Three weeks after Christmas 1938 was Harry’s fifty-fourth birthday. He had worked hard his entire life and was doubtless thinking dynastic thoughts. Although he’d had junior partners in H. W Iverson, the business had remained essentially a family concern, and it was only natural that Harry anticipated his son following him in it. Whether Jack’s future career was determined by negotiation or command, he entered the records of the Real Estate and Stock Institute as a licensed sub-agent for H. W Iverson on 9 May 1939. Most in the industry at the time were thus classified: under the Real Estate Agents Act, a sub-agent could perform all the functions of a registered agent providing that they were ‘lawfully authorised in writing’ to do so.
By the time the licence was renewed on 1 January 1940, however, circumstances had altered. Australia was again at war. Two divisions of Australian troops were bound for North Africa; another two would be established that year. Policy guidelines on enlistment were published in newspapers: the ideal recruit of the 2nd Australian Imperial Force was to be between twenty and thirty-five years, at least five feet six inches tall, Al at a medical examination and not in a reserved occupation. Twenty-four-year-old, six-foot-two-inch Jack Iverson fulfilled all these criteria when he passed his medical at Caulfield RRD on 15 June 1940 and assumed the guise of VX2 3811. The only additional detail his enlistment form notes are distinguishing features-a burn scar at the base of his left index finger and another scar on his right thigh-perhaps legacies of his time on the land.
Jack was allocated to 212 Anti-Aircraft Regiment (Heavy) a new unit then establishing its headquarters under Lt-Colonel E. M. Neylan at Puckapanyal Training Camp near Seymour-which divided into 4, 5 and 6 Battery, of which Jack joined the last. It was a curious juncture in what was still a European conflict. Price controls had been introduced but few commodities were rationed, and foodstuffs and petrol remained plentiful. Though the Australian Golf Open and Sheffield Shield were about to be suspended, takings at the 1940 Melbourne Cup would break records.
Hitler’s conquest of Holland and Belgium and invasion of France the previous month had jolted Australian complacency, but the transition to a war economy was proving anything but seamless. Munitions were in short supply. When 212 commenced rather desultory training on the unit’s weapon of choice, the 3.7-inch gun, it had to husband its ammunition carefully, and ensure against overtaxing the relatively few skilled trainers. Six Battery’s first assignment was a month in the Melbourne suburb of Maribyrnong, ostensibly to provide air defence for the ordnance and explosives factory there, but it did not fire a live round until a practice shoot at Werribee at the end of September. There was ample time to enjoy the picture shows in the YMCA tent, concerts in the RSL tent, to thumb through the unit newspaper Ack-Ack and to anticipate the visit the regiment received from wrestler Big Chief Little Wolf.
Other, more formal, visitors reminded the new soldiers of their common purpose. Prime minister Robert Menzies reviewed the troops on 28 June and the governor-general did the same on 23 August. The unit diary proudly recorded the latter’s response: ‘He subsequently commented very favourably on the parade and was particularly impressed by the steadiness of the men.’ And VX2 3811 seems to have been a typically steady man, becoming a 1st Class Driver on 25 September, and gaining promotion to Lance-Bombardier on 12 December.
In the ranks of 212, there were a few familiar faces; by coincidence, both his old friend Alan Meckiff and his schoolboy contemporary Lindsay Hassett were members of the same unit. Both the countryside and the regimentation of the routine also reminded Jack of his years at Landscape; reveille at 0630 hours would have been no hardship for one who had risen half an hour earlier at the sound of Essington Lewis’s bell. When he spent Christmas Day 1940 fighting bushfires round the camp, Jack would have found the sensations familiar indeed.
