by Tim Bowden
Nathanya was a little town near Haifa which was used as a convalescent camp and rest centre. Those who went there had the option at night of either returning to camp or, ‘if you struck it lucky’, could stop in Haifa. There was no roll call, and the troops had more or less a blanket leave pass.
Back in camp, life was more or less pleasant with ‘a minimum of parades and army bullshit’. Now and again they got an issue of beer tickets which were useable at Blamey House, an establishment in Gaza where you could get a feed, have an Australian beer, write a letter or have a game of ping-pong and other comforts. This place was named after, and for a time run by, the wife of General Blamey, commander of all the Australian troops in the Middle East.
Charlie and I went one night to Gaza, had a few beers at Blamey House and after using all our beer tickets, went in search of some more refreshment. After finding this and getting a couple of bottles of plonk for the morrow, we ended up in a wog café sipping tiny cups of black coffee each smoking a hubble-bubble [hookah].
Two or three days before the big move we were given booster shots for typhoid and tetanus, and also a short-arm inspection. Now we knew for sure we were due to go.
One morning they were issued with paint and brushes to put identification marks on their kit bags. Later that night Charlie mistook some yellow paint for the liqueur advokaat, and took a good gulp. The next morning he reported sick with a badly burned throat and was immediately hospitalised. As a result, Blazely said, ‘He missed travelling home with us and came back with some other hospital patients on the City of Bermuda.’
The beer ration at Blamey House was modest to say the least. ‘Hardly a day went by when there wasn’t at least one in our tent in Gaza “running the rabbit” for more grog.’ They drank practically every kind of booze that was available except a wine called ‘alicante’—which was curiously banned. Late one night all that was left was some arrack, which they drank mixed with cold cocoa. ‘Delicious! We should have copyrighted it.’ Blazely added, ‘This drinking caper was by no means confined to the hoi polloi. I always reckoned if you wanted to hear a mob of screaming drunks, do a guard near the sergeants’ or officers’ mess on grog night.’
Finally the big day came, and with it the order to pull down the tents and tidy the area. After the last night the mess tents and any permanent buildings were also taken down. The 2/8th Regiment were taken by truck the next day across the Sinai Desert, this time bound for Suez.
They spent the night under canvas, sleeping on the sand, before they boarded lighters that took them out to their transport home—New Amsterdam, a former Dutch luxury liner and a substantial vessel of 35,000 tons. Blazely was allocated his sleeping quarters and told he would be on permanent duty for the voyage as ack-ack gunner and submarine sentry. ‘This was a real good number. My station was on the docking bridge, which is a long narrow platform that runs across the ship just in front of the main bridge. At each side of the bridge was a Lewis machine gun. These were manned at all times by a couple of other blokes.’
There was a permanent squad of British gunners on board but not enough to man the various guns full-time; beside machine guns there were some ack-ack guns of fairly large calibre. In case of trouble the Australians’ job was to hold the fort until the permanent crew arrived. During the voyage the only time they saw the English gunners was once, when there was a practice shoot somewhere on the Red Sea. ‘One bloke used to come around and clean and check the gun every morning, that was all. So long as you turned up for your shift on time, no one worried us at all.’
After the New Amsterdam was fully loaded, they headed down the Red Sea to where the rest of the convoy lay waiting at Massawa on the Eritrean coast. As the sun sank slowly in the west and the ship pulled away from the shore, Ivo leaned on the docking bridge rail and thought of the regimental bard’s immortal words: Arabs’ heaven, soldiers’ hell—bastard country fare thee well.
The convoy consisted of the Queen Mary, Il de France, Aquitania, City of Bermuda and New Amsterdam. They were escorted by a cruiser and a couple of destroyers down the Red Sea, past Aden and out into the Indian Ocean.
After about five days sailing, they pulled into Abbu Atoll on the southern end of a group of low-lying islands, the Maldives. Now they are pleasure resorts, but then they were a naval depot and refuelling station, so secret that very few of the troops knew where they were.
