neither fear nor stigma’. In a memorandum of 14 June to the rest of the War Cabinet, War Secretary Sir Percy James Grigg appeared to support Auchinleck. He wrote:
My military advisers are unanimous in their opinion that the abolition of the death penalty for desertion in the field and cowardice in the face of the enemy was a major mistake from the military point of view. They hold that the penalty was a powerful deterrent against ill-discipline in the face of the enemy, which might so easily mean a lost battle and a lost campaign. In this connection it may be noted that the U.S. Army retain the death penalty for practically the whole range of offences to which it applied in the British Army in 1914–18 …
Grigg, a career civil servant whom Churchill had appointed Secretary of State for War the previous February, then turned from the purely military to political factors:
It is a subject on which there are strong feelings, and to justify a modification of the present law we should have to produce facts and figures as evidence that the British soldiers’ morale in the face of the enemy is so uncertain as to make the most drastic steps necessary to prevent it breaking. Any such evidence would come as a profound shock to the British public and our Allies and as a corresponding encouragement to our enemies.
He concluded, ‘Nevertheless, if military efficiency were the sole consideration, I should be in favour, as are my military advisers, of the reintroduction of the death penalty for the offences in question. But the political aspects are, at any rate, in present circumstances, as important, if not more important, than the military.’ Grigg asked Auchinleck for exact figures on the scale of desertions before the Cabinet could reach a decision.
Neither the 51st Division at sea nor the troops in Egypt knew of Auchinleck’s request to reintroduce the death penalty for those among them who might desert. It was kept secret from the public for the same reasons that Grigg opposed the death penalty itself: it would harm military morale, make the public more suspicious of the army command (which was held in low esteem by public and press alike at that time, as Cabinet minutes noted) and give the enemy a propaganda tool. Grigg explained in a memo to Churchill, ‘If legislation is necessary, the facts and figures must be serious. But if they are serious, we can’t afford to tell them either to our friends or our enemies.’ Moreover, Commonwealth troops serving alongside the British were not subject to the death penalty. Changing the law would mean that an Australian and a British soldier deserting together would receive very different punishments: the Australian would receive three to five years in prison, while the Briton would be shot.
The Australian and New Zealand commanders demonstrated more concern for the men’s morale than their British counterparts, who in correspondence complained of their soldiers’ ‘softness in education and living and bad training …’ The first units to establish forward clearing stations for psychiatric cases near the front were the 2nd New Zealand and the 9th Australian Divisions. By allowing the men to sleep and talk over their fears with physicians, the Australian and New Zealand medical staffs helped up to 40 per cent of the psychological casualties back into the field. The British followed suit in August, when the Royal Army Medical Corps’ 200 Field Ambulance placed an ‘Army Rest Centre’ near the Alamein Line. Brigadier General G. W. B. James, the psychiatrist who probably originated the term ‘battle exhaustion,’ wrote that of the men treated for it ‘a fairly constant 30% returned fairly satisfactorily to combatant duty’.
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
