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One small step for a Zetland boy

‘I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore . . .’

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

After over a month at sea, the convoy and its human cargo docked in the Suez Canal. There was no time for sightseeing as troops lined up for a 250-kilometre rail journey to training camps in Palestine, just north of Gaza. For Stanley, the contrast between the dilapidated railway carriages and the spacious liners was not welcome, the seats being so uncomfortable that many men chose to sleep in the luggage racks. For Bill Pye and his men, it was to be a case of out of the frying pan.

When we got to Suez, they took the ship in close to the side of the canal and we had to climb down ropes, with all our gear on. They took us to the shore and there was bugger-all there, just sand . . . The officers who’d been sent down from Palestine said, ‘Look, you see that hillock there, you go over there.’ There were no toilets, no running water, nothing there and we stayed there that night . . . They took us and we got on a train, and the trains were absolutely filthy, the lavatories were full of excreta, there was no water, they took us to Gaza and we went into camp there. It was bad enough on the seven weeks over, but arriving there, it was even worse, and we all wondered what we’d got into.

On arrival in Palestine the three as-yet-unbattalioned privates were sorted for duty. The 9th Division had been under siege in Tobruk since April. Pte Roy Lonsdale drew the shortest straw and was marched out to the 2/13th Battalion. He was soon on his way to Tobruk. Pte Oxman’s straw was not much longer: he was marched into the 2/17th Battalion and followed Roy just in time to catch the last two and a half months of the siege. For the moment, Pte Livingston was marching nowhere.

As the boys were arriving in the Middle East, Australian commanders were pushing for the 9th Division to be withdrawn from Tobruk. The troops were exhausted. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, did not share this opinion and instead shared his own on the matter with a succession of prime ministers who were falling like dominoes back in Australia. Three Australian prime ministers, Menzies, Fadden and Curtin, lobbied for troop withdrawal. Menzies was forced to resign in August, making way for the hapless Arthur Fadden to reign, as he put it, ‘for forty days and forty nights’, before John Curtin settled into the job. Churchill reluctantly backed off and the withdrawal began in September. While Stanley remained in Palestine, the intensity of the siege began to decline. Gordon and Roy soon discovered that declining intensity still required them to take their turn on the front line as enemy aircraft relentlessly bombed those in the rear. Being bombed in the rear was something Roy would become familiar with in the not-too-distant future. By late October the 2/17th were preparing to move out of Tobruk, one of the last to leave. Gordon’s harrowing initiation into front-line warfare was over. Pte Roy Lonsdale’s battalion, the 2/13th, ran out of luck: the final convoy making its way to relieve the troops was attacked and forced back, so the 2/13th were left behind. It had been a brutal six months for the battalion and now they were worse off than ever. G.H. Fearnside, now a sergeant in the 2/13th, said of the moment they were returned to Tobruk, ‘the battalion was re-equipped and re-armed by British quartermasters and packed off to the front before it committed the unsoldierly—and psychologically unsound—error of feeling sorry for itself ’. The 2/13th became embroiled in tank and infantry battles during three days of hell from 29 November to 1 December. A couple of weeks later they were out of the stunt, the first in and the last out. Seven hundred and eighty-eight men of the 9th Division didn’t make it out of Tobruk at all.

In late October, Pte Stanley Livingston was marched in to join the weary ranks of the 2/17th just as the battle-scarred 9th moved out of harm’s way. Or, to be more precise, the 2/17th marched in to Stanley, who had not left camp in Palestine. Roy, Stanley and Gordon were reunited just in time to enjoy their first Christmas overseas, at Hill 69, a camp maintained exclusively for Australian troops 50 kilometres south-west of Jerusalem. Their quarters consisted of row upon row of eleven-man tents, spread widely and surrounded by slit trenches, safer havens than tents in the event of an air raid. Pte H.D. Wells described the trenches as ‘a perfect trap for AWL drunks on moonless nights’. The narrow roads and lush green fields surrounding the camp reminded Pte Peter J. Jones of children’s book illustrations of biblical scenes. The ‘occasional sight of a small donkey carrying a large Arab’ only heightened this. A photo opportunity perhaps? Had veteran Bill Pye guessed correctly?

