They all agreed with Ernie, but right then a cup of tea would have done. We hadn’t had one all day. We didn’t have a primus and we couldn’t light a fire. The enemy hadn’t picked up this post and the boys didn’t want to give him a trail of smoke on which to lay his machine-guns.
We’d been up all night and during the day the flies and fleas had done their best to stop us sleeping. We’d had a quiet night, but the troops were still weary. The tucker had been late getting up from the company cook-house, and the bully stew and tea were almost cold by the time they reached the forward posts. The carrying party had been held up by enemy machine-guns firing during those few hours just after dark when there was almost a gentleman’s agreement not to fire at all, so that both sides could get their evening meal.
Usually from dark until midnight you could safely move around the Salient posts, but about twelve o’clock the fun started. By day you couldn’t move at all. In the dead flat desert the machine-gunners and snipers on both sides could see every move. And so for 13 hours of daylight both sides lay quiet and fought vermin and boredom. In most parts you couldn’t even stand up, for the unyielding Libyan rock made the digging of deep trenches impossible in this sector. This meant that you lay in a stuffy dugout all day and sat in a cramped shallow weapon pit all night. You might stretch your legs going back to Company H.Q. after dark to guide the ration party forward. That was exercise but it was no pleasure stroll, for you never knew when the Hun would forget the rules and start sweeping the desert with machine-guns.
You couldn’t dig communication trenches leading back to Company and Battalion H.Q., as in France during the last war, and for hundreds of yards back behind the front there was no dead ground to give you cover. In fact, most of the time you were safer in the front-line posts than walking about on the plain. You might also find some exercise in working on the posts at night – repairing the wire or digging deeper weapon pits and trenches; but you couldn’t do much between bursts of fire. You had to keep the upper hand by giving the Germans more than burst for burst. Some nights these private machine-gun battles developed into willing combats with fire from mortars and artillery added. During the night you took your turn in the listening post a couple of hundred yards out in no-man’s-land –lying in an 18-inch trench; straining your eyes and ears; slowly growing numb with cold. Then came the stand-to, and you waited for dawn with its uneasy quiet.
Once it was light, if anyone happened to be wounded or ill, he had to lie there until dark, while his mates gave him what attention they could. One afternoon in a forward post a sergeant was badly wounded. His mates couldn’t move him back in daylight, so a Digger telephoned to Company H.Q. While he was speaking a mortar cut the line, but the Digger crawled out some distance under enemy fire and repaired it. From telephoned directions he dressed the wounds and kept the Sergeant alive until he could be taken out on a stretcher. It wasn’t altogether a sweet job in the Salient posts. Quite apart from discomfort and the nervous strain of holding the most vital part of the perimeter, there was the constant struggle with boredom.
There was little to do in the drawn-out daylight hours in a muggy, cramped dugout. You could try to make up for lost sleep; or write a few letters – only there wasn’t much to tell; or read a well-thumbed magazine or book that was lying round the dugout – but you’d probably read them before; you could smoke cigarette after cigarette – if you had enough. The supply was better than it had been – 50 a week as an issue; perhaps another 50 from the canteen or the Comforts Fund. But you needed every cigarette you could get when time hung heavy on your hands.
Boredom and discomfort took your appetite away. You had a hot meal at night. That was usually fairly good – these days anyhow – bully-beef stew with vegetables; tea and a pudding, sometimes stewed fruit. But for other meals you couldn’t cook anything. If you didn’t possess a primus – and few posts did – you just had bread and marg., jam and cheese, washed down with chlorinated water for breakfast and lunch.
Usually you didn’t feel hungry enough to tackle the ration of cold bully, let alone the cold tinned bacon or salt herrings. There were about 20 tins of these stacked in a corner of the dugout.
‘Do you ever tackle the bacon or the goldfish, Ernie?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t feel like it. We’ve told them not to send any more but it’s on the ration scale; so up it comes. We can’t cook the bacon and there’s no water here for washing dixies.’
