Eyewitness (9 page)

At seven in the morning the enemy poured a heavy and intense barrage upon us. The men were wanting sleep, but none was possible while they were stretched on that rack. Three-fourths of our total casualties were caused by the shelling. It lasted till nightfall.

Meanwhile, the two companies at the centre of the northern side of Villers-Bretonneux were pushing on steadily into the town. The Germans, at first taken unawares, were captured or killed in hundreds. There were combats from house to house. At daylight our men were advancing boldly through the streets, fired on from right and left, liable at any minute to be cut off. There were five spears pushing towards the centre of the town – two slender companies of the 57
^th
from the left side, the English from the rear, and two detachments of the 13
^th
Brigade from the right. All eventually met about the centre, then turning east, swept the Germans out of the town. Over a thousand Germans were captured in Villers-Bretonneux itself as they fled, the few that escaped capture or death were sniped at from our trenches on the left. Wonderful stories are told: of four men attacking over 100 Prussian Guardsmen, fully officered, and killing or capturing all after a stand-up fight in the open street; of a single man capturing six officers and a dozen N.C.O.s in a house within the area held at the time by the Huns. There was an enormous booty in the town – field guns, field kitchens, many
minenwerfers
, heavy and light, hundreds of machineguns (13 were found in a hedge 90 yards long and 200 yards on the right of the place where we first encountered fire in the attack), many revolvers, technical instruments and rifles, much transport, both motor and horsed; also horses and mules, some with British markings. There were also recaptured British confidential documents, some of which had left the army printing shop within that very week.

The detachments in the town appeared on the eastern fringes at about 10 a.m., and filled the gap between the two brigades. The battle was won. A captured German staff officer said to an Australian colonel, ‘This was to have given us victory. Now I can only congratulate you on the quality of your regiments.’ He was openly incredulous when told the number of the attacking force.

Several men arrived at a chateau on the outskirts of the town. It had belonged to a millionaire, and was regally furnished. There was an aviary in the grounds where birds from all parts of the world were kept. They were all dead – killed by the gas that the Germans had poured into the town before their attack. The men entered the chateau, found a billiard table, and with a typical gaiety began to play while bullets smacked through the window above their heads. They sniped the enemy through a hole in the wall between shots. One of them was pounding ragtime choruses on a grand piano.

On the Warfusée Road the men were having a bad time from shells and machine-guns. Casualties were mounting fast. Before the morning sun had completely dispelled the mists, communication from the rear was easy. Our line was on the forward slope of a ridge. There were no communication trenches. The summit behind was heavily wired. Among this wire there occurred a series of heroic acts which are no less wonderful because they are not rare.

At about 9 a.m. two runners were picking their way through the entanglement toward the front-line. The mist suddenly lifted, and they were shot down by many machine-guns. One was killed, the other wounded. Throughout that day, man after man attempted to reach him. First, two stretcher-bearers succeeded in getting him upon their stretcher, when both fell, riddled with bullets; thereafter no-one was able to approach within a hundred yards. The result by 4 p.m. was four killed and five wounded in attempting the rescue. Then a man, whose name is known only to his comrades, sprang from the trench, and aided by extraordinary luck, traversed untouched 200 yards, calmly picked his way through the entanglements while bullets kicked up the dust and struck sparks from the wire. Then he carried the wounded man over the ridge. He made in all four journeys, and returned to the front-line.

That night the line was consolidated under shell-fire. The next day was occupied by the miserable business of sitting still and being pounded by shells, with brief intervals every four or five hours. During the following night new dispositions were made. Some of the brigade, moving from one part of the line to another, passed the English in a support trench. The latter asked them, with doubt and apprehension in their voices, if the Australians were going away. ‘Yes,’ was the careless answer, meaning that they themselves were vacating that particular section of the line. Gloom settled obviously on the Tommies, who apparently had learnt to lean on the strength of the Australians’ arms, and having seen their work, regarded them as supermen. But when they heard that other Australians were moving into that place, the word was passed along very eagerly, and a subdued but spontaneous cheer of relief went with it, which was flattering to hear. Incidentally, the English we had ‘salvaged’ could only with difficulty be persuaded to leave us. They were better cared for than with their own people.

