The Battle of Damour, between 5 and 12 July 1941, was the final operation. Wadi Damour, the valley of the Damour River, needed to be forded if Beirut was to fall. Major-General Tubby Allen outflanked Damour, attacked it from its north-eastern side, and encircled many French units as well as cutting the road to Beirut. By now British forces were descending from the direction of Iraq and, later in the month, neared Damascus and Homs and General Dentz sought an armistice. At Acre on the night of 12 July, Dentz, the Vichy French commander, came to terms with the Allies, and a ceasefire came into effect, one of the conditions of the armistice being that all Allied prisoners should be set free. The Allies were permitted to lobby the Vichy French military through pamphlets, loudspeakers and broadcasts to join the forces arrayed against Fascism. Lavarack was ‘most charming in his attitude’ towards Dentz, perhaps as part of that process. In September, Dentz and his senior officers were allowed to leave for France, another of the armistice conditions.
Major-General Speers, head of the British military mission to General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, complained to Blamey of Australian miscreancy. ‘The Australians are already greatly feared by the natives. Their behaviour, with the exception of some specialised units which are well disciplined, would be a disgrace to any army. They are alleged to have stolen Vichy officers’ wedding rings and have deprived prisoners of their water bottles. At Mezze aerodrome . . . they stole and smashed vital parts of the Air France wireless installation.’
Blamey appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Rogers to investigate the complaints. Rogers’ report said that ‘there was no basis for the accusations’ and that the charges were ‘a gross exaggeration, most unfair and extremely defamatory. None but British troops had been billeted in or near Mezze aerodrome’. Whatever the value of Rogers’ conclusion, and though it was an internal investigation, it need not be written off as totally invalid, and the accusations indicated the uneasy relationship between the British and the Australians.
By then Australia had taken nearly sixteen thousand casualties in Syria, more than four hundred of them killed.
Earlier in the campaign, Lieutenant Roden Cutler had won a Victoria Cross in fighting at Merdjayoun in the centre column. In company with a lance corporal named V.G. Pratt, a farmhand from Queensland, Cutler was opposing an attempted advance of tanks and Vichy infantrymen. Fire from a tank turret killed Pratt, and a Captain Clark of Strathfield. Cutler fired an anti-tank rifle whose projectiles bounced off the turrets. He was able to hit the tracks, however, and infantry were driven off.
Merdjayoun fell to the Australians on 12 June. The Vichy French counterattacked the 25th Brigade and took back the town but the Australians took it conclusively on 18 June. Damascus fell to the Free French, Australian, British and Indians on 21 June. The day after, on 22 June, the German army advanced into Russia. It was obvious now that that was where their minds had been, and that they probably had no intention at all of occupying Syria.
The German invasion of Russia caused a shift of perception and behaviour in Australia. Margaret Holmes, a Sydney pacifist, declared, ‘I can remember that overnight these Commo friends of mine, they changed—from saying that it was a phoney war and we shouldn’t take part in it, to saying, oh no, it’s really “workers and all unite”.’ The Communist Laurie Aarons noticed that Frank Packer’s Sunday Telegraphbegan to call the Russians ‘our gallant allies’. Joyce Batterham, a Communist Party member who worked in Newcastle, received a letter from a friend who had joined the forces now that Russia was under attack and who was stationed in Darwin. When in the open-air cinema ‘God Save the King’ was played, many of the troops called out for Stalin: ‘We want Uncle Joe, we want Uncle Joe’.
CYRENAICA RATS
The troops shipped back from Greece and Crete were sorely needed in North Africa, where a crisis had struck. On 8 March 1941, as the Australian veterans of the 6th Division were on their way to Greece, the assault of the German general Rommel and his Afrika Korps burst from the borderlands of Tunisia and, driving east along the Libyan desert coast, and in a little over three weeks, overwhelmed and outflanked the Allied forces garrisoned and dug in around the coastal towns—Benghazi, Cyrene, Tobruk, Derna, all captured in such style from the Italians in past months. Rommel was advancing against the ‘minimum possible force’ that the British commander Wavell mistakenly thought he had needed to hold the line in the desert, given all the forces committed elsewhere. The soldiers Wavell retained in Africa when Rommel surprised him included the 9th Australian Division troops, fresh to the desert and led by a vigorous and stubborn citizen-general named Leslie Morshead. It was thought that the British, Indians, South Africans and raw Australians could hold the line, and a Rommel attack had not been expected so early. Wavell’s minimum possible force now proved cruelly inadequate.
