigade, the desert south of the road between Cairo and the pyramids. Bain recalled taking the train there from Alexandria: ‘An Arab was selling hard boiled eggs and bread, and they simply took his entire stock and threw him off the train.’ Near the Mena House, Egyptian Khedive Ismail’s nineteenth-century country lodge that had become a fashionable pyramid-side hotel, the 153rd Brigade dug trenches and constructed other defences to protect Cairo. Their exertions were wasted, because Monty was no longer planning to defend Cairo. The time had come to commit soldiers like John Bain to an all-out offensive.
On the average the men from the northwestern part of the United States get the highest scores [on the Army General Classification Test], the men from the southeast the lowest.
Psychology for the Fighting Man, p.189
STEVE WEISS BLACKMAILED HIS FATHER for permission to join the Army, but Alfred T. Whitehead of Tennessee claimed that he deceived his widowed mother to achieve the same end. Whitehead asked her to sign papers for his entry into the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal programme for the Depression’s unemployed to plant forests and establish state parks. For a penniless youngster like Whitehead, the CCC’s monthly pay of $30 ($25 of which went direct to the parents) made it an attractive option. Or so his mother, who was raising six children in a backwoods cabin, imagined. Whitehead related in his privately printed memoir, Diary of a Soldier, that he waited until she had signed the document before telling her the truth: he was becoming a soldier.
Whitehead had left home before, when he was fourteen. Beatings by his ‘heavy handed stepfather’ forced him to run away. In the town of Lebanon, in Tennessee’s Wilson County, a family of moonshiners took him in and put him to work driving a truck. He learned dice and poker at their gambling den. ‘Once in a while, they cut a guy’s throat,’ Whitehead wrote, ‘just to keep their reputation for being tough.’ Being tough appealed to the young Whitehead, whose upbringing required a thick hide.
His coal miner father, Artie Whitehead, had been crushed to death in an underground accident. Alfred wrote that he shed tears at his father’s funeral, which he remembered as taking place when he was four years old. In fact, he was older. His Social Security and service records give his date of birth as 31 January 1922, which made him four in 1926. Artie Whitehead had a daughter in 1927, when Alfred