Next day the 58
^th
and 60
^th
advanced a little to straighten the line.

About 6 a.m. on the 27th, after the vigil of the night, when the order to stand down had passed along the trench, when the rum had been served and the men were beginning to crawl under their waterproof sheets for their daylight sleep, the enemy commenced to shell. Then large bodies of Germans were seen coming over the opposite hill in dense parallel columns. While two white stars, our S.O.S., were still hovering in the sky, our barrage, mostly shrapnel, descended on their masses with a deadly accuracy which counterbalanced the relative weakness of our artillery. The enemy were stopped and slaughtered in heaps while the infantry riddled the masses with lead from rifles and Lewis guns. The Germans did not reach within 400 yards of our trench. They burrowed, shot at by our men. On the night of the 29th, we returned to our dugouts in the Aubigny line.

In a little more than three days, Villers-Bretonneux had been recaptured under circumstances which seemed not to admit the remotest chance of success, the equivalent of at least one and a half strong enemy divisions had been utterly destroyed, our position had been consolidated and held until the crucial days had passed, and a strong German attack had been completely smashed – all by the same few men.

Companies in the morning gathered round in pathetic groups of 20 or 30, to hear the rare thanks of Field Marshall Douglas Haig in special orders of the day.

Chester Wilmot

Tobruk was captured by the Australian 6
^th
Division on January 21st–22nd, 1941, and defended (mostly) by the 9
^th
Division which withdrew into it after Rommel’s advance in March and April 1941. With the help of British artillery, and courageously supplied by sea, the Rats of Tobruk held on until relieved in August, and all except one battalion were out by October. Australian commander General Leslie Morshead had promised: ‘There will be no Dunkirk here. If we should have to get out we’ll fight our way out. There is to be no surrender and no retreat.’

The Salient, in the south-west corner of the defensive perimeter, was the only place the Germans made any ground during the Australian occupation.

Tobruk was captured from British and South African troops in January 1942, and recaptured in November 1942 after the Battle of El Alamein.

Reginald William Winchester Wilmot was born in 1911, son of the distinguished journalist and sportswriter Reginald William Ernest Wilmot. Father was R.W.E. Wilmot whose nom-de-plume in the
Argus
and
Australasian
was ‘Old Boy’. R.W.W. became the more manageable Chester, and went to the same school – Melbourne Grammar. He graduated in Arts and Law from Melbourne University in 1936, having been President of the SRC, and prominent in the formation of the National Union of Australian University Students.

Wilmot gave talks for the ABC, visited Germany in 1938, started an articled clerkship and to his great relief was appointed as a journalist to the ABC’s field unit which went to the Middle East in September 1940. He spent several months at Tobruk, arriving in August 1941 with all too fallible recording equipment, making several broadcasts accompanied by the sound of battle, and interviewing many of the soldiers after action.

In 1942 he was on the Kokoda Track with Osmar White and the great photographer Damien Parer, a comrade from the Middle East. Much of his work here was censored.

Wilmot impressed ordinary soldiers with his willingness to talk and interview them, to share their dangers; and many officers with his grasp of strategy. But not Australian Commander-in-Chief General Sir Thomas Blamey, who relieved him of his commission in November 1942. Wilmot, journalist, had a sniff of one of the unsavoury, and probably true, stories that clung to Blamey during the war, and Blamey exacted revenge by trying to have him conscripted into the army. Wilmot was supported by the ABC through this, and although Blamey tried to prevent it, he was eventually permitted to work for the BBC, covering the invasion of Europe.

While in limbo in Australia, Wilmot wrote his classic account
Tobruk 1941
(1944), and the riveting and perceptive history of the war in Europe and its aftermath,
Struggle for Europe
(1952).

