Enlistment and deployment
Now I decided to enlist together with some of my mates there to the carpenters, jockeys, burglars and all sorts of people and we were seconded into different parts of the IAF and from there I was finally seconded to the artillery. And which was, I found myself in what was called that time the second second medium regiment, which was mainly of permanent soldiers from Queenscliff and a peon got us into heavy equipment from field equipment upwards and finished up.
Going to pick up I know, we were due to go to England to pick up the more modern guns but they lost those at Dunkirk, the British army was sadly defeated, of course there and we were then changed to a field regiment, which became known as the 2/12th Field Regiment, part of the Nazi Australian Division.
The other two failed regiments was 2/7th and 2/8th, and then we remained for the rest of the war, or Iraq for the next five years or so. I was fortunate enough to be there in the beginning and Roger the finish. Roger the finish.
Tobruk
But the same retreat took place and as I came back, I pass through the various places and Tobruk brings have such an important part water and other sort of basics that are required in the desert. That I don't know, we just found ourselves being called up as an artillery unit with a vast experience because a lot of our people in the second second medium regiment was former gunners from here from Queenscliff and peon operators or permanent soldiers, was there a guide to great skills and they thought that we could use some of the captured equipment.
And they're in we were it became closed off April the 10th, I think, so to use that as a general date that it was closed up. In other words, the Germans went around it and kept on going the main force and the perimeter ran from coast to coast with Tobruk sitting up in harbor situation, nice setup. And the basics required water and all these sort of things. Bliss sort of thing.
Support of the Navy
We were shipped into the place, I personally went in and we shall be ever be grateful to our navy, the destroyers and those ships that supported and kept us alive because without the navy we would not have seen out the distance. So I went into Tobruk, to be quite honest, on the Vampire, HMAS Vampire.
The Vampire, Vendetta, Waterhen and these vessels did countless runs and they put the, they came in on the phases of the moon at night, into the harbour in that period to get in and dump whatever they had.
General Morshead and good officers
It was to be a sort of temporary relief whereas the British forces would regather, rake over the territory and come and take Tobruk, of course, in three weeks or a month and our boss man said 'There will be no retreat here. There will be no Dunkirk. There will be no surrender and the only way we will get out of here is to fight our way out of it.
That's your alternative.' Morshead was our commander, General Morshead but we were blessed and my unit was blessed with very good officers and excellent drills and so forth which I was fortunate enough to serve because I served as a gun sergeant.
Luftwaffe raids
The Germans were operating for their Luftwaffe just below Tobruk at a place called El Adem. It was sort of a desert operation and they had plenty of aircraft and would give us a serve every, sometimes three times a day and I think he biggest raid we had during the siege of Tobruk would have been up around 100 planes or something like that. You didn't have much place to shift around.
Use of captured equipment
I personally went in with a haversack and a water bottle, the water bottle being about this size, you know, a couple of pints or something and a few items in the pack on your back and no gun. I can recall the sailors on board saying 'Righto boys, get off. Get off.' We were loading wounded on the other side off a lighter in the middle of the harbour and we were unloading one side and you're loading the wounded on and we thought 'What sort of war are we going to here? Do we fill these bags with rocks and run out and throw it at them or something like that?' However, when daylight came we were introduced to a lot of captured equipment and my regiment served on a multiple group of 75s, 100s, 105 millimetres and 149 millimetres and some old 60 pounders that were there and were used up because they were old British guns and they were the only ones that had the range to deal with Bardia Bill, the big German gun that was shelling the harbour all the time. We had sufficient range with a bit of punch in it and I finished up with a 75 millimetre Italian gun. I don't know, I've forgotten now what the year on the breech block was, something like 1910 or something but the problem being, of course, that they're in metric system and we're in the imperial system but just the brilliance of our officers and so forth, who had to do conversions of tables for the meteor corrections and all the things that go with artillery and what not, plenty of ammunition and so forth. They'd deal with a number of problems with prematures that killed gun crews and things like that. That burst. Anyhow that became our lot for the period of time there. There's not much places for alternative positions, you know, the area that we were contained in. The perimeter had something like about, I don't know, from one side to the other about fourteen miles, we were using miles in those days, of course, yards and so forth and degrees and about from the centre of town out to the edge of the perimeter would be about eighteen miles. That's the general area if you can visualise that because it was Tobruk itself. No trees. One tree, a fig tree.