After a sea journey of five weeks on the Mauretania, 212 Anti-Aircraft Regiment (Heavy) arrived in Gaza on 17 March 1941. Camp was struck at Khassa, a huge tent city in Palestine already home to many other units. A rumour at once swept 212 that it was to be diverted to Greece. ‘There were all sorts of threats about going there,’ recalls Alan Meckiff. ‘We had our gear packed ready to leave.’ But, when the British commander-in-chief General Wavell designated 60,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops to compose its defensive garrison on 5 April, the new arrivals were not among them. Over the next fifty-six days, as the Germans swept both Greece and Crete, the men of 212 would have considered themselves fortunate.
At the time, Wavell was stretched thin by a host of demands on his limited manpower: there was insurrection in Syria, a pro-German coup in Iraq, and an Italian army in Ethiopia to neutralise. Worst of all, German forces in the desert were now under the command of the adroit field-marshal Erwin Rommel. Even as Wavell was siphoning off troops to Greece, Rommel’s Afrika Korps was sweeping more than 320 kilometres across the north coast of Cyrenaica as far as Bardia and Sollum in barely a fortnight. Then, however, Rommel was forced to halt, both by supply difficulties and by the thorn in his side posed by Australian soldiers from the 9th Division in the fortified enclave of Tobruk. The war in North Africa lapsed into an uneasy stalemate, the respective armies like exhausted boxers in need of a bucket and sponge. They would grapple with each other for almost a year without either achieving a decisive breakthrough.
It was, in all aspects, a most unusual theatre of war, the antagonists intermeshing for the most part like frictionless gears, only occasionally rubbing against each other to spin off a stream of sparks. Alan Moorehead, the gifted Australian war correspondent of the Daily Express, imagined it like sea warfare on land:
Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea...There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. These patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing.
The way the desert enveloped both friend and foe made for protracted periods of idleness and, having come so far, 2/2 became part of that general inactivity. Khassa was almost as much conurbation as camp, its occupants almost as much settlers as soldiers. The main threat to their welfare became, not some abstracted enemy, evidence of which they seldom saw, but the desert itself. Gunners were unprepared for the enervating heat and fierce glare, reflected off the sand. Drivers and convoy managers, of whom Jack was one, contended with rutted and treacherous roads that snapped axles like matchsticks and sand that seemed to impregnate every pore. As Keith Douglas put it in his classic desert war memoir Alamein to Zem-Zem:
On the main tracks, marked with crude replicas of a hat, a bottle, a boat, cut out of petrol tins, lorries appeared like ships, plunging their bows into drifts of dust and rearing up suddenly over crests like waves. Their wheels were continually hidden in dust clouds; the ordinary sand being pulverised by so much traffic into a substance almost liquid, sticky to the touch, into which the feet of men walking sank to the knee. Every man had a white mask of dust in which, if he wore no goggles, his eyes showed like a clown’s eyes...Trucks and their loads became a uniform dust colour before they had travelled twenty yards; even with a handkerchief tied like a cowboy’s over nose and mouth, it was difficult to breathe.
Disease, too, exacted a steady toll; diarrhoea was rife, and no-one was spared the ‘wog’ sores that followed exposure to the air of cuts and burns. And, like scores of others in 2/2, Jack had a spell at 1 Australian Corps Rest Station recuperating from sandfly fever. He would have been careful henceforward to observe instructions for the application of the repellent Flysol: 1 ounce per 2000 cubic feet released in the tent twice a day, at dawn and dusk, and allowed fifteen minutes to settle.
Otherwise, Jack’s time was occupied with guard duties and the camp’s varieties of recreation. There was a cinema, a range of approved cafes and hotels, even donkey races. There were games of rugby and cricket—indeed, the regiment had an unusual number of good cricketers, including Australian players Hassett, Alec Hurwood and Ted White—although Jack seldom played and did not make the regimental team. It would have been an existence at once busy and tedious and, as inactivity is so frequently the enemy of military discipline, a flavour of camp life is detectable in the records of courts martial published in Lt-Colonel Neylan’s daily orders detailing offences for which soldiers were disciplined: the private who, told to ‘pick up the step’, asked: ‘What bloody step?’; the gunner who ‘on being ordered to rise from his bed did continue lying therein’; the soldier who on being warned about grinning on parade replied: ‘This is my night in the clink, put me under arrest’ (in fact, he was fined £1).
