Conditions in Tobruk
Oh, well, you had sandstorms, you know, real bad sandstorms, you couldn't see from here to that wall, real bad ones but you had the fleas and the rats and all that sorts of things you could have well done without and our water supply was, we were rationed on water and the navy used to have to bring the water in. They did have one well there but the supply wasn't any good. Why they didn't put down more wells I don't know.
The tucker dump
Oh, well, food was hard. A lot of fellas lost weight but I didn't lose much weight, I didn't lose any but they had what they called dog biscuits, square ones like that, they were as hard as the hogs of hell but there was a lot of goodness in these things and if you could scrounge some milk, scrounge, pieces, and put the dog biscuits in your dixies and put a bit of milk on them then they were like porridge in the morning and made it a lot more palatable.
You'd have three or four fellas go down to the tucker dump and drop one fell off and he'd go and talk to that guard, and then drop another fella off and the other couple get into that tucker dump, and put them on the ute we had and head back to our digs which was on the blue line and you had a bit of milk that you pinched as well and on the blue line, if you were lucky, you'd get down to have a swim now and then, that was about the only good, and wash your head in salty water and of a night time up on the red line, they used to bring up stews in hot boxes and they used to bring them up so far in vehicles and they used to carry them from there into the front line for the fellas to have a warm meal, all sorts of different concoctions.
They'd feed you on the one thing, you know, until everyone got sick of it and then they'd change the diet…like rice. They reckon they must have found a big stock of it up in one those pyramids down there and were feeding us this rice for months, because, oh well, it was handy, you put it into curries, chucked a few raisins in amongst it and that was sweets.
Patrolling
Oh, well, you'd have, well it depends, you'd have bigger patrols and smaller ones. One lot there, we'd be out of a night-time, maybe sending eight or ten of you in a patrol. You're looking for new minefields and any sign of the other fellas prowling around, all that sort of thing. The odd time they went out with the idea of attacking one of their posts to take a prisoner in to find out what he knew. Yes, but that was on nearly every night.
A lucky escape
After Tobruk they, there was Alamein and the 2/28th Battalion, the tanks surrounded them and they run out of ammo. The Germans grabbed them and put them in the bag but I was in the 63rd British General Hospital in Cairo, so I didn't get caught and when they came back, they reformed the battalion but me mates they were all in the anti-tanks so I went into a different mob, the guerrilla platoon and we used to go out prowling around every bloody night, you know, those special glasses, watches, seeing, but that was Alamein.
Wounded by a mortar shell
Anyway we got up to this, Ruin Ridge and they said, "You've gone too far. It's the ridges behind you." So we went back to that one and got back, and I think it must have been a mortar, landed about where that the bloke is sitting on the chair there, and I got one in the wrist there. Only a little bit and another one went into that foot there and they had to needle it…and fish it out.
The one in the wrist was not bad. They didn't do nothing there and years and years after I had something wrong with that hand and they said, "What did you have your wrist operated for?" I said, "I never had my wrist operated on." But there's two little bits in there still. Only as big as a match head, they actually itch.
Allotments and leave
One of the worst parts about it was a lot of the fellas they made an allotment to their wives or girlfriends, or mothers and whoever and some of them only left themselves a shilling a day which was only seven shillings a week and when you're out of the line, if you went to the canteen, your shilling a day didn't go far and if leave came up then a lot of them didn't have the money to go on leave. I didn't have no allotment and the extra shilling a day soon mounted up as well.
I always had money in the paybook so if leave did come up, well, I was able to go. I went to Cairo one time for a week and something happened in the desert and I had to stay for another week.
Making do
Oh, well, it was a big thing to stop the Germans in the Second World War. That was the first time they'd ever been stopped and this was by a mob of people who weren't properly trained and we were poorly equipped but when you look at it deeper, we'd just come out of a depression here in Australia and, the depression year, if you were farming or whatever you were doing, if anything went wrong you had to make do and they same thing happened in the army. Whatever you had you had to make do. You had to do the best to your advantage and that's what they done.
A big butterfly
Another time there at Finschhafen, one of our companies got cut off and they sent a carrying party out to take supplies to them. They had a protective mob on each side of them, a screen, they got half way out to where these blokes were cut off and they got, the Japs had a trap set up for them and they went up on these hills, three or four, so the others they retreated back and the following day they had to go out again and I had, the main carrying and a party on each side, a fighting patrol, I was in charge of the one on the left hand side and another fella on the right hand side but we took them and the padre came out and a couple of fellas with shovels to bury the men killed.
The padre was a fella called Ben Holt. He was a big tall fella, about six foot two or something. He was a pom but he wasn't a bad one and he was real bald and we were burying these fellas from the day before and he got half way through the service and up in New Guinea they have them big butterflies, you know, big colourful wings about that big, and he was half way through his service and this big butterfly come and perched on his bald pate, you know, so there's always two sides to, wherever you go, a very serious occasion and something like that happens and you have to look on the bright side. It's no use looking at the other side of things, you know, where you start to worry and worry kills people. Yes , but he got killed, that padre, so you never know your luck in this hard world.
