THE COLLECTIVE ANZAC hero is the ‘digger’, originally the volunteer citizen-soldier of the First AIF and the ANZAC Corps who saw the war as an unpleasant but necessary job that had to be done and so went and did it. The digger was impatient with official discipline, rank and drill and was more than a handful when on leave, but he fought fiercely and efficiently, if in an unorthodox style. This image of the Anzac hero, of course, leaves out nurses, sailors, aviators and a range of other brave people who saw it as a duty to serve their country. The digger is undoubtedly the idealised human symbol of Anzac but, as in the ancient mythologies of Greece, Rome and other cultures, Anzac has many individual heroes and heroines.
They just poured into the wards all day
Nurses arrived at the front during World War I by various routes—some through official military arrangements, some through charities and some by private means. With an ethos derived from Florence Nightingale’s ideals and teachings, developed through her Crimean War experience, nurses were ready to serve. Sister Tucker from Launceston in Tasmania wrote home about her time on hospital ship HMS Sicilia, the first to begin taking off the wounded from Gallipoli. She and the medical staff accompanying her had a relatively pleasant voyage from Alexandria in Egypt to Lemnos, though the situation changed dramatically soon after their arrival in Mudros harbour.
We see masts and funnels by the score all round, but do not know whether our troops are landed or are still on them. We had a very nice trip here, after waiting at Alexandria for three or four days for orders. Most of the crew are Indians—also the doctors, orderlies, dressers, waiters, and stewards. The colonel and medical officers are from India; but, of course, are Imperial men. Colonel Bird and his son are Australians, and we have 12 nurses. We have the honour to be the first hospital ship to enter the Dardanelles. We are equipped to take 400 patients. The boat is fitted with five large wards, with a couple of officers’ wards, special wards, and a nice little theatre. One night at sea was fairly rough; but everybody was able to appear at meals—of course, we were very keen to do so, as we were chosen on account of being good sailors. The French uniform is a pale blue flannel material, with long coats, and blue or scarlet caps. We do not think they look so nice as our men. Perhaps it’s conceit on our part, but we are so proud of being Australians when we see our troops marching by.
April 29—We returned to Alexandria yesterday, after three weeks. We spent the day unloading our patients, and are to sail again at 6 p.m. When waiting in the harbour at Lemnos, four of us nurses were ordered to transfer to the hospital ship Gascon. We left Lemnos on Saturday evening, and early on Sunday morning came to the Dardanelles. About 2 a.m. the first shot was fired. We were right up in the firing line—several gunboats were behind us, firing right over us. Several shots from the boats splashed very near to us. About 9 a.m. the first patients were brought on board. It was awful to see them, some with scarcely any clothes on, blood pouring in all directions, some limping . . . others with an arm bandaged. Several died as they came across in the boats to us. It was absolutely grand to see how ‘game’ they were. I felt just proud of being an Australian, and owning them. They just poured into the wards all day. My ward holds 96—and I was responsible for about 40 on deck. I had three orderlies and a sergeant-major to assist. The dock was just lined with patients lying on mattresses—530 patients—though our boat is only fitted up for 400. You can imagine how we all worked until we got to Alexandria again—early on Thursday morning. Now we are making bandages—dressing, splints, etc. ready for the next patients.
Landing the patients was a pathetic sight. Hardly any of them had shirts. They were so blood-stained and torn they had to be thrown overboard. Others had their coats and trousers split, and hurriedly sewn over. Some were minus a boot; very many minus socks. It took hours getting the stretcher cases off. We started at 9 a.m. The last was landed at 4.30. One day we had six to bury at sea; another day several . . .
After a few months medical supplies and water became scarce on Lemnos, as this doctor described to relatives in Adelaide.
I must say that the men we brought from Australia have turned out grand fellows, and one could not wish for better nursing orderlies, nor find more conscientious and hard-working fellows. I am helping to look after 1100 patients, as we have taken over No. 2 Australian Hospital. All the nurses have been ashore (from the transports) for three days, and have to sleep in tents, so it is rather rough on them. There is a limited supply of water, so I expect they find life rather rough and dirty, but it gives them an idea of how things are run in a camp hospital. One night I had to admit patients from 10.30 p.m. to 1 p.m., and as I had started at 5 o’clock and been on my feet all day I was rather tired. We start at 9 o’clock doing the cases, and generally finish about 10 p.m. We commence to operate at 7.30 p.m. For my first seven days at Mudros I had 60 patients to look after, and could generally manage to finish by lunch, as the greater number were suffering from diarrhoea. This complaint has been troublesome lately, three-fourths of our patients having been complaining of it. They are a jolly fine crowd, and are always ready to see a joke.
Mudros has altered beyond recognition since our first arrival. There are numerous hospitals around the bay . . . We are frightfully short of beds. Many of the men are accommodated on mattresses on the floors, and are as comfortable there as on beds, although the insect life is simply dreadful. I was showing a naval doctor around one day and he asked me about the livestock. I asked one patient, and when he pulled back the blankets to show how numerous they were, one of the Australian wits at the end of the ward cried out, ‘Company, form fours.’
The water problem has been solved to a certain extent. Water is brought to a certain spot every day in barges and thence carted by the two or three water-carts attached to each hospital. Unfortunately we have been unable to obtain reinforcements, and have had to take a man from the Evacuation depot at Mudros to help. Practically none had done any nursing or medical work, so you can understand our position. Still the raw material is turning out well, and without such assistance it would be impossible to carry on. We are also frightfully short of instruments, and have to do what we can with the few things we have. Of course, we have the instruments in the theatre, but one cannot send an orderly 250 yards every time, and, again, the instruments there are in use most of the day and evening. There is a disease prevalent here characterised by ‘tripexia,’ dirty tongue and loss of appetite. It is like typhoid, but certainly is not true typhoid fever.
The X-ray cases are all seen at night time, so we manage to look at these between the operations, and while the orderlies are cleaning the theatre. The majority of the operations are small, such as looking for and extracting bullets and pieces of shell and cartridge casings. These take more finding than one would imagine. We take off a fair number of fingers and extract numerous shrapnel bullets.
Everyone was as cheerful as possible
In July 1915, Dr Brennan wrote home, praising the heroism of the troops on Gallipoli, from the landings onwards. Brennan had been in the first wave of the landings and had himself performed acts of gallantry, which he does not mention in his letter, preferring to praise the men who served with him. The letter also records the moment at which the Anzacs realised that they were too far north of their prescribed landing point.
On the day of departure from the island (Saturday, April 24) half our battalion embarked on destroyers and were taken to H.M.S. London, and started out, all the battleships and cruisers in line, the transports (with the remainder of the troops) following, and the destroyers buzzing about like bees. The Queen Elizabeth went on ahead. We cruised about the Aegean Sea all the afternoon, and at dark started slowly up the Gulf of Saros. The officers of the London were awfully good to us; they gave up their beds to us and fed us up like fighting cocks. If you ever hear anyone saying anything derogatory about the Navy in future just plug him and explain it’s from me. They really are the finest lot of men I have ever met.
After a few hours sleep we were called at 12.30 a.m., and had another feed. By this time we were just in sight of land, and the night was glorious; but as the moonlight was so bright we had to keep well away from the land. About 1.30 a.m. we embarked in boats which were towed by the battleships’ packet boats on the opposite side of the ships from the land, so that only the battleships could be seen, and then started slowly in diagonally towards the part of the shore where we were to land. Of course, there were no lights, and the silence was absolute, except for an occasional low-voiced order from a naval officer. By this time the moon had gone down, and we had just an hour before dawn. Then all at once the battleships stopped, and we turned half-right and started hell for leather for the shore—six packet boats (off three battleships), each towing four or five big pinnace launches and cutters. Our tow was on the extreme left. A few hundred yards behind us came seven or eight destroyers packed with the remaining companies of our battalions, which they had collected off the transports; then behind them again came the transports carrying the troops of the other brigades waiting until we were landed for the picket boats and destroyers to return and land them.
The land loomed closer and closer, and there was still no sign of the enemy having discovered us, but all at once it struck me that the look of the land ahead of us was distinctly different from what it should have been by the maps which were issued to us: the hills were steep right to the beach, instead of the ground gradually sloping as we were told. Evidently others made the same discovery, for presently I heard a navy chap say in a drawlly way ‘I believe we’re A Mile Too Far North.’ But it was too late to mend the error—dawn was just breaking—so after turning still further north for a couple of hundred yards about quite close to the shore we made straight on. Just as the picket boat cast off and we were lowering the oars to pull in the last 40 or 50 yards a single rifle shot rang out in the stillness, and everyone jumped about a foot off his seat. But we all soon got over the jumping business, as within about five seconds the fire opened from the whole hill in front of us, and then a machine gun opened fire.
