by Tim Bowden
He recalled ‘Plonky’ Staben lining up in front of him one day asking for a Craven A, ‘because they don’t hurt my throat’. Holt laughed, and was immediately ‘doubled to the commandant’s office’.
I was then doubled to the isolation cells where I was stuck for three days on bread and water. These cells were tiled and below ground level and were as cold as charity. At reveille the blankets were taken out of the cells and a lump of bread and a bucket of water were left on the floor. There was nothing to do but to count the tiles and walk up and down the cell as it was too cold to sit on the floor. An Arab cemetery backed onto the jail (which was Kaiser Wilhelm’s Palace before 1914). The first couple of days I leapt and pulled myself up to a small barred window and swapped the bread for cigarettes and matches with an Arab working among the gravestones. I was always a good tooth man and on the third day I decided against smoking and munched on stale bread—besides I didn’t think I could have reached the window anyway. What cannot be cured has to be endured and the fourteen days eventually passed. I was one happy chappy when I was discharged.
Returning to the hospital unit, Holt again applied for a transfer. The commanding officer gave him a dressing-down and told him that his attitude left a lot to be desired, and if he thought that his behaviour would get him a transfer he had another thing coming. What Holt needed was discipline and the CO had just the man to instil this military virtue into him.
The sergeant was all set to do just that, till I gave him a whack in the eye. The CO must’ve given up on me, for my services as a hospital ‘pisspot juggler’ were terminated forthwith and my transfer back to the 2/3rd Battalion was arranged for the following day. The 2/2nd Australian General Hospital was as pleased to get rid of yours truly as I was to leave them.
Back at the battalion at Julis camp, Holt was returned to his original section in B Company. They trained hard and he became familiar with the new weapons such as Bren guns and Boys anti-tank rifles among other artillery.
Our section became notorious in the battalion and we were known as the ‘Bing Boys’. An ex-sailor, Peter White, put three needles on a stick and tattooed a star on the arm of everyone in the section. ‘Plonky’ Dean was away somewhere and missed out on the tattoo. He worried Peter for a week, till one night he set to work. Peter had his needles in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, while Plonky hung on grimly to a bottle of Stella. The light was bad and neither could see very well anyhow, but the tattoo was done eventually to their mutual satisfaction. When Plonky saw his arm the following morning his squeals of anguish were piteous. Peter endeavoured to repair his work of art but Plonky had to wear it until he was killed in action against Germans in Greece.
An Arab known to all as ‘Jimmy the Shit’ looked after the toilets. The Diggers spent a good deal of time chiacking and having fun with him until a visit from the Palestine police. It turned out that Jimmy the Shit was one of the most notorious terrorists in the country during the Arab Jewish troubles, which were held in abeyance during the war. ‘At this time there was a policy of friendly relations with the Arabs. A platoon of us would go to an Arab village. The officer and two or three men would go and drink Turkish coffee while squatting on the floor of a mud hut with the Muktar [village leader], while the rest of the platoon in full equipment were on guard.’
It was widely believed that an Australian soldier named Spinney had taken his discharge in the Middle East after the First World War. He must have finished up a very wealthy man for nearly every camp in Palestine was eating Spinneys’ sausages. According to Holt:
Roman Catholics could eat them with impunity on Fridays, as I’m positive they didn’t contain any meat. There was no beef in the Middle East and it wasn’t until years afterwards I realised that the tasty steaks we consumed with relish in the cafes while on leave were camel meat.
We had our fill of bully beef and McConachee’s Meat and Vegetable and there was a surfeit of tinned herrings in tomato sauce. We had the herrings so often for so long that eventually the smell of the newly opened tin would turn even my stomach. At breakfast we usually had bread and then an argument with the cooks as every fellow and his brother crowded round the cookhouse fire to make toast.
