Eyewitness (12 page)

Time and again, siren screaming, he dives but can’t line us up for the
coup de grace
.

‘The white one, Stan,’ Redpath orders, without enthusiasm. ‘It’s worth a try.’ Down comes the Greek flag and up goes the white flag of peace, fluttering aloft our unconditional surrender. I’m ready to fling up my hands. This time I feel no shame. But he ignores our offer.

Throughout the onslaught, Redpath’s little bunch have stuck to their posts and are now the only ones on the upper deck. My heart is kicking at my ribcage but, by mustering everything I possess, I manage not to jump overboard. When Redpath orders below all hands not required on deck, I join the lubbers in the hold. Boyle is beside me. Agreeing that to drown below decks must be the worst of deaths, we burrow into the figs like frenzied armadillos.

Today I remember Boyle chiefly for his sisters – who adored him – and for Keith, his gallant brother; but there’s this vignette of him to which I still cling.

With cheeks pillowed into the figs we brace for the next burst of cannon shells. Boyle pulls out his weed and tries to roll a smoke but his fingers are unwilling and he’s not too successful. Eventually he controls them and fashions a fag.

‘Christ, I don’t wanna die!’ the soldier on my other side snivels. As if he has a choice. Boyle lights up and takes a long drag.

‘Nor do I, Joey, but …’ here he hands the offender his smoke and pauses maliciously, ‘yer-just-might-hafter!’

When we face our moment we’re all completely alone. Eyes spinning, the soldier next to me tolls a string of worry beads like a rosary, as if his salvation depends on it. Pagan though I am, I’m not sure it doesn’t. We need a miracle and will grasp at any hope.

The dunny on our port bow is in splinters, mains’l yard snapped, sails in tatters, and our morale dented – but he can’t put us down for the count of ten. We’re still afloat, slowly and agonisingly heading for a safe haven in Sollum.

The Heinkel keeps at us. A shanghai, for Christ’s sake – something to throw back. But we are as defenceless as a sitting rabbit. Fear turns into a dull acceptance of destiny – to die within swimming distance of Sollum. There’s no armour against fate.

The only one who gets hit is the poor bloody skipper who cops a ricochet in the shoulder. Redpath dresses his wound and, in a voice that carries down to the base of the figs, implores God’s help.

‘Jesus, Benny! He’s praying for us!’

At any other time I’d have felt extreme embarrassment for him. Not now.

‘… while I draw this fleeting breath …

When my eyelids close in death …’

Redpath sings, his voice as steady as with the church choir in Palmerston North. The lips of hardened sinners move with his, silently reciting as he intones the psalms. Although I no longer believe in God, I am afraid of Him – and sing the half-remembered hymns with fervent conviction. If prayer can pull it off for us, this pagan will pray. If hymns will do it, I’ll sing louder than any …

‘… Oh, hear us when we cry to thee,

For those in peril on the sea.’

Perhaps, as W.C. Fields murmured to a friend who found him reading the bible, it is ‘just a precaution’. Just to make sure, I repeat the prayer under my breath. For those brief moments, I’m converted into an ardent Christian, more deeply committed with every dive the warplane makes.

‘… our brethren shield in danger’s hour

From rock and tempest, fire and foe

Protect them where so e’er they go.

Thus evermore shall rise to thee,

Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.’

Many times before on Crete I’d been through something like this without feeling a need to turn to the Almighty because there was usually an olive tree, or a wall to shield behind, a hole to jump in. Surely the earth means so much more to the soldier than to any other man. But, on the boat, we are as helpless as men before a firing squad. If the German is any good, he’ll sink us. Fortunately, he is no von Richthofen.

Looking back on that fearful trial much later, I still don’t know whether our deliverance is due to Redpath’s prayers or not. But the Heinkel flew off. Out of fuel or ammunition or luck. Perhaps he was just a rotten shot.

Some of us climb out of the hold to join the stalwarts who’ve stuck to their posts throughout the blitz. It has been a great hour to survive. Redpath is attending the luckless skipper. Although shaken and dreading the Heinkel’s inevitable return, we wait on our fate with a shrug and the soldier’s simple philosophy – ‘if it’s got your number on it.’ But, there are still two or three hours of the sun to run. Nursing his arm, the skipper speaks to the ship’s boy and the lad darts for’ard, dropping down the hatch to rummage in the locker. Flapping and clinging to the halyards like windswept gulls, the bits and pieces of canvas are torn off and ditched overboard.

Stripped of her canvas, our little craft wallows in the swell. The sky is ominous, the air heavy and still as death. The lull before a storm. Can we limp into the sanctuary of Sollum Harbour? Tantalisingly close. It’s a forlorn hope.

The boy emerges from the ship’s locker with a sail slung over his arm and runs her jib up the halyards.

The pilot’s sure to have radioed our position to his base in North Africa and be back there now, exhorting his ground crews to refuel, to replenish the bomb bays and replace machine-gun belts. Now, ready for his return mission, he’ll be anxious to win back lost face and notch up his first kill.

And surely that’s what would have happened. But our prayers pay off. A southerly blows off the desert and drives our boat away from the entrance to Sollum Harbour – and an ironic welcome from the Africa Korps. Unknown to us, the Germans have taken Sollum while we were on the water.

*

The southerly develops into a
khamsin
, a dust storm that fills eyes, nose and throat with a powder fine as talcum, blots out the sun and makes all aimed movement impossible. It is our salvation.

The
khamsin
hides us and the storm carries our little craft northeasterly. The seas boils, the shrouds whine, and her jib billowing dramatically, she skims the cream-topped combers like a sailboard, descends into the hollows between and rising, shakes the waters from her bows.

The Heinkel has returned with his mates. While being blown away from Africa, we listen to their drone and imagine the hunters, like duck-shooters before dawn, waiting for a sitting