I was in the second boat of the tow, and being a fairly light boat we ran well into the beach. The first boat of the tow was a big pinnace, and having 50 men on board she grounded a fair distance out, and when the troops got out they were up to their shoulders in water; we were only up to our waists. There were only a few casualties in our boats—the machine gun didn’t get into it—but there were more in others especially those who didn’t get rowing while they still had way on [forward motion] from the picket boat. As you can imagine, there was no time wasted in getting out of the boats and across the beach (only about 15 yards wide), to the shelter of the bank; but even there we found we were not safe, as they were enfilading us from a bit of a cape about 200 yards to the south, so we had to crawl round until we found a little depression in the bank. Of course, all this was a matter of seconds. Soon there were a good number of men ashore. I heard an officer sing out ‘Fix bayonets, lads and up we go’ and with a yell they started up the hill, which was very steep. They had to crawl up on hands and knees: more men were coming all the time, following the others up. Suddenly the shrapnel started. They were firing from a battery on the Gaba Tepe, a cape about 1½ miles south of us, and at once the battleships opened in return, and the din was tremendous. There seemed to be shrapnel bursting over and all round the boats. I was busy dressing all kinds of bullet wounds. An engineer was shot through the chest just beside me, and died in a few minutes. Suddenly there was a cheer from the top of the hill; our boys had captured the machine gun and driven the Turks out of their trenches. All this time there was not a rifle fired by our side. Coming ashore the rifles were not even loaded. I followed them up, dressing the wounded and leaving them to be picked up by bearers.
As soon as our fellows got the First Hill they got the Turks on the run and kept them going, down the other side of the hill they went, and up the next—very stiff climb; a hill or a ridge rather about 400ft. high. The whole country is covered with low scrub, and in the rush forward lots of the Turks lay down under bushes and sniped our men off after they had passed them. They crossed a plateau 100 yards wide, and followed down another dip into a big gully with a creek in it, where we found five tents, evidently having been occupied by supports for the trenches. There were a lot of wounded Turks about, but as there were so many of our wounded I hadn’t much time to look at them. Besides, they had no field dressings like our men carry. I gave some morphine to a few of them, but most of them spat it out.
Everyone was as cheerful as possible in spite of everything. Coming up the first hill I heard one fellow say (the bullets were very thick at the time), ‘If they’re not careful they’ll fire one shot too many, and the bullets will chock [collide] in the air’. On the plateau I met my A.M.C. sergeant, and it was very fortunate, as two can do better than one, especially with fractures and bad haemorrhage cases. We fixed a couple of shattered legs, and went on down into the big gully, along that for a bit, and then up on to the top of the main ridge which our fellows had just taken. The first wounded man up there that I struck was Peck, our adjutant; he had a bullet through the shoulder. It had just missed the bone.
Our men had gone on still further, but by this time (about 10 a.m.) the Turks were reinforced strongly. Although during the morning and early afternoon some of our sections got out more than a mile further, they had all eventually to fall back to the main ridge. During the later afternoon this position got very warm. We were on a knoll on the left of the centre of our line (which by this time was about 2½ miles long) overlooking the left flank. Then some Turks got round a ridge about 500 yards away on our left, from which they could get the back of the hill we were on, as well as the front, and we had to dig in as quickly as possible.
Of course, all the units were fearfully mixed up by this time. Major Denton was close to me and about half a dozen of our men; all the other men were a mixture of battalions. I found myself in a trench with some machine gun supports, and borrowed a bit of their trench to haul wounded into and dress there. My sergeant was a little further along the line. When darkness came you could move about a bit as long as you kept off the skyline, and I went and visited Denton and found Barnes, Brockman and Everett along the line with a mixed command. There were not so many casualties now, but every now and then a man would be wounded while digging trenches just over the hill. Altogether it was a very anxious time from the middle of the afternoon until next morning. The firing was continuous, and very heavy. The Turks are wonders at taking cover and would worm their way right up to within 10 yards of the trenches and pot at anything they saw move in the darkness. About midnight, to increase our discomfort, a drizzly rain started, and before long we were wet to the skin. The men in the trench with me had their bayonets fixed all night, and I had my revolver ready. I had already taken off my red cross, as it wasn’t much use in such a situation. We all had a few pots at apparently moving shadows during the night. The snipers from the hill opposite came round during the night, and our knoll and the left flank were surrounded, except along the ridge towards the centre. We were all very glad when morning dawned. Time after time during the night the enemy had come right up to the trenches, but they would not face the bayonets, and always retired.
The following five days saw continuous fighting, we holding the position on the top of the ridge, and they trying to break through. Of course, if they had broken through our line anywhere it would have meant that the whole line would have had to retire. An Indian mountain battery got busy on Sunday afternoon, and in spite of severe losses caused by the concentration of the enemy’s shrapnel on them, they did wonderful work. Then on Monday, as soon as our line was established, the battleships opened fire over our heads. The ‘Lizzie’s’ shells were a revelation; they would whistle over our heads, and the next, there would be a terrific explosion on the big hill on our left front and when the smoke and dust cleared the whole contour would be changed. Every time that the Turks massed in any spot the observers would pass along the word by field telephone, and the ship’s shells would be on them. Of course, they were not quiet either, and there was shrapnel bursting continuously over our trenches.
On Monday and Tuesday our batteries were landing and soon opened fire also. On Monday morning Denton, Everett and Selby formed an observation post on our knoll, a telephone was brought along to my dugout, and they got a dugout just over the hill 10 yards away. They could observe the whole left flank, and shouted messages down all day, which Denton sent on by telephone until he got wounded (not severely) on Tuesday afternoon, and then I sent them on after that. There was a fearful shortage of officers; one after another came over the hill wounded, and some were killed, including Charlie Barnes, while observing for a machine gun. Croly also got a severe wound through the elbow. Later Everett, Selby, and I were the only three left in our section of trenches with a couple of hundred men—all under the few N.C.O.s left. Everett and Selby were kept busy in their posts, and as the wounded were diminishing I took on a bit of army service business, sending down parties for water, food, rum, ammunition, etc., and sent their messages to the head quarters by telephone. Altogether we were going from morning till night, but after dark we could do a bit of a crawl round.
On Monday night I took a stroll down to the beach to get my pack, which I had dropped there as soon as we landed, and luckily found it, and got an overcoat and waterproof sheet out, and took them back. The greatest trouble we had in our part was the removal of the wounded. We could do practically nothing till dark, and even then there were snipers about. Many stretcher-bearers were wounded, and to make matters worse all day and part of the night the valley was swept by shrapnel—in fact, the valley was called ‘Shrapnel Valley.’ In the dugouts around me were my sergeant and a pioneer sergeant and two assistants looking after the ammunition supply. One of these last was a trick of a kid. He would duck down the hill to the valley to fetch up water and sometimes tea for us, and if a sniper got closer to him than usual he would put down whatever he was carrying, turn in the direction from which the bullet came, and put his fingers to his nose, and then come on again.
There were examples of wonderful bravery all round us. One boy of 19 and a Corporal the only two left out of a machine gun crew [manned] the gun for four days and nights with practically no sleep, and in spite of splinters from bullets which had hit the gun and had embedded in their arms and hands. They only left when the gun was ruined. I could tell you dozens of equally courageous things.
On Thursday we heard a rumour that our Battalion was reforming on the beach, so I went down to see and found that they had been down resting since the previous afternoon. I went back to tell Everett and Selby to collect my things. They couldn’t leave until officers could be spared to relieve them, so I got together the sergeant and the only one I had left of five stretcher-bearers I had managed to collect (all the others were wounded), and I went down to the valley and slept my first decent sleep with Joe Kenny, who had a section of the 4th Field Ambulance there. I arranged with him to see that the section of trenches I had been looking after were evacuated of wounded and went and joined the battalion. Met Dixon Hearder on the beach; he had been doing great work with his machine guns in the centre. When the Battalion reformed there were 11 officers killed, wounded, or missing, and between 500 and 600 men out of the 1,000 odd of the men who had landed.
I am writing this in my dugout and as there is a good deal of shrapnel kicking and whizzing about just outside us we are sitting tight. The food is pretty good; we have tinned meat, bacon, jam, cheese, and biscuits, besides tea and sugar, with rum twice a week; also spuds and onions. The chaps on the London have been great. Nearly every day a hamper comes over with the bread, tinned milk, butter, cigarettes, tobacco, matches, chutney, sauce and chocolate, golden syrup, and bootlaces. So we are very happy; even when it rains we rig our waterproof sheets for a roof.
