by Tim Bowden
Water was short but not as bad as some of the previous camps and there was plenty of petrol for washing clothes, which was used on everything except socks. Singlets and underpants were definitely not in fashion in the desert.
Some Pommy tanks came and camped near us for a few days. I went over and had a bit of a shufti. They could have their job, what with being battened down inside with temperatures over the hundred, and the gun recoiling past your ear-hole every time you fired it. You wouldn’t want to be suffering from claustrophobia.
When they left I found a container which I took to be water, a couple of gallons or more. A chance to have a real good wash, I thought. I poured about a gallon into a tin and reckoned to wash my hair first so I grabbed the soap and dipped my head in. I should have smelt it first as it was petrol. I must’ve had a pretty tough skull, for after rinsing it quickly with water, I suffered no ill effects except a bit of stinging for about an hour or so. Another time I found a tin I thought was petrol and started to wash my shirt and a pair of shorts in it. This turned out to be diesel. I hate being dumb.
To stop the troops getting fat and lazy, the officers started them digging alternative positions. One man per gun was dropped off each day, mostly in the afternoon. One day the driver of the truck that came to pick up the working party said, ‘I’ve got some good news for you, Tassie, you’ve cracked it for four days leave to Cairo.’ Ivo reckoned it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella. It had been a long time between drinks for him as far as overnight leave was concerned. He realised he hadn’t actually had any, officially, since his final leave back in Australia.
When Ivo got back to the gun, he found that George was going too, possibly the only ones in their troop to go to Cairo. Two or three others were going to Alexandria. (As far as leave time went, Alexandria was thought to be the best deal as two days were lost travelling to Cairo and back.)
The next morning the leave party fronted at the regimental headquarters and got their leave passes and received the customary lecture from the regimental sergeant major about not going absent without leave or contacting VD and letting the side down. ‘All this was duly noted and forgotten.’ They boarded the leave train at Burg-el-Arab.
There was a motley collection of troops there representing every Allied force in the desert, South Africans, New Zealanders, Indians the lot. There were even a couple of Yanks hanging around. They were members of some American technical unit, or what their actual job was I don’t know. They were the only ones wearing their tin hats and someone said, ‘You don’t want to wear them if you go up near the front or you might get shot for a Dago.’
In Cairo the New Zealanders had a club with a good bar so that became the daily headquarters. Australians were the only others, barring their own troops, who were let in. Definitely no British, South Africans or any others were allowed past the door. ‘The story went that a couple of South Africans were invited to have a drink with some Maoris, but said, “We don’t drink with coloured people.”’ They never knew what hit them and were dragged out and dumped on the footpath.
The next day Ivo and George went to see the pyramids and the Sphinx. It was a hot day and they were both hungover, so did not go inside or risk climbing them—just looked. ‘Marvellous what they could do in the days of cheap labour and no unions,’ Ivo remarked.
He got another break early in October when the regiment was pulled out for a rest. But on the first morning out Ivo woke up with his right eye stuck shut and ‘feeling as if half the Western Desert was in it’. He was diagnosed at the regimental aid post as having conjunctivitis and evacuated to a casualty clearing station. The tent he was in was reserved for more or less minor complaints such as eye problems and yellow jaundice.
There were quite a few infantry present so Ivo just lay back and listened to their stories. They were not exaggerating, it seemed, but just telling things as they were. One bloke told a story about a fight he was in when one of the section jumped into a hole with a badly wounded German. They both sat and eyed each other for a minute or two, then the German’s pain got too much and he made a grab at the Australian, who thought he was being attacked and shot him. Afterwards remorse set in. The Australian told his mates over and over, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’
The reply came: ‘What do you think we were back on Civvy Street, a bunch of habitual bloody murderers?’ Subject closed.
Ivo was finally transferred to the 2/7th Australian General Hospital, a few miles east of Alexandria. Here he was given a cup of Milo ‘by a nice little VAD [a nursing orderly]’, had a good shower and settled down to a relaxed time in the eye ward. But nothing was ever perfect as they weren’t allowed to read and weren’t supposed to go to the pictures.