Some character wrote some doggerel and it had an element of truth:
The Australian soldiers’ weakness, in spite of what you hear,
Isn’t cigarettes or women or even Aussie beer;
It isn’t baked potatoes or a brown and gravy roast;
It isn’t scrambled hen fruit; it’s a lump of buttered toast.
When the bugle sounds for breakfast or for dinner or for tea,
He’s not content to stand in line, to get his ‘mungaree’,
He’s around the cookhouse fire like a dog around a post,
With some rounds of bread he’s lifted and is busy making toast.
And when he’s fighting battles and the shells are falling around,
And bombs from Fritz’s aeroplanes are tearing up the ground;
Quite cheerfully he’ll run the risk of giving up the ghost,
To reach a fire if he can – and make himself some toast.
But they were in the Middle East to fight a war, and in 1941 that became a reality.
Chapter 4
DESERT DIGGERS PREPARE FOR WAR
Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen fought in North Africa and the Mediterranean for nearly five years following Italy’s entry into the war in June 1940. Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, aimed to expand Italy’s colonies in North Africa at the expense of British and French colonies. Always the self-serving optimist, Mussolini remarked to his army’s chief of staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, ‘I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.’
Although Australia had sent its naval ships and aircraft to the Mediterranean, pressure began to mount from the British to send the Sixth Division to Egypt or Palestine to finish its training, believing a second Australian division would soon follow. Prime Minister Robert Menzies obliged, despite the fact that the Sixth Division was not even fully trained at that stage. That would have to be finished on foreign soil.
The Sixth Division troops who had arrived in Palestine would not see combat until the Australians took part in Operation Compass, the successful Commonwealth offensive in Egypt which began in December 1940. Before that there was an urgent need to finish training before the troops faced up to combat, although they were still not fully equipped.
For Gunner Ivan ‘Ivo’ Blazely, this meant continuing under the ministrations of Sergeant Major ‘Turkey Arse’, and he was about to meet his new troop leader Lieutenant ‘Slit Trench’ George—so-called because of his propensity for heading for cover even if it was only rumoured that hostile aircraft were heading his way. His main job seemed to be standing about trying to look like a soldier. Blazely observed: ‘Actually he looked like a slightly larger version of The Turk, immaculately turned out, a little moustache, cap at a jaunty angle, wearing a Sam Browne belt and carrying a swagger stick. It was none other than Slit Trench George.’
After a few days some of the draft went to signals school, others to driving school and to learn cooking. The rest furthered their training as gunners and were pleased to find that ‘at least there were real 25 pounder guns to fire’.
Training went pretty smoothly and Blazely fell foul of the system only once. The residents of his tent decided on one Sunday morning to give Church Parade a miss. They were charged and the presiding officer asked Ivo if he was a conscientious objector. He said, ‘No I’m in the Army, ain’t I?’ The officer patiently explained he meant Blazely’s religious beliefs and told him he had to attend the parade whether he went to church or not—then awarded him seven days confined to barracks. ‘If you didn’t go to church, you were given a fatigue which kept you occupied until after the parade was over, so from then on I was a regular believer.’
After a few weeks the strutting and fretting Sergeant ‘Turkey Arse’ a
nd Lieutenant ‘Slit Trench’ left the unit and were replaced by another lieutenant and warrant officer. By comparison, the new troop leader turned out to be ‘not at all like old Slit Trench’. Ivo thought ‘Lieutenant Brian was a true officer and gentleman by Act of Parliament.’
Christmas came and went, the first of several Blazely was to spend in the Holy Land. On New Year’s Eve his gun troop went to the artillery range at Beersheba to test their training on a shoot with live ammunition. By then it was thought they ought to be proficient enough to handle things without blowing themselves up. ‘Each gun crew had an instructor standing by to make sure there were no really bad stuff ups’ and under the overall fatherly eye of Lieutenant Brian things went off pretty smoothly.
