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 was five. And the US Census reported him as living with his family in Putnam County, Tennessee, in 1930. Alfred T. Whitehead was at least eight, if not older, when his father died. This was the first of many inconsistencies between Whitehead’s memory and the historical record.
Artie Whitehead was interred in ‘the family cemetery’ at Silver Point, Tennessee, ‘with generations of relatives: Whitehead, Hatfield, Sadler, and Presley.’ Alfred’s mother returned by train to Buffalo Valley with her children to live near ‘the one room, stone chimney, log house where I was born’. Young Whitehead’s rural upbringing was typical for the impoverished Southern hills of the time. His family sent him to school only a few weeks a year, ‘just enough to keep the authorities off their backs’. Even by the standards of the Depression-era South, his was a brutal childhood. Alfred’s great-grandfather, Wily Whitehead, who was ‘as old as the hills and senile’, lived in a henhouse with a rope tied around his waist to keep him in. Their stepfather treated the six Whitehead children still living at home so harshly that the county assumed custody of them for a time. Young Alfred enjoyed rare moments of freedom, usually alone fishing or shooting in the woods. For the most part, he wrote, his mother and stepfather robbed him of his youth:
They had me working in the fields from sunup to sundown: plowing, clearing land, and helping to make moonshine whiskey by the time I was nine. Other times, my stepfather would hire me out as a laborer to other farmers for fifty cents a day. Then he’d take all the money I made and drink it up, gamble it away, or spend it whoring around South Carthage, depending on the mood he was in.
The wartime army offered an escape from backwoods poverty and abuse. It was unlikely Whitehead needed his mother’s permission, though, to join it. His service records put his enlistment date at 11 April 1942. At that time, he was twenty. Parental consent was required only for volunteers younger than eighteen. Just as he must have been older than four at his father’s funeral, he was more than eighteen in 1942. Yet depicting himself as underage stressed his role as victim in the saga he was making of his life. He portrayed his departure from his mother in poignant terms: ‘She followed me all the way out to the front gate by the road, crying, and telling me that I had better get a good insurance policy in the Army. I couldn’t help remembering how she and my stepfather had squandered my dead father’s insurance money and property.’
For many relatively well-off young Americans, like Steve Weiss, the army was pure hardship. To Alfred T. Whitehead, it was liberation. The training and discipline were light compared to farm labour. The army supplied three meals a day, regular rations of meat, hot showers, clean clothes, medical care, a bed to himself and, above all, travel beyond the hills where he was born. Such luxuries were unobtainable for a poor rural Southerner, white or black, in civilian life.
Whitehead and other young recruits reported early one warm April morning to a restaurant in Carthage, Tennessee. Carthage, originally a trading port where the Cumberland and Caney Fork Rivers met, was known to Whitehead and the other recruits as the town from which the state’s most famous First World War veteran had embarked on his military career. Alvin Cullum York, having conquered alcoholism before the war to become a devout Christian and pacifist, was drafted into the Army in 1917 at the age of twenty-nine. Trained at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he served in France with the 82nd Division. On 8 October 1918, York earned the Medal of Honor. His citation, presented to him personally by General John J. Pershing, read:
After his platoon suffered heavy casualties and three other non-commissioned officers had become casualties, Corporal York assumed command. Fearlessly leading seven men, he charged with great daring a machine gun nest which was pouring deadly and incessant fire upon his platoon. In this heroic feat the machine gun nest was taken, together with four officers and 128 men and several guns.
York, about whom a Hollywood movie starring Gary Cooper had been released the year before, set a high standard for the young Tennesseans. Whitehead was proud to set out from the same town York had.
The recruits ate a hot breakfast at the little restaurant and boarded a bus. Driving along the ramshackle road past Whitehead’s family’s cabin at Sulphur Springs, Alfred wondered if he would ever see it again. It did not matter to him either way. While the driver filled the bus with petrol in Lebanon, he slipped away to buy ‘a jug of moonshine’. He and his companions drank the illegal alcohol before nightfall, when the bus entered the gates of Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.
After a few weeks of kitchen duty and barracks cleaning at Fort Oglethorpe, Whitehead was shipped to Camp Wolters, Texas, for Basic Training. The Infantry Replacement Training Center, where Texan Audie Murphy trained with Company D of the 59th Training Battalion, was then the country’s largest. The nearest town was Mineral Wells, which some of the GIs called ‘Venereal Wells’ for obvious reasons. Whitehead became a buck private with about sixty other youngsters in the 4th Platoon, Company D, 63rd Infantry Training Battalion. His boyhood proficiency with a rifle qualified him as ‘sharpshooter’ and then ‘expert’. Despite his success and