I could find no mention of any mule-training in Palestine around Christmas. The official war diaries suggest that the main concern was to rest the men as much as possible. Large numbers were sent on leave. After eight months of desert warfare, the boys of the 9th deserved some down time. A concert party was held and nominations were called for participants, including first and second comics, a tenor vocalist and a female impersonator. (The Stanley Livingston I knew could have auditioned for three out of four of the above—on second thoughts, make that all four.) The only other demands for the holiday season were orders that all blankets were to be aired, that ablution sheds not be used for purposes other than those for which they were intended, that latrine seats be kept closed at all times when not in use, and a footnote stating that the latrines marked ‘Natives Only’ were being used by troops and the practice must cease immediately. Cross-cultural abluting was obviously frowned upon in this man’s army.

The only real action of the month was a series of security patrols in the local villages. Visits to these villages were to be as short as possible and it was made perfectly clear to those on patrol duties that ‘To the Arab, womenfolk are invisible. One thing which he will never overlook is interference with his women and this includes attention be it ever so polite. If possible avoid even looking at them.’ These patrols were performed by companies B and D; being a member of C Company, Stanley Livingston didn’t get the chance to treat the local women as if they were invisible.

Stanley Livingston had a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, and his first Christmas away from Australia probably included celebrating mass in the YMCA hut reading room. He may or may not have attended the confessions that were heard beforehand. Perhaps he had no reason to—after all, he kept his latrine seat down, aired his blanket and hadn’t so much as glanced at an Arab woman. Or perhaps, as Pte Peter J. Jones and many other Catholic boys did, he upped the antichrist and committed the mortal sin of AWL in exchange for the once-in-a-lifetime temptation to attend the high mass at midnight in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. The Palestine Post reported on 26 December 1941 that thousands of serving men and women of all ranks, many of them fresh from the battlefields, had crowded into the church on Christmas Day.

Jones and fellow Catholics Jack ‘Griffo’ Griffin, Harold ‘Wart’ Waterhouse and Danny ‘Haddock’ McLaughlin hired a taxi to Bethlehem after stowing away in a unit truck en route to Tel Aviv. They arrived at the Church of the Nativity in good spirits—spirits no doubt purchased in Tel Aviv while lying low in the Australian Soldiers Club before hailing the taxi. The four penniless men passed through the low entrance to the church, known as ‘the eye of the needle’. It was standing room only as they settled in with senior officers of the army, navy and air force. Peter and Haddock remained standing for the duration of the one-and-a-half-hour mass while Griffo and Wart lost the spirit and wandered off to nap in the empty confessionals. All four managed to get back to Hill 69 an hour before morning roll call the next day.

Sgt G.H. Fearnside, weary from the gruelling siege at Tobruk, found Christmas in the Holy Land a more sombre experience. He expected much from his well-earned leave: ‘I had wanted to hear the chanting of psalms, prayers and holy study coming from the synagogues, prayer houses and yeshivot throughout the city. What was the reality?’ For Sgt Fearnside the reality was the pervasive smell of donkey dung together with a poverty and squalor that deadened the senses. Hoping to lift his spirits he visited the great Western Wall, its cracks filled with letters from all over the world, but these were troubled days in the Promised Land. There were rumours of Arabs in the courtyard of the mosque pouring boiling water down upon the devout Jews. ‘One could never call back the past,’ he said. ‘It had been a mistake to have attempted to recapture it.’ Fearnside had felt no sense of rapture here. His mate Jack Halcroft was by his side at the Wailing Wall. ‘Let’s go and get drunk,’ he said.

Meanwhile, back on Mars, Japan dramatically entered the war with its attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. As a result, the 6th and 7th divisions were brought back from the Middle East to defend Australia, leaving the 9th to be part of a force defending the Turko–Syrian frontier. By early January 1942, the 2/17th Battalion were on the move. To where and for what was not the business of an infantryman. They left Hill 69 and caught the train to Haifa, where trucks were waiting to take them further north across the coastal road through jagged hills on one side and dark rocky beaches on the other. When Stanley described these perilous road trips to me, I got the impression they filled him with as much terror as any battle.