There was a party of military police on board from the feared Jerusalem Detention Centre and various other field punishment centres. They were treated like lepers by the other troops. As they were all sergeants and above, they ate after the other sergeants had finished their meals. All the other units’ sergeants refused to sit at the same table with them and they had to wait on themselves as the mess orderlies had declared them ‘black’. The number of the table was 44 and a new phrase was started, when the number came up in a bingo game, ‘Forty-four—all the screws’.
Ivo said that later, back in New South Wales, any Ninth Division soldier who was absent without leave after his homecoming, and banged up in the Holsworthy Military Prison, was asked which ship he came back from the Middle East on. If he said the New Amsterdam he was automatically bashed!
‘The screws were mainly ex-crews and coppers on city streets, who carried on their city job in the army, with the added bonus of an overseas trip thrown in. Whenever they came on deck, they wore no colour patches or any other identification. If anyone would have been a candidate for shark bait, it would have been them.’
After about another two weeks of watching the flying fish by day the troops on the New Amsterdam arrived at Fremantle, where the ship pulled into the wharf to let the Western Australians disembark.
The next morning New Amsterdam pulled out and set sail east across the Great Australian Bight, towards Port Melbourne. Here the returning troops were greeted on the wharf by the band of the First American Marines Division, playing all the latest hits, most of which they had never heard. Ivo commented, ‘I will say this, the Marines had a good band more like a dance orchestra than an army band.’
The ‘Crow-eaters’ (South Australians), Victorians and Tasmanians disembarked. The Tasmanians were taken by train to a camp near Seymour, where they were issued with food ration coupons and their leave passes. Then next morning it was back down to Melbourne to board the Bass Strait ferry Nairana for the short overnight trip to Tasmania, berthing at Devonport.
A sergeant Ivo knew, Claude, had his wife waiting for him with a car. He offered Ivo a lift home. Claude lived at Rowella on the West Tamar. They went home the back way and finally dropped him on cross-roads about 100 yards from his family’s home at Winkleigh. Just as Ivo got out of the car, his old man came out of the house to collect the mail. ‘I thought that was you,’ was all he said.
‘Sentiment never ran very high in the Blazely family,’ Ivo wrote.
After being wounded and nearly losing a leg in the Allied invasion of Syria against the pro-German Vichy French army from June 1941, Private Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt of the 2/3rd Infantry Battalion, Sixth Division, was not unhappy to hear his unit was to return to Australia.
At Port Tewfik, early in March 1942, Holt’s unit embarked on the decrepit English tramp steamer, Laconia. They called into Aden, but there was no shore leave and the ship sailed on to Colombo. The war news was all bad and this was brought home to them when they came into the harbour, which had just been bombed by the Japanese. The dock area was in a mess and lots of ships had been sunk and damaged. A small Royal Navy aircraft carrier, Eagle, was in flames and was being towed out to sea.
The Laconia had stores to unload and the troops aboard were transferred to the Australian ship, Duntroon. They did have a night’s leave in Colombo and were accommodated in what was probably ‘the flashiest hotel in Ceylon’, the Galle Face, although at this time it was ‘far from its halcyon splendour’. Holt observed: ‘There were iron bars across the windows and the cashiers were plying their trade behind iron grills and the drunken soldiery ro
istered, where once the crème de la crème of Ceylonese colonial society disported themselves.’
On the following night Holt sailed for Fremantle on the Duntroon. Shortly after leaving port, the ship was hit with something that made her shudder from stem to stern. It was strong enough to throw soldiers off their feet, but they never did find out what happened. Next morning they were told that instead of sailing to Fremantle, the next port of call was Bombay.
The Duntroon was a far different ship from the overcrowded and dirty Laconia. It was clean and the food was first class. Holt and a mate, Bluey, wrangled a job in the galley and shared a cabin. The work was easy and they did not have to attend any parades. The Australians got on well with the crew and in general lived the ‘life of Riley’.
