The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  Although, therefore, undoubtedly much of the dash and devotion (perhaps the major part) of the men of this battalion could be attributed directly or indirectly to their AIF leaders, just as obviously this could not have been the whole explanation. Perhaps the key lies in the fact that the 39th had already acquitted itself well in battle with the Japanese before its arrival at Gona. Had enough battle wisdom come from that experience to make the battalion the fighting force it proved itself to be?

  Again, a positive answer must surely be sharply qualified for the reinforcements who had built the battalion’s shattered strength could, at the best, have been only vicariously battle-wise. Most significant, too, in this connection, is the fact that about 100 of those had come from the 53rd Battalion whose record had not been good. And high praise was given these men after Gona by the original members of the 39th!

  Surely the final element in the complex answer must be found in the pride with which the battalion remembered its earlier experiences and that it had been the first Australian unit to meet the invaders. From that recollection moral strength must have flooded in like a tide bearing with it a high purpose, a will to endure greatly, and a contagious inspiration for newcomers.

  So it was that this militia battalion became the pivot on which the capture of Gona finally swung, pressed to a successful conclusion a difficult and costly action after the fall of the main Gona bastion, and accepted losses which were remarkably high even for the type of warfare that developed in Papua.

  But, as Ralph Honner wrote, the 39th retained their spirit right to the end:

  Although instances of heroism and fortitude in battle are more memorable and more inspiring, I would mention one less dramatic episode as typifying the spirit that still permeated the battalion as its remnants marched out of its final campaign into history.

  When the last Japanese beachhead at Sanananda fell in January 1943, the 39th mustered only 7 officers and 25 other ranks. The RMO [Regimental Medical Officer] considered some of these unfit for the next day’s march to Dobodura Airfield. Higher authority refused a vehicle for them, providing transport only for stragglers who should fall out on the march.

  But in the 39th marchers didn’t fall out, so they all marched, all the way – for some a long torture on the verge of unconsciousness that only pride and the solicitous support of their mates made endurable. Pale, silent and sweating under the fierce sun, they toiled in the wake of truckloads of cheering, fresh-looking ‘stragglers’; and at last they straightened up to march at attention across the airfield. When an amazed bystander exclaimed ‘What mob’s this?’ he was ignored except by my second-in-command at the end of the line who barked: ‘This is not a mob! This is the 39th!’

  The Kokoda campaign (from the initial battles along the Track through to the final annihilation of the Japanese South Seas Force at the beachheads) was one of the most gruelling in Australian military history. It was a total disaster for the Japanese – less than 10 per cent of the original invasion force of 14,000 ever returned to their homeland. It was a major triumph for the Australians (and the Americans who joined them at the beachheads). Yet, for many years, its participants failed to receive their due credit.

  A comparison between the Americans’ campaign at Guadalcanal and Kokoda illustrates the point. Guadalcanal attracted strong publicity at the time and was highlighted in many Hollywood blockbusters. Because of MacArthur’s media manipulations, Kokoda received scant coverage. Worse than that, its coverage was inaccurate and left an impression that has taken years to correct. But the facts stack up differently. The Americans threw 60,000 troops against the Japanese on Guadalcanal. Of these 1600 were killed and another 4200 wounded. In total, the Australians committed less than half that number during the entire Kokoda campaign, yet they (and the Americans at the beachheads) lost more than 3000 killed and another 5500 wounded. And that does not take account of the huge casualties suffered on the Track and the beachheads from disease, estimated at three times the number of other casualties. Overall, during the Papuan campaign 2165 Diggers were killed and 3533 wounded, while the Americans had around 3000 casualties in total.

  The Kokoda campaign has had a long-lasting impact on the Australian Army. One of the other major differences between the earlier fighting by Australians in World War II and the Kokoda campaign was that the Diggers heading to New Guinea knew they were defending their homeland. Phil Rhoden believed this was a crucial motivating factor in the development of their determination to prevail against overwhelming odds:

  We were fighting for Australia on Australian soil. It was important that we won because if we didn’t win, who knows what would have happened.

  We didn’t know their numbers but we certainly knew that there were a hell of a lot more than us. We certainly knew they had more ammunition and firepower than we had. Those mountain guns, when they cracked in the trees above you, were not only damaging physically but they were terrifying as well with the noise they made. It was a new conception, a new thing for us – no place you could get into a dugout or into a hole. We were all one. No place where the commander could get away and study his maps. You were just all in there together.

  Kokoda marked the first time both sides of the Army, the AIF and the Militia, fought together. Along with the simultaneous action at Milne Bay, it was the first time the rampant Japanese had been defeated on land. It was the first time that Australians had been called on to directly defend their homeland from the threat of invasion. The lessons that were learned on the Track by bitter experience were passed on for subsequent use in New Guinea and Borneo, and later still in Vietnam.