On 4 April the first action in which the 9th Division’s troops were involved occurred, when its 19th Battalion (ideally a thousand men, in reality some hundreds less) had to fight off three thousand Germans seeking to surround them near the coast during what twenty-two-year-old Les Watkins, along with others, called ‘the Benghazi Handicap’.
Morshead’s men defending Benghazi lacked equipment to a degree close to scandalous. They were not equipped with anti-tank guns, transport, artillery ammunition or signals gear. There was a shortage of field ambulances as well. The Australians were forced to improvise with enemy equipment, and as the 23rd Battalion diary says, ‘There has never been a phone issued to the battalion, yet we have over twenty miles of wire and sixteen phones (all Italian) working.’ The 17th Battalion diary confessed that they were ‘alarmingly under-equipped’ but that they ‘fossicked’ amongst the debris left behind earlier by retreating Italians and found three motorbikes and several Breda and Fiat guns.
One of Morshead’s brigades was in reserve at Tobruk. The British general Neame, an incompetent fellow who to the delight of many would soon be captured by the Germans, wanted to take another of Morshead’s brigades, but the forthright Morshead refused him in a way Neame thought unmilitary, appealing over his head to Wavell, the commander in chief, and to Blamey. It was just as well Morshead objected, because the British 2nd Armoured Division, bravely using captured Italian tanks, disintegrated under Rommel’s initial attack. Morshead and his staff, despite the regular bombing attacks, were able to transport his men from one rearguard or blocking position to another. He had requested and been granted permission to move out all Italian civilians and Arabs from the region he was to defend, and his troops undertook the work enthusiastically and not without some of the attitudes engendered by White Australia. But Morshead did not want to waste his men on policing these groups and preventing them from cutting or stealing signal lines, for which they had an appetite. The Arabs of the Libyan region Morshead was trying to clear were members of the Senussi sect and largely friendly; their enthusiasm for telephone equipment was more enthusiastic than malicious, but could prove disastrous.
Before Rommel captured him, Neame had been critical of the Australian troops’ own looting and ‘disorderly behaviour’ in the towns along the coast—complaints that were a predictable British refrain by now. ‘The Commander in Chief was accosted in the street by a drunken Australian soldier while visiting me here,’ wrote Neame in protest. ‘Without in any way condoning any offences,’ commented Morshead in response, ‘I fear it is the same old story of giving a dog a bad name.’ Morshead called Neame’s bluff by telling him that he was forwarding the insulting letter to Blamey and might forward it also to the Australian government.
The untrained Australian infantry, supported by limited British artillery and by 6 Squadron RAAF, who could not safely use their decrepit airfield at the nearby airstrip of Agadabia, were nonetheless able to fight an appropriate rearguard action. One Australian battalion, the 13th, with British help, held up the Germans at Er Regima in an intimate, gory little skirmish—‘little’ unless one speaks of the dead, for whom it was cosmic. The Afrika Korps itself was beginning to find t
he going hard as it came eastwards—it often lacked fuel and supplies and the men suffered from exhaustion. Also Rommel decided to advance on three fronts, so that when his leading elements ran into the 9th Division there was not as much weight in their thrust. But if he took Tobruk, his men could be resupplied from that port, and even from the British fuel and other dumps located there, and so be renewed in effort and morale.
Tobruk with its defences and dumps lay in the path of Morshead’s retreat. He had inspected its defences earlier in the year, so when the retreat arrived there, he decided that the port could be held. His 24th Brigade was already there, bringing up his division to something like full strength. Wavell visited Tobruk; Morshead, with his chief intelligence officer, met him at the El Adem airstrip. ‘They [Morshead and his officers] looked and smelt of the desert, of defeat and of retreat,’ wrote one British observer, John Connell. But Wavell’s affirmation that Tobruk must be held, said this observer, seemed to stiffen them. Connell’s tale may be unreliable—in pictures of the meeting, Morshead and his intelligence officer look robust and confident.