Sporadic air activity occasionally enlivened affairs. The unit recorded its first kill on 10 June 1941, which was chalked up to 4 Battery at Ir Gannim near Haifa, and 5 Battery also subsequently had a busy time at Suez. But when 6 Battery finally embarked on its first posting on 28 July, it was to Beirut, actually one of the Middle East’s quieter comers. The soldiers’ digs were relatively commodious at the Caserne Joffre and Quarrier Foch barracks on the Rue de Verdun in the west of the city, and the war had left the city virtually untouched. Gendarmes still directed traffic, cars observed a 15 miles per hour speed limit, and articulated trams threaded the main drag, the Place des Martyres. The town was a military melting pot: the Australian soldiers cohabiting with units of the Free French and British sailors from the destroyers Hasty and Kingston that swung at anchor in the harbour. But there was no sense of siege or, when the occasional air raid warning was heard, of panic. Shopkeepers methodically drew their shutters and joined the rest of the civilian population heading for shelters, only to emerge half an hour or so later when the siren proved a false alarm.
Six Battery accommodated one change, taking control of a bunch of 75mm anti-aircraft guns surrendered to the Australians as part of the armistice with French forces. They also spent inordinate amounts of time excavating elaborate gun emplacements, dugouts and command posts camouflaged with hessian and dummy trees. But they had little confidence in their new weapons, which dated from World War I, when finally they fired them more than three months after their arrival on 1 November 1941 at an unidentified aircraft flying overhead from west to east. The crews of 6 Battery loaded with impressive speed, after nearly eighteen months of training, but fired with unimpressive accuracy, the French weapons proving cumbrous and difficult to aim. Which was just as well for, after a score or so rounds, the scream was heard: ‘Cease fire!’ They had been firing on an RAF Hawker Hurricane.
The exercise was repeated the following day with another unidentified insurgent, this time probably a German aircraft, but out of range. The unit diary put the best face on it: ‘The fifty-two rounds fired by the battery on the first two nights of the month have made the men keener than ever’. But Jack’s first Christmas overseas would have been notable largely for snow: the first in Lebanon for twenty-two years and probably the first he had seen in his life.
By the beginning of 1942, the business of war had grown more earnest. Russia, the United States and Japan had entered hostilities. The strange and artificial stalemate persisted in North Africa, but the Afrika Korps had retaken Benghazi and further hemmed in Tobruk. In a rearrangement of AIF forces following the recall to Australia of the 6th and 7th Divisions, a new anti-aircraft unit was to be formed as part of 9th Division under the command of Lieut. Col. Paul Chalmers. This was the 2/4 Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, composed of soldiers from the three pre-existing anti-aircraft units in the Middle East: 211, 212 and 2/3. Those designated began arriving at Beit Jirja in Palestine on 16 January. Jack Iverson and many colleagues from 6 Battery were among about four hundred troops taken on strength that day. He became part of 11 Battery, commanded by Captain John Bloomfield.
Jack seems to have fitted in well with his new mates. ‘He was a nice fellow,’ says Bert Davey, then a bombardier in 11 Battery. ‘Happy, you could have a good laugh with him about things, and he told a good story.’ But it was Captain Bloomfield who became the most significant figure in Jack Iverson’s military life. A forty-year-old barrister from Armadale and an alumnus of 212‘s 6 Battery himself, he was an enthusiastic officer with an avuncular manner that led to his nickname of ‘Uncle John’, or ‘UFJ’ when his men became a little peevish. An unflagging monitor of morale, he distributed among his NCOs a dissertation on their duties comprising no fewer than fifty-one points, many of them accented towards ‘spirit’ and ‘initiative’. Ken Noldt, who became troop clerk in 11 Battery, recalls:
He was actually a rather wonderful man. Never meant to be a soldier, and not meant really to be an officer either, in the sense that he was never above the other ranks. He was always with us. I can still see him marching along, one gaiter in his trousers and one gaiter out. A few fellows detested him, of course, but I think underneath everyone respected him.