  As they had in World War I, the sub-unit structure of the Australian Army, the leadership of the field officers and the NCOs, and the initiative of the individual soldier proved to be key elements in their eventual triumph. Ralph Honner had a slightly different take:

  We do give high praise to the ingenuity and individualism and there was a great deal of it but there was also a great deal of looking to the platoon commander and the company commander. He’s got the job. He leads. That’s his job and they followed him and they looked to him. So, when a company went into attack, the individual soldier wasn’t taking over on his own initiative, he was seeing that the leader was doing the leading and he would back him to the hilt but he wasn’t taking over.

  But it was leadership in the end that made the crucial difference: the instinctive leadership of the Digger, where each man, when needed, steps up and carries his share of the load. One photograph taken before the 2/14th Battalion started their march up the Track shows the need for this depth in leadership. It shows five of the battalion’s officers standing in a line before the camera, smiling, full of hope and promise: Lieutenant Moore was killed at Isurava; so was Stan Bisset’s brother, Lieutenant Butch Bisset; Captain Claude Nye died at Brigade Hill; Lieutenant ‘Mocca’ Treacy survived Isurava and the remarkable 42-day journey with Buckler’s party, only to die at Gona; of the five, only Lieutenant Lindsay Mason survived, after being wounded in late September 1942 in the final stages of the withdrawal down the Track. This photo illustrates the extent of losses in officers that many units suffered. In each case, when an officer went down, the next in command took his place. This continued through the ranks. Many Diggers started the campaign as privates and emerged as officers during the subsequent battles in New Guinea and Borneo.

  Teddy Bear, one of the 2/14th’s heroes at Isurava, was an excellent example. A private in the Middle East, where he won a Military Medal for bravery in action, he had been promoted to corporal by the Battle of Isurava. He was a sergeant in the following campaign in the Ramu Valley, where he won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for valour at Shaggy Ridge. He was wounded again there and then sent home to the officer training course in 1944 when, not surprisingly, he won the Baton of Honour and ended the war as a highly respected officer.

  CHAPTER 10

  Alamein and After

  While the 7th Division Diggers were embroiled in the Pa
puan campaign, the Australian 9th Division was playing a leading role in one of the great battles of World War II, the Alamein offensive in Egypt, where it suffered nearly 6000 casualties.

  The Australians formed part of the Eighth Army, under Britain’s Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, which faced off against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps.

  It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast in scale and terrain than those between the battles in the Papuan jungles and that of El Alamein, a town on the Mediterranean coast in northern Egypt, about 240 kilometres west of Cairo. That Diggers could excel in both theatres, under such diverse conditions, is testament to their adaptability and skills as warriors. Dudley McCarthy, in his official history, South West Pacific Area – First Year, summed up the warfare in the jungle:

  In it there is none of the wild, heart-thrilling drama of great bodies of men meeting on wide battlefields in the shocks of massed encounter. Instead, for the most part, it is the story of small groups of men, infinitesimally small against the mountains in which they fought, who killed one another in stealthy and isolated encounters beside the tracks which were life to all of them; of warfare in which men first conquered the country and then allied themselves with it and then killed or died in the midst of a great loneliness.

  On the other hand, the battle for El Alamein was warfare on a vast scale: massed troops, thundering bombardments, and huge movements of armoured weapons and aircraft. Montgomery called on 220,000 men, 1000 tanks and almost as many artillery pieces. Rommel had 180,000 troops, 600 tanks and 500 guns.

  The AIF Diggers who had been rushed back from the Middle East to fight in the Kokoda campaign had shown remarkable versatility as they switched from their recently learned desert fighting skills to swiftly learn a completely different method of fighting in the jungle. CO of the 2/14th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Phil Rhoden:

  In the Middle East, of course, you could see where you were going. That was a great advantage. There was room to manoeuvre. There was room to make plans during the course of a battle. If things were not going right you could send people round on the flanks and you could influence things by having fire-power, artillery, airplanes. There were so many ways you could influence the course of a battle. It was like coaches in football moving people off the bench; you could have an influence. But in New Guinea, you were stuck, stuck on the Track.

  There was just that Track. There was a bit of measure off the side but not much and if you got into that you were in real trouble. The Japs had the idea of coming up front, accepting many casualties, then spreading out to the flanks and they outflanked us sometimes but they didn’t get far.

  Of course we were so outnumbered that we couldn’t extend to prevent them. In fact, they didn’t have to go far out. I likened it to a couple of Melbourne Cricket Grounds – the space in which we were operating. And they were almost down the end of the cricket pitch sometimes.

  In New Guinea it was that close but in the Middle East things were wide open. In the jungle, for example at Isurava, we had rifles, grenades and Tommy guns and Bren guns but that’s all. No mortars, no heavy stuff, no artillery, no airplanes to call in. You just had to take it and like it. That’s the difference between arms, space and numbers.

