Desert Boys- Australians at War from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein

745 Pages·2016·36.52 MB·English

by  Rees Peter

:4s gritty as it is real. An amazing book about ordinary
Australians made extraordinary by the times they lived
through . . .' PETER FITZS.MONS
PETER REES
Australians at war from Beersheba
to Tobruk and El Alamein
PETER REES
DESERT
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Australians at war from Beersheba
to Tobruk and El Alamein
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ALLEN &UNWIN
First published in Australia in 2011
Copyright © Peter Rees 2011
Maps by Ian Faulkner
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CONTENTS
'"!I •••
Author's note ix
Introduction xi
Maps
Egypt, 1916 XVlll
Palestine, 1917-18 XIX
Beersheba xx:
North Africa, World War II XXI
Greece and Crete, 1941 xxii
Lebanon and Syria, 1941
XXIll
PART I WORLD WAR I
1 Cairo bound 3
2 Spoiling for a fight 18
3 Desert patrols 33
4 A bit of a jaunt 49
5 Hell let loose 64
6 A ripping fight 87
7 Dead scared 109
8 A brilliant escape 119
9 We thought we had the place 130
vi DESERT BOYS
10 Enough to make one sick to death 142
11 No forgiveness in the air 160
12 Take the town before dark 176
l3 The wild ride 191
14 They are not soldiers; they are madmen 208
15 Fed up 227
16 Hell in the Jordan Valley 242
17 Chappattis at Ziza 260
18 The finest cavalry feat the world has ever known 274
19 Going home 285
20 Between wars 295
PART II WORLD WAR II
21 Unprepared 307
22 Camp life 322
23 lven's thunderbox 344
24 The kind eyelids of night 363
25 Colonel Thruster 380
26 Tobruk booze 394
27 Puffs in the sand 414
28 Face to face with the Hun 431
29 Hisses from the rocks 448
30 Abandoned on Crete 465
31 Wishing for a Murray moon 479
32 Just one shot 503
33 Dick Camm's Pioneers 519
34 Forgotten in Syria 538
35 The shroud 554
36 The balance shifts 564
37 Dog fights 576
38 Local goodwill 595
39 The EI Alamein box 609
40 A premonition 624
41 Dinner at Romanos 640
CONTENTS
vii
Epilogue 657
Acknowledgements 661
Notes 665
Bibliography 684
Index 694
AUTHOR'S NOTE
~.II
In Laurence Binyon's poem 'For the Fallen', which adorns numerous war
memorials around Australia, there is a verse that every Australian knows:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
And then there is the refrain from the hymn 'Recessional': 'Lest we forget'.
But forget what, and just how do we remember those men and women who
have given their lives on behalf of Australia during war?
There is, of course, the biannual observance of two minutes' silence on
Anzac Day and Remembrance Day, but what are we really remembering in
that silence? Perhaps we reflect on the concept of sacrifice in war in general,
without really knowing just what that sacrifice means: the odds against which
the sacrifice was made and the pain and devastation of the families who were
left behind.
About 1300 Australians died in the desert campaigns in World War I,
while another 3500 died in the desert and Mediterranean campaigns in
World War II. Thousands more carried the wounds of war for the rest of
ix
x DESERT BOYS
their lives. Countless were the families who mourned them. A ripple of grief
passed down the generations.
And then there are the times of victory and elation. But how were those
victories won? What perseverance and daring were required? And just how
did the troops deal with their fear to achieve those victories? Through letters,
diaries, personal memoirs and recollections told to family members, we can
begin to answer these questions and remember as individuals some of the
men and women who fought. Not everyone wrote a diary, and not all letters
sent home were preserved. But those that were represent the many, and
through them we can better understand just what the troops endured day
to day.
That is the aim of this book. It is not meant to be a definitive account of
battles and campaigns. That is for the official histories and war historians.
Rather, while not ignoring strategy or politics, this book narrates the
experiences of people who fought the battles of two wars in the Middle East
and Mediterranean theatres. It is a look at historical events from the inside.
Like my previous book, The Other Anzacs, it is intended as a representative
history rather than a complete one.
INTRODUCTION
.'Ie'"
For the men who would become the first Desert Boys, it all began at Gallipoli
during that northern spring of 1915 when the world went mad. They left
their horses behind in Cairo and joined their Anzac comrades on the
exposed beaches and jagged ravines, and in the hastily built trenches just a
short coo-ee from Johnny Turk, the enemy they would soon come to respect.
This was their first taste of battle, fighting not as they expected with their
horses on the barren deserts of the Middle East, but on foot, trying to win a
few metres of blood-soaked ground. In the Gallipoli cemeteries they lie, the
Light Horsemen denied the desert campaigns to come.
After eight months the Australians were evacuated, the Light Horsemen
re-uniting with their Walers to continue the fight against the Turks in the
deserts of Sinai and Palestine. Resilient and resourceful, they quickly adapted
to the harsh environment to become the elite troops of the British campaign.
Along with their New Zealand comrades, they were the backbone of the
military effort. Hardened, they went into battle at Romani and Magdhaba,
although one particular battle became legend: Beersheba. Like Gaza, Jerusa
lem and Damascus, this biblical town was a faraway world when they enlisted.
That changed on 31 October 1917 when 800 Light Horsemen charged across
the desert intent on capturing the town and its wells.
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xii DESERT BOYS
To walk across that undulating battlefield today, with its sparse cover of
weeds struggling to survive in the sandy clay, is to tread ground that has
entered Australian legend. In the distance the dome of the mosque in the
old city peeks out from behind newer buildings and catches the sun, just
as it did on that memorable day in October 1917. Off to the left is the low
hill where Harry Chauvel watched the charge he had ordered unfold; on
the right, archaeologists are uncovering the ancient ruins of Tel el-Saba
now known as Tel Be'er Sheva-the rise from where the Turks controlled the
battlefield for much of that day. Scratch hard enough and the desert where
the Bedouin's camels and goats forage as best they can, will yield the odd
spent cartridge from the Beersheba battle.
Today, the Park of the Australian Soldier in modern Be'er Sheva com
memorates the charge of the Light Horse. Nearby is the Commonwealth War
Graves Cemetery, where the graves of Australians who fell lie in neatly tended
rows: Tibby Cotter, scourge of English batsmen before the war; sixteen-year
old Harold Wickham; Ted Cleaver, the Sale butcher and first man in the town
to enlist in the Great War; and Ernie Craggs, the nineteen-year-old trooper
who stood in his stirrups yelling like a madman.
When they were buried, red gum saplings from eucalypts introduced into
Palestine in the late nineteenth century marked their graves. Those trees have
long gone, but more recently planted eucalypts now border the cemetery,
their boughs offering broken shade from the scorching desert sun, and a
poignant link to the homeland of the 175 sons of Australia lying here among
the 1241 war dead.
Captain Dick Camm a Desert Boy himself, was one of their mates. A modest
man, he was a veteran of the 3rd Light Horse Regiment, the Imperial Camel
Corps and the Australian Flying Corps, and served at Gallipoli and in the
deserts of Sinai and Palestine. He carried the wounds of battle.
After the war he established a chicken farm with his brother Aubrey at
Kilmore, sixty kilometres north of Melbourne. When neighbouring children
visited his weatherboard home, Dick would fascinate them by showing
war photos in a stereoscopic viewer. 'We would sit by the fire eating apples
and walnuts from his orchard and never wanted to go to bed; one of those