In spite of desert sores, loss of weight and gradual sapping of energy, the physical condition of the troops remained reasonably good. They also stood up well to the mental and nervous strain of siege conditions. Men who have fought in both wars say that the combined air and artillery attack on Tobruk was never as fierce or as sustained as the shelling in France in the Great War. Certainly during the last four or five months few troops outside the town and harbour area were regularly bombed, and the shelling was not heavy except in the Salient and half a dozen other hot spots. In July the enemy sent over an average of 650 shells per day; by September this had increased to 1000, but on a 30-mile front this was not heavy by last war standards.
The percentage of men suffering from shock – known in this war as ‘bomb-happies’ – was, I understand, considerably lower in Tobruk than on the Western Front in the last war. Moreover, the greater proportion of these were later returned to their units, fit for front line service. Two Australian psychiatrists (Major E. L. Cooper and Captain A. J. M. Sinclair) ran a war neurosis clinic in Tobruk for many months and achieved remarkable success in treating nervous disorders. Out of 207 patients treated between May and August, 38 per cent returned to their units without leaving Tobruk; 23 per cent became fit for front line service after treatment in Palestine; 23 per cent became fit for base duties and only 12 per cent were returned to Australia permanently unfit. It says much for the spirit of the garrison that only 3 per cent of the bomb-happy patients they examined were found to be malingerers.
While the strain on the garrison was not intense after the first month, it was continuous. Axis guns could shell anywhere inside the perimeter, and their bombing was so haphazard that no place could be considered safe, not even the hospitals, since they could not be placed clear of all military objectives in a fortress like Tobruk. The main hospital had to be in buildings, and consequently in the town, where the 4th A.G.H. occupied a former Italian hospital. It was near buildings the enemy had used as workshops only half a mile from the harbour, and was thus always in danger of being hit in raids on the town or shipping. Seventeen bombs landed in this hospital at various times and eye-witnesses assure me that on at least one occasion the pilots wilfully bombed it. Frequently delicate operations were carried out in the middle of an air raid, but the operating theatre was reasonably safe, for it had been so strongly protected by heavy timber and sandbags that it could withstand anything but a direct hit by a 1000-pounder.
Another hospital1 on the beach was dive-bombed and machine-gunned several times during the first fortnight. At least one attack was deliberate, but the hospital was then not adequately marked, and was only a few hundred yards from an ack-ack position and several other legitimate targets. It was soon moved to another part of the beach two miles from the harbour – and conspicuously marked. After that, although a few strays fell close, the beach hospital was not intentionally attacked. Here the Germans certainly respected the Red Cross, for no other such collection of tents anywhere inside the perimeter would have lasted twenty-four hours.
Similar respect was shown to the Regimental Aid Posts of front line battalions, which often had to be in places under enemy observation. Two hospital ships at Tobruk, however, were dive-bombed and one was sunk. A German pilot, shot down during one of these attacks, stated that they had orders to bomb any and every ship in the harbour.
Frequently troops were machine-gunned while swimming or sun-baking and the beaches were regularly protected by Bren guns mounted for ack-ack defence. Battalions often had greater casualties from bombing and shelling when in reserve than when in the Red Line. One day a platoon of the 2/43rd was repairing a road when a stray stick of bombs killed three and wounded five. Tobruk was like that. There was little let-up. But the very knowledge that they were hemmed in with their backs to the sea strengthened the garrison’s resolve and developed a do-or-die spirit. There were a few whose nerve cracked, but generally the casual, phlegmatic, what-the-hell-anyway attitude of Diggers and Tommies carried them through.
General living conditions, however, did not ease the strain. Troops quartered in the town were reasonably comfortable. They certainly had to endure frequent bombs and occasional shells, but they became accustomed to these. Some slept secure in deep tunnels drilled out by the Italians. Others made solid shelters with sandbags, wood and slabs of concrete salvaged from wrecked buildings. Some timbered up rooms in stone houses, making them strong enough to withstand anything but a direct hit. Living in the town had advantages. The sea provided good swimming and, with the help of home-made distilleries, good drinking water. Occasionally rations could be supplemented by fish caught with the aid of hand grenades.
