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.
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