Shortly after the new year began, a draft of gunners was sent to join the regiment at Qastina. Blazely thought he was lucky to be included—anything was better than Nusarat. They arrived about mid-morning and were allotted different troops in the 15th Battery. Some went as ammunition lumpers to battery headquarters and others to their gun troops. Ivo just had time to settle in a tent with what seemed to him to be ‘a group of pretty good jokers’. After lunch an afternoon parade was called. Then he heard the command, ‘Fall out Gunner Blazely’, and was told to report to battery headquarters. When he arrived there, his reception committee of Captain ‘Swivelneck’ and Sergeant Major Roysie were waiting.
Captain Swivelneck immediately started to lecture me on my deportment—at that stage of the game I didn’t even know what that meant. Another humungus crime I’d committed was wearing a blue jumper. Hardly my fault as I’d been issued with it. Sergeant-Major Roysie was very dapper with a little Errol Flynn moustache and somehow seemed out of place in a mob of mostly rough soldiers. However he wasn’t a bad sort of bloke and kept a pretty fair duty roster. Swivelneck, also known as ‘Gertie’, was so-called because as he walked or marched his head used to bob around like a puppet. After these minor matters were sorted, Roysie took me to meet my gun-sergeant and crew.
The sergeant who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Fish Eyes’ didn’t impress me at first sight and things deteriorated from then on. His second-in-command Bombardier ‘Silver Tongue’ wasn’t much better. In my opinion then if you’d booted either of them in the arse you would have kicked their teeth in.
Before Blazely’s unit left for Syria, General Sir Thomas Blamey briefly addressed a divisional parade and praised the Ninth Division as a whole. Ivo recalled, ‘After his speech, as the convoy of staff cars moved off, one of a group of soldiers near some trucks close by the gate out of the parade ground, called out loudly, “Goodbye Tom—you old cunt!” I reckon if I could hear it from where I was, the general surely did.’
After Italy entered the war B Company was ordered to strike their tents and dig them into the ground. Route marches and manoeuvres were the order of the day. One of Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt’s officers earned his nickname during this period, in the Hebron Hills. One night he sneaked up on a sentry, Joe Gray, who let him get quite close before roaring out, ‘Stand up on your hind feet. What are you doing crawling round on your belly like a bloody lizard?’ From that moment Lieutenant Fulton became ‘Lenny the Lizard’.
The Australians, sharing the casual racism of the times, shamelessly exploited the local tradesmen. Jewish jewellers came around the camp selling their wares from a tray full of watches and rings, and all the troops were on the lookout for a bargain. A technique was developed where a soldier would pass a watch around one way and a ring the other. Someone else would select a ring and then pass it on to another who would inspect it. Another would pick up a watch—and then one of them would take off and run like a deer. The jeweller would catch up with the absconder at the toilet, where the Australian would explain he had been taken short. By the time the jeweller had got back to the tent, his clientele would be missing and so were the rest of his wares.
At a Jewish barbershop, soldiers could get a haircut and pay for it the following payday if they put their names in the book. This happy state of affairs didn’t last for long, however, for there were far too many Ned Kellys, Ben Halls, Sydney Ferries, Sydney Bridges and Sydney Domains sprinkled through the book and these credit privileges were quickly stopped.
Holt’s platoon commander was Lieutenant ‘Slops’ Calman, who was highly regarded by his men. According to Holt:
Slops spoke with a lisp and didn’t look like a military man, but he was a soldier and a gentleman to boot. He tried to keep us on the straight and narrow with his man-to-man talks. He never did have a great deal of success, but he never stopped trying and he had the respect and affection of every man in the platoon. We would have crawled over glass for him.
(Unhappily Lieutenant Calman was later transferred to Headquarters Company and was killed in action against the Italians in Badia in January 1941.)