The Australians and the British support troops in Tobruk would be helped by the desert soaks and sand morasses to the south, which could limit the thrust of the attack just as it limited the Allied supply lines. In British minds, and possibly in the minds of the novice Australians, the malign legend had taken root that Rommel could not be stopped. Just the same, the 24th Australian Battalion took up positions on the scree of the escarpment running south and west of Tobruk, with the port behind them. And when on Morshead’s orders the 48th Battalion fell in on the ridge beside them, the Australian determination increased that they would not be moved except by retreat orders. Even to the individual soldiers, this struck them as a holdable position.
Far to their rear, people with an investment in the outcome—Egyptian elites, Greeks, French and British in Alexandria and Cairo—felt something very like panic. Slessor was most concerned for his wife Noela, with him in Cairo. He wrote, ‘It seems that our forces have fallen back again from the Fuka area to positions around El Alamein [an Egyptian village and train station only 100 kilometres from Alexandria], where they are making a desperate stand. The Australians [are] said to be ready at posts on the Alexandria defence perimeter and between Cairo and Alexandria on the desert road.’ The general feeling was that Alexandria was as good as doomed, and if it went, so would Cairo and the Suez Canal, and God knew what degree of penetration eastwards. Slessor had already seen hundreds of lorries packed with Australian soldiers (ones other than those already surrounded in Tobruk) streaming through Cairo, heading desertward to take new positions on the threatened flank. They yelled cooees to the bemused Egyptians who watched them roll through town. Slessor noted that Ray Moseley and Geoffrey Hoare, journalists for the London Times, were trying to buy a car to escape. Arrangements were made for getting the correspondents away if it were necessary (thirty seats were to be reserved for them on one of the last special trains to leave Cairo for Palestine), and all those who could find private transport were told to use it.
The battle offshore was lethal, involving German U-boats attacking supply ships and naval vessels running supplies into Tobruk under protection of British and Australian aircraft or attack from German ones. Slessor would write perhaps his finest poem, ‘Beach Burial’, about the corpses of young sailors, both enemy and ally, washed onto the North African beaches. As he wrote, ‘The sand joins them together, enlisted on the other front.’ The Allies’ struggle to prevent supplies getting through to Rommel’s men, and that of the Axis to stop supplies reaching the British in Malta and North Africa, was brutal.
During the Allied retreat, Morshead understood, first, that Tobruk, and Tripoli, far to the west, were the only viable ports to support Rommel, so that if the German general could take Tobruk his supply route would be simplified and shortened. Morshead understood further that the loss of Cairo and the Suez Canal would be catastrophic both for Australia’s trade with Britain and for the Allied hold on the Mediterranean. He must do whatever could be done to slow the advance of the Nazi regime eastwards into an unlimited eastern version of the Reich beyond the Canal and as far as the oilfields of Iraq and into Persia.
Morshead had been a young schoolteacher when war broke out in 1914. He landed at Anzac Beach, Gallipoli, on 25 April 1915, and was wounded at Lone Pine. In this second war he had replaced Major-General Wynter when Wynter became ill. Amongst his troops in Tobruk he shared with Prime Minister Menzies the nickname ‘Ming the Merciless’, a name derived from the villain in Buck Rogers serials at the flicks. Living up to the name, Morshead banned within the besieged port the playing of two-up as a potential source of trouble in the garrison. Perhaps not quite understanding the Australian penchant for embracing negative epithets, William Joyce, the Irish Nazi who broadcast from Berlin under the nickname Lord Haw-Haw, gave the troops in the port their own nickname, ‘Rats of Tobruk’. Indeed, there would be a sort of rodent stubbornness in the way the men possessed the bunkers and half-ruined streets and shattered houses of the port, endured grit in their food and tea, and developed a close acquaintance with the walls of slit trenches and the earth, generally during near-ceaseless daytime attacks from the air.