The battalion arrived at Tripoli and encamped at the place where Turkish generals had planned to quash the advance of T.E. Lawrence and his Arabs in World War I. The next morning the road convoy moved higher into the mountains of Syria, to a camp north of Aleppo in the Turkish border area. This was wild country—a lawless land inhabited mainly by Kurdish tribesmen—and murder was common. This was to be their home until March. Special mention was made in the official war diaries in regard to the ploughing abilities of the local people using donkeys and cows. As far as I can make out, there are no mountains in the background of Stanley’s photo, and the ‘wog’ in the foreground doesn’t quite embody the demeanour of your average murderous Kurdish tribesman, although he is wielding that dagger with some menace. Stanley spent most of this period billeted in a tin hut that offered little protection from frequent snowstorms. Leave parties to Aleppo eased the tedium of training under wet and muddy conditions. The history of the ancient city was not appreciated by most of the troops, with reports of frequent rowdiness and drunkenness. Presumably, Pte Livingston wasted no time sightseeing around this 5000-year-old city, or its great Citadel, inside where it is said the patriarch Abraham used to milk his cow. Milk was the furthest thing from Stanley’s lips.

In mid March the battalion left the Turkish border for Latakia on the coast of Syria. Latakia had been around for some time too, and one piece of history that would have interested Stan was that this city had in the seventeenth century become a major centre for cultivating and trading tobacco and remained that way into the twentieth. On arrival the unit began intensive training in harsh conditions. The casualty count by month’s end included seven cases of tonsillitis, two peritonsillar abscesses, one case of venereal disease and two cases of pedicular pubis, or crabs, the latter being dealt with in no uncertain manner by the might of the Australian Field Ambulance forces attached to the brigades.

In regard to these last two afflictions, the Australian commanders were sharply aware that they were in charge of a multitude of young men who had recently been confined to a male-dominated desert for eight months. To relieve the tension, a concerned officer in command of the French forces, General Montclar, suggested that separate regimental bordellos be established for the Australian, French and French Colonial troops in the area. The suggestion drew approval from all sides and, as G.H. Fearnside put it, ‘Perhaps for the first and only time in the annals of Australian military history, an infantry battalion came to have its own brothel.’

Liberated from infectious organisms and for the exclusive use of Australian troops, the Maison Dorée was located in a dead-end street on the outskirts of town. Henrietta was the madam, and among her troops were Angel, Baby, Jeanette, Big Tits Betty, Vera the Turk, Linda and Rosie. The result was that in at least one battalion, the 2/13th, not one case of venereal disease was reported in Latakia. I think Eddie Emmerson might have been closer to the truth when he put it to me like this: ‘The officers never got venereal disease. The troops got VD, but the officers got urethritis.’

Around this time, a letter sent to Brigadier W.J.V. Windeyer of the 20th Infantry Brigade from Lieutenant Colonel M.A. Fergusson, Commander 2/17th Australian Infantry Battalion, contained some straight-shooting advice for the troops under the heading ‘Notes on Contra-Propaganda’. Point 8 of the document states: ‘Men are accustomed to the belief that the counter to enemy action is to disperse and hide in a hole . . . It is not suggested that this has no value, but it is beyond doubt that a soldier who is more concerned with killing the enemy than with his own protection is the most likely to survive.’ In point 11, pontificating on the subject of the morale-diminishing properties of being dive-bombed, the distinguished commander asserts, ‘The enemy must be presented with individual targets, each target necessitating a change of direction by the plane.’

Reading this correspondence twigged a memory of the first war story my father ever shared with me. I was no more than ten years old, quietly putting the finishing touches on my scale-model Airfix Messerschmitt Bf 162 bomber. Exactly where the incident he related occurred I cannot recall. It’s not that I wasn’t listening—as a child I was riveted by the tale—but in retrospect I can see that the ‘where’ did not matter as much as the ‘what’. I can narrow it down to somewhere in the North African desert, for the image burned into my mind is of a soldier wandering across a vast open plain with an enemy fighter bearing down on him; and given that I was at the time gluing the wings onto a Messerschmitt bomber, the desert location seems plausible.