Commanding Officer Colonel ‘The Black Panther’ England also featured in Holt’s recollections:
About this time there was a great deal of bad language being used by the men and it caused our commanding officer Colonel Viv England some heart burning. ‘The Black Panther’ was never one to hide his light under a bushel and he certainly believed in calling a spade a spade. On a battalion parade he told us he wanted the swearing to cease forthwith. ‘Only the other day I heard an English soldier talking to his mate who was exhausted. He said, “The fookin’ fooker’s fooked.” You don’t want to finish up like that, so stop the bloody swearing as of now.’
Two characters from B Company, Frankie Richardson and Harold Gobert, used to take ‘French Leave’ occasionally and would dress up as Arabs or Jews. They were able to make themselves understood in both languages. They enjoyed themselves around Arab coffee houses, sucking on ‘hubble bubble’ pipes and gossiping. On other occasions they would don shorts and Panama hats and take off to the Jewish settlements. To the uninitiated they really looked and acted the part. But on their last escapade in mufti, a Jewish informant had a word to the military police. They were travelling by bus when it stopped near the provosts’ post and everyone had to step down from the vehicle. The MPs didn’t seem particularly interested in the identity of the travellers, but were very interested in their footwear. ‘Shalom,’ said Frankie as he raised his Panama hat to the military police. ‘I’ll shalom you, you Australian bastard,’ roared a big beefy MP as he belted Frankie on the head with his baton. He had sighted Frankie’s tan Australian military boots under his Arab robe.
Like Hooker Holt, Gunner Clarry McCulloch was camped with his unit near Gaza while their training continued before going into action.
Some of the route marches took them through Arab villages which looked as though they had not changed much since Biblical times. Wheat and barley was harvested by hand and the grain was threshed by driving donkey teams round and round on the straw. The practice which caused the most amusement to the newly arrived Australians was the use of any kind of animal droppings, which were dried in the sun, as cooking fuel. Firewood was almost non-existent, as McCulloch learned:
One day when marching through a village we met a man riding a donkey. When quite near us the donkey lifted his tail and began to defecate. A young Arab girl, probably about eleven, immediately rushed out from a nearby mudbrick house, caught the dung as it fell into her bare hands, formed it into a neat circular pancake and stuck it on the wall of the family house to dry.
Route marches in the surrounding area was the army’s way to keep the gunners occupied while they waited for their Vickers guns to arrive. On some of these outings it was not uncommon to meet well-dressed Arabs mounted on very smart Arab stallions. The ex–Light Horsemen in the group would cast envious looks at them as they slogged on foot across the sand. It was high summer and one day the temperature climbed to nearly 50°C so the route marches were cancelled and the gunners spent most of the day sitting through lectures in one of the large demonstration tents.
So far no enemy aircraft had come anywhere near their camp and complacency had set in. That was shattere
d rather rudely one day. While resting in their tents after lunch, there was a tremendous roar and three planes thundered up along the gully, about twenty feet above the tents. Then they suddenly zoomed up at an acute angle and the resulting slipstream stirred up a short, blinding sandstorm. ‘Fortunately, they were British Tomahawk fighters on a low-flying exercise and, despite all the bad language which ensued, we realised just how vulnerable we could be.’
They never did find out whether the exercise had been set up by the authorities to alert them to the danger, or whether it was just sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the pilots. Plenty of threats were made of dire consequences to the pilots if caught skylarking while on leave. In McCulloch’s view, the Royal Air Force redeemed itself later in Syria by destroying a lot of the enemy aircraft in that area.
By this time everyone was anxiously waiting for the first leave to be granted. In the first draw Dick Clark and I were the lucky winners from No 11 platoon so, with our boots shined and passed as satisfactory by the Sergeant-Major, we joined the other happy winners from the battalion and boarded a bus bound for Jerusalem for the day.
The first part of the trip was uneventful but I still remember quite vividly how the bus hurtled down the very steep last couple of miles into the city. Swooping down around the seven hairpin bends at breakneck speed, the Arab driver obviously had complete faith that Allah would see us safely to the bottom—and He did! This, to us, was our first miracle in the Holy Land.