On arrival in Bombay we were given leave for the day. About half the troops had gone ashore when the message was relayed over the loudspeaker that all leave was cancelled. Military Police were posted on the gangway to see the order was enforced. Bluey and I went to the stern of the ship and borrowed a ladder from one of the crew. We climbed down to the wharf and then held the bottom of the ladder while dozens of soldiers, who had seen what we were up to, clambered down. We let the ladder fall to the wharf only when some of the Provosts attempted to use it. Bluey and I didn’t stop running until we had reached the city proper.
Bombay was a city of extremes. Splendour for the British and ruling class, abject and abysmal poverty for the workers. It was strange to see women building-workers, with loads in baskets on their backs, climbing around tall storage buildings over rickety bamboo scaffolding. Because of their appalling living conditions in the teeming, squalid slums, it was no surprise that at least some of the Indians were very militant about British rule, and riots and demonstrations were by no means uncommon.
‘Bluey and I decided to have a drink at the palatial Taj Mahal Hotel but were quickly disillusioned on this score,’ Holt wrote. ‘This establishment was very British. Pukka sahibs and officers only were allowed through the hallowed portals. There were hordes of exotically dressed flunkies pandering to the whims of the patrons, while a hundred yards away the common people were sleeping four and five deep on the footpath.’
They bought some ivory carvings, had a few beers and then a few more, and had a visit to the tattooist. Then they decided to have a look at the notorious cages in Grant Road. They dodged the military police and saw the ladies of easy virtue, who they thought could do with a bath and who spent their spare time going through one another’s hair for nits, plying their trade from iron cages. ‘They looked for all the world like monkeys, and after a quick look, it was unanimously decided we would leave and have a few quick cognacs. I eventually lost Bluey among the hordes of servicemen thronging the streets.’
Bob didn’t have much money and to fill in time he decided to give one of the many houses of ill fame a good looking at. He didn’t intend to indulge himself, but when a young lady grabbed him ‘by the whistle’, his ‘good intentions went out the window’.
In a few minutes I found myself on the footpath, broke, except for a handful of annas. I hadn’t a clue as to where I was or how I would get back to the ship. I’m positive the majority of Bombay gharry drivers have second sight, for I hailed at least half a dozen before I got one to take me to the wharf. When we arrived at the waterfront I gave the driver a fistful of worthless coins. He bellowed like a bull and inside seconds had a great tribe of Indians behind him. They chased me right to the gangway of the Duntroon. I left it to the armed guard on the gangway to argue the point with a crowd of what I reckon must have been half the population of Bombay.
The Duntroon left India and steamed to Mombasa in Kenya. To get to the port the ship had to sail for miles up a river. The jungle came right to the water’s edge and was full of chattering monkeys.
Holt’s trip ashore was a disappointment. They saw a spread-out dusty town and even though this was a port for the British colony of Kenya, the offices of the Italian and German shipping lines appeared to take pride of place. During a leisurely walk around the town, Holt was unimpressed to see several cases of elephantiasis.
My father had been in the New South Wales Fire Brigade since his discharge from the First AIF and I had lived on fire stations for years, so I decided to have a look over the local station. The firemen were black as your hat and had tribal scarring on their faces. Not one of them could speak English but we conversed in sign language and they were pleased to show me over the station.
Walking back to the Duntroon I got into conversation with an English matelot and he took me on board his ship the Ark Royal where we had a sandwich, cocoa and watched a film on deck. We were not sorry to see the last of Mombasa. We sailed down the coast to Durban. There we saw a lady on the breakwater signalling a welcome to us with flags. It was the famous ‘Durban Signaller’, who had made a name for herself during the 1914–18 war, welcoming Anzac troops passing through South Africa. She was a wealthy woman in her own right and a poet.
We tied up and I was amazed at the size of the huge wharf labourers and of the rags they were wearing. They appeared to be even more poverty stricken than the Egyptians.
The troops were disembarked and taken about 10 miles out of Durban to camp under canvas at Clairemount Racecourse. A chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up and the ‘Durban Signaller’ was helped to the top of the vehicle, where she addressed the Australians. Remarkably, she said she would be pleased to arrange accommodation at her home for any man who cared to stay with her. Holt didn’t know what he would be letting himself in for, ‘so I didn’t accept her kind offer’, and he was to later regret this.