The gist of the story was this. Somewhere in that Western Desert, while strolling across an isolated airstrip, Pte Stanley Livingston, alone and unarmed, came under fire from an enemy bomber strafing the airfield. Stanley found himself in a fair bit of strafe and the only thing he had on him was a blanket, and a well-aired one at that. As the bomber swooped, Pte Livingston lay prostrate on the airstrip, huddling under the blanket as machine-gun bullets sprayed all around him, the futility of his actions only occurring to him later. A drowning man will clutch at a straw; a 23-year-old private being dive-bombed by a German fighter aircraft will clutch at anything, and with no hole in sight to leap into, a blanket would have to do. Surviving the attack unscathed, the shaken private picked himself up and continued on to do whatever it is a private does when he heads out alone into the desert with only a blanket for company.

He was a lucky man. The Luftwaffe put a lot of stead in its dive-bombing proclivities. The aircraft that interdicted on the lonely figure of Pte Stanley Livingston as he took his late-afternoon stroll was most probably one of the Luftwaffe’s Stukas. The psychological effect of these attacks cannot be overestimated. The Stukas were equipped with dive sirens, or, as the Germans dubbed them, Jericho-Trompeten—‘trumpets of Jericho’, used essentially to unnerve those under attack. Eddie Emmerson will never forget the sound of the bombs. ‘What they used to do,’ he told me, ‘was they’d alter the fins on the bloody bombs, and put an organ tube in it and it would scream.’ I can just imagine Stanley under his blanket being strafed to the glorious strains of Wagner’s ‘Treulich Geführt’.

Eddie Emmerson found himself a target on another occasion.

I remember once in Tobruk, we got a heavy raid. We seen ’em coming in, a flock of them, and I was with a bloke called Slugger Wright, big bugger, and I said, ‘Come on, Slugger,’ and he says, ‘We’ll be alright, they’re going on to the harbour,’ and so we thought we’ll watch this, and next minute he says, ‘No. They’re coming our way, come on,’ and we laid in a hole, and I was laying next to him on me belly, and a bomb came down and it made a different noise, and I said to him, ‘So long, Slugger, this is the one you don’t talk about.’ It exploded a hundred yards away. What had happened, its pins had fallen off and it was tumbling, so it made a different noise. You get used to the scream of them but this one was the one I thought you didn’t talk about.

Which brings us to point 15 from ‘Notes on Contra-Propaganda’: ‘In the past the Australian soldier has not had occasion to hate his enemies . . . The advantages of destroying the impersonal attitude of the Australian towards his enemies are apparent . . . Men will not be so ready to surrender either to the enemy or to their own fears.’ Stanley Livingston never had a bad word to say about any German to my knowledge, but he had no time for Stukas, isolated airstrips and well-aired blankets, not to mention Jericho-Trompeten.

While many idle hands were busy in the devil’s playground run by Henrietta, during March and April of 1942, discipline was becoming a concern. A sergeant charged with attempting to obtain money by wearing badges of a rank to which he was not entitled was stripped of his rank and given six months’ detention with hard labour. Three privates convicted of striking a superior officer were given year-long detentions, and an unlucky private found sleeping at his post was given ninety days. The thumb of command pressed hard on the troops. Routine orders of 10 March warn that the possession of hashish, cocaine, morphine, marijuana and heroin was strictly forbidden. A report warns that large sums of money were being offered to drivers of military vehicles to smuggle hashish. Rewards were offered for information, and severe disciplinary action threatened for offenders. As the month passed, another dozen court martials were reported, including that of a private who, while AWL, struck another private before striking a commanding officer and then resisting an escort after discharging his rifle without sufficient cause. Another failed to appear at a place of parade and had by neglect lost his clothing. No names were attached to these crimes in the war diaries, and I wonder if Stanley Livingston could have been a culprit. He was partial to a drink, but hard drugs and striking officers didn’t seem to be his style. As for avoiding parade while prancing about naked, those who knew him wouldn’t have put it past him. Despite Henrietta’s valiant efforts, morale had reached an all-time low. The news from home was ominous. After the Japanese attack on Darwin in February, the growing threat to Australia hung over the troops.