‘Anyhow they make you too thirsty,’ said Charlie. ‘The Jerries’ve got the right idea. We found some of their stuff in a dugout we took. There was cubes of chocolate, concentrated sugar, milk tablets, dried fruits, lemon drink tablets to put in your water bottle and that sorta thing.’
‘A few things like that’d make all the difference,’ said Mick. ‘The blokes wouldn’t be too bored to eat then. What they don’t understand back there is that in these dug-posts boredom’s worse than the Boche.’
But they made the best of it. Late in the afternoon Paddy – a kid of 19 who had been sleeping in the other dugout – breezed in. ‘Blasted fleas kept me awake all day,’ he said. ‘Still, I can’t quite make up my mind what to do tonight. Dunno whether to go to the pictures or take me girlfriend down to the beach.’
‘Why don’t you pour yourself out a long cool beer and think it over?’ said Mick.
Soon after dark a Digger came over from another post; his face was glum. ‘They got Pete last night,’ he said. ‘He was out in the listenin’- post and he copped a stray burst as he was comin’ in.’
The dugout was heavy with silence until Ernie said, ‘So they got Pete, eh? In a listenin’-post … Wouldn’t it? We were mates when we joined up. A bloke doesn’t mind so much if he gets knocked in a stunt. He more or less expects that, but to cop it out in a listenin’-post – I don’t want to go that way. That makes his section pretty weak; only five blokes now instead of ten. I wish those reos [reinforcements] would come over from Aussie a bit quicker. We could do with ’em.’
‘Couldn’t we?’ said Mick. ‘I wouldn’t mind going home for a bit. There’s lots of chaps I know there, cobbers of mine – once. They aren’t married and they aren’t keeping families or anyone, except themselves. I’d like to go back and tell ’em what I think. One of our fellows wrote a poem about “My Friends Who Stayed at Home”. They reckon he got killed a few days later. He was rough, but he was dinkum, like his poem. Want to hear it?’
He lit a smoky hurricane and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. In his voice as he read, I sensed a feeling that was widespread among the men who had fought so stubbornly, cheerfully and gallantly to hold Tobruk. It was one of disappointment and resentment. They were bitter because they felt that they’d been let down by some of their own people. To some extent it was unreasoning, unquestioning resentment; but it was real and widespread. The men didn’t stop to think that there were many vital jobs to be done in Australia if they were to be kept fighting. All they knew was that newspapers from home still contained stories of strikes and political squabbles. Not unnaturally, they blamed these for the shortage of equipment and reinforcements. They had seen many of their best mates fall in an unequal struggle and they knew how slowly others arrived from Australia to take their places. What they felt and said was bluntly expressed in the verses Mick read:
I’m pullin’ off my colours, I’ll throw away my web,
I’m goin’ down to Cairo to get a beer an’ bed.
I’m tired o’ bein’ a soldier, so ’elp me Gawd I am;
Of dust an’ salty water; of bully, marg. an’ jam;
Of fightin’ Huns an’ Dagoes out here all on our own,
While sittin’ back in Aussie, are my friends who stayed at home.
Now when I told my mother I’d volunteered to fight,
She said, ‘God bless you, Digger, an’ bring you back all right.’
But they called me ‘chocolate soldier’ an’ ‘five bob tourist’ too,
They said, ‘You’l
l never see the front – or even get a view.’
They said, ‘You’ll have a picnic no matter where you roam.’
But they weren’t game to face it, my friends who stayed at home.
They’re not such bad shots either – along the rabbit track;
For rabbits aren’t so dangerous; an’ rabbits don’t hit back.
They shine before the barmaid; they brag, they’re full of skitin’,
But at the corner of the street is where they do their fightin’.
A billiard cue their rifle, a bar their battle zone,
For there are no bullets for my friends who stayed at home.
I’ll bet they’re walkin’ down the street, their chests puffed out with pride,
An’ skitin’ to their cobbers how they saved their worthless hide.
While out here in the desert if a bloke should show his head
He’ll just as likely get it filled with some damn German’s lead.
But give me the old Lee-Enfield; I’ll buckle me webbin’ about.