Just a line in conclusion about the effect of being under fire on oneself. You read of men crying and laughing and getting hysterical. I have seen a little of that amongst our reinforcements who were not in the first flutter. But I saw none at all in our lot. Everything was so crisp and sudden, and it seemed just as safe to keep going forward as it did to stay where you were. The different sounds of bullets, shells, etc., we are now experts in. There is the sharp crack of the bullet overhead, with a ‘ping’ when it hits anything. There is the nasty, unfriendly swish of one that passes close to your ear. Then there is the ‘crackle’ of a machine gun, changing to a mournful disappointed ‘whisp whisp’ when the bullets get closer. Lastly, there is the cheerful whistle of the shrapnel shell well overhead, and at which we all used to duck (we don’t now, we know they’re safe). It’s the vicious brute that is just past you as you hear it that makes you take cover in case there’s another following it. I heard one fellow in the trenches the other day say to another, ‘One of these days we’ll be standing at the corner of Hay and Barrack streets and a motor tyre will burst close by, and the people around will be wondering why we’re lying on our stomachs.’ ‘And when a barmaid opens a bottle of soda we’ll all be down under the counter’, replied his mate.
Private William Joseph Punch was one of the 500 to 800 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who served in World War I. At least five of these men are buried on Gallipoli, although Punch’s war experience was at the western front. Although his death was sadly typical of the Great War, the story of his life is unusual.
Along the Bland Creek (near Frampton, New South Wales) one night in 1880 a group of Aborigines were murdered by settlers as punishment for cattle spearing. A young man named John Siggs from a local settler family came across the site shortly afterwards and found the only survivor, an infant trying to suckle at his dead mother’s breast. Filled with disgust at the deed and overcome with pity, Siggs took the baby boy and raised him as a member of the family. The story was put about that the boy was from Queensland, possibly to conceal the fact that he was the sole survivor of the massacre. Under the name William Joseph Punch the boy grew up and went to school along with the other children in the region, and he became a noted sportsman, musician and participant in local social activities.
In December 1915, Punch enlisted. He was in camp with 300 other enlistees at the Goulburn Showground until February 1916 when he was transferred to Sydney. He was reportedly a popular man with the troops and eventually joined the 1st Battalion and fought on the western front. He was wounded in September 1916, though he subsequently returned to duty. He was wounded again the following year in France, shipped back to England and nursed, as many Anzac troops were, in the coastal town of Bournemouth, in Dorset.
We may well never have known about Private Punch’s life and death if not for an attempt made by the Returned Services League in 1931 to identify indigenous diggers. That year, the RSL publication Reveille issued a request for information that drew a letter from an Australian nurse who had looked after Punch during his last weeks in the hospital at Bournemouth. Sister O’Shea not only wrote to Reveille about the black digger but also supplied a photograph of him in his hospital bed.
One of Punch’s old mates, W. Scott, also wrote in with his recollections of the man.
I would like to add my quota in remembrance of Bill Punch, of Goulburn, who was admired by all his comrades, and regarded as a ‘Dinkum Digger.’ Bill was a full blooded aborigine—a Queenslander, I think. He was adopted when a youngster by Mr W Siggs of Woodhouselee, between Goulburn and Crookwell, who educated him and employed him as a stockman and station hand up till the time of his enlistment. Bill, as well as being well educated, was a musician of no mean ability, and very popular with his Digger mates. He went through Goulburn and Liverpool camps, and on to Tel-el-Kebir with our reinforcement, the 17th of the 1st Battalion.
Unfortunately, in Egypt, Bill and several others were quarantined for mumps or something and were left behind. We went on to join the 53rd Battalion at Fleur Baix, and Punch and the others eventually joined the 1st Battalion . . .
On 29 August 1917, Private Punch died of pneumonia in the Mount Dore hospital in Bournemouth. He is buried in the Bournemouth East Cemetery, Boscombe.
He was the Salvation Army minister who allegedly led troops into battle brandishing a shovel. This and other legends formed around the remarkable man known as ‘Fighting Mac’, properly William McKenzie, Chaplain to the 4th Battalion, AIF.
Born in Scotland, he arrived in Australia at the age of fifteen in 1884 and quickly adapted to outdoor life in Queensland, cane cutting and dairying. He became a Salvation Army minister in 1889—‘the true religion for a fighting man’, he later said—but retained an intensely practical approach to his duties, which formed the basis of his amazing wartime story on Gallipoli and the western front.
On the transport ship to Egypt he organised sporting events and other recreations for the men, including boxing matches, which he sometimes won against some of the AIF’s hardest nuts. These activities gained him the respect of the troops and legends began to attach themselves to his larger-than-life personality. In Egypt he was rumoured to have been incensed at the rather heavily populated venereal disease treatment camp and to have assisted the troops in pulling down the barbed wire around it.
On Gallipoli he worked tirelessly as a water-bearer, stretcher-bearer and chaplain, burying many men and also providing a ready ear for advice and guidance. It was said that in one three-day period alone he conducted 647 burials. One of his earliest burials was that of Lieutenant Colonel Onslow Thompson, the commanding officer of the 4th Battalion, who was killed on 26 April—‘It was a relief to find the body of our colonel . . . after it had lain out for a full fortnight. We buried it after dark, as it lay in an exposed position. I had to kneel and keep head and body in a crouching posture while reading the service. Hundreds of bullets swept over us while this was going on.’
According to legend, Mac was conducting a service when a Turkish shell exploded nearby, showering him and the congregation with dirt. ‘Hallelujah!’ he called out, as he picked himself up and continued the service. Although chaplains were officially prohibited from engaging in combat, McKenzie was involved in many battles. At Lone Pine the troops reputedly begged him not to risk his life but he replied, ‘Boys, I’ve preached to you, and I’ve prayed with you. Do you think I’m afraid now to die with you?’
He continued his hands-on approach on the western front, assisting with the establishment and running of ‘comforts’ such as coffee stalls. He was present at many of the now iconic battles of the war in including Pozières, Bullecourt and Mouquet Farm in France, and Polygon Wood and Passchendaele in Belgium. In 1917, at the age of forty-eight, he was released from service as a result of the decline in his physical health and the emotional toll of the things he had seen and done. McKenzie was the object of deep respect from his comrades and had also become a national hero—he was sometimes called the most famous man in the AIF. He had been decorated in 1916 and there were rumours that he had several times been nominated for the Victoria Cross.
Despite the poor state of his health, McKenzie continued to actively fill a leading role in the Salvation Army after the war, which included spending some years in China. He was awarded an OBE in 1935 and became a popular presence at Anzac Day observances. McKenzie retired from the Salvation Army in 1939 and died in Sydney in 1947. It is said that weeping diggers marched six abreast at his funeral.
The action officially known as the ‘attack’ on the French village of Fromelles was the first to involve AIF troops on the western front. It took place around the villages of Fleurbaix and Fromelles on 19 and 20 July 1916 and includes what is generally considered to have been the worst-ever day of fighting for Australian troops. After it was over more than five-and-a-half thousand Australian troops were dead, wounded or imprisoned. The British also suffered heavy casualties and the action was a strategic failure.
This graphic description published four years after the battle mentions Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott, a brilliant but independent Australian brigade commander who had already declared Fromelles a hopeless task at the planning stage. His highly trained men were, literally, cut to pieces by the enemy fire and he was seen with tears streaming down his face as he shook hands with the few survivors after the battle.
The morning of the 19th was calm and misty, with the promise of a clear, fine day later. Reports from patrols in No Man’s Land during the night indicated that the damage done to the enemy’s wire was as yet inconsiderable, but no real importance was attached to that, as the chief part of the artillery preparation had still to come. The patrol reports disclosed also that the enemy was very vigilant, and that close inspection of parts of his wire was impossible owing to the presence of strong enemy posts in No Man’s Land. At a quarter past 2 p.m., however, there was a marked increase in enemy counter preparation, and by 3 p.m. a heavy and continuous volume of fire was falling over the front and support line and the saps leading to them, now filled with the assembling infantry. The assembly was reported complete on the 8th Brigade front at 25 minutes past 3 p.m., on the 14th at a quarter to 4 p.m., and on the 15th at 4 p.m. The men had received specially good breakfasts and dinners, and were in high spirits. The enemy fire continued to increase in volume on the front trenches, where already three of the four company commanders of the 53rd Battalion had become casualties.
Punctually at 5.43 p.m. deployment into No Man’s Land commenced, and it was hoped that the artillery barrage would be sufficiently intense to keep enemy heads down until the deployment was completed. On the extreme right of the 5th Divisional frontage the 59th Battalion was scarcely over the parapet before a little desultory musketry fire was opened on it, coming chiefly from the Sugar Loaf. Before the men had gone 30 yards this fire had grown in intensity, and a machine gun added its significant voice to the rapidly increasing fusillade. The waves pressed forward steadily, but just as steadily the enemy fire grew hotter, and the enemy front lines were seen to be thickly manned with troops. The losses mounted rapidly as the men pressed gallantly on into the withering fire. Lieut-Colonel Harris was disabled by a shell, and Major Layh took charge of the dwindling line, which, finding a slight depression about 100 yards from the enemy parapet, halted in the scanty cover it provided, and commenced to reorganise their broken and depleted units.