After the war he worked for the BBC, and was sadly killed in a crash of the BOAC Comet airliner in 1954 on his way back from Australia. Transcripts of his ABC broadcasts, including those from Tobruk, were published as
Chester Wilmot Reports
in 2005.

*

Holding the Salient was a matter of patience as much as courage, for boredom and discomfort were persistent enemies. In the pages that follow I have set down what I saw and heard while living for several days among the troops who held these positions.

All day we lay in a dugout just big enough for three Diggers and me stretched out. Four feet above us was a roof of corrugated iron resting on sleepers and over that sandbags, earth and bits of camel-bush, which made the top of the dugout just one more piece of desert to German snipers scanning the level plain from 500 yards away. The late afternoon sun beat down on the sandbags. We were clammy with sweat. The wind died away and dust stopped drifting in through the small air vent and the narrow low doorway that led to the crawl trench outside. The air was heavy with dust, cigarette smoke and the general fug we’d been breathing in and out for the past 13 hours. We waited for darkness when we could stretch our legs and fill our lungs with fresh, cool air, and the troops could crack at the Hun who had been lying all day in his dugout, too.

Every so often we’d hear the rumble of guns, and shells would whistle high overhead. The gunners were having their evening ‘hate’, but the enemy’s shells were landing well back. His machine-guns had been silent since dawn. Even his mortars had not been landing with their usual unheralded crump around our forward posts. It had been a quiet day – like so many since the hard battles in the Salient in May.

I woke about seven in the evening and started to scratch. I seemed to be itching all over – the itchiness of being dirty. You get that way after the flies and fleas have been at you all day. You don’t know whether you’ve been bitten or not, and you just scratch as a matter of routine. In the far corner Mick was doing a bit of hunting. He had his shirt off. Seriously, deliberately he ran his thumb nail under the seam and a slow smile of success spread across his face. ‘Got you, you little — That makes four less anyway!’

Over by the phone Ernie, the platoon commander, was censoring letters, which had to go back to Company H.Q. with the ration party after dark. He was only a sergeant and should not have been exercising an officer’s privilege of censoring letters, but his battalion (the 2/24
^th
) was still so short of officers that this rule was not strictly observed in the case of platoon commanders whose commissions were about to come through any day.

Ernie had shaved since lunch and then ‘bathed’ in his shaving water. He said he felt a new man. The phone beside him buzzed. ‘Ernie’s here,’ he said, ‘… Say again … oh … ammo … Send us up 500 Bren and 500 Breda … yeah … got plenty o’ smokes … an’ look, what’s the ration with that writin’ paper? … What? … Three envelopes and eight sheets a man … an’ I got to censor the lot … OK … What? … Oh, pretty quiet down here … not even enough to make life interestin’ … No, nothin’ else – not unless you got some bloody beer.’

Beer? Even Charlie woke up at that; a Queensland miner, he still had a miner’s thirst. He didn’t do very well on a water bottle a day. ‘Beer,’ he said, ‘there ain’t no such thing. I ’aven’t ’ad four beers in the last six months, and we won’t get no more now till they get us out of ’ere; an’ Gawd knows when that’ll be.’

Mick chipped in again – ‘I know what I’ll do when I get out. I’m going to a pub and I’m going to have a hot bath and splash the water all over the floor – I’m going to waste it. Then I’ll drain out the mud and fill the bath again with clean water and I’ll lie there and wallow. And while I’m lying there they can bring me iced beer. And when I’ve had enough of the bath, and I’ve had a feed, I’ll just get into bed and they can bring me beer and more beer. I’ve got a six months’ thirst!’

Charlie broke in – ‘Well, if you was given the choice of beer or a bath right now, what’d you pick?’

‘I’d rather have a bath,’ said Ernie. ‘One beer now’d only take the dust off my throat. Even a bottle wouldn’t do any real good. I’d rather get clean in a decent bath and get on some clean clobber instead of the lousy things that you live in here day and night till you stink.’