Towards the end of April the entire 20th Brigade, the 2/17th, 2/13th and 2/15th, embarked on the five-day, 150-kilometre march from Latakia to Tripoli. The average distance travelled was a touch over 30 kilometres a day at a speed of around ten kilometres per hour. Spring was in the air, if not in the step of the men as they passed groves of olives and mulberries. The locals turned out to watch the parade from balconies and pavements just as their ancestors had done for over two thousand years as countless soldiers marched up and down this coast. In the Australian War Memorial reading room I gently thumbed through a delicate pocket-sized volume missing its cover. The item, listed under ‘anonymous’, houses page after yellowing page of poignant notes and poems on the minutiae of wartime life in the Middle East, penned by unnamed soldiers. Handwritten in black-inked pen, this communal log contains eyewitness observations, some in verse, some merely facts, of the cities visited and the geography of the lands surrounding the coastal route where Stanley, Roy and Gordon marched. One reads: ‘Along the coast have marched the conquerors of history. The Assyrians, Alexander the Great, the pharaohs, Crusaders, the Ottoman sultan down to the British armies of the great war, and their monuments may be seen carved in the rocks above the dog river north of Beirut.’

By the time the troops marched in to Tartus, halfway between Latakia and Tripoli, a reception of another sort was there to greet them. Henrietta, Big Tits Betty and a few of the other girls had hired a taxi, set off, caught up with the marchers and driven between the rows of soldiers before disappearing ahead. The tempo of the march quickened apace after that. The girls took up their forward position on a balcony above a restaurant in Tartus. As the battalion marched by, the girls raised their skirts as one. As Sgt Fearnside far too clearly recalls, ‘No general, reviewing his troops, ever got a more efficient “eyes left” than did Henrietta and her girls that afternoon.’

Unfortunately for Henrietta, leave was not given. A health report during the month of April unsurprisingly shows a distinct spike in foot injuries, a severed tendon of the big toe, a scalded foot, one ruptured calf, a ligamentous injury of the knee and a torn fibular collateral ligament. Among these lower limb injuries was a single case of chronic anxiety. We might assume this was Henrietta when informed of the ‘no leave’ provision. However, there were rumours of AWLs that night and it is possible Henrietta and her crew may just have recouped the cost of their taxi fare.

Come May, the boys were ensconced in Mule School. Pte Livingston spent his time learning the mule trade and drinking plenty of arak while on leave in the Beirut cafes. Unbeknown to the ORs (or ‘other ranks’, as the unranked—such as privates—were ranked), those higher rankers were aware of a worrying situation in the Western Desert: the opposing armies had been engaged in static fighting for four months, but of late the British Eighth Army looked to be in danger of losing its ground.

On 21 June, Erwin Rommel and his forces captured Tobruk. The Australians, the British and the Polish forces had kept Rommel and his army at bay for eight months, but it had been surrendered to the Germans the previous day, 20 June 1942. Winston Churchill was not happy. ‘Defeat is one thing,’ he said, ‘disgrace is another.’ Hopes within the Australian troops of a return home anytime in the near future were now sunk. Hitler immediately promoted Rommel to Field Marshal. Meanwhile the British Eighth Army retreated as far as El Alamein in northern Egypt. Field Marshal Rommel was soon at their heels. With his army oozing confidence, Rommel’s troops came to a halt 95 kilometres from Alexandria with the prize of the Nile delta now within the Field Marshal’s reach.