THE THINNING LINES
The deployment of the 60th Battalion was attended by similar circumstances. Heavy fire was encountered almost from the moment of its appearance over the parapet. Into this the troops pressed with the same steadiness as that displayed by the 59th, and with the same result. The ranks, especially on the right, where they were most exposed to the Sugar Loaf, thinned rapidly; but the later waves followed on without hesitation or confusion. On the left flank more headway was made. To halt in No Man’s Land in these circumstances was to court certain death, and Major McRae led his troops towards the enemy parapet. It was his last act of gallant leadership. Just at the enemy wire the enfilade fire from the Sugar Loaf became intense, and there, almost at his goal, he fell. His adjutant fell beside him, and there, too, the greater part of the 60th Battalion melted away. Only on the extreme left were the enemy trenches entered by elements of the 60th. They appear to have had some temporary success, for they sent back a few prisoners; but, as the official report significantly states, ‘Touch with them was subsequently lost.’ Thus on the entire front the 15th Brigade, within half an hour from the time of assault, it was apparent that the 61st Imperial Division had failed to take the Sugar Loaf strong post, which was its allotted task, and that it was beyond human power to cross so wide a No Man’s Land in the face of the machine-gun fire that streamed continuously from it. By 6.30 p.m. the remnants of the two battalions were doggedly digging in as near to the enemy parapet as they could. Thirty-five out of 39 of the assaulting officers were already killed or wounded, and with them most of the N.C.O.’s. In these circumstances the survivors could only hold on determinedly to what they had won and await such further action as their trusted brigade commander might devise to meet the situation.
The troops of the centre and left brigades, although they had suffered heavily under the preliminary bombardment, experienced in their assault a vastly different fortune. Immune from the fatal enfilade of the Sugar Loaf, the 53rd and 54th Battalions completed their deployment with comparatively slight additional casualties, and as the barrage lifted the leading wave dashed into the enemy front line. The enemy was caught in the act of manning his parapets, and some bitter hand-to-hand fighting followed. It terminated, as all such hand-to-hand fighting terminated throughout the war, in the absolute triumph of the Australians and the extinction or capitulation of the Germans. The front line thus secured, the later waves streamed over it and made for the enemy support trench, which, according to their information, lay about 150 yards behind his front line. The intervening country torn with shell holes, and intersected by communication trenches, was difficult to cross, and it was swept by a certain amount of machine-gun and musketry fire. A careful search of the terrain failed to disclose anything in the nature of an organised enemy support line at the place indicated on the aeroplane maps, and both 53rd and 54th Battalions spent considerable time in searching for one. Except for certain fragmentary trench sections, all that could be found was an old ditch, containing a couple of feet of water. Whatever the purpose of its original construction, it was now used as a drain to convey away the water pumped by pumping plants from the deep dugouts of the front line. The non-existence of an organised support line at the place indicated in the orders was an immediate and fruitful source of complications, aggravated particularly in the 53rd Battalion by the dearth of senior officers. Instead of stepping into a definite and well constructed line, the men became dispersed in the search for one, and with night closing in and the enemy counter-attacks impending the necessity to consolidate somewhere became pressing. This was done, but the line taken up lacked the continuity and lateral communications that a good trench would have afforded. In the circumstances, the 53rd Battalion’s touch with the 54th on its left became intermittent, and finally ceased, while even between the elements of the 53rd itself, communication was irregular. The position of the 54th Battalion was materially better. Although three of its four company commanders and three of its four seconds in command wore casualties prior to the assault, Lieut. Colonel Cass had happily escaped injury, and was thus able to direct the consolidation of his position. By strenuous efforts the line of the drain was improved, and a moderately good fire position along the whole of the 54th Battalion frontage was soon in course of construction.
On the left sector, Major-General Tivey was faced from the outset with the heavy responsibility of securing the extreme left flank of the entire battle frontage. At 6 p.m. the battalions stormed over what was left of the enemy wire, and were soon masters of the enemy front trench. Many Germans were killed, and a good number of prisoners taken. Pressing on to their next objective, they met with an experience precisely similar to that of the battalions of the 14th Brigade. An open ditch, containing about 3ft. of water, 150 yards behind the enemy front line, was the only trace of enemy works in the vicinity, and though Lieut-Colonel Toll personally explored the country for several hundred yards farther, he found no trace of an enemy support line. The search for the expected system took many of the officers and men of both battalions into the area of our own protective barrage, and not a few casualties were suffered thereby. Constrained to make the best of things, Colonel Toll ordered his battalion to consolidate along the ditch.
The general position of the 5th Divisional front at 7.30 p.m. on the 19th was that the attack was definitely held up from the right brigade sector, and successful on the central and left sectors. The 59th and 60th Battalions had suffered terribly, and in the 53rd, 54th, 31st, and 32nd Battalions, the percentage of losses, especially amongst the officers, was very high, and still mounting steadily. The line held was an indifferent one. Consolidation was difficult; the line was not continuous, and later communication along it was irregular and uncertain.
General Elliott received official news of the failure of the 61st Imperial Division (on the right) at about 7.30 p.m., by which time he was also aware that the 59th and 60th Battalions were badly cut up, and quite unable to advance without assistance. On receipt of information at 7.52 that he could use two companies of the 58th to support his attack, in conjunction with the attack of the 184th Imperial Brigade on the Sugar Loaf, he took immediate steps to make the necessary arrangement. Command of the attack was entrusted to Major Hutchinson. Few more gallant episodes than this dashing, hopeless assault exist in the annals of any army in the world. The attack of the 61st Imperial Division had been abandoned (without the battalion knowing it), and the Sugar Loaf defences were thus enabled to concentrate the whole of their organised machine-gun fire on the one thin Australian line which now endeavoured to penetrate it. With wonderful dash the companies pressed on, losing at every step, but undaunted to the end. They reached the remnants of the 59th and 60th Battalions, where they lay grimly waiting in their shallow, improvised positions. They caught them up and carried them on towards the enemy by the impetus of their own heroic charge. Impeded by broken ground and shell holes, the thinning line searched brokenly forward, reeling under the enfilade, enduring everything but the thought of failing. It was in vain. At the enemy wire the fire became hellish, irresistible. Major Hutchinson perished gloriously close to the German parapet. The attack melted into nothingness.
The information that the 8th Brigade could no longer maintain the left flank against the increasing enemy pressure was received at Divisional Headquarters at about 5 a.m. on the 20th. At this moment General Munro, commanding the 1st Army, was, with Major-General McCay and other officers, at Sailly, in conference on the situation, and it was immediately decided that the 14th Brigade should be withdrawn forthwith, from its precarious position. Communication was difficult at this time, and none of the first seven runners despatched succeeded in reaching Lieutenant-Colonel Cass. The eighth runner had better success, and Lieut-Colonel Cass acknowledged the receipt of retiring instructions at 7.50 a.m. He instructed Lieut-Colonel McConaghy who was still in the enemy front line, to provide from his command a rearguard to hold back the enemy during the withdrawal, and Captain Gibbons and several other officers, with about 50 men of the 55th Battalion, were detailed for this desperate duty. Long before the movement was completed Captain Gibbons’ small rearguard found itself fighting bitterly against overwhelming numbers of the victorious enemy. No one thought of himself—no one thought of yielding. No one thought of anything save holding on with his last ounce of strength till the brigade could be extricated. So one by one they fell at their posts, and of this gallant band scarce a man was left alive when the last file of their comrades had passed through the trench to safety. Thus it was at about 9 a.m. on July 20, 1916, the survivors of the 14th Brigade regained their old front line and the battle of Fromelles ended.
The total casualties among the Australians from noon on July 19 to noon on July 20 were 178 officers and 5,335 of other ranks.
The actions of Anzacs in France and Belgium were deeply appreciated by many of the local villagers, and even today there are many positive memories of the Australian contribution to the ultimate victory on the western front. So well regarded were the Australians that even the simple fact of their return to the fighting could instil great confidence in the battered local populations, as described in this account.
The reception of the Australians by the local population was unmistakable and made their return to the Somme a high romance. In many of the farms and village houses were found still pinned to the walls photographs of individual Australians and flags commemorating Anzac Day 1916. For this country hereabouts had very nearly come to be a little bit of Australia by association during the summer and winter campaigns of that year. Some of the Diggers here found themselves known by name and remembered like intimate friends. They had fought and played, lived and died about the countryside not merely as soldiers but like patriots defending their own homes. And not in vain. To say that the French women and children rejoiced to see them again is to report the fact but mildly. As the Australian advance guards appeared many of these people, packing their old wagons to flee, were suddenly seized with new heart and a great emotion; they tore their household goods from off the carts again, and dragged the old people and the youngest children to the roadside to shout ‘Vivent les Australiens’; the word ran from village to village ahead announcing the arrival of the saviours of France. And that they had come to save France the Australians were tempted to believe, not only on the enthusiasm aroused in every man of them by this great reception, but also by their uplifting confidence in themselves and their capacity to thrash the Hun wherever they should meet him. ‘Finish retreat’, they told the villagers ‘beaucoup Australians ici.’