Bloomfield took an unusual interest in Jack, promoting him to bombardier, and recommending him upon return to Beit Jirja as supervisor of 2/4’s MT School, which held courses on map reading, convoy administration and maintenance. Jack would eventually be responsible for all 11 Battery’s transport fleet-thirty-seven vehicles, ranging from tractors to haul guns through lorries to move men-which was no mean achievement for one whose principal claim to driving fame was victory in the bending race at Tallarook six years earlier. Jack returned Bloomfield’s regard and appreciated his confidence; it was the first time in his life that he had been entrusted with a responsible position. Other members of 11 Battery noted that Jack was unusually ‘tight’ with the CO, ascribing it to their both being private school boys: Jack from Geelong College, Bloomfield from Geelong Grammar. ‘There were a lot of officers from public schools,’ says Bill Carmody, an 11 Battery gunner. ‘But not a lot of the enlisted men were, so that would have made Jack a bit unusual.’ It would be stretching definitions to call it a friendship—officers and other ranks could never truly regard themselves as friends—but it was a mutual regard. Much later, in July 1953, when Bloomfield was endorsed Liberal candidate for the seat of Malvern, Jack helped in his campaign and ran his transport pool. When Bloomfield became Victorian minister for education between 1956 and 1962, the families exchanged Christmas cards.
In the Middle East, Bloomfield appreciated a reliable underling like VX2 3811. As did other battery commanders, he frequently had his hands full with disciplinary matters. When 2/4 finally gathered for exercises in the Syrian desert in the first week of June 1942, the results were dreadful. ‘Discipline on the whole was poor,’ noted the unit diary. ‘Too much talking and swearing went on round the sites and a general tendency to lounge, even in the presence of officers, was noticeable.’ Records of courts martial enumerate a vast range of offences, while the sentences convey some sense of the vagaries of military justice: for trafficking hashish, thirty-two days in the stockade; for pawning a military vehicle, sixty days; for selling a pair of boots, ninety days; for rather carelessly shooting an Arab child while on sentry duty, nothing at all.
Discipline, however, was now imperative. In July, at last, 2/4 was blooded as a fighting unit. With the unit briefly disaggregated to provide cover for field artillery trying unsuccessfully to dislodge German units on Tel El Eisa Ridge near the coastal town of Alamein, it fought a series of short but sharp engagements costing seven lives but in which it could claim ten enemy aircraft shot down. It was a promising baptism, and providential, for there was clearly far more fighting to come. When Churchill appointed new management for Allied forces in North Africa the following month-commander-in-chief General Alexander and his field commander General Montgomery—rumours circulated of a long-awaited ‘big push’ to evict the Germans from the region.
After a profusion of offensives and counter-offensives, the Allied and Axis armies were staring at each other across a defensive line drawn sixty or so kilometres from Alamein to the Qattara depression, a salt marsh lying below sea level. Something had to give. Throughout the lull in fighting in August and September, regimental orders became stricter and more hectoring. Thriftlessness about supplies, once condoned, was replaced by orders to conserve oil, re-use cooking fat, and collect jam tins. Even stationery was rationed: letters home had to use both sides of paper, single-spaced. Censorship was strictly enforced: of their activities in July, soldiers were limited to the statement ‘I have been in battle’.
