The usual citation and the book referenced in the quoted quote below is:

Tune: "Lili Marleen," Norbert Schultze, 1937. Words: Anon.; "Collected for the Lili Marleen Club of Glasgow" by Seumas Mor Maceanruig (Hamish Henderson), ; _Ballads of World War II_, Caledonian Press, Glasgow, c1952.

(Great booklet, by the way)

I quote from r.m.f:

Subject: Re: Q: Banks of Sicily Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 01:01:07 GMT From: Mike.Roebuck@datacomm.ch (Michael Roebuck) --------
The following quote courtesy of the late Hamish Imlach. Taken from the inside cover of his and Iain Mackintosh's German Album "A Man's a Man - Scottish Songs of War and Peace" of 1978, the quote is allegedly from an Interview by Hamish Henderson for Folk News in 1977:

(for the sake of clarity, I reproduce the entire quote. Please excuse the long post)

"I published the army songs at the suggestion of Hugh MacDiarmid. There were some of my own songs and some I'd collected. I made no differentiation between the two. It's a very old Scottish tradition. I didn't claim any of my songs.

At that time, you couldn't print a thing like that openly, and naturally I didn't want to expurge the songs. My own version of 'King Farouk and Queen Farida', for example, is printed without expurgation.

The most famous songs from the collection are "The D-Day Dodgers", inspired by an apocryphal remark supposed to have been made by Lady Astor, accusing the Eighth Army of getting out of participation in the Normandy invasions, and "The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily".

The 'D-Day Dodgers' is my own reshaping of verses that already were beginning to circulate. I just grouped them and gave it a shake. The origin of the phrase, D-Day Dodgers, always interested me. In the desert the folklore figure for the establishment was Lady Astor. There were these extraordinary ideas that circulated among the swaddies in Egypt that Lady Astor had said,for example, in the House of Commons that any Eighth Army swaddie coming back would have to wear a yellow armband to give warning to women in Britain that he had probably been in the Berka, the big brothel in Cairo.

"In a town called Cairo there's a street of shame Sharia-El-Berka is its f***ing name"

That's not my song. It's a bawdy song to the tune of "Abide With Me".

Anyway, In Italy the rumours circulated that Lady Astor had said, again in the House of Commons, that the troops in Italy, they were the D-Day Dodgers, the troops that hadn't come back to take part in the French invasion which, of course was very ironical because the troops in the Mediterranean area had been through as many as four D-Days of their own, if you count the great battle of Alamein, the invasion of Sicily, Salerno and Anzio beachhead - all these were in their own way D-Days.

Though I never checked up on it, my theory was that quite likely the originator of this phrase was Axis Sally, one of the enemy's Lord Haw-Haw-type broadcasters. It's just the sort of vicious slander you might expect from that source. I thought that at the time and I still think so.

When I heard a verse of 'D-Day Dodgers' to the 'Lili Marlene' tune, I thought: Now this is it, this is t h e thing, we are going to make a good song of this. I grouped the things together and the song as it is sung today is my song, but it already existed in fragmentary form before I used it.

At one time I was accused for being too sentimental in the last verse, the one about: "there stand the scattered crosses; there's some that have no name" but I don't think so. I think the juxtaposition of the Lady Astor verse and the verse at the end is powerful. That's my own view of my own song. I think it's artistically forceful and powerful."

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Later:

Perhaps written in November 1944 by Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn of the Tank Rescue Section, 19 Army Fire Brigade, and quickly passed into oral tradition. The tune is. of course "Lili Marlene" composed by Norbert Shultze. See Roy Palmer's What a Lovely War" Sgt Pynn's widow sent Roy the story when he was compiling the book, and he has checked it out and found it to be true. Hamish: "I started to hear snippets of song to the tune of Lili Marlene, all with the chorus of 'We are the D-Day dodgers, Way out in Italy,' and I put this song together." It's not clear how much he wrote, and how much is the snippets he heard.