In September 1917 a correspondent for an unnamed English newspaper visited the western front. The unnamed journalist closely observed the recently victorious diggers and was struck by their casual attitude towards the business of war and their irreverent sense of humour, among other characteristics. Australian forces had just broken the German lines at Mont St Quentin and Peronne in France. Three VCs were won, but the Australians suffered around 3000 casualties.
To test one’s psychological impression of the war solely by the Australian front would be rash. For the Australian Corps is very individualistic, and, after its recent victories, very happy, so that it strikes one less as part of a tragic world contest than as a band of Elizabethan adventurers in great fettle, engaged on a high emprise of their own which they pursue with ardour, gaiety, and an immense confidence. The note is well struck in PERONNE. Here and there in the cleared space between shapeless heaps of brick and mortar which is the main street of that town one may pick out the signs of five occupations. Very faint are the traces of its peaceful day . . . The German notice boards of the first occupation are commoner, with traces of the French return superimposed upon them. But in his last tenure, the enemy had plastered it all afresh . . . And suddenly one comes on the largest notice board of all. The effect is like that of a clean and merry wind blowing through a swamp. The board bears the title ‘Roo de Kanga,’ and it marks the Australian conquest of the ruins of Sept. 1.
And what of the ‘Digger’, as the Australian private is content to call himself? One could learn much of him quickly, for he has no servility and little shyness. Sometimes one had a quite uncomfortable revelation of him, as when four self-conscious civilians who arrived, not without misgivings, in the forward area met a battalion of him fresh from the trenches and were greeted with the crushing comment: ‘Thank God, the Americans at last!’ Or one would note him crowding, in the highest spirits, round a cageful of newly captured Germans, comparing notes in a dispassionately professional vein on the recent engagement, or offering, not without success, to exchange a tin of bully beef for an Iron Cross. In the major features of his thirty-mile push the Digger is less interested than in such sporting venture as that of a little party of Australians who pushed across the SOMME into CHIPILLY, whence the enemy was enfilading the line, and bluffed a German force many times their size into surrender. He is delighted, too, with the mule who was set to draw a dummy tank, and did so dejectedly, for a while, but later, satisfying himself with an inquisitive sniff that the thing was vulnerable, kicked it to smithereens. He is, too, most boyishly gleeful about the colossal German gun which he came on in a peaceful glade in the course of his forward rush . . . Its great bulking carriage towers from its concrete base among the trees, a tremendous monument of man’s madness. The Digger has written on it ‘captured by Waacs,’ and Australian names are graven all over it, from that of the Prime Minister downwards.
And everywhere he will have sport. You can see him with his brown chest and arms gleaming in the sun, defending a wicket on a pitch in a bend of the SOMME that he has just captured; or scarcely to be stopped from that super-energetic sort of rugby that is played under his code to watch the ‘Archies’ peppering a Boche airman; or cheering a famous Australian jockey pelting along in a mule race on a course improvised where the shell holes are fewest. In lazier moments he is regaled by one of the troops of entertainers for which his Corps is famous in a theatre he has knocked together out of nothing; or he is to be found studying with much interest one of the large maps of the front, with which he is kept in touch with the latest news of the whole line, and deciding what he would do at this or the next place if he were Foch [commander of the French forces].
While the Australians took this well-earned rest along the ‘Roo de Kanga’ they were commended by the commander of the British army to which they were attached. General Rawlinson of the Fourth Army, in the language of the period, paid tribute to the diggers and looked forward to the end of the war.
Since the Australian Corps joined the Fourth Army on April 8th, 1918, they have passed through a period of hard and uniformly successful fighting, of which all ranks have every right to feel proud.
Now that it has been possible to give the Australian Corps a well-earned period of rest, I wish to express to them my gratitude for all they have one. I have watched with the greatest interest and admiration the various stages through which they have passed, from the hard times of FLERS and POZIERES to their culminating victories at MONT ST QUENTIN and the great Hindenburg system at BONY, BELLICOURT TUNNEL AND MONTBREHAIN. During the summer of 1918 the safety of Amiens has been principally due to their determination, tenacity and valour.
The story of what they have accomplished as a fighting Army Corps, of the diligence, gallantry, and skill which they have so thoroughly learned and so successfully applied, has gained for all Australians a place of honour amongst nations and amongst the English-speaking races in particular.
It has been my privilege to lead the Australian Corps in the Fourth Army during the decisive battles since August 8, which bid fair to bring the war to a successful conclusion at no distant date. No one realises more than I do the very prominent part they have played, for I have watched from day to day every detail of their fighting, and learned to value beyond measure the prowess and determination of all ranks.
In once more congratulating the Corps on a series of successes unsurpassed in this great war, I feel that no more words of mine can adequately express the renown that they have won for themselves and the position that they have established for the Australian nation, not only in France, but throughout the world.
I wish every officer, NCO, and man all possible good fortune in the future, and a speedy and safe return to their beloved Australia.
Private Vernon Carter left Australia in November 1915, and after training in Egypt went to France in June 1916. He was wounded in the battle of Fromelles where he was taken prisoner and transported at first to Dülmen prison camp in Germany.
For about ten weeks I was in Dulmen camp, and my arm got better. They then sent me through to within eight or ten miles of the Russian border, to what was really an outpost of Schneidemuhl camp. They put me at once to work in a sugar factory, where they work two shifts of twelve hours each, with only a half hour break in the shift. All they gave us was a thing called soup, which you could have put through a colander without a trace of solids being left. It was little better than colored water. Sometimes the diet was varied by a little bit of bread containing strange ingredients, including sawdust. We were entitled to 250 grammes of bread per day, but the stuff was so sodden that the ration would seem no larger than a slice off a toast loaf. I was in that wretched place for five weeks, and during that time they knocked a lot of chaps about. Until that time I had a clean skin, and had not fallen out with any of our oppressors. Some of the men were most cruelly treated, for no reason which we could see, unless it was that none of us understood German.
On the Sunday morning when the five weeks of which I spoke were up a dreadful blizzard commenced to blow—I suppose you can imagine what a blizzard in that place would be like—and we decided to strike work. We had to go to work at 6 o’clock on the night shift. The men, tired of ill-treatment, refused to work. The guards flourished their bayonets over their heads for an hour in the hope of frightening us into working. They got no satisfaction from that, however, so they rang up an officer and told him what had happened. The officer replied that if we refused to work we could stand at attention in the snow until we repented and returned to our toil. But this threat failed to move the men, and they were forced to experience a bitter taste of disciplinary kultur. We had had nothing to eat and nothing to drink since 12 o’clock midday; yet from 7 o’clock that night, strangers to food, we stood to attention in that blizzard till 12 o’clock next day. It was a form of punishment so cruel that few would care to undergo it a second time. (I may say here that we have handed to the British authorities the names of the officials responsible for the horror and the British Government is ‘pushing it’ with the object of having the tyrants punished.)
At 12 o’clock on the Monday, when it was found that this harsh treatment had not broken our spirits, we were sent back to camp, reaching there about 3 o’clock the next morning. And still we had had nothing to eat. We got a little food about 8 o’clock, when some English prisoners gave us some of theirs before we were put into the ‘clink.’ After five days in confinement we were sent among a party of 500 Russians, French and others to Westphalia, and from December 21, 1916, to August 20, 1918, I worked in a coal mine. For a month I worked on the surface, but was afterwards sent below, where they work shifts of eight hours. It takes an hour going to the face and an hour to return, and the prisoners are the first to go down and the last to return. For a year and eight months I worked in a drive [tunnel] no higher than a table, pushing trucks, and my hips bear the marks today of the knocks I got while slaving in that position. The only thing that saved me from being ill-treated then was that I had the ‘boss’ bluffed. He was a sergeant who had had twelve months in hospital—no man has a boss-ship in a mine unless he has been a sergeant in the army. Three or four of us had threatened to throw him down a shaft if he did not leave us alone.
About this time I went into hospital with a poisoned foot. At this mine men were beaten every day. If they did not do enough work they were reported to the boss and were kept at attention until they caved in and went back to work. After having spent eleven weeks in hospital with my poisoned foot I was sent to work on a farm and was there until the armistice was signed, and I was soon afterwards given my liberty.
Private Carter was understandably bitter about his harsh treatment as a prisoner of war. His weight had fallen from his normal 14 stone to only 10. But there had been at least one bright spot in the experience:
I cannot conclude without paying the highest possible tribute to the work of the Australian Red Cross. It was wonderful. The packages we got from its workers in Australia, which in my case sometimes included articles from Toolondo and other places near home, were the only gleams of sunshine in the whole dark picture. It is not too much to say that every man’s life depended upon them, and that without them not many of us would be alive to-day.
The 2nd Australian Tunnelling Company (originally No. 2 Company of the Australian Mining Corps) specialised in the highly dangerous job of ‘sapping’—burrowing deep beneath enemy lines to place explosives beneath their fortifications. On the western front, the tunnellers became known as ‘the underground artillery’. Some of their story was told by one of their number under the pen name ‘Willie Wombat’.
It was a certain place in a sector of considerable strategic and tactical importance in which there were at that time keen and active mining operations by the enemy. This part of the line was held by Australians, and with the advent of the miners at this particular period the Huns, for the first time on the Western front, were confronted by Australians in every department of war with the exception of aerial work . . . The enemy knew they were up against Australians, for did they not welcome them by displaying a notice over the parapet with the inscription, ‘Advance Australia. If you can!’ and the arrival of the miners gave them further opportunity in their publicity department to display in a like manner ‘Welcome 500 Australian Miners.’
With these taunts in their minds it was quite natural that our army—I include the New Zealanders—would not take things lying down. Many of the men were hardened veterans of Gallipoli and Egypt, and they very soon put into practice the adage that there should be no peace for the wicked, they organised all sorts of ‘stunts,’ anything and everything to pester Fritz. ‘Keep tickling him up’ was their motto; and they did. And, as was only natural to suppose this method of procedure drew retaliation—what was really asked for. Events soon became interesting.
A blow by either party would quickly go the rounds, and, as this branch of warfare increased in activity the front-liners declared that the Miners were pumping more good stuff into the Hun than the artillery, and so it came to pass that as banter continued some wag referred to the diggers as ‘the underground artillery.’ To be nicknamed by brother-soldiers from the same sunny clime was considered a very great honour and full of good fortune, as well as being accepted in a grand form of brotherly comradeship, for it was on this field that many old mates renewed friendship, and where brothers met, and father and son clasped hands for the first time since the main Expeditionary Force left Australian shores. To the Miners it appeared as a happy omen that they should take up their posts in the front battle line, with their own kith and kin, and as a result a great national pride soon became established throughout the company. It was only natural that they should try to acquit themselves as creditably and as gloriously as their veteran brothers. And I believe this lucky commencement was the real beginning of the fame and honour that have been their reward since coming to France, for today to its credit it must be recorded that it is regarded by General Headquarters as the crack mining company of the Western front.
AUSTRALIANS ’ FINE RECORD
It is only my intention at present to cover a period of the first 20 weeks of the company in France, in which period the combined effort of the Australians and the enemy resulted in the explosion of 35 mines, 24 of which were blown by the former and 11 by the latter; or, in other words, the Australians blew twice as often as the Huns, plus a shade to spare. And when one comes to realise the explosion on an average of over a mine per week it must be admitted that it was a very creditable performance for human energy can only do its best. In addition, the geological conditions and otherwise were not the best.
For several weeks the enemy had been heard working up in the direction of a certain sap, and it was decided to allow him to come as close up as advisable, and a week after our last blow we fired at half-past 7 in the morning. The listeners had a most anxious and exciting time, for minute after minute and hour after hour they could hear the enemy getting closer and closer. Anyhow, all went well for the miners exploded their mine just as the enemy were about to break through into our subway. This was an exciting piece of work, and proved to be most profitable, by reason of the certainty of the proximity of the enemy’s working. After this punishment, and the apparent useless efforts of the enemy miners to get the best of the Australians underground, the Hun subjected this particular part of the workings to a heavy minenwerfer [short-range mortar] fire of the heaviest calibre. These large-sized ‘Minnies’ are capable of penetrating the ground for some distance, and on explosion blow a crater up to 20ft. deep by 40ft. to 50ft. wide, so that it will be apparent the amount of head-cover necessary for safety in running galleries under no man’s land. The attempt was, however, abortive, and no damage was done.
TREMENDOUS EXPLOSIONS
A week after these last desperate attempts of the enemy, as the result of careful preparation and more hard and enduring work, the Australians fired another mine and with a success that was anticipated. Our luck was in, so everyone said, but I firmly believe that, whilst a certain amount of it was in our favour, we had grasped from the very beginning the secret of defensive mining. What evidently perplexed the Huns most was that they were of the opinion that at this particular point our policy was offensive work. Instead it was defensive. The Australian miners’ work was to cut Fritz off and let him have it and to wait for him at other places and hand him out the usual medicine.
For a week there was quietude on both sides, the Australians enjoying themselves in addition to exercising great care as to Hun movements in carrying out a tactical move by preparing a mine on the left as the signal for attack on the right of the Australian division in the Battle of Fromelles. It was at 6 p.m. at this strategical point that a large mine was blown, forming an excellent crater in which many Australian infantry took cover, maintaining a withering and punishing fire on the enemy. Six days following this affair the enemy exploded another mine in the vicinity of our workings, doing neither damage nor causing any casualties.
Almost three weeks elapsed before any more activity took place, when early one morning the enemy fired a charge which caused slight damage to our galleries and killed two men. These were the Australians’ first casualties underground and were men from an Australian pioneer battalion attached to the company. The same day the Australians replied with a powerful charge and gained their objective. In this part of the sector nothing more was heard from the enemy in the matter of blowing mines for six weeks.
By this time it was generally accepted that in this point of the mining system we had also mastered the Hun. Anyhow, during that period three powerful mines were exploded with great destructive force, having in mind two things, first, to let the enemy know we were still active, and, secondly, to point out to him that he was beaten and that it was useless for him to continue the repairing of the wreckage caused. However, at the end of the time stated, the enemy blew another mine which caused slight damage to our workings but no casualties. It was his last explosion in this part, and as it was the second vital spot of the mining system that had been completely defeated, he had to give the game up.
A week later, after this last effort, we gave him a final charge, which was the end of active mining in a sector which had asked for the best that human energy and endurance could give. After making certain that the Hun had been completely defeated, the company took its departure to a certain place to assist in the good work that was being done in the ground preparations for Messines. And on their departure the officer commanding received a letter from the high command eulogising the patience and perseverance, energy and gallantry of all ranks of the company, and asking that congratulations be conveyed to all for having ‘so completely mastered the enemy mining system.’ During the period referred to the company had placed to its credit one mention in despatches, one D.C.M., and five Military Medals.
Although Australia’s unofficial national anthem was composed by A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Christina Macpherson twenty years before the Gallipoli landings, its journey to the status of national and international musical icon was closely tied to Anzac.
The song began its close association with war when troops from Queensland reportedly sang a version of it during the Boer War (1899–1902). By 1916, C. J. Dennis’s The Moods of Ginger Mick puts the rabbit-seller mate of ‘The Sentimental Bloke’ fame on Gallipoli with ‘the little AIF’, an experience that he says has made us ‘all Orstalians now’. As the sequel to the enormously popular The Sentimental Bloke, published just before the war began, The Moods of Ginger Mick was a great hit with the diggers. One of its poems, ‘The Singing Soldiers’, has Mick mentioning the song in his letter back home to the Bloke:
‘When I’m sittin’ in me dug-out wiv the bullets droppin’ near,’ Writes ole Ginger; ‘an’ a chorus smacks me in the flamin’ ear: P’raps a song that Rickards billed, or p’raps a line o’ Waltz Matilder’,
Then I feel I’m in Australia, took an’ shifted over ’ere. Till the music sort o’ gits me, an’ I lets me top notes roam While I treats the gentle foeman to a chunk uv “Ome, Sweet ’Ome”.’
The sheet music of the song was also distributed to troops during the war for the community singing that was such a popular pastime of the era. But ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was not on everyone’s lips. It was not until the singer Peter Dawson recorded a hit version of it in the late 1930s that it began to take off, and it took another world war for it to become the national song it is today. By the early 1940s it seems that the song had become widely popular and was recognised as an expression of Australian identity. In 1940, Movietone News covered the arrival at Mascot airport of a Halifax Bomber called ‘Waltzing Matilda’. From 1942, British tanks named ‘Waltzing Matildas’ were used in North Africa, then in Russia and also in New Guinea. The same year, in a guide to Australian manners and customs for American service personnel based in Australia, it was stated that:
A standard favorite all over the country is Australia’s own folk song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. In fact, the Aussies have made it a classic all over the world. When the Anzac troops made their first assault on Bardia, they did it to the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. They sang it in the heat and fever of Malaya.
The lyrics, with translations, were printed on the following pages.
The song was so well known by this time that it was used as the basis of a new song composed by diggers about their experience of the disastrous campaign in Crete in May 1941. Over 28 000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops were stationed there to repel a determined German air attack for which their commanders had not prepared. A chaotic retreat to the south of the island ensued. At great cost, the Royal Navy managed to save just over half of these troops, leaving the rest as a rear guard to face the advancing Germans. Over 2500 Australian and New Zealand troops were killed and over 5000 captured. This song uses ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to create a new and different composition with its own significance, deriving from that of the original song and its stature as Australia’s unofficial anthem, as well as the dire circumstances in which the Australian troops—including those in the Australian Army Ordnance Corps (AAOC)—found themselves.