By 30 June, Stanley’s battalion was ready to move. Some over-optimistic rumours suggested ships were waiting at Suez to take them home; others laid money on the ships taking them straight to the Pacific theatre. Unknown to the men, Major General Leslie Morshead, commander of the 9th Division, had received orders to move his men to the Egyptian front. The idea was to maintain secrecy during the move, and disguising a thousand men on the march is no easy feat. Firstly they were ordered to remove the rising sun badges from their hats, so as to be unrecognisable as Australians. Captain Alan Wright describes the order as ‘one of the best of the World War Two jokes’. Even removing from vehicles the division logo, a platypus over a boomerang, could not hide the soldiers’ accent. Pte Peter J. Jones remembers crowds in Egypt lining the streets shouting and mocking, ‘Aussie, Aussie, Alamein!’ (presumably without the ‘Oi Oi Oi’). The Egyptians were feeling insecure. Their 22-year-old King Farouk was sympathetic to the Italians, who were sympathetic to the Germans, yet the Egyptians on the whole thought the Germans the more unwelcome visitors and were quite happy for the Allies and the Germans to fight it out in their desert.

The men of the 2/17th survived the month of July thanks to supplies received from the YMCA, including twelve table-tennis balls, twenty-four sheets of blotting paper, ten thousand sheets of writing paper, six New Testaments, twenty-four gramophone records, six sticks of chalk, a set of quoits and, thanks to the Australian Comforts Fund, 891 tubes of toothpaste, razor blades and packets of tobacco, and 893 packets of cigarette papers. Eddie Emmerson claims that the Australian Comforts Fund literally taught the men to smoke, which primed them for the harder stuff. ‘Sometimes we went onto British rations and were given cigarettes mainly from India. They were the only cigarettes in the world you needed two hands to smoke. One to smoke them and another to hold the top of your head as you lit it. Geez, they were rough.’

The Australian Comforts Fund raised funds for the troops with the help of ‘wives, mothers, fiancées, sweethearts, sisters, aunts and friends’. The Sydney Comforts Fund’s shop on Rowe Street became something of a refuge for family members eager to share news from desert or jungle. By war’s end the women of the Comforts Fund had provided 3,085,776 pairs of socks, 1,139,087 balaclavas, 592,610 woollen gloves, 274,677 jumpers and six million hankies. Women were also active in the Red Cross, where they used up 500,000 kilometres of twine to produce camouflage netting.

Comfort was much needed by many of the unit, as the monthly medical report lists a high incidence of sandfly fever and gastroenteritis. Apart from the usual bouts of dermatitis and scabies, and just the one abscessed buttock, there were two cases of ‘Shizophrenia’ (sic), one being an attempted suicide, and a case of ‘Post Traumatic & CSM Confusional State’. (CSM remains a mystery to me: it could be cerebrospinal meningitis or perhaps just a confused company sergeant major.) Off the record, the ominous move south may have just quietly unnerved many more of the troops as they boarded a train at 0730 hours on 1 July destined for a rumour of war.

When the train arrived in Sidi Bishr station near Alexandria a couple of days later, it was clear their ship hadn’t come in. There was now no doubt they were heading to the Western Desert, and on 9 July the battalion arrived at their defensive position about halfway between Alexandria and El Alamein. The night spent here was described in the war diaries as ‘uneventful’ with only ‘slight enemy activity’. Is there even such a thing as a slight enemy? An enemy who slightly intends to annihilate you? To decimate you just a little bit? It might have been uneventful for some, but I have an inkling that at least one non-battle-hardened private gripped his well-aired blanket very tightly that night. For Pte Stanley Livingston, the slight enemy activity was the first and only enemy activity he had experienced in his twenty-four years. He would have encountered plenty of enemies growing up in the backstreets of Zetland, but none even slightly like the slight enemy he experienced that night. The next day, visiting commander Brigadier W.J.V. Windeyer described the men of the battalion as anxious to ‘get into it’. Perhaps some were, but I’d wager many more were just plain anxious.

On 15 July the troops were moved by truck into the desert at El Hammam. The next day they were readied for a further move with an order from the commander-in-chief stating that ‘no conditions of fatigue or any other disability can permit withdrawal from our new position’. The new position was towards the El Shammama sector of the El Alamein defence line, where all companies commenced digging in. In this particular desert the sand stopped around 30 centimetres below the surface; from there on down it was solid rock. But they needed holes—for sleeping, for abluting, for weapons. This was more than mere digging; this was excavating.