The Tobruk area was a plateau surrounding a spacious east–west harbour. The Red Line—the defences built to protect it—ran in a semicircle across the desert from the coast thirteen kilometres east of the harbour to fourteen kilometres west of it. The defences were not continuous but consisted of many strongpoints protected by barbed wire and anti-tank ditches. Mines were laid down in the barren, stony ground beyond the perimeter. It could have been a Central Australian scene the 9th Division men and others faced to the south, but they had the Mediterranean at their backs, and it was a source of supply and an aid to hygiene. The Germans launched their first attack on Morshead’s perimeter on 13 April 1941—‘the Easter Battle’. The Afrika Korps and their Italian allies expected to surge over the Tobruk plateau and capture the port in quick order. But the two-thirds Australian defenders collaborated with the one-third British with a wholeheartedness the Afrika Korps had not before encountered. Morshead had already warned his brigade commanders, ‘There’ll be no Dunkirk here. If we should have to get out, we shall fight our way out.’ Chester Wilmot, transmitting from inside Tobruk and making it famous, was told by Morshead, ‘I determine we should make no man’s land our land.’ In the Red Line, the front line, everyone was employed in regular patrols. The nightly patrols allowed the Australians to find where the enemy was most thickly bivouacked so that the artillery could shell their camps. Morshead later said, ‘We set out to besiege the besiegers.’ At night the wounded were taken out of the port by ship, and new men and food and ammunition came in. A Royal Artillery anti-aircraft brigade protected the port from the Luftwaffe. The 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers worked the machine guns, and there were men from the 18th Indian Cavalry and the 3rd Armoured Brigade deployed as part of the garrison.
When the enemy sent in the infantry on Easter Sunday, they broke the perimeter in only a few places. There were exchanges of the greatest savagery, involving bayonets and grenades, as young German men were met by similarly young Australians, crazed with proprietorial rage and ready to eject them. The gods of battle dictated terms. Jack Edmondson, a corporal dying of wounds, found the strength to bayonet two Germans before collapsing. The next morning, 14 April, Rommel launched a tank attack with tactics used in the Blitzkrieg in France in 1940, methods that had not yet failed the German army. Les Watkins, one of the Rats, yelling, ‘Whop it up ’em, mate!’, admired the sangfroid, the gameness, with which the British-manned and inadequate Matilda tanks rattled forth between Australian weapons pits, foxholes and strongpoints to take on the Panzers. On Morshead’s orders, the German tanks were let through the perimeter, and it was the German infantry following the tanks on whom the soldiers on the perimeter turned their guns. The tanks were isolated and became targets for British anti-tank guns and for those
impudent Matildas. At last, the enemy tanks retreated through the very gap they had made in the perimeter; as they exited, they were caught from both sides by mortars, cannon, Bren guns and rifles. In a communiqué to Roosevelt, Churchill said that this ‘is the first time they [the Afrika Korps] have tasted defeat’. Italians sent in that night against the Tobruk perimeter met fire sufficient to cause them to surrender; this so enraged their German allies that they fired on them.
Ships continued to bring in new men and took the mutilated and damaged out. At least sometimes they did: a transport that landed the 23rd Battalion one night was immediately attacked by Stuka dive bombers and blew up soon after the men landed. The town they moved through, a place of rubble now, smelled of dead bodies and excreta.
These new men were in place along the perimeter on 30 April to see Rommel’s tanks and infantry transported by trucks churning up the desert to the west. This was the start of the next attack, which would grow in intensity to be named the Battle of the Salient. Rommel’s spearhead fell on the 24th Battalion sector of the perimeter, concentrating his dive-bombing and artillery bombardments on those men. Morshead had laid down a new minefield in the path of what turned out to be Rommel’s planned penetration, but it would not stop a penetration three kilometres deep and five wide. The Panzer tanks worked with assault troops, capturing post after post, killing or taking prisoner the Australians who garrisoned them before attempting an armoured drive on the port. By nine that night, forty German tanks were inside the perimeter and most of the perimeter posts had fallen. More tanks and artillery rushed into the gap and so, widening it, did German and Italian troops. Flamethrowers were directed at posts held by the 26th Battalion. Communication between Morshead’s headquarters in the town and the posts on the Red Line had been lost from the start. It was impossible, therefore, to find out what posts still lay in Australian hands. Morshead moved supports up behind the 24th Battalion on the west side of the perimeter, though he did not yet know if the 24th had held on. In the afternoon, he ordered his 48th Battalion to counter-attack and recapture before dark the perimeter strongpoints now held by the Afrika Korps. These were stretched out over four kilometres. Spread thin over so many kilometres, many of the battalion were killed, as their colonel had predicted to Morshead they would be.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 25