Once a private soldier was sitting in his Ordnance store
Down by the shore of the Aegean Sea;
And he said when they asked him what he was a-doing of,
‘I’m just a bloke in the AAOC.’
Working in Ordnance, working in Ordnance,
Handling the stores of the infantry;
Truck for your transport, uniforms to clothe you in,
Fixing the guns for the artillery.
Down came the Heinkels and down came the eight-eights,
Came down in thousands—one, two three!
And they blasted the island ’cos they owned the upper air,
So we withdrew to a new country.
Blew up our vehicles, ruined our Ordnance,
Men, we withdrew the majority.
But the Private stood while the transports were pulling out:
‘I’ll always fight with the rear guard’, said he.
So the private soldier burnt down his Ordnance store;
Blew up his workshop with TNT.
And he smiled as he bent to buckle his equipment on:
‘I’ll always fight with the rear guard’ said he.
‘Fight with the rear guard, fight with the En Zeds,
Fight with the men of the Sixth Divvy.’
And his ghost may be heard ’round the seas where Ulysses
sailed,
He is the pride of the AAOC.
Together with British and Indian troops, around 14 000 Australians withstood the siege of Tobruk in North Africa from April to August 1941. An army of German and Italian troops commanded by General Erwin Rommel, sometimes known as the ‘Desert Fox’, aimed to gain access to the Suez Canal to avoid bringing troops and supplies across a large expanse of desert. ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (an alias adopted by American-born and Ireland-raised William Joyce), broadcast Nazi propaganda in which he referred to the defenders of the Tobruk garrison as ‘rats’. They gladly accepted the insult and turned it back on their enemy, becoming ‘the Rats of Tobruk’. Joyce was executed for treason in 1946.
During the siege, Gunner J. M. Stephens wrote home with a graphic account.
Life is just going on the same old way. Any time now we are expecting to get news from home telling us that the war is over and that we have been left here and forgotten. But here we are, all types of guys thrown together and going on as if we could walk out at any time. In a way it’s rather a lot of fun being besieged. You never know when there will begin a hell of a rumpus and the boys from the other end will march in to relieve us with all the glamour of historic occasions, bands playing, flags flying and a general welcoming committee to greet them.
On the other hand, we never know when Jerry will start the same sort of rumpus and get tired of being left out in the cold for so long. But if he does, there will be a decent sort of welcoming committee awaiting him.
Of course, we are extremely lucky in a way, because our mail comes in by sea fairly regularly and we hear the news each night on Army wireless which, by the way, are certainly not intended to be put to that use.
It is distinctly not in the rules and regulations of the A.I.F., but each night there is a ‘national hook-up’ which should make technicians of the A.B.C. turn green with envy. Imagine a regiment scattered over the country-headquarters back a bit, gun positions half-way to the front line and the observation posts right up forward with the infantry. All these parts are connected by army phones.
At night the signaller on duty at headquarters gets an especially hot programme on the Army wireless, mugs it in somehow to his exchange and it is thereby relayed through the phones to all those places I mentioned. The place where I enjoy this relay most of all is at the O’-pip observation post, as only two at a time go there, we have to do rather long watches as one man must be awake at all times. You can imagine the experience of listening to a programme of Harry Roy or someone equally famous—within a thousand yards or so of Jerry’s front line. This arrangement and our mail are the only ways we are in touch with the outside world so you can imagine how it is appreciated. Those simple things of life, which we all took for granted at one time, we are learning to appreciate pretty fast.
In my opinion, there is nothing better these days than a cup of tea boiled on a primus stove round about midnight and a good yarn about old times. War has really taught me two things, appreciation and patience, two valuable assets in the periods to come after it is all over. That is about the main thing in our lives these days—just thinking of what we will do when the war is over. I look forward to that time more than I looked forward to Christmas or birthdays when I was a kid.
About four days ago I saw the best air show I have ever seen. As Jerry doesn’t seem to be able to shell us out with his artillery, he sent over what I thought must have been his whole Air Force to try and bomb us out. The only thing he accomplished was to provide an exciting half hour’s entertainment for the troops. When Goering taught his Huns to fly he did a good job, but he didn’t concentrate enough on teaching them to drop bombs accurately.
There were all types of planes everywhere you looked, diving and mucking around like two-year-olds at the barrier. They must have dropped tons of bombs, but I don’t think they did anything but stir up a few desert fleas. When they see that the bombs have no effect they get very liverish and dive at us in an endeavour to machine-gun civility into us. But we were well in the comparative safety of our slit trenches and he drew a blank. When they come over in droves like that everyone gets into a slit trench and blazes away with any weapon he can lay hands on.
There are some duds among the stuff Jerry drops and I can’t think of a more uncomfortable experience than to be lying in bed, hear a plane go over, hear that very unwelcome whistle of a falling bomb (the blasted things seem to take an hour to land), increasing in sound as it comes nearer, and then, when you are all keyed up for the bang, all you hear is a dull plop. You get the same sort of feeling during the shelling.
There is a popular saying of the last war that you never hear the shell that gets you. I used to wonder how that could be, but I know it is true now because it is the same with a near miss. The other night we heard the guns and in an instant everything went black. I expected to find myself flitting around the clouds with a brand new pair of wings, but the blackness was due to the blast, dust and, I suppose, momentary concussion. But we didn’t hear the whistle at all because the shell travels faster than the noise.
I have just had my nightly cup of tea and listened to the B.B.C. news which never seems to be any different. It is just about midnight and I am writing in the light of a well shaded hurricane lamp, the reason being that that man is around again. It is bright moonlight outside and Jerry thrives on that, so I don’t want to have a beacon to light him on his way.
It is funny in a way the manner in which we disregard his nightly visits. Every night without fail we have a raid, and at any time of the night you like to go outside you can bet on one of these crates being overhead. If ever we got to London I am afraid that we would be the worry of the air warden’s life as we have got so used to visits. Of course, being in open country makes us feel safe, and it would doubtless be vastly different in a thickly populated town.
One thing in particular I will appreciate when I get back is unrestricted lighting without some raucous voice bellowing through the night, ‘Put that ——— light out. Where do you think you are; Luna Park?’ Except on one or two occasions I don’t think I’ve seen a car with head lights on since I left Australia. Those occasions were in Palestine a long way from here.
By the way, in the letter I just received you mentioned that you had sent over some more parcels. Parcel delivery is rather awkward here, but we get them all in time, though they take a while longer than other places. It’s great to know we are not forgotten and your thoughts are appreciated more than you can think.
For the first time in weeks, the horrible ’un has begun booping off his big guns at night. He must be getting a little excited over something, or is trying to frighten us. At this moment he is landing them about a thousand yards away and until he begins to land them within yards of us we can afford to be blase.
Well, I seem to have run out of any more to say, so, in the words of Fitzpatrick, the travel expert, we say goodbye to this glamorous city of the Western Desert and, to the music of our jovial friend Herman’s bung bungs [artillery], we come to the close of another perfect day and hope to shake the dust of this gigantic, enormous and magnificent b—— place off our army boots very shortly. V for Victory, or something.
P.S.—He seems to be getting closer. Always like a tense and dramatic finish to my letters.
Keith ‘Bluey’ Truscott was one of Melbourne Football Club’s finest players and a scoring member of the club’s 1939 premiership team. When he joined the RAAF in July 1940, his enlistment was widely publicised in the press, with even more coverage when he returned to play in his club’s next grand final win in September 1940. He joined the Empire Air Training Scheme and then flew Spitfires in Britain, where he was promoted and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) after shooting down six enemy planes. He continued to destroy German aircraft, was promoted to squadron leader and gained a bar to his DFC. Truscott’s winning personality, auburn hair and flying skills made him a celebrity in Britain, where a fund was organised to raise money to buy a Spitfire for ‘Bluey’.
Truscott returned to Australia on leave in May 1942, playing once again with his club. He was reportedly out of condition, but the crowd loved him anyway and cheered him enthusiastically. It is said that after the game he bumped into one of his old teachers who asked him what he thought of returning to football. Truscott reportedly answered that it was ‘too dangerous’.
Truscott’s fame increased when he was posted to New Guinea just before the Japanese attacked Milne Bay in mid-1941. He took over the command of No. 76 Squadron and led the Kittyhawk fighter-bombers through several dangerous days of fighting. He was mentioned in dispatches for this work.
Another RAAF squadron involved in the battle for New Guinea was 75 Squadron. Their deeds, real and not so, live on in a rollicking ballad about their exploits that reflect the devil-may-care attitudes of the young Australians who risked their lives in the primitive airplanes of the time. P40s were fighter-bombers, also known as ‘Kittyhawks’, while the Zero was the Allied name for the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M fighter plane.