They all agreed with Ernie, but right then a cup of tea would have done. We hadn’t had one all day. We didn’t have a primus and we couldn’t light a fire. The enemy hadn’t picked up this post and the boys didn’t want to give him a trail of smoke on which to lay his machine-guns.

We’d been up all night and during the day the flies and fleas had done their best to stop us sleeping. We’d had a quiet night, but the troops were still weary. The tucker had been late getting up from the company cook-house, and the bully stew and tea were almost cold by the time they reached the forward posts. The carrying party had been held up by enemy machine-guns firing during those few hours just after dark when there was almost a gentleman’s agreement not to fire at all, so that both sides could get their evening meal.

Usually from dark until midnight you could safely move around the Salient posts, but about twelve o’clock the fun started. By day you couldn’t move at all. In the dead flat desert the machine-gunners and snipers on both sides could see every move. And so for 13 hours of daylight both sides lay quiet and fought vermin and boredom. In most parts you couldn’t even stand up, for the unyielding Libyan rock made the digging of deep trenches impossible in this sector. This meant that you lay in a stuffy dugout all day and sat in a cramped shallow weapon pit all night. You might stretch your legs going back to Company H.Q. after dark to guide the ration party forward. That was exercise but it was no pleasure stroll, for you never knew when the Hun would forget the rules and start sweeping the desert with machine-guns.

You couldn’t dig communication trenches leading back to Company and Battalion H.Q., as in France during the last war, and for hundreds of yards back behind the front there was no dead ground to give you cover. In fact, most of the time you were safer in the front-line posts than walking about on the plain. You might also find some exercise in working on the posts at night – repairing the wire or digging deeper weapon pits and trenches; but you couldn’t do much between bursts of fire. You had to keep the upper hand by giving the Germans more than burst for burst. Some nights these private machine-gun battles developed into willing combats with fire from mortars and artillery added. During the night you took your turn in the listening post a couple of hundred yards out in no-man’s-land –lying in an 18-inch trench; straining your eyes and ears; slowly growing numb with cold. Then came the stand-to, and you waited for dawn with its uneasy quiet.

Once it was light, if anyone happened to be wounded or ill, he had to lie there until dark, while his mates gave him what attention they could. One afternoon in a forward post a sergeant was badly wounded. His mates couldn’t move him back in daylight, so a Digger telephoned to Company H.Q. While he was speaking a mortar cut the line, but the Digger crawled out some distance under enemy fire and repaired it. From telephoned directions he dressed the wounds and kept the Sergeant alive until he could be taken out on a stretcher. It wasn’t altogether a sweet job in the Salient posts. Quite apart from discomfort and the nervous strain of holding the most vital part of the perimeter, there was the constant struggle with boredom.

There was little to do in the drawn-out daylight hours in a muggy, cramped dugout. You could try to make up for lost sleep; or write a few letters – only there wasn’t much to tell; or read a well-thumbed magazine or book that was lying round the dugout – but you’d probably read them before; you could smoke cigarette after cigarette – if you had enough. The supply was better than it had been – 50 a week as an issue; perhaps another 50 from the canteen or the Comforts Fund. But you needed every cigarette you could get when time hung heavy on your hands.

Boredom and discomfort took your appetite away. You had a hot meal at night. That was usually fairly good – these days anyhow – bully-beef stew with vegetables; tea and a pudding, sometimes stewed fruit. But for other meals you couldn’t cook anything. If you didn’t possess a primus – and few posts did – you just had bread and marg., jam and cheese, washed down with chlorinated water for breakfast and lunch.

Usually you didn’t feel hungry enough to tackle the ration of cold bully, let alone the cold tinned bacon or salt herrings. There were about 20 tins of these stacked in a corner of the dugout.

‘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 dugout 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’d 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 19 who had been sleeping in the other dugout – breezed in. ‘Blasted fleas kept me awake all day,’ he said. ‘Still, I can’t quite make up my mind what to do tonight. Dunno whether to go to the pictures or take me girlfriend 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 dugout 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 reos [reinforcements] 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: