REGINALD WILLIAM WINCHESTER ‘CHESTER’ WILMOT was born in the bayside suburb of Brighton, Victoria, in 1911. He went to Melbourne Grammar, then studied arts at the University of Melbourne. After giving ABC radio talks and touring international universities with a debating team, he worked briefly as a legal clerk.
In late 1940, a year after the start of the Second World War, Wilmot became a correspondent for the ABC. He was sent to the Middle East, then to the sites of major actions in North Africa and Europe. His dynamic radio reports from the frontlines were remarkable for their lucid analysis and innovation: he incorporated the sounds of battle as well as interviews, modernising the format.
Wilmot returned to Australia and married Edith Irwin in 1942; later that year, he was in New Guinea, again reporting for the ABC. A courageous journalist unafraid of controversy, Wilmot incurred the wrath of General Sir Thomas Blamey after delivering his criticisms of the Australian commander-in-chief to the prime minister, John Curtin. Defended by the ABC, Wilmot was nonetheless sent to Sydney.
There, his time in North Africa informed the writing of Tobruk 1941, published in 1944. That year Wilmot became a lead correspondent for the BBC, reporting on the final stages of the war in Europe. He subsequently settled in England, where he became a well-known radio and television broadcaster and documentary presenter. His second book, The Struggle for Europe (1952), was a bestseller and is considered one of the greatest single-volume military histories of the Second World War.
Chester Wilmot died in a plane crash in the Mediterranean Sea in 1954.
PETER COCHRANE has written extensively about war. His books include a study of photography at Tobruk, Tobruk 1941; the companion volume to the ABC television series Australians at War, The Western Front 1916–18; and Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend. Cochrane is also the author of the award-winning Colonial Ambition and the novella Governor Bligh and the Short Man. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
ALSO BY Chester Wilmot
The Struggle for Europe
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Desert Masterpiece
by Peter Cochrane
Tobruk 1941
List of Maps
Preface
1. Before Zero
2. Break-through
3. The Thrust to the Town
4. The Round-up
5. The Town We Took
6. Tobruk Derby
7. The Fortress and its Garrison
8. The Easter Battle
9. Tobruk Commander
10. Offensive Defence
11. Battle of the Salient
12. Rommel Changes His Tune
13. Wouldn’t It?
14. Holding the Salient
15. Salient Scenes
16. The Battle for No-Man’s-Land
17. ‘We Never Say “No”’
18. Smashing the Stuka Parade
19. Keeping the Harbour Open
20. So Long Tobruk
21. What a Relief
Epilogue
Appendix I: Tobruk Garrison
Appendix II: Honours and Awards
Appendix III: The Main Events of 1941
Desert Masterpiece
by Peter Cochrane
CHESTER WILMOT was on board British Airways Flight 781 on 10 January 1954 when it exploded in midair and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the island of Elba. He was forty-two years old, a distinguished wartime broadcaster, a bestselling historian, a BBC regular, the military correspondent for the Observer and a pioneer of documentary television. He was at the peak of his powers, a success at everything to which he’d turned his mind since his days at Melbourne University, when he led the debating team on a triumphant world tour.
His wife, Edith, was at Heathrow Airport waiting for that ill-fated flight. Years later she remembered how they took the listing off the noticeboard. She recalled her daughter, Caroline, in tears, screaming: ‘My father was Chester Wilmot, he was a famous, famous man.’
In England at that time, Wilmot was indeed famous. His most recent book, The Struggle for Europe (1952), had been an instant hit, with presales of eighty thousand copies—not counting the American market. A German edition was due for publication at the time of his death. But, in his homeland, Wilmot’s reputation was firmly entrenched by an earlier success: Tobruk 1941 was first published by Angus & Robertson in 1944.
Wilmot began working in journalism while studying at Melbourne University. With the outbreak of World War Two he joined the ABC’s Broadcast Unit and sailed for the Middle East in September 1940. He covered the campaigns in North Africa, the debacle in Greece and the savage war against the Vichy French in Syria before rejoining the besieged forces in Tobruk.
Australian, British and Indian troops had held the town of Tobruk, the deep-water harbour and its defences, since January 1941. Since April, they had defied Rommel’s Africa Corps at every turn, and they were required to hold out for months more. When Wilmot arrived by sea (the ‘bomb alley’ run from Alexandria), he was fully aware of the strategic and symbolic significance of Tobruk at that moment. Without first taking Tobruk, Rommel could not push on to Suez, and while he was halted there, ‘leg-roped’, the defenders bought time for the Allied mobilisation in Egypt—preparations to repel the Axis forces, render Egypt secure and retake the top of Africa.
The symbolic significance was no less powerful than the strategic purpose. As yet, German forces were unchecked on land, ‘from Poland to the Pyrenees, from Norway to North Africa’, as Wilmot writes. Then came the siege of Tobruk. The importance of holding the fortress and the harbour was common knowledge to Allied forces in every theatre of war. Churchill understood the moment. ‘The whole empire is watching,’ he wrote to Major-General Leslie Morshead, the Australian commander inside the fortress.
Wilmot and the Broadcast Unit shipped into Tobruk in early August 1941. The battle for the fortress had become something of a stalemate, Rommel having been repeatedly repelled by the defenders. But this was no ordinary stalemate. Morshead had determined at the outset that ‘no-man’s-land would be our land.’ Raiding parties went out almost nightly, striking at Axis positions in the desert, while German artillery and aircraft pounded the defenders by day and by night. Nowhere inside the fortress was beyond the reach of Rommel’s guns or Luftwaffe bombs.
Wilmot went to work immediately, recording broadcasts with officers and troops for the listeners at home. They recorded in the township, on the harbour and on the ‘Red Line’ in the ‘coverless desert’, the outer perimeter, a semicircle of barbed wire and dug-in fortifications about fifty kilometres in length, a bloody arc, where raids with grenade and bayonet seemed never-ending.
Some of Wilmot’s contemporaries—Alan Moorehead, Quentin Reynolds and others—were busy writing memoirs at this time, accounts of their adventures at war. But, as his notebooks indicate, Wilmot had something more substantial in mind. He wanted to write about the action, not the correspondent. He had quickly decided he would focus on Tobruk alone. As his biographer Neil McDonald writes in Valiant for Truth (2016): ‘In the closed world of the desert fortress, he had been able to research earlier events in the siege, not just as a broadcaster but also as a historian.’
At Melbourne University, Wilmot had absorbed the craft of historical enquiry under Professor Ernest Scott, along with the necessity for original research and the importance of masterly narrative. Like Charles (C. E. W.) Bean, the official historian of the first Australian Imperial Force in the Great War, Wilmot was committed to giving voice to the ordinary soldier. Inside Tobruk, he was everywhere, talking to the fighters, sharing their hardships and some of their perils, jotting his impressions in his notebooks, the notes taken down in his own, self-styled form of s
horthand.
His democratic nature and his gift for the demotic fed naturally into his broadcasting and his writing, as did his belief in seeing for himself: ‘If you are to describe accurately and graphically the actions in which the troops take part,’ he wrote to his father, ‘you must see the ground over which they have to fight, and you must see the positions from which they are fighting.’ Some of the best writing in Tobruk 1941 comes from the ‘Salient Scenes’ chapter, where he reports from the trenches and dugouts on the front line—the burning heat, the flea-infested sand, the rumble of guns, the evening ‘hate’.
In addition to his notebooks, Wilmot had at his disposal a small archive of original sources: his full dispatches, his broadcast scripts (the uncensored copy), captured diaries, and officers’ reports to which he had access (thanks to Morshead), as well as his own record of interviews with the rank and file, the officers and the commander himself.
But the opportunity to work this rich material into book form did not arise until 1943 when, unexpectedly, Wilmot had time on his hands. It arose principally because he was never merely a reporter and he was quick to become an activist. From the outset, he was a military analyst, a historian and a correspondent who believed it was his duty to reveal hard truths when leaders failed their men.
