Tobruk 1941

by Chester Wilmot

  ‘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 dug-out 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 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 nineteen who had been sleeping in the other dug-out – breezed in. ‘Blasted fleas kept me awake all day,’ he said. ‘Still, I can’t quite make up my mind what to do to-night. Dunno whether to go to the pictures or take me girl friend 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 dug-out 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 reos1 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:2

  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’ll 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 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?’

  ‘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 floor-boards of our open ‘pick-up’ – a sturdy little Morris truck specially built for war in the desert. It had no hood or wind-shield, 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 churched 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 rockface, 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 sand-bagged the entrances to the caverns and made ‘dug-outs’. 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 dug-out. It hadn’t gone off, but it had broken the battalion’s last bottle of whisky.

  The dug-out 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 dug-out 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 ground-sheet and dropped down a small hole into an old water-cistern – roughly pear-shaped and about thirty feet by twenty. 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 B.B.C. 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 B.B.C. 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 front line 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 dug-outs, 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.

  Suddenly from somewhere in the darkness two German machine-guns came to life. Bullets sang past the post, followed by sharp cracks like the back-lash of a stockwhip. We bent our heads below the parapet; the men working on the wire hopped back to their trenches and in a few seconds their guns were firing. There were only the corporal and six men in the post, but they had four automatic weapons and an anti-tank rifle between them. To their own tommy gun and Bren they had added a captured Fiat medium machine-gun and a light Breda. They gave the Germans a stirring reply.

  After five minutes it seemed that every enemy machine-gun for a mile around was firing on us. The Australian posts on either side joined in and the whole front was ablaze. From the German lines, four or five hundred yards away, went up flare after flare. They certainly knew where this post was. One machine-gun, firing on fixed lines, sent a stream of tracers a few feet above our heads every minute or so.

  ‘That’s a big bastard – probably a Schwartzloe,’ said the corporal. ‘Fires from somewhere near the water-tower. Too far away from us. If we had a Vickers or a decent mortar we might get him. But our mortars haven’t got the range. If we bring ’em up here, they draw the crabs. If we put ’em back behind somewhere, they can’t reach the water-tower.’

  After a quarter of an hour the enemy’s flares went up less often; one by one his guns stopped; but the big Schwartzloe still stuttered out occasional bursts and a few heavy mortars landed behind us. One more flare hung in the sky and spluttered out, leaving the now-silent German lines shrouded in darkness.

  The Australian posts on either side of us fell silent too, but the corporal said, ‘Keep ’er goin’, boys. Jerry started it.’ Turning to me he added, ‘If we didn’t give ’em more than they give us, we couldn’t even stick our heads out. We usually stir ’em up, but we’re keepin’ things quiet to-night. We’ve got some blokes comin’ up with mines. They should’ve been here before this started, but those mortars must’ve landed bloody near ’em.’

  Our guns kept going a little longer but the Germans didn’t want to renew the fight. ‘O.K.,’ said the corporal. ‘We’d better get on with the wiring.’ Grumbling a little, the troops scrambled out of the machine-gun pits. As he went, a Digger mumbled, ‘Gawd struth, corp., one thing you’ve always got plenty of round ’ere – and that’s blasted barbed wire.’

  A few minutes later half a dozen figures loomed up out of the darkness. It was the mine-carrying party. ‘Did you cop much o’ that, Joe?’ asked the corporal.

  ‘My oath,
we did,’ replied Joe. ‘The M.Gs was all right, but them mortars damn near blew me tin ’at off. You can ’ave that game. Lyin’ out there with a box o’ mines beside you, an’ Jerry mortars givin’ you the works. Got a water-bottle?’

  He took a swig, and then went on – ‘Brought some mail for yer. It come up too late for the ration party. I got a letter from ’ome meself to-day. A bloke’s a flamin’ mug – diggin’ ’ere in the desert, an’ back in Aussie rabbit-skins is eight-an’-six a pound.’

  I went back with the mine-carrying party. The front was lively again. Every few seconds a flare went up or a machine-gun burst whipped past. I was walking with Joe, and I found myself ducking involuntarily when anything happened. A couple of times we all flattened out on the sand and camel-thorn when something seemed to come rather close. But for the most part Joe walked nonchalantly on.

  As we approached the Company H.Q. in the fuggy cistern, I said to him, ‘Do you usually cop much on the way up at night, Joe?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you do an’ you don’t; but they gotta be good to get you.’

  _____________

  1 Reinforcements.

  2 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.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE BATTLE FOR NO-MAN’S-LAND

  After the failure of his two smash and grab attacks Rommel settled down to contain Tobruk. As the enemy rested on the defensive, Morshead and his men might well have done the same – sitting passively behind their defences. Had they done that, however, Tobruk would have played a much smaller part in the defence of Egypt in 1941; it might in fact have been lost. Morshead knew that the Battle for Tobruk – and even for Egypt – would be largely fought in the no-man’s-land outside his perimeter. The more offensive his garrison was, the greater the force Rommel would need to keep watching it, and the smaller the force he would have available to attack Egypt. ‘From the first day I determined that no-man’s-land would be our land,’ Morshead once told me.