After a couple of days when he got the run of the place, Ivo looked up an A Troop gunner who was in the ward that was reserved for those who had loved not wisely but too well. This was the happiest ward in the hospital. No sisters or VADs to disturb them with their fussing about. None of the inmates seemed too worried about their condition. As one put it, ‘It’s a bloody sight better than being shot at.’
On a later leave into Alexandria, Ivo and a mate thought they’d have a look at a bit of the mystic East’s culture.
After making some inquiries to a young ‘wallah’ boy who had tried to sell us his sister who, he assured us, was ‘Very clean, very sweet, very hygienic, only fifteen, George,’ he introduced us to a young man who could have been his older brother, who in turn for a negotiated price led us through some back alleys until we came to a house in the out-of-bounds area.
There we entered into a small room with a fairly mature ‘bint’. She immediately disrobed and biting us for two cigarettes, lit them and placed them in two of the more prominent orifices of her body. Then while they smouldered away she danced a more or less sensuous dance, accompanied by her male companion banging on a drum and wailing a Wog love song.
After the cigarettes had gone out, she and her boyfriend then copulated before our very eyes. This act was known in the trade as a ‘can-can exhibition’. After the act drew to a climax in more ways than one, we left, leaving the couple resting, no doubt preparing for their next audience.
By the time Ivo got back to A Troop, the big battle was just about over, and looking at his mates he could see he had missed out on ‘a lot of bloody hard work’. A day or so before the end, A Troop went through the wire and took up a position near the coast road. The last of the Germans soon retreated and the battle was over, at a terrible cost to the infantry—some battalions having less than 100 men left. ‘We as usual had been lucky, we had a fair amount of stuff thrown at us with very little doing any damage.’
Scrounging became the order of the day. Ivo was glad to have picked up a little knowledge about mines:
When you got to within about 100 feet or so from a German position, you had to watch where you were putting your feet on account of S mines.
These nasty little bastards were canisters full of round lumps of metal like quarter-inch ball bearings. The S mines were buried with just three prongs protruding about an inch above the ground. When trodden on, and the foot taken off for the next step, a charge sent the canister up to about groin height, where another one exploded the container with very nasty consequences for anyone in the immediate area.
There were also some impromptu celebrations, as Ivo recalled: ‘The night after Jerry pulled out, the infantry in front of us treated us to a regular regatta night display. They let go tracer bullets, Verey lights—anything that would make a light or go bang.’
This went on for quite a while until the German planes came back and dropped bombs and inflicted casualties, mainly on the unlucky 2/28th Battalion. Ivo woke up in the early hours of the morning to the sound of a hostile aircraft flying around in the moonlight, the pilot firing bursts at anything he could see. He hoped it would keep well away. ‘It would be crook to cop something at this stage of the game.’ But gradually the sound of the engines died away
towards the coast and quiet reigned once more.
Because of Ivo Blazely’s eye troubles and his leave in Cairo, he missed the climactic battles that Montgomery’s Allied forces fought to clinch the victory at El Alamein.
Rommel became convinced that the main thrust of Montgomery’s attack would be near the Mediterranean and he moved a large amount of his Afrika Korps there. The Australians fought with ferocity—even Rommel commented on the ‘rivers of blood’ in the region. However, the Australians had given Montgomery room to manoeuvre.
He launched Operation Supercharge. This was a British and New Zealand infantry attack made south of where the Australians were fighting. Rommel was taken by surprise. The 123 tanks of the 9th Armoured Brigade attacked the German lines. But a sandstorm once again saved Rommel. Many of the Allied tanks got lost and they were easy for the German antitank gunners to pick off. Some 75 per cent of the 9th Brigade was lost. But the overwhelming number of Allied tanks meant that more arrived to help out and it was these tanks that tipped the balance.