Though I’m only a flamin’ private, I’ll see this business out,
And if I stop a bullet, I’ll die without a moan,
Though they put the kibosh on me – my friends who stayed at home.
No-one said anything when Mick finished reading. He took out the makings. ‘And the bloke who wrote that stopped one,’ he said. ‘Wonder what’s stopping those blokes back home?’ (Although hundreds of Diggers in Tobruk firmly believed that this poem had been written by one of the garrison, I understand that it is a last war veteran. It is quoted here because so many Australians in Tobruk adopted it as the expression of their own viewpoint.)
‘They Gotta Be Good To Get You’
All we could see ahead was a trail of dust, as we followed a truck laden with mail, rations and ammunition. It was nearly dark and for once the enemy was not shelling as we drove across the flat in front of the Blue Line minefield and made for a twisted wadi that led to the headquarters of the battalion holding the northern sector of the Salient.
The track was a trough of brown powder, which swirled up under the floorboards of our open ‘pick-up’ – a sturdy little Morris truck specially built for war in the desert. It had no hood or windshield, and the dust made me cough. ‘Can’t take it, eh?’ said the Digger at the wheel. ‘I’ll try it out here where it’s not churned up, but you’ll probably get your guts bounced out as we go over the camel-thorn.’
He lugged the wheel over, but it was better on the track in spite of the dust. The camel-thorn bushes gather drifting sand in their tangle of branches until they form solid hummocks about a foot high, and too irregularly spaced for a truck to straddle or dodge them. At last we reached the mouth of the wadi. There was no track, but the driver found his way round huge boulders, across deep gutters and along the rough rock-face, with the truck often tilted at an angle of 30 degrees or more.
At the head of the wadi we found Battalion H.Q. housed in a number of small, wide-mouthed caverns which nature had hollowed out of the rock. The troops had sandbagged the entrances to the caverns and made ‘dugouts’. The C.O.’s quarters were heavy with the smell of Scotch. Half an hour before an enemy shell had gone through the sandbag wall of the next dugout. It hadn’t gone off, but it had broken the battalion’s last bottle of whisky.
The dugout was just big enough to hold the colonel’s stretcher, a table made from packing cases, three petrol cases nailed together to form a ‘chest-of-drawers’, and two rickety chairs scrounged from a house in the town. The colonel spread out his maps and explained how they held the Salient by giving more than they got. Before he’d finished, I found that even a colonel’s dugout in Tobruk had its colony of fleas.
It was dark when we resumed our journey forward, but with uncanny eyesight the driver picked out the track – a line of churned dust. Riding on the step was a Digger who knew the way through the minefields. A couple of nights before a truck had blown up there and had drawn the full fury of the enemy’s fire on itself and its passengers.
Here and there we came to a sentry. The colonel had warned us to remember the password because, he said, ‘these men don’t wait to ask questions.’ He didn’t know his own sentries. The challenge and the passing were typically Australian.
‘That you, Pete?’
‘Yeah, mate, ’oo’s that?’
‘Mick ’ere. On yer go.’
It was the same when we continued on foot. Not once this night – nor on any other night – did I hear a password. It would have taken a smart German, however, to trick them. One time two Diggers, lying in a listening-post in no-man’s-land, saw two shadowy figures coming towards them. ‘Who are you?’ challenged one Digger. ‘We are Aussie soldiers,’ came the answer. The Diggers replied with a Tommy gun.
After half an hour’s bumping along we reached a slight hollow, beyond which vehicles could not go. A chink of light from a hole in the desert beckoned us. We lifted a groundsheet and dropped down a small hole into an old water cistern – roughly pear-shaped and about 30 feet by 20. Through the fug of dust and cigarette smoke glowed the light of several hurricane lamps, burning evil-smelling Italian oil. It was a Company H.Q. Men were sitting round eating, smoking and talking. Their evening meal had just arrived and they were tackling it before it got cold. Dust, stirred by restless feet, went in with every mouthful. It was warm and stuffy in the cistern but at least you could have a light and a smoke.