In Cairo he had spoken out against the leisurely hours kept by sections of the British officer class while soldiers were fighting for their lives in the Western Desert, and men and women were working long and perilous shifts in targeted war industries in Britain. And from Kokoda (where he went after Tobruk) he was critical of high command for failing to supply the men on the Track with the proper equipment, suitably camouflaged gear and adequate supplies. His criticism of the Commander-in-Chief of the AIF, General Sir Thomas Blamey, made him a political target.
The ABC supported their man throughout the dispute, but Blamey was quick to cancel Wilmot’s accreditation as a war correspondent. Absurdly, Blamey called Wilmot ‘a dangerous subversive and a communist’, and refused to reinstate him. Late in 1942 Wilmot was grounded in Sydney, with time to reflect, and to write. Had he remained in the field, we might not have his classic.
Wilmot tackled Tobruk 1941 as he did everything else—at full throttle. The ABC’s Head of Talks, B. H. Molesworth, provided him with a secretary and an office from where he continued to prepare regular broadcasts and to shape his drafts for the book. He was a fluent writer, brilliantly synoptic and gifted with the power of vivid description. The chapter on the Battle of the Salient, about twelve thousand words, was drafted over four days. By night he worked on the manuscript in his digs at the University Club. ‘What a sweat—the first continuous account,’ he wrote to his family.
In addition to his own papers (notebooks, scripts, correspondence, photostatic copies of select records and so on), he now had access to Australian War Memorial files, housed in Melbourne, and he was gathering further evidence from participants. Whenever possible he caught up with veterans of Tobruk, and he sought reports and copies of correspondence from both officers and men.
Wilmot’s account begins with the seizure of ‘the fortress’ in January 1941, and concludes with a moving Epilogue: a summary of the global significance of the Allies’ triumph, followed by the transcript of his own broadcast from the closing ceremony in the desert cemetery, his tribute to the feat of arms and the dead.
From the escarpment to the south comes the occasional thunder of guns; along the road from time to time trucks, armoured cars and tanks roar past on their way to or from the front; half a mile away troops are shaking out their blankets. The ordinary life of war goes on while we are gathered to do homage to those who have found peace only in death…
In Tobruk 1941, Wilmot’s roving eye blends coverage of fast-moving raids and battle with rich social observation, and melds the local story with its global implications. His narrative is punctuated with biographical cameos and excerpts from interviews with the men of the garrison, so the vernacular figures prominently in an erudite text. He is the educated Australian who can lapse into pub-yarn mode, his manner easy, his intellect sharp. He is both military analyst and social historian, providing eyewitness accounts of combat and conditions in the fortress, covering themes such as food, fleas, health, work, sport, concerts and other entertainment. He is pioneering a new form of military history, blending a cool dissection of material realities with a record of battle and striking descriptions of everyday life.
For the Allied writer and broadcaster, German diaries and other documents seized in the field or taken from prisoners must have seemed like gold. Wilmot quotes them liberally and to great effect. A classical allusion in a German tank commander’s diary delighted him: ‘Our opponents are Englishmen and Australians. Not trained attacking troops, but men with nerves and toughness, tireless, taking punishment with obstinacy, wonderful in defence. Ah well, the Greeks also spent ten years before Troy.’
Wilmot’s biographer tells us that his principal reader of the manuscript was Mervyn Scales, a documentary-film producer who was also staying at the University Club. Scales was a stickler for accuracy, and he was happy to read excerpts and talk them over each evening. Wilmot’s friend the photographer Damien Parer, who had been in Tobruk as an official Department of Information cameraman, also ‘read bits of it and was most helpful’, and Wilmot sought the advice of his friend and mentor Charles Bean, who was just a tram ride away in Chatswood.