. . . So we grabbed some P40s and went to the fight,
And we soon found the Nips had a nice little kite.
It was bright shining silver and Zero by name
And a bloody fine show as it goes down in flames.
Down in flames, down in flames,
And a bloody fine show as it goes down in flames.
Now the papers they tell of this squadron’s success
And Nippon has many an aeroplane less.
But the pages don’t say how the hell it was done—
Without our replacements and at seven to one.
Yes to one, yes to one,
Without our replacements and at seven to one . . .
Back in Australia to help defend Darwin and the north against the possibility of invasion, Truscott destroyed another enemy plane. But on 28 March 1943 he misjudged a training manoeuvre and was killed when his Kittyhawk dived into the sea in Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia. His tally of enemy aircraft was sixteen destroyed, three probably destroyed and three damaged. Despite this record, Truscott was notorious for his bad landings.
Angels of the Owen Stanley Range
‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy Angels’, as they were dubbed, are a permanent part of the Anzac legend. While there has been some controversy about over-romanticising the motives of the ‘Angels’ and about the paternalism towards them inherent in the attitudes of the day, there is no doubt that the diggers were deeply grateful for their sacrifice. Letters home praised the Angels unreservedly. Captain Trevor King wrote from New Guinea to Miss Clare Theobold of Newtown in Sydney, NSW:
The Papuan natives have done a wonderful job up here. I personally owe my life to one of these chaps. During one part of the show I was trapped crossing a mountain stream. The river was about 40 yards across and running very fast, and with a Jap machine-gun blazing away I decided to cross in an endeavour to sneak up and put Tojo’s gun out of action. I became stranded on a wet, slippery log midstream, and with lead flying in all directions it is not the most comfortable feeling. After a period of shouting for assistance, using as much native language as I knew, one of these chaps spotted my predicament and, in a flash, despite machine-gun bullets, cut a rope of lantana vine and threw it out from a ledge of rocks, soon to haul me to safety.
Private A. Johnson wrote in similar manner to Miss B. O’Brien in Melbourne:
I am in hospital in a back area. Had to be carried by the native bearers for over a day. They are worth their weight in gold, and are doing great work in getting the wounded back. Then I was lucky, and came the rest of the way by plane, and it was only a matter of minutes getting over the country that took weeks to cover on foot.
Probably the most famous Australian poem of World War II celebrated the Angels of the Owen Stanley Range. It was written by Bert Beros, a Canadian veteran of World War I who served with the second AIF in the Middle East and New Guinea. Beros said he wrote the poem hurriedly on ‘14th October, 1942, at Dump 66, the first Range of the Owen Stanley’. It began:
Many a mother in Australia,
When the busy day is done,
Sends a prayer to the Almighty
For the keeping of her son,
Asking that an angel guide him
And bring him safely back.
And went on to describe the actions of the Angels:
Bringing back the badly wounded Just as steady as a hearse,
Using leaves to keep the rain off
And as gentle as a nurse.
Slow and careful in bad places
On the awful mountain track,
The look upon their faces
Would make you think that Christ was black . . .
Australia’s secret submariners
Australian submariners played central roles in some pivotal incidents of World War II, including the raid on the German battleship Tirpitz, the D-Day invasion and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan.
In 1942–43, the Royal Navy developed a secret class of miniature submarines known as X-craft. With a four-man crew, they were designed to attack enemy shipping in port. At around 50 feet (15 metres) in length and weighing 30 tons (27 tonnes), they were towed—on the surface or submerged—to their targets. Lacking torpedoes, they were instead armed with clockwork detachable mines that could be placed beneath enemy ships by a diver, allowing plenty of opportunity for the submarines to escape before the blast. But this all proved to be difficult in practice, a situation worsened by the sometimes fatal buoyancy problems of the X-craft. Many submariners were lost in these extremely hazardous vessels, quite a few of them in non-combat accidents.
The X-craft first went to war in an attempt to sink the German battleship Tirpitz at her Norwegian base at Kåfjord in September 1943. Submarines X5 through to X10 were deployed, towed submerged and surfacing every six hours to change crews. The tow of X9 parted on the way to the target and two men were lost with the vessel. X8 was also lost on the way to the attack. On 22 September, the three remaining miniature submarines, X5, X6 and X7, did attack Tirpitz, causing substantial damage that delayed her deployment for some vital months. All three submarines were lost during the action or afterwards.
Over the next two years, X-craft carried out other operations in Bergen harbour in Norway, off the French coast, and in the Pacific. Australians were prominent in X-craft, including NSW-born Lieutenant Brian ‘Digger’ McFarlane, West Australian Lieutenant Jack Marsden and Victorian Lieutenant Ian McIntosh. McIntosh was destined to become Vice Admiral of the Royal Navy and was knighted in 1973. McFarlane and Marsden were both lost with X22 in a collision with another ship in February 1944.
In January 1944, Tasmanian Lieutenant Kenneth Robert Hudspeth, Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve, a schoolteacher before the war, was in command of X20 conducting reconnaissance off the French coast in preparation for the D-Day landings. He had already won a Distinguished Service Cross for his part in the Tirpitz raid and now won a second. The citation read, in part:
For outstanding courage and devotion to duty whilst commanding HM submarine X-20 in a hazardous operation. He showed great coolness, grasp and ability in manoeuvring his X craft submerged in shallow water close under enemy defences during the first experimental beach reconnaissance from X craft in January 1944 . . .
At a similar location later the same year, Hudspeth received a third DSC ‘for gallantry, skill, determination and undaunted devotion to duty . . .’. Hudspeth and crew spent two cramped and humid nights beneath the waters of the English Channel reconnoitring what was to become known as Juno Beach. As the bombardment that launched the invasion began, X20 surfaced and used her lights to illuminate the safest passage for the landing craft.
In 1945, six XE-craft, refinements of the earlier versions, were sent to Pearl Harbor to take part in the Pacific war. Admiral Nimitz of the United States Navy, himself a submariner, observed that they were ‘suicide craft’. The Americans were reluctant to put them into operational roles—until they discovered that the X-craft had a longer operational range than they had assumed. The XE submarines then went into training off the Queensland coast to prepare attacks on Japanese warships and on underwater telegraph cables. This would eventually be known as Operation Sabre, designed to cut the cables linking Tokyo with Singapore, Saigon and Hong Kong, an important communication channel for the Japanese high command. Special tools and techniques had to be developed for this unprecedented operation.
After training in Hervey Bay in Queensland, during which two divers were lost in accidents, a group of XE-craft were deployed in missions against the Japanese. On 31 July 1945, Perth engineer Lieutenant Max Shean was in command of XE4. Also aboard were Sub-Lieutenant Ken Briggs from Glenn Innes in New South Wales, Engine Room Artificer Level 5 ‘Ginger’ Coles, Sub-Lieutenant Ben Kelly and Sub-Lieutenant Adam ‘Jock’ Bergius. On that day, XE4 and her crew were submerged off the Mekong River in what was then French Indo-China, now Vietnam. They were dragging a grapnel hook across the seabed in an attempt to locate underwater telegraph cables. After several futile runs, they finally located the southbound cable beneath sand and silt at a depth of fifty feet (15 metres). At 1229 hours Ken Briggs left XE4 through the exit hatch, found the cable and cut it with the hydraulic cutters specially developed for the task. He was back aboard in thirteen minutes, carrying a length of cable as evidence of his success. Adam Bergius RNVR then left the submarine at 1402 and, after several attempts, managed to sever the northbound cable and return by 1452.
The cutting of the undersea cable forced the Japanese to use radio for their communications. The Americans had already cracked the Japanese radio codes and so were now able to gain access to vital information that had been unavailable when transmitted beneath the sea. XE4’s action that day provided intelligence that was reportedly a factor in the decision to use nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Max Shean added a bar to the Distinguished Service Order he had won for his previous X-craft service and the United States awarded him a Bronze Star. The other members of the crew were also decorated, with Ken Briggs and Adam Bergius both receiving the Distinguished Service Cross for their bravery.
During their brief but decisive careers, X-craft submariners, British and Australian, were highly awarded with four Victoria Crosses, four Distinguished Service Orders, seven Distinguished Service Crosses, one Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, two Distinguished Service Medals, one Bronze Star (USA) and eleven mentions in dispatches.
Today, X24 can be seen at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, Hampshire, in the UK. The remains of two others, thought to be the remains of the XT, or training versions of the X-craft, lie at Aberlady Bay in Scotland’s East Lothian region. The Imperial War Museum at Duxford, UK, has an exhibition of X-craft, including the remains of X7 and an intact X51. There is a memorial to the 12th Submarine Flotilla, of which the X-craft were a part, in Sutherland in Scotland and two other memorials near the X-craft training base at Bute, also in Scotland.