It was true, however, that cricket and football matches were played from time to time. The players were chiefly British gunners and tank crews, who were not under the immediate stress of holding front line posts. Almost every night near our camp ack-ack gunners played soccer. Their pitcher was a bare patch of stony desert, hard on knee, elbow, and soccer ball, but that did not lessen their zest.
The Tommies occasionally played cricket and so did the Australian infantrymen. The best account of a Tobruk cricket match is in verse that will remind all Australians of ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘The Geebung Polo Club’. And well it might, for it was written by ‘Banjo’s’ son, Private Hugh Barton Paterson.
You’ve heard of Bradman, Hammond, Macartney, Woodfull, Hobbs;
You’ve heard of how MacDougall topped the score,
But now I’d like to tell how we play cricket in Tobruk
In a way the game was never played before.
The players are a mixture, they come from every rank,
And their dress would not be quite the thing at Lords;
But you don’t need caps and flannels and expensive batting gloves
To get the fullest sport the game affords.
The wicket’s rather tricky, for it’s mat on desert sand,
But for us it’s really plenty good enough;
And what with big bomb craters and holes from nine-inch shells
The outfield could be well described as rough.
The boundary’s partly tank trap with the balance Dannert wire,
And the grandstand’s just a bit of sandy bank;
Our single sightboard’s furnished by a shot-down Jerry plane
And the scorer’s in a ruined ‘Itie’ tank.
One drawback is a minefield which is at the Desert end,
And critics might find fault with this and that,
But to us all runs are good ones, even if a man should score
Four leg byes off the top of his tin hat.
The barracking is very choice; the Hill would learn a lot
If they could listen in to all the cries,
As the Quartermaster-Sergeant bowls the Colonel neck and crop
With a yorker, while some dust is in his eyes.
If we drive one in the minefield we always run it out,
For that is what our local rule defines;
It’s always good for six at least, sometimes as high as ten,
While the fieldsman picks his way in through the mines.
Though we never stop for shell-fire, we’re not too keen on planes,
And when the Stukas start to hover round
You can sometimes get a wicket, if you’re game enough to stay,
By bowling as the batsmen go to ground.
So when we’re back in Sydney and others start to talk
Of cricket, why we’ll quell them with a look:
You blokes have never seen a game of cricket properly played
The way we used to play it in Tobruk.
The organization of these concerts and cricket matches was typical of the Tommies’ and Diggers’ determination to make the best of things. Characteristic of this was the ingenuity shown by Major H. R. Birch of the 2/23rd in arranging a dinner for the officers’ mess when the battalion had finished its first five weeks in the line. In honour of the occasion and of the birthdays of the C.O. and three officers, they wanted a change from the usual fare of bully, bread and tea, and the inevitable aluminium dixies. Tobruk in May had few luxuries, but Birch went exploring. He found the canteen store almost bare, but it provided six tins of chicken-and-ham roll, one bottle of whisky and another of gin – the nucleus, at least, of a dinner.
From the Y.M.C.A.’s stock of Comforts Fund stores, Birch collected chocolate, Bonox and two small bottles of olives. From a secret reserve the quartermaster produced tins of potatoes, peas, spaghetti and peaches. But the occasion demanded more than special food. Two white tablecloths were unearthed from the linen chest of the ‘Albergo Tobruch’; a chipped decanter and some ersatz port were found in a former Italian officers’ mess; and, as a final touch, coffee-cups and saucers and paper table-napkins were salvaged from an Italian junk heap.
A ‘banquet hall’ was made by stretching a tarpaulin across the gap between two sides of a narrow wadi, and it was furnished with a table and seats made from sandbags and planks. The crowning elegance was a strip of dusty red carpet, borrowed for the occasion from the town hospital. The officers sat down to a five-course dinner, the first they had eaten together since the siege began; for many of them it was their last formal mess. Two days later in an attack on the enemy Salient, the 2/23rd had four officers killed and three taken prisoner.
It is not easy to generalize about Tobruk. Living conditions varied so much from sector to sector, unit to unit. It is true that most men went through the siege without seeing a football or hearing any music but the whine of bullets; without drinking anything but salty chlorinated water or tea brewed from it; without swimming or bathing on more than four or five occasions in six months; without tasting tinned fruit or fresh vegetables more than a couple of dozen times. But it is equally true that football and cricket matches were played – by a few; that some concerts were held; that some units drank sweet water from beachside distilleries and swam almost every day. There were men who were bombed almost daily, and others who were not attacked from the air once in six months. Nothing was typical of Tobruk except bully-beef, flies, heat, dust – and boredom.
Yet all these factors combined to produce something that was typical – a spirit you found in every part of the garrison. The men might well have been dominated by an environment so unfriendly and an enemy so powerful in engines of war. But the men of Tobruk defied the enemy and rose superior to the environment. In doing this they needed more than courage, initiative and readiness to die. These carried them through the straight fight against the German, but they needed also faith in themselves, patience and sticking-power with which to combat the potential enemy within, for they had more holding-on than hard fighting from mid-May onwards.