From the roof hung sticky fly-catchers blanketed with victims. On a natural, flat rock table in the middle lay an odd assortment of dirty mess dixies, dusty-lipped tins of jam and margarine, the ends of two loaves of bread, a couple of Bren magazines and a Tommy gun. You had to be careful not to trip over a half-sleeping Digger, an empty dixie or a can of water on the floor.
In one corner the company sergeant-major was trying to hear above the surge of speech a message from Battalion H.Q. In another the O.C. of the company was holding a platoon commanders’ conference. By the light of a senile torch they pored over a map.
Conference over, we went on by foot for half a mile to the forward posts. As usual there were no landmarks so the guide took a signal wire in his hand and we found the first post easily.
It was S10 – one of the Italian-built concrete posts. ‘Follow me and stick to the track,’ said the guide, as he led us in through the minefield and the barbed wire – much battered by shelling but draped with booby-traps like a Christmas tree.
There was not a sound of war, but in the weapon pits on top of the post Diggers were squatting beside each machine-gun. Inside we tripped over men sleeping fully clothed on the concrete floor of the narrow corridor-trench, which was cluttered up with empty dixies, boxes of ammunition, rifles and accumulated junk. We stumbled over cursing figures till we came to a small concrete room opening off a side trench. It was about six feet square. Its furniture was a couple of ammunition boxes and a table made from petrol cases. The Italians had meant it to be a ‘shell-proof’ command post, but the roof was cracked and crumbling and only the steel reinforcement kept it from falling in.
Following my upward glance at the roof, a Digger said: ‘They’ve got their finger on this blasted place. They can land a bloody shell on ’ere any time they like. When there’s a blitz on, we cop all the muck in the world. It’s the only entertainment we get.’
‘Shut up, will you,’ said another Digger, with his ear to the phone in the corner. ‘The news is comin’ on.’ The battalion sigs were picking up the BBC news and ‘piping’ it out along the signal lines to the forward posts. The Digger at the phone began taking notes.
There was silence, more or less, until he put the phone down. He read out the headlines: ‘Roosevelt and Churchill meet at sea – Nazis reckon they’ve surrounded Odessa – ’ and finally, ‘At Tobruk patrol activity only.’
‘Patrol activity only,’ echoed a Digger with heavy sarcasm. ‘The bloke who wrote that oughta been ’ere last night. I suppose the Aussie papers’ve still got bands playin’
in Tobruk’s main square.’
It was hardly the moment to introduce a correspondent who broadcast for the BBC. Someone produced a dixie of tea, brewed over an Italian primus, and the platoon commander – a young sergeant – began telling me about the post.
‘You won’t see much here,’ he said. ‘This is in the second line, and we do little except send out patrols. In some ways it’s better in a frontline post, like S9. There you can hit back. We’re at the receiving end most of the time here, but it’s better than being in the dug-posts in the Salient itself. Like to go over to one?’
Outside it wasn’t as quiet as it had been. Every few seconds a German machine-gun would spit out a burst of red tracer bullets. Fifty yards to our right streaks of light shot by like live morse code. ‘That’s a fixed line from Spandau Joe – down an old Italian pipeline,’ said the Sergeant. ‘The post we’re going to is on the far side of that. If we make it snappy we’ll get across before the next burst. The pipeline’s an easy route to follow and he puts one down there every now and then.’
We went on. There was no signal wire to guide us but the track was marked by a thin hessian tape strung between camel-thorn bushes. The post was very crude – three sandbagged circular machine-gun pits about four feet deep and five feet across. They were connected by shallow crawl trenches, off which opened two low dugouts, roofed over with boards, corrugated iron and sandbags. The desert here was soft grey sand instead of the usual rock and brown earth. The corporal in charge of the post said they had a job preventing the walls of the pits and trenches from falling in. ‘Even sandbags don’t help much,’ he said, ‘because heavy Jerry mortars landing round the post blow the sides in anyway.’
It was after eleven. The troops had finished their meal and, in front of the post, some of them were putting up more barbed wire, muttering curses as they struggled with an obstreperous coil.
Eyewitness Page 10