Those who were stationed in the intermediate zone between the coast and the perimeter lived almost permanently in an atmosphere laden with dust churned up by the traffic. Nevertheless the personnel of the various H.Q. units and the British gunners and tankmen in this area had a chance to make themselves moderately comfortable because they were seldom moved.
The Australian infantry battalions lived in much worse conditions. Every few weeks they were moved. A normal rotation was for a battalion to go from the Red Line concrete posts to the exposed positions in the Blue Line; thence to one of the inner reserve areas, and from there to the most uncomfortable Salient sector. They were probably best off in the concrete posts of the Red Line, where there was less dust and the posts were as clean and comfortable as front line positions could be. As we shall see later they were worst off in the improved posts in the Salient.
Apart from the few who had their own salt-water distilleries, the men of Tobruk had little water with which to wash clean their dust-parched throats, and that little was brackish and chlorinated. The ration at first was half a gallon per man per day for all purposes, but after June 19th it was increased to three-quarters of a gallon. At first the water tasted like medicine, but after a while it seemed quite good unless you happened to have some sweet water with which to compare it. One night a new arrival brought some water from Alexandria. In the mess a precious jugful was passed round. We drank it neat. The troops could console themselves, however, with the thought that the enemy had water problems too. One German officer said in his diary that the water ‘looks like coffee and tastes like sulphur’.
Whatever its drinking qualities, Tobruk water was certainly God’s gift to the makers of razor blades. Even if a blade were most carefully dried, the edge rusted off after two or three shaves. The water’s reluctance to lather provided a further excuse for going unshaven, especially as, until August, the troops received only one blade a fortnight. But one day Routine Orders came out with a curt comment on this unsoldierly conduct. A few days later some friendly fate guided an enemy bomb straight to the main dump of new blades, but other dumps were unharmed and the order stood.
Water was scarce enough but the beer position was well summed up by one of Tobruk’s poets, who wrote:2
There’s militant teetotallers
Who abhor all kinds of drink,
There’s wives who break good bottles
And pour them down the sink;
This place would suit them to the ground,
We’ve searched in every nook,
But booze is rare as hen’s teeth in
This place they call Tobruk.
Two or three times during the siege the garrison did receive about half a pint per man, but this was barely enough to lay the dust. The men were resigned to the shortage, but few things annoyed them more than the newspaper story that beer was regularly issued to them. One of the garrison’s unrecognised achievements was its destruction of the legend that the Digger cannot carry on without his beer.
As months of enemy inactivity drugged on, boredom became the garrison’s greatest danger. But Morshead knew that nothing would sap the troops’ morale as much as idleness. He kept them working and he kept them in contact with the enemy. The work of strengthening the defences went on from the first day to the last. Morshead was never satisfied. Whil
e the forward troops improved the Red Line, the reserve battalions built the Blue Line; and when that was finished, they started a Green Line farther in. As soon as one minefield was laid, sappers started putting down another. Up to their last night in the Salient, the troops continued digging, wiring and mining their positions.
They worked through heat and duststorm, cold and darkness, grumbling as they did so, but still capable of a laugh. In October Tobruk’s tank strength was trebled by the arrival of fifty Matildas, and Australians were detailed to dig ‘harbours’ for them as a protection against bombing. The new tank commander (Brigadier A. C. Willison), a British Regular, stopped beside one working party and listened for a moment to the Diggers cursing as they toiled. Then he said – ‘Tough going, boys?’ ‘My flamin’ oath,’ said one Australian, ‘but you bring us the bloody tanks and we’ll dig the bastards in.’
Morshead’s aggressive, hard-working policy was never of greater value than after the failure of the two attempts to relieve Tobruk in May and June. The natural dejection that followed these was vigorously countered by aggressive patrolling and the garrison’s self-confidence was soon restored. In his shrewd appreciation of this danger Morshead showed his quality as a leader.