The fig tree
The fig tree was a tree that was over a coral sort of found foundation with a big hole underneath it and it was used for all sorts of things, casualty clearing station for the perimeter of course for a lot of injuries and accidents, a headquarters, all sorts of things over its time. The three weeks it was supposed to be there, it lasted really for 242 days, I think, which was eight months.
Hard conditions at Tobruk
The hardest thing probably was. I don't know, each one of us found our problems. I suppose one bottle of water for all purposes, no trees and you're just out in the bare sunlight. Scrubby stuff, bit like sort of saltbush around the area. I've got a few photos of the area there. That was pretty hard to take, that does strange things to the mind at times when you look out there and it can get cold at night. It can be 45 degrees or more sometimes. Sandstorms come up and they just shut down the book for two three days at a time or a couple of days anyhow. Just like pulling a blind down from the sky and vicious sort of things come up out of the desert. We suffered a lot more of that of course at El Alamein later on and other times. No, it became a bit hard to take and dealing with disease and fleas. You couldn't imagine the fleas that gather in multiples, in a tin hat, and flies, that caused an awful lot of problem. Desert sores and hard rations all the time. I think old Bill Angliss wouldn't have not been too proud of his bully beef out of the tins, we turned the key in them just like a sardine tin or the package that they were in and the hot fat just run down the outside and that's breakfast, dinner, tea and hard rations a lot of time. And water. That was precious. That was precious.
Stuka attacks
The hurly burly of action, of course, the artillery apart from what they call counter battery fire, your enemy was on you all the time with the sound ranging and flash spotting equipment, they can pinpoint you pretty smartly but you didn't have the chance of shifting to another position sometimes to give you a bit of a temporary break as you can in other territory. That was a bit hard to take and our duty of which, I always consider the infantry the back bone of the army in my book. Our job was to give them every support we possibly could. You stand to no matter what and you take it and the Stukas gave us a fair sort of attention because they used this Stuka, a pretty accurate sort of a thing, it comes down, if you can imagine, and they scream, and they open every door or whatever apparatus they've got but they're screaming all the time they come down and you watch the bomb come from out under the plane and they're aiming straight at you, like that, and then they pull away. They were hard and the German artillery was pretty accurate.
Psychological and physical pressure
On the human side of it I suppose the thing that gets you is probably your mind disciplines got to be good. The physical bearing you learn to live with a lot of those things but as in other places too, the unseen is a very hard thing to take and attending to casualties, you learn to cope with that in a way but sometime in your period of service, when you're in action, I think there's more VCs buried in the Western Desert than came out of it. But to experience these things is, it can affect your metabolism alters a little bit with the danger, of course, some of us are a bit stronger than others but trust is one of the most important things and your faith in your mates. It's something money can't buy.
Ten killed in a truck
With the sixty pounders that we were using we tried to get a couple of alternative positions and dig them in another area, to shift the guns at night and that sort of thing and part of the team, there was ten on a crew of a sixty pounder. A number of ancillary people were in the back of big truck in the middle of the day, quite quiet actually, sometimes in the middle of the day as it could be. A lot of our infantry patrols were done at night. The infantry boys were very, very good at that sort of thing. They were coming back and there was a lone spotter up and he was just flying about and they wouldn't throw too much artillery up at the one bloke about the place because you're giving away your own position and that sort of thing and the German artillery had opened up and just dropped, they'd bracketed the movement of the vehicle and one of the gunfire shots landed in the back of the truck and killed ten blokes and they're in there all buried alongside one another.
El Alamein
The most horrifying sight I think I've ever had anything to do with or seen was a British Army in retreat in North Africa and what happened was the 8th Army in retreat and we're going the other way, seemed to be an idiotic sort of thing, and they were just smashing up new equipment a lot of the time, disabling it. We went straight up to this place called El Alamein which was a place just as big as a garage or something like that, that was all that was there. But the feature was sufficient, between the sea and the Qattara Depression was about 40 miles of territory, and the Germans run out of steam. To support that sort of quick movement you gotta have all the supplies, that happened to be the case and we went straight into action. Our infantry went in, nine battalions of the infantry went in and I do recall vividly that on the 10th of July, we didn't even take the guns in. We just set up camp and surveyed the guns.
