Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Enlistment
My father had served in the First World War and fought on the Western Front but he got gassed and sent back home.
He told me he wouldn't allow me to join the army but he died Christmas 1939 when I was seventeen and on my eighteenth birthday that's when I tried to join the army and got in on the beginning of my nineteenth birthday.
The front line
Mostly you kept awake at night-time to fight off any patrols our anything because we'd go out to a listening post out from our front lines and our patrols would be out at night, actually we owned No Man's Land.
Our patrols were out guarding the perimeter every night and it was just one big battle of the night and it was pretty dusty in the desert and to dig your trenches, where you had to dig them, they were rocky. It was sort of a rocky desert and you couldn't go down, sometimes you'd only be that deep in the trench so you had to keep your head down all the time.
You had the heat of the day and at night-time, the cool, the desert nights and that, especially if you had to be out at a listening post just laying there waiting for the enemy to come. You had your minefields but you had your path to go through them. You had your tripwires and all different things like that and your barbed wire and all that surrounding your own post.
There was no continuous trench system. There was a section post here and one would there and the next one would be over there. That's how the front line went but it was never ever continuous like a trench system was in the First World War.
Lack of showers
We wouldn't bath or shower or anything like that for at least a month. When we came out of the front line, they would take us down to the sea so we could have a clean up down there but that was few and far between. They were pretty harsh. You didn't feel dirty but, you know, you were a bit grubby by the time you had done your service in the front line.
We were three to four weeks we'd be in the front line, it depended on the conditions and the movements of the enemy and the same with our troops in other parts of the front line which stretched right round Tobruk, so it was quite a length to look after.
Wounded in the front line
We were in there, in the normal trench system and then we were transferred back to what they call the blue line which is the second line of defence and it was the first time we'd sat above ground for about a month because back in the blue line because you were away from small-arms fire and you could lie on the ground there at night-time and then round about lunch time all hell broke loose.
The big guns were firing at us and the planes were coming in strafing us and everything so we knew something was going on in the front line and that was when the salient was formed. We were taken in by that and what really happened was, they decided, that was when the Germans took a section of the front line, they decided to send us straight back in.
It was yes and no going on all the time and they raced us in but it was too late at night time and we dropped short of the front line and by the time we got to a certain point where the artillery thought we were, we weren't, and then that created a bit of havoc and that because their guns opened up on us again and that was when the front line was gone and it was that night that I received a bullet wound and anyway that's where we formed the front line so it was the trench system that we built.
You could only go down about waist deep in that section of the desert. I was sent back to the, not the reserve battalion, the reserve company, and then when I came back to report, you know, they were nowhere to be seen and that's when the machine-gun opened up and I just happened to cop a bullet. It was a flesh wound fortunately for me. It was about seventeen hours before I was treated. You don't run away from scratches like that.
Strafing attacks
That was common. It was common practice, especially when you were in the front line. It was more so when they were going to attack too, they'd send them in. You'd look up and you'd just about see the whites of their eyes before they released their 500lb bomb on you, but these things happen.
Bombs fall all around you and you survive…as long as you were below ground level, if you get a direct hit, that's unfortunate but as long as you were below ground level no matter where the bombs hit, all the shrapnel would go but you were safe below ground level but it just comes, you do it in your stride. These things happen every day.
Patrolling
You just go out trying to look for the enemy or trying to get the strength of the enemy. You're testing the enemy all the time. You go out and you're probing here and probing there. Or you might a German patrol or an enemy patrol in the desert. You just do your work and hopefully you get back to your own front line.
Then we had a special group that would be behind the line and they'd come up of a night-time and do all these patrols and we used to do our own from our own trenches where we would have a listening post to warn the trench system that the enemy was approaching and things like that but every night we had patrols out there so I think the enemy was on their toes knowing that the Australians were in No Man's Land every night.
War, war, war
We had lots of fun together with our mates, you know, even though it was wartime and everything was war day after day, night after night. It was just war, war, war, war. But we had our own fun in the group.
We used to get the mail from home and you had to go down behind the front line to bring up your hot meal. If everything was quiet you could go down and bring that back up, bring your ammunition up and all that, so we used to get the mail up and of course we'd pass on the news from home around with the boys, you know, so it was quite good.
But you get used to the sand blowing here and blowing there and you get used to the conditions and after almost nine months, you know, it was just common knowledge and practice and just bare the days in and out, so it was quite good.
Captured and escape to Switzerland
We captured Tel El Eisa. Two sections of us were left we didn't know the rest of the battalion had fallen back to higher ground and we were captured and we were taken to Italy and put into what was called the bad boys camp, then we were sent out to work camps, well three of us escaped from there and we walked across the Swiss Alps into Switzerland and the first three days it rained and they couldn't find us, you know, in the mountains.
So long as we could get some distance away from there and then we just marched and walked on. We had to change from our uniforms to civilian clothes and we only had ordinary shoes and that, yet we walked right across the mountains into Switzerland.
The mountain people were very good and we were in the French Italian section and they were very, quite kind to us but you couldn't trust anybody so we just, even when we were given a bed at night-time we'd just jump out the window and just wander off because you didn't know who you could trust so we just kept plodding across the mountains.
We surrendered to a guard post and they said they'd been watching us for hours coming down the mountains on their side and they were quite good and then when the second front came, we came out through Geneva into France and back home to join our own army again.
Inward contentment
We don't talk about it much but inwardly you feel that you have done something great that's helped Australia, you know, because we were the first to beat Hitler's army back in those days, so inwardly you feel quite content with yourself, you know, that you have achieved something. It was one of the great victories of the war.