Events were starting to wind down for the Australians in the Middle East. The night the Afrika Korps retreated from Alamein, Ivo’s gun crew was having a mild celebration, but no grog was involved. About 11 pm most were bedded down except Charlie and George, both of whom could play and sing a bit. ‘After about half an hour or so, Captain Swivelneck arrived and put a halt to proceedings and returned to his doover [dugout].’
The two singers chewed over the injustice of it all, and then went over to where the captain was in bed and wondered if he would like a hand grenade to keep him company.
Swivelneck even made mention of it on the A Troop parade the next morning. To save face he treated it more or less as a joke, but Ivo could have assured him that he didn’t know how lucky he was. ‘Charlie was a wild man and George a good backstop.’
Charlie, Dusty and Ivo set off the next day to have a look around the area known as the Clover Leaf. This was a small mound where the Germans had had a muster of strong-points and machine-gun posts. They found among other equipment a lot of German stick bombs and hand grenades. These had about a four-second fuse. ‘But Charlie had a nasty habit of tossing a stick bomb about 20 feet to the side and then saying run!’ Which they did very smartly.
Charlie was also good at taking the gelignite out of landmines and making bombs to blow up fish with, not that we got many. They seem to be in pretty short supply in that area.
We found two bodies, not together, an Aussie and a German. They both looked to have been dead for some months. The Aussie was wearing sand shoes so obviously had been killed on a night patrol and most likely that Jerry had too. We had no way of burying the Aussie so we did the time-honoured thing of sticking his rifle upright on the ground and placing his steel helmet on top to make the job of finding him again easier. We cut off his meat tickets [identification discs] from around his neck and handed them in when we got back. He would be picked up later by the War Graves detail and placed in the Alamein War Cemetery.
The first day out we found a lot of flare cartridges. We found out that if you pulled the wick out of the end of these and set them up on end and lit the wick they shot up in the air and whistled just like a shell did. When we got back to the ridge just in front of the guns, A Troop was just beginning to line up for the evening meal. We lined up about half a dozen of these cartridges and lit them. Up in the air they went whistling like a salvo of incoming shells. There was much ducking and diving in the dinner queue as everyone was still a bit edgy. Later I heard that Lieutenant ‘Snooky’ said, ‘He ought to have his ears boxed.’ I’ve often wondered who he meant.
Some of the troops went over by truck to where the British tanks had broken through on the last couple of days of the battle. The area was ‘a real shambles’. Here, in military parlance, enemy guns had ‘fought to the muzzle’. British tanks could be seen knocked out half a mile away and right up to the gun positions. The Germans’ 88-mm anti-tank and field guns had their pits full of corpses. Tanks were lying about on their side with their tracks damaged and turrets in some cases blown off. All the bodies had been lying about under the hot sun for a week or more and were on the nose to some order. Ivo remarked, ‘I don’t know who had the job of cleaning things up, but I was glad it wasn’t me.’
Now and then the Australians would see an Egyptian on a camel laden with rifles and ammunition, probably on their way back to Palestine, getting ready for their own private little war with the Israelis. ‘No one seemed to worry about them and just let them go on their way.’
Meanwhile, life in A Troop was about as good as Ivo ever had as a soldier—no parades, only roll call in the morning. There was plenty of beer and the odd bottle of Vat 69. The beer was mostly Canadian, fairly strong stuff with an alcohol content of around 6 per cent. ‘I remember at this time none of us knew what the future held, whether we would move on with the Eighth Army, stay where we were or what.’
Early in December the regiment pulled out, heading east. The rumour mill had it that they were going home, but that was not to be just yet. The regiment moved in separate convoys. Half contained signallers and a selection of miscellaneous Diggers. The ack-ack gunners left one morning; the other half with the guns the next day. The area was left as clean as possible by using the scorched earth method.
The convoy Ivo was with pulled up that night at a place called Wade Natrun, nicknamed by the troops as ‘the halfway house’. It was a staging camp with a wet canteen, so this called for another mild celebration. Next day they did a sharp left turn at Cairo, junking all the immediate rumours that they were going home.
When the gun convoy stopped at Ismalia, a nice little town on the canal, Lofty, a tall dark gunner who had joined the Fifteenth Battery at Alamein, exclaimed, ‘I know this joint.’ He straight away bit the nearest sergeant who had money—Fisheyes of all people—for a quid, put as much tea and sugar as he could scrounge in a sand bag and headed in the direction of the town.
He caught up with the regiment back in Palestine three days later. When he fronted for being AWOL, the commanding officer asked him what his excuse was. Lofty replied, ‘The convoy stopped and I went to answer a call of nature, Sir. By the time I’d finished the convoy had moved on.’
‘It must’ve been a long shit,’ mused the colonel.
‘Fined five pounds.’
Ivo felt that made it a pretty expensive one, too.
Chapter 11
RETURN TO AUSTRALIA
Until the day he died in 1998 at the age of 91, Captain John Bowden, with the Seventh Division, believed that Australia’s new Labor prime minister John Curtin had demanded that the British prime minister Winston Churchill return the Australian divisions to Australia from the Middle East when Japan looked likely to enter the war late in 1941. John Bowden, who was my father, said:
If it hadn’t been for Prime Minister John Curtin, I don’t know where we’d have finished up. But he had his row with Churchill when Singapore fell in February 1942, and pulled the 7th, 6th and 9th Divisions back from the Middle East to defend Australia against the Japanese threat from the north. Anyway, thank Christ I still had my testicles and whatever intelligence I possessed, and these were the things I hoped I’d get back to my wife Peggy with.
Word got around the Diggers that there was a big move on back to Australia. It was known as the ‘Step Sister’ move, and the first to go were the fighting units, the infantry and artillery. The odds and sods like the schools and training units and some artillery schools were shunted down to a place called Nusarat, further down the coast from Gaza.
Well, it is too late to tell him now, but this has been an enduring myth. John Curtin became Labor prime minister in October 1941, and took the defence portfolio in early 1942. His two main lieutenants were Ben Chifley and ‘Doc’ Evatt, Minister for External Affairs and attorney-general. The new government did not immediately bring any new policy changes from Menzies’ Liberals—and despite the increasing threat from a bellicose Japan, made no mov
e to recall Australia’s troops from North Africa and Egypt. Indeed, as late as November the government approved Britain’s request for yet more Australian troops for the Middle East.
Reputable British historians, like Arthur Bryant, have aired the notion that soon after Japan entered the war, the Australian government began to demand the return of our troops from the Middle East. This was not the case. Churchill (with the prompt agreement of the Australian government) dispatched the Sixth and Seventh Divisions from the Middle East to the Far East, not to Australia.
In mid-February, when Japanese troops were storming down the Malay Peninsula towards the ‘impregnable fortress’ Singapore, and when one of the Australian divisions was at sea, it was proposed by the British government that it not be landed in the Dutch East Indies as had been planned, but instead in Burma (where the defence was then collapsing), but the Australian government insisted that it be diverted to Australia.
Soon afterwards, at the suggestion of the Australian government, two brigades of the Second Division were landed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to strengthen the small garrison there. The return of the Ninth Division was sought by Curtin, on the advice of his chief of the general staff, in mid-February 1942, but the division did not embark from Egypt until early 1943.
Alas, part of the Seventh Division stopped off to defend Java on behalf of the Dutch colonial empire—the 2/2nd Pioneers, the 2/3rd Machine Gun Battalion and ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s medical unit—who were all captured there and joined the Eighth Division as prisoners of war of the Japanese for the rest of the war.
Ivan Blazely and his 2/8th Field Regiment gunner mates were aware that the decision had been made to send them home. ‘Christmas came and went. Everyone was starting to get a bit edgy as it was only a matter of when I scored seven days leave at a rest camp in Nathanya.’