She arranged leave and accommodated the men in beautifully appointed rooms and a manicured garden. It was luxury living with a vengeance, with the finest food and drink laid on, the servants at everyone’s beck and call. I have wondered since if this open-hearted generous woman ever received any reward or acknowledgement from the Australian or New Zealand governments for her mighty efforts on behalf of Anzac troops in two world wars.
For the first few days Bob and his mates went into Durban and ‘plied ourselves with strong drink’. The city was full of servicemen of all nationalities and survivors of ships recently sunk by the Japanese, and drunken rows were common. Bob went to a picture theatre one night and the ceiling was a moving galaxy of stars. It was the first time he had seen anything like this until he went back a second time with less grog on board, to find it was an open-air picture show!
He was certainly well lubricated when he set off to return to camp one night, but woke in the morning at the side of a railway line miles from anywhere to find that he had been bashed and robbed. Bob felt better disposed to ‘one friendly black fellow who went miles out of his way to take me back to the racecourse and I didn’t even have a stamp to give him for his trouble’.
The Australians were not popular with the white Afrikaaners and this feeling was reciprocated. Holt thought it was degrading for both parties when he saw huge Zulus with their magnificent head-dresses pulling overweight whites around the city in rickshaws.
The ex-battalion butcher Alf Jackson and I only had a few shillings, so we decided to have a tour around the suburbs of Durban. We got onto a tram and went to the terminal at the Valley of the Thousand Hills. There was a pub handy and we called in and put two shillings on the bar for a drink. The middle-aged barmaid came over and said, ‘I probably served your fathers in the first war, so you better have a beer on me.’ We downed our drink, put two shillings back on the bar and called for another. The barmaid filled our glasses and said, ‘The fellow over there has bought these for you.’ The fellow waved and we drank. The rest of the afternoon no one came near us or spoke, but every time we emptied our glasses someone would shout us another. At closing time we poured ourselves out of the pub and returned to camp.
The next morning I asked Alf where he was going, and he replied, ‘The same place as you.’
They headed back to the same pub and the same proced
ure took place as on the previous day.
The Japanese naval presence in the Indian Ocean must have eased off, as the troops left the racecourse and re-embarked on the Duntroon. As the ship moved down the harbour, they passed the convoy which was on its way to the invasion of Madagascar.
After their convoy left Durban, it turned south. ‘We must’ve pretty near gone to the Antarctic for the weather was as cold as charity and the seas were really rough until we made land at Fremantle.’
Their return to Australia was an anticlimax as no one appeared particularly interested in them. The Australians had been associated with the British army for two years or more and, although there were problems at times, they at least respected them. When they saw their first new American allies in Perth, ‘with their flash uniforms and loud mouths’, they did not impress at all.
Some troops and stores were unloaded in Port Adelaide and there was some shore leave. ‘Bluey, Green and I quaffed the odd measure or two of ale at a little waterfront pub and never did get to see the City of Churches.’
In Melbourne the returning troops helped unload stores and the Victorians disembarked (there was no leave for New South Welshmen). The waterside workers put Bob and Bluey on shore in a cargo net. ‘I went into the city and had a yarn with my uncle. On the way back to the ship I had a walk through the city which was teeming with Yanks. Nearly every doorway had a Yank or Yanks canoodling with giggling girls. Melbourne was like Sister Street in Alexandria run riot.’
Duntroon left Melbourne and sailed along the coast to arrive outside Sydney’s Port Jackson on the afternoon of 31 May. After waiting outside the harbour for some hours, they came in through the Heads in company with a Dutch naval vessel, the hospital ship Orangie. Apparently three Japanese midget submarines had followed Duntroon into Sydney Harbour, which was full of Allied shipping and warships. All hell broke loose in the harbour that Sunday night but the only damage the submarines caused was the sinking at its Garden Island moorings of the wooden ferry HMAS Kuttabul. There were a number of casualties among the seamen on board the tender. Two of the midget submarines were sunk and the location of the third remained unknown until it was discovered off Sydney’s Newport Beach in 2006.