During the months of boredom two things were all important to the garrison – mail and cigarettes. Throughout the bombing an Australian postal unit operated in a bank building and by August was handling up to 50 tons of mail a week. Most of this was for the Australians, as the people of Britain could still send only very small parcels and even letters came infrequently. The Australian people flooded Tobruk post office with 5000 parcels and more than 50 000 letters a week. The average weekly mail then was 700 bags inward and 350 out.
The Australian Comforts Fund, through its invaluable agents the Salvation Army and Y.M.C.A. representatives, provided the troops with writing paper, envelopes and, most valuable of all, air-mail letter cards ready-stamped. In addition the post office during one month sold £3200 worth of Australian stamps. The bulk of the mail from Tobruk was made up of souvenirs fashioned by the troops in their spare time from Stukas, Italian shell cases, hand grenades, and general wreckage. ‘Professional’ souvenir makers did a brisk trade and I knew one shrewd corporal in an Army Field Workshops, who made several pounds a week by selling mementoes he had turned on the workshops’ lathes. According to the Tobruk postal sergeant, ‘If there hadn’t been an 11-pound limit on parcels, they’d have packed up shells, guns and all and sent them home.’
Cigarettes were almost as valuable as mail in sustaining morale. As the troops were on British rations they had a free issue of 50 a week, and from June onwards they were usually able to buy another 50 each week from the canteen. In August canteen sales averaged 320 cigarettes per man. These, in addition to the free issue and those given out by the Comforts Fund, were almost enough for the average soldier. Cigarettes were the No. 1 priority cargo on all canteen ships and until July there was room for little else. But the Comforts Fund managed to find odd space on all kinds of craft – from destroyers to barges – thanks primarily to the resourcefulness and persistence of its Commissioner in Alexandria, Major Eugene (‘Pat’) Gorman.
The Australian Comforts Fund made no distinction between British, Indian and Australian troops and, by serving all alike, contributed much to the sense of unity in Tobruk. As one British officer wrote to Gorman: ‘What makes these gifts even more acceptable to a British unit is the knowledge that the A.C.F. normally caters only for Australian troops. This gesture is one of many which maintain and strengthen the spirit of comradeship amongst all troops in the Tobruk Fortress.’
Shipments of both canteen and Comforts Fund cargoes increased considerably in the last few months, so much so that the Australian canteen alone had a turnover of more than £20 000 in both August and September. Unloading canteen ships was one ‘fatigue’ for which there were plenty of volunteers, as there was always the chance of getting away with some of the cargo. A working party from one battalion, however, looted so much that the unit was denied the ‘privilege’ of providing future unloading parties.
In addition to such occasional looting there was trouble throughout the siege with troops – mostly Australians – who ‘ratted’ the food dumps. The number of men guilty of this was comparatively small, and they were mostly those stationed near the dumps and were not front line troops. Strong disciplinary measures were taken against any who were caught, but the practice persisted. Because of this, letters from Tobruk often gave contradictory reports about rations. But if anyone boasted of living well, he was probably one of those who shared in loot from a food dump. It is an interesting commentary on human nature that this should have happened even in a place like Tobruk, where the general spirit of comradeship was remarkably high.
An important element in maintaining morale was the supply of news. Rumour is rife in all armies and isolation from the news of the world would have had a most adverse effect on the beleaguered men, if they had not been kept informed by a daily news-sheet edited and published by Sergeant W. H. Williams.
Tobruk Truth – The Dinkum Oil came out every day in spite of enemy bombs, which once wrecked the office and several times put radio set or ‘printing press’ out of action. Each night Williams listened to the B.B.C. news, took shorthand notes, typed the items, plus any local news or gleanings from Australian papers, on to a wax stencil and roneoed-off the copies on an antiquated cyclostyle machine. At first the news was picked up on a salvaged Italian set, and the duplicator and typewriter were also of Italian origin. When these threatened to break down, a brand new typewriter and duplicator were rushed up from Cairo, and the Comforts Fund provided a new radio. Because of the shortage of paper, the daily circulation was limited to 600, and even this was maintained at one stage only by printing the news on the back of Italian Army forms.