In the ‘big push’ codenamed ‘Lightfoot’—which Montgomery foresaw ‘hitting the Germans for six’—2/4’s role was again to provide anti-aircraft cover for designated artillery units; in the case of 11 Battery to shepherd 2/12 and 217 Field Regiments from positions south of the main road and west of the Qattara Track. The logistics behind the assault were formidable. Much of the physical moving was to occur under cover of darkness, and driving by night in the desert could be hairy. Vehicles had to black out most of their lights in order to avoid attracting enemy attention and it was easy to stray from the barely marked paths that counted as roads. Once lost, drivers could have the devil’s own job re-establishing contact with their comrades. Part of the MT School course that Jack led involved recourse under such circumstances to Cassiopeia: a chair-shaped group of stars on the opposite side of the Pole star to the Plough. When not swathed by clouds, the stars were a natural navigation beacon.
As ‘Lightfoot’ commenced at 9.40pm on 23 October across the full sixty kilometres of front, there was no trouble seeing anything. With the racket of 908 field guns and artillery pieces sounding across the sky like the crack of doom, the light was for fifteen minutes so brilliant that one could have read a newspaper in the forward positions. Darkness and an unearthly silence then followed in a five-minute pause, before a creeping barrage began, peppered with tracers, to protect and steer the advance of the Eighth Army infantry. Marching at a mandatory seventy-five yards per minute on either side of guide parties navigating the minefields, thousands of soldiers weighed down with kit, rations, shovels and sandbags dropped stakes every 100 yards with rearward facing torches that shone different coloured lights designating different units towards their own lines. ‘You’ve never heard such a noise in all your life,’ recalls Bert Davey. ‘And you’ve never seen a fireworks display like it.’
For the next eight days, as they traced their artillery units forward, 2/4’s batteries were kept busy by a succession of air raids. Eleven Battery even had the experience of being strafed by RAF Hurricanes, luckily without casualties. During the day, the glare was such that aircraft were often heard before they were seen. During the night, the flash from their guns would momentarily render targets invisible. Nonetheless, the guiding principle of anti-aircraft warfare was to keep firing, no matter what. Even if a battery could not score a hit, the intensity of their discharge should discourage accurate attack by forcing aircraft to disgorge their bombs too soon. And 2/4 kept up its rate of fire, loosing off 12,000 rounds before the first day without raids on 3 November, and suffering only two dead and ten wounded. As the sand settled on Alamein, it emerged that Montgomery’s Eighth Army had put its enemies to flight, capturing 30,000 men including nine generals. The British commander’s ebullient summary was read to 2/4, as it was to all units, on 12 November: ‘When we began the Battle of Egypt on 23 October, I said that together we would hit the Germans and Italians for six right out of North Africa...Today, there are no German and Italian soldiers on Egyptian territory except prisoners.’
‘God,’ wrote one soldier, ‘was good to the regiment.’ It had seen its share of fighting, but suffered only eleven dead in a strength of almost 900, and was now leaving the desert behind. After leave and Chrisnnas, a truck convoy from El Bureij camp in Palestine began a week-long journey across the Sinai desert to Port Tewfik for embarkation on the Ile de France, a 47,000-tonne French liner.
Jack returned to Melbourne in February 1943 enervated and underweight, and spent much of his leave with his family. Harry, Ede and his sisters had moved from palatial Kuring-gai eighteen months earlier after buying a similarly spacious two storey residence called Moana about half a mile down the road at 148 The Esplanade. Jack moved into a bedroom there.
The war was now in full swing, and hard to escape from. Part of Jack’s convalescent ritual was strolling over the road, often with a book, to laze on the beach; he had a favourite spot, a few metres from a flight of bluestone steps that led down to the sand.
One day, he returned from his daily beach sojourn and went upstairs to Moana’s sunroom. ‘Had a nice thing done to me today,’ he told his assembled family. ‘When I went down to my spot on the sand, someone had stuck a white feather there.’ A self-righteous watcher had apparently mistaken Jack for a civilian layabout neglecting his duty. Jack’s sister Ruth, who recalls the story, could not tell whether her brother was upset or merely reporting a fact: ‘That was John. You never knew if he was really bothered about something.’