25 pounder versatility
When that settles down you then become, you dig a hole and put the gun in it and all that sort of stuff and you're there for the long haul. We built up from, we had 25 pounders there, and that was the best gun we had during the war. They had great adaptability, they were mobile. They had the vehicle pulling them, of course, but when they dropped the gun, the vehicles move away into a rear position but they had a platform that they went up on and the gun sat up on that and the repercussions and buffer and recoils and all those sort of things, it steadied. It had four different charges. You could use it, it could be used as a howitzer as well, that means more like a mortar. You would lower the charge, put the shell into the breech and then the cartridge in behind it and reduce the charge and that allowed you to pop it up in the air like that on a shorter range and just allow it to get over any obstacles, or, with more punch and power in it you could alter the bags of cordite you were using in it on a shallower trajectory it would travel a longer distance and then we had one in reserve using the same shell but with another supercharge and a maximum range of, well the most I ever got out of a 25 pounder but just on odd occasions when we did have to move you'd leapfrog and go as far forward and then this mob pull out and go to the front. It was a very versatile gun and, yeah, my regiment fired 359,800 odd rounds at the Battle of El Alamein in the first twenty-four hours, off my gun alone on the gun program, 653 rounds in twenty-four hours and you've got to manhandle these guns. There's a hundred pound weight and four shells in a case so you get muscles on muscles.
Desert v Jungle
The unseen is the biggest problem in the jungle. That registers in more ways than one. There would be more, in my humble opinion, more taxing on the system than the ironmongery that gets thrown around in the other area. The desert actually was a good place to have a big war to be quite honest. That sounds silly, forgive me for saying that but in my opinion it was wide open territory.
There was no women and children or any of that sort of involvement. Teams were operating against each other and it gave them room, large areas of room to move. Some of those tank battles, you know, they're talking 200 or 300 tanks running around the paddock having a go at one another. It's a frightening thought. Mayhem. Mayhem.
The importance of training
A lot of the deeds that were done by people, you know, and your own actions at times when you've got to make a decision on certain things. What comes to the top, I suppose, is like milk and cream. If you've got good product knowledge and a lot of the things. I went to a number of British schools in the Middle East. I did a number of schools and one of the best I went to was not long after we landed in the Middle East.
The commanding officer said 'You're a bit of an expert on machine guns.' I said 'Well I was an infantry trained bloke before doing the artillery.' And he said 'Right. I want you to take charge' for the period of time we were teaching these blokes about machine guns. This was before we went overseas. Well when you see these things happen, there's a lot, there's a requirement for instant reaction. It can only be performed well with constant study and familiarity.
It can be contemptible after a little while if you're not careful, too familiar with the thing but if you've got the skill, the product knowledge, I like to call it and I shall never forget some of those British army instructors we ran into in the British schools in the Middle East. Some of them were very, very good soldiers and had been in the army twelve years and served in Hong Kong and China, the North West frontier in India and these places. I'm talking about Afghanistan and that type of country.
They had the skills that went with that and they'd actually been there and they'd come back. Some of these instructors were the greatest friend you had and as soon as the whistle blew and you were in a class, you'd reckon you had malaria or something or leprosy. They'd cut you to pieces but they insisted on product knowledge and when it comes to an emergency, that's when it comes out.
A lot of the deeds that were done by people, you know, and your own actions at times when you've got to make a decision on certain things. What comes to the top, I suppose, is like milk and cream. If you've got good product knowledge and a lot of the things. I went to a number of British schools in the Middle East. I did a number of schools and one of the best I went to was not long after we landed in the Middle East.
The commanding officer said 'You're a bit of an expert on machine guns.' I said 'Well I was an infantry trained bloke before doing the artillery.' And he said 'Right. I want you to take charge' for the period of time we were teaching these blokes about machine guns. This was before we went overseas. Well when you see these things happen, there's a lot, there's a requirement for instant reaction.
It can only be performed well with constant study and familiarity. It can be contemptible after a little while if you're not careful, too familiar with the thing but if you've got the skill, the product knowledge, I like to call it and I shall never forget some of those British army instructors we ran into in the British schools in the Middle East. Some of them were very, very good soldiers and had been in the army twelve years and served in Hong Kong and China, the North West frontier in India and these places.
I'm talking about Afghanistan and that type of country. They had the skills that went with that and they'd actually been there and they'd come back. Some of these instructors were the greatest friend you had and as soon as the whistle blew and you were in a class, you'd reckon you had malaria or something or leprosy. They'd cut you to pieces but they insisted on product knowledge and when it comes to an emergency, that's when it comes out.