Tobruk Truth was the father of all the other ‘newspapers’ in the Fortress. Many Australian and a few British units had their own roneoed news-sheets, some with picturesque names like the 2/23rd Battalion’s ‘Mud and Blood’; the 2/24th’s ‘Furphy Flyer’;3 and the 2/48th’s ‘Grubb’s Gazette’ (named after its editor, Corporal R. W. Grubb). These reproduced the main news from Tobruk Truth, items of local interest and readers’ contributions, and they did much to build up and maintain unit spirit in conditions that often prevented even platoons in the same company from having any contact with one another. By these means rumour was kept in check, and men inside Tobruk got at least as much truth about the war as those outside it.
Very often, however, they did not know what went on within their own perimeter. For instance, a lieutenant-colonel who was rather a martinet, said to me some time after Tobruk was relieved, ‘My wife tells me you broadcast a concert allegedly by some Australians in Tobruk. What a hoax! There were never any concerts while I was there.’ I assured him that we had recorded this concert by men of the 20th Brigade in September and that British troops had held concerts almost every week throughout the latter part of the siege, but he remained unconvinced.
The 20th Brigade concert was not the only one that Australians held in Tobruk, but it was probably the best. It ran four nights to an audience of 500 Diggers on each occasion. Until a few days before, both players and audience had been in the line. They came to the concert grimy from the desert, steel helmets on their heads and rifles slung over their shoulders.
It was held in an underground ammunition chamber – one of many which the Italians had tunnelled from the rock face of a wadi near the El Adem crossroads. This man-made cave, with its walls, roof and floor covered with concrete, was not acoustically sympathetic, but it was good enough. It was 20 yards wide and 50 long and held 500 men at a pinch. The stage was a rough wooden platform draped with army blankets and camouflage nets. The footlights were car headlamps shielded by cut-down kerosene tins. In the wadis and on the plateau outside British guns occasionally replied to Axis shells that landed, as they so often did, around the important road junction near by. But for t
wo hours down in the underground ‘theatre’ nobody heard them. The troops were a long way away: through the blue-grey haze of dust and cigarette fumes they saw a land of smoky gums and soft sunshine on rolling golden paddocks; a world of blue hills, bright lights and white breakers as they sang songs that carried them down the road to Gundagai, past a swagman and a billabong, on to Dixie, London, Lambeth, Tipperary. After six months in Tobruk they could still laugh and sing.
They sang accompanied by a piano, a saxophone, a violin, a piano-accordion and a mouth-organ – instruments with a history. The piano had once played for perfumed Italian officers as they danced in their silk-lined, velvet-collared uniforms with their painted ladies on the piazza of the ‘Albergo Tobruch’ by the town’s then-peaceful waterfront. The saxophone had often been heard in Brisbane’s Tivoli and its owner, Ted Donkin, had carried it to the borders of Tripolitania and back again. To keep the dust out he used to wrap it in an army blanket and bury it in the sand. His ‘sax’ was none the worse for all its adventures, but the same could not be said for the violin. It was of doubtful ancestry and in the absence of catgut, had been strung with army signal wire.4 The ‘squeeze-box’ had been suffering from asthma until an ‘M.O.’ made it fit for action by patching it with sticking plaster. These were the instruments that led the men in singing those songs that tugged so strongly at Australian hearts, when the recording of the concert was eventually broadcast by the A.B.C.
The concerts were far from mythical but there was no truth in the report that an Australian band played every day in Tobruk’s main square. Where that story originated I do not know, but the London Times on April 25th reported: ‘Contrary to the German contention that Tobruk is a beleaguered city, actual conditions did not indicate such a state of affairs, says an Exchange Message from Cairo. An Australian band plays every day, and the only inconvenience is caused by bombing, against which ample accommodation is provided in underground shelters.’ This story was published all over the world and every war correspondent who later went to Tobruk was accused of being its author. I found that most of the phoney reports about Tobruk originated not in correspondents’ dispatches, but in letters written home by troops. They wanted either to convince their friends and families that they were going through hell unperturbed or to persuade them that Tobruk was a picnic. Some of these letters found their way into the popular weeklies and the stories they spread did considerable harm to the reputation of correspondents in general.
Tobruk 1941 Page 23