Bean’s influence certainly registers in reflective pages where Wilmot writes about the Australian national character and the qualities of the Digger, of men forged in the bush tradition, notably the harsh conditions of the outback. Wilmot is not inclined to an explicitly racial interpretation of the struggle, but he does follow Bean in seeing the Australians as men of dash and daring, and the British as steady and dogged, noting how formidable was this compound of national types. As ever, his sympathetic eye conjures the best in both. But only in the closing scene, in the cemetery, do we learn that ‘Mohammedans’ (Indian cavalrymen) also died in the siege and were buried in a corner of their own.
In other ways, too, the book is a creature of its time. Wilmot evades the appalling effect of war on civilians. Non-combatants hardly register. There is a moment when ‘the Senussi were looting the town’ of Barce, near Benghazi. There is a helpful ‘Arab’ who figures momentarily in the retreat to Tobruk, and there is a passing mention of ‘9000 Arab civilians’ who lived in a ‘native village half’ a mile north of the harbour, but nothing on their fate.
Nor does the text dwell on death. Tobruk 1941 was completed in 1943 and published while war still raged. Wilmot was a committed anti-fascist, bent on victory. This was no time to dwell on the carnage of war. The word ‘blood’ does not appear in the text and wounds are rarely described; the dead, never. The needs of citizen and soldier morale sanitised the narrative in this regard. For action after action, he cites casualty numbers as he must, and then moves on, the enthralling sweep of the narrative concluding with his moving paean to the fallen.
Tobruk 1941 established Chester Wilmot as the pioneer of a new kind of military history and one of the great chroniclers of twentieth-century war: it is among the supreme achievements of modern wartime writing. Wilmot would later remark that it was the crucible which eventually forged The Struggle for Europe, described by the distinguished war historian John Keegan as ‘the supreme achievement of Second World War historiography’.
More books were planned, including a volume of Australia’s official history of the war. What might have been…
TO
GENERAL MORSHEAD
AND HIS MEN
Tobruk 1941
LIST OF MAPS
1. The Capture of Tobruk—The Break-through, January 21st, 1941.
2. The Capture of Tobruk—Last Phase, January 21st–22nd, 1941.
3. The ‘Tobruk Derby’—Rommel’s Advance into Cyrenaica, April 1st–9th, 1941.
4. The Easter Battle, April 14th, 1941.
5. Battle of t
he Salient—Phases I and II: The German Attack, April 30th–May 1st, 1941.
6. Battle of the Salient—Phase III: The Garrison’s Counter-attacks, Evening, May 1st, 1941.
7. British Attempt to Relieve Tobruk, June 15th–17th, 1941.
8. 2/23rd’s Attack on Northern Flank of the Salient, May 17th, 1941.
9. The Salient Sector Showing Ground Regained by the Garrison, May–June, 1941.
10. The Relief of Tobruk—Phase I: The Eighth Army Attacks, November 18th–22nd, 1941.
11. The Relief of Tobruk—Phase II: The Eighth Army Links up with Tobruk Garrison, November 23rd–29th, 1941.
12. The Relief of Tobruk—Phase III: Enemy Cuts Eighth Army’s Link with Tobruk, But Fails to Relieve Bardia, November 30th–December 10th, 1941.
PREFACE
THE Libyan Desert is one of the great natural defensive barriers of the world. From September 1940 to November 1942 it was the chief bulwark of the defence of Egypt. The battle for the Suez Canal was fought in this desert and throughout 1941 the hub of the battle was Tobruk. Its capture by General Wavell’s Anglo-Australian forces in January of that year determined the immediate fate of Cyrenaica. Without first taking Tobruk Wavell could never have gone on to Bengazi.
The holding of Tobruk by Australian, British, Indian and later Polish troops from April 10th to December 10th 1941 was fatal to whatever hopes Rommel had of Egyptian conquest that year. Without first taking Tobruk he could not push on far towards Suez. In November 1941, when General Auchinleck launched his counter offensive, the Tobruk garrison played a crucial part in Rommel’s defeat. It is not too much to say that without the capture and holding of Tobruk in 1941, Cyrenaica could not have been conquered by Wavell; Rommel could not have been checked on the frontier of Egypt and Libya from April to November, nor could he have been driven back beyond Bengazi before the end of the year.
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