They saw British planes in twos and threes shot out of the skies by Axis aircraft in twenties and thirties. The enemy had complete command of the air after the first few weeks, but he could never attack with impunity. They saw enemy tanks in fifties and sixties, and their own in fives and sixes, but they held on. They came under fire from heavier German artillery, mortars and machine-guns and they had few weapons with the range and calibre necessary to strike back. But they did not become discouraged and say, ‘We can’t carry on in conditions like these; we must have this and that before we will fight.’ They set their teeth and fought with what they had.
Tobruk was significant not because the British and Australian troops there were basically different from Tommies or Diggers anywhere else but because Tobruk brought out the fighting best in them. The pressure from without produced a solidarity within, which left little room for complacency or individual interest. Every man, section, and unit grew to realize that the safety of the garrison in greater or lesser degree might depend on the success of his job, no matter how unimportant it might seem.
Tobruk forged such a sense of unity that what happened to one small sector seemed to have happened to the whole garrison. If the town were bombed, they were all bombed, though they may not even have seen the planes. A successful raid by ten men was a triumph for them all. This feeling underlay their determination to see the fight through together. One day in August a company commander in the 2/23rd called his best N.C.O.s together. There was a good job for one of them. It meant a commission. It meant going back on the first destroyer to Alex. And on the first ship home to Australia, away from flies, grime, bully and all the discomforts and dangers of the siege.
‘Any takers?’ he said. Not a man volunteered.
_____________
1 This was part of the 4th A.G.H. commanded by Colonel N. L. Spiers. Surgical cases were accommodated in the town hospital; medical cases were
treated at the beach section.
2 This verse was written by the author of the poem that appears on pages 217–18.
3 A ‘Furphy’ is a rumour. Dr Bean says that the term originated in 1914 at Broadmeadows Camp, where the scavenging carts were branded with the manufactuer’s name, Furphy.
4 The comment in the broadcast that the violin was strung with signal wire prompted several Australians to send me sets of violin strings. ‘If this goes on,’ commented A.I.F. Censor, Major George Fenton, ‘instead of using signal wire for violin strings, we’ll be able to use violin strings for signal lines.’
CHAPTER 14
HOLDING THE SALIENT
FROM Hill 209 the Germans dominated a wide sweep of desert inside the perimeter, but the piece they had bitten out must have left a sour taste in their mouths. They could not afford to abandon it, because they kept a foot in the door of Tobruk by holding Hill 209. From here, when the time came to renew their attack, they might force that door wide open. But meanwhile the Salient they had established covering 209 was costly to hold. For this task Rommel was forced to use German troops that he could ill spare from the frontier area. From May to August he had only eight German battalions that could be used as infantry and it took more than a third of these to hold the Salient.
It was some days after the failure of the 18th Brigade’s counterattack on May 3rd–4th before either side established any stable line in the disputed territory. The garrison had yielded a box-shaped area a mile and a half to two miles deep and two and a half miles wide.
This was an awkward front. The desert sloped gradually upwards from the forward Australian positions to Hill 209; the rise was only about 100 feet, but it gave the enemy much better observation. The garrison had been holding 3½ miles of the old perimeter on favourable ground, wired, mined and covered by fire from the Italian-built strongpoints. Now it had to defend a 5½-mile front with the enemy sitting on top of it. In May ten companies of infantry were needed to cover the sector that in April had been held by two. (An infantry rifle company then contained 129 men, and there were four of these in a battalion.)
This placed a severe strain on Morshead’s reserves. Before the May attack he had only four battalions not occupying the Red or Blue lines. Now with the 2/24th so weakened that it had to withdraw for reorganization, he was forced to use the best part of three of his four reserve battalions to hold the Salient sector. Fortunately, the 2/32nd Battalion’s arrival on the night of May 4th more than counter-balanced the 2/24th’s losses.
Nevertheless, Morshead’s resources were sorely over-taxed and he urgently needed to shorten the Salient front so that two battalions could hold it. At this stage the Germans, apparently content with sufficient ground to screen Hill 209, had not tried to occupy all the territory yielded by the garrison on May 2nd and 3rd. In places no-man’s-land was well over half a mile wide, and in the next ten days there were only occasional patrol clashes in this area. As a result of these, however, the enemy was persuaded to withdraw a little towards Hill 209 and began to establish a strong line of defensive positions.
On May 13th the 18th Brigade took over the Salient and the western sector, and was ordered to move forward until its battalions were in close contact with the Germans. Moreover, offensive action was very necessary to provide a diversion at Tobruk while British forces on the frontier launched an attack.
During the 14th and 15th the garrison did its best to convince the enemy that it was about to make a thrust towards 209. Radio messages were sent out in the hope that he would intercept them and be misled. To confirm these, trucks and light tanks were driven back and forth between the harbour area and the western sector all day on the 14th, raising foreboding dust-clouds. On the morning of the 15th the R.A.F. reported that enemy tanks were concentrating near Acroma, and that the majority of his troop-carrying vehicles in the Sollum area were withdrawing towards Tobruk.
On the morning of the 15th, as part of the deception, two platoons of the 2/12th Battalion, led by Lieutenants F. K. Haupt and K. B. Thomas and supported by three cruiser tanks, sallied forth to attack Italian positions a mile west of S15. Enemy artillery strafed the tanks as they moved out, but the Italian infantry did not stay to fight. ‘As they fled,’ said the 2/12th Battalion’s operational report, ‘they discarded weapons, greatcoats and jackets to speed their movement and our platoons were not able to keep up with them.’ Although it proved to be little more than a demonstration, the raid did succeed in confirming enemy fears as to the garrison’s aggressive plans.
This sortie was followed twelve hours later by an advance in the northern sector of the Salient. There the 2/10th’s front line, which was between 1200 and 2000 yards from that of the enemy, was moved forward after dark about 1000 yards in one sweep. This straightened the line and brought the Germans under direct machine-gun fire.
While the 2/10th was making this move the enemy attacked in force on the 2/12th’s front. He was alarmed by the garrison’s apparently offensive preparations and wanted to get in first with an attack which he had evidently been preparing. Good as his observation was from Hill 209, the enemy knew that he could greatly increase the garrison’s difficulties by widening his salient and capturing a position known as ‘Figtree’ on the crest of the escarpment overlooking the Derna road. From there he could dominate the flat below this escarpment and force the garrison to withdraw at least to the Blue Line in this sector, and possibly even further.
Towards midnight on the 15th–16th Posts S8, S9 and S10 came under considerable small arms fire and by 2 a.m. the whole sector was being heavily mortared and shelled. Under cover of this, Germans attacked these posts from the south, while Italians went for S15 from the west. The Italians failed completely, even though they used flame-throwers and fought strongly. A few managed to get through the wire, but by dawn the rest had been routed and fifty were soon captured by the 2/12th’s patrols.
The Germans had greater success. From midnight onwards S8, S9 and S10 were covered by fire from anti-tank guns and machine-guns. Using tracer shells and bullets, the Germans cunningly guided their infantry to the Australian posts, marking each one with intersecting lines of tracer from either flank. By firing high they enabled their infantry to crawl up close to the posts before they were discovered. At S8 and S9, however, they struck stubborn opposition, which they could not subdue even with the help of tanks. At S9 they actually reached the anti-tank ditch around the post, but a counter-attack, led by Lieutenant A. L. Reid, drove them back.
Meantime another enemy party had pushed on with five tanks to S10, 500 yards behind the other two posts. While fire from the tanks kept its garrison below ground, flame-throwers sprayed the concrete trenches, until the men were virtually scorched out. Before dawn prisoners were observed being marched away from S10 and, as the signal lines to it and the other two posts had been cut, it was presumed that all three were in German hands.
Good shelling by the 51st Field Regiment fortunately prevented the tanks from doing any further damage, and before dawn on the 16th they withdrew. The 2/12th’s C.O. (Lieutenant-Colonel John Field) determined to counter-attack at once, but when a platoon led by Lieutenant G. H. Rose tried to get to S10 soon after dawn it was driven back by heavy fire.
Undiscouraged, another patrol attacked about midday with strong artillery support. It had to advance across 900 yards of open desert completely covered by enemy fire, but Lieutenant E. M. Steddy audaciously led his men in, captured the post and with it a German officer and twenty-seven men. He also found there three Australian wounded, who had been well cared for by the enemy. Although this attack succeeded, no one could get near S8 and S9 until after dark. It was then found that these posts had beaten off half a dozen enemy assaults and had almost run out of ammunition.
Long before this news came through, preparations had been made for the 2/23rd Battalion, supported by nine ‘I’ tanks, to counter-attack at dawn on May 17th. It was to retake S8 and S9 and continue on to S6 and S7. These two posts were particul
arly valuable because they were situated on top of a sharp escarpment which commanded a clear view of S8, S9 and S10. When Morshead learned that S8 and S9 had not been lost he ordered the 2/23rd to proceed with the attack on S6 and S7 and, if possible, go on to S5 and S4.
This was no easy task, for the enemy had established himself not only in the old Italian concrete perimeter posts, but also in strongly prepared positions both east and west of them. This meant that in attacking along the line of the old perimeter the Australians would come under fire from either flank as well as from their front. It was important, however, for the garrison to regain the initiative in view of the dangerous enemy concentrations around Acroma which, it was believed, might presage another major attack.
A dawn mist hung over the desert on the 17th as two companies of the 2/23rd waited at their start-line for the barrage to begin. At 5.27 a.m. the Northumberland Fusiliers with twelve Vickers guns put down a belt of fire over S6 and S7 and the flat ground behind them. Three minutes later came a barrage from thirty-nine British guns, a few of which laid a smoke screen around Hill 209 to blind the enemy O.Ps.
Tobruk 1941 Page 24