  The 9th Division of the AIF who had stayed in the Middle East were seasoned desert fighters by the time of the El Alamein offensive, but even they were astonished by the ferocious artillery barrages which marked the start of the battle against Rommel’s men at 9.40 pm on 23 October 1942 and ran for 12 furious days. Tom Roberts of the 2/7th Australian Field Regiment was there. He recorded his thoughts in his war diary, Will We be Disappointed – After? (privately published by his widow, Pat, after Tom’s death):

  She’s on … As I write the terrific roar of gunfire and bursting shells continues a din that has lasted an hour or more. At 2130 hrs we had delivered the last of between 6000 and 7000 rounds and were back to fill up again when it began. All traffic had stopped. All noise had stopped. Not a gun was to be heard anywhere …

  Then one gun spoke – a Pommy 4.5 gun-howitzer was guessed by the sound. And almost before the sound reached us the whole skyline and ground was a mass of light from the flash of hundreds of guns: the initial crash was tremendous. From then on the roar was continuous as each gun fired at top speed for its own particular target. Jets of flame burst out on every side … shells screamed over our heads from the guns behind us and tore through the air at all angles and elevations. In a few seconds we could hear the reports from some of the bursts and in a few cases could see the flash of their explosions.

  Big fires started in a few seconds and we knew men were dying terribly, and are still doing as I write. None of us spoke. Each man was busy with his own thoughts.

  Tom Roberts had fought in the British Royal Field Artillery in World War I, enlisting as a 14-year-old in 1914. After the war he came to Australia, working as a jackaroo and eventually becoming a world authority on horses and equine training. Although he was within months of the upper age limit of 40, he joined up again in 1940 because he felt his World War I experience would be invaluable. His mature observations in his (illegal, of course) diary paint vivid pictures of the stresses of the fighting the Diggers experienced at Alamein:

  I don’t think I’ll ever forget this experience. The loud cutting report of our guns and their blinding flashes, the deeper duller ‘Woof’ and the blinding light of Jerry’s shells as they landed and the ‘phut’ and whine of the fragments; the darkness and not knowing when you were going to fall into a shell hole. The air was full of death and worse.

  Frightened? I was frightened beyond all description. It’s the uncertainty and the inability to do anything about it that gets you. You think: ‘I’m still alive. I’m unhurt.’ And you know that even before the thought is formed almost, you may be blown to fragments or perhaps have one nice little chunk blown off you, an arm, a leg or your jaw … You are filled with an extraordinary feeling of excitement.

  In the initial 15-minute barrage, the British guns poured 900 artillery rounds a minute on the German positions, then paused, and followed with another even more intense barrage which heralded the advance of the Allied troops. Within two hours they had taken their first objectives.

  Despite the huge scale of the El Alamein offensive, as always the real drama was played out by individuals. One, Private Percy Gratwick of the 2/48th Battalion, turned the tide with an inspired burst of leadership, individual courage and initiative. His platoon had been attacking one of the critical strongpoints, the ground around a hill called Trig 29, when they were pinned down and savaged by German fire. The platoon’s original 30-odd men had by that stage been reduced to just seven. Percy Gratwick summed up the situation and suddenly leapt up to charge the two dominant enemy machine-gun posts. He captured one post, destroyed a mortar gun and killed several of the enemy before he was killed. Nevertheless, his extraordinary courage opened the way for his comrades to finish his work and capture the position. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

  Tom Roberts was on hand when his Forward Operations Post found itself caught in the middle of a tank battle in a Bren carrier:

  They turned to get clear of them but took a direct hit through the carrier. Bill [Captain Bill Ligertwood] had his right leg blown off above the hip and Tom [Private Lewis] had a very severe injury to his back. The other two [Jack Flanagan and Keith Farr] were knocked out. After a while Jack came round and sat up – the Captain told him to ‘Attend to Lewis who is badly hurt’.

  Jack went over to Tom and went to turn him over to look at his back but it looked as though he would break in two. The fight had moved away and things were quiet by this time: ‘Drag me over and I’ll give you a hand,’ said Bill Ligertwood. ‘Drag me over?’ thinks Jack and then had a good look at the skipper for the first time. His right leg and hip had been completely torn away. Nevertheless he made Jack drag him over to Tom and lying down, he assisted in turning him over.

  After the two wounded
men had been put on stretchers, Tom Roberts recalled that, despite his terrible injuries, Captain Ligertwood’s primary concern was that his men return for their radio.

  He insisted they come back and salvage the equipment – which they did. All this in no man’s land with a tank and infantry battle going like hell. Guts. Neither Tom nor Bill are expected to live.

  A week later, Tom made the following entry:

  Capt. Bill Ligertwood has died from his wounds. Exit ‘Twinkletoes’. I only hope I can show as much courage if it is asked of me.

  Tom Roberts noted that many of his mates had adopted a fatalistic approach to their chances in the chaos of battle:

  It’s no use worrying or stirring about your future; what will happen will happen, they say. And, of course, so many things have happened while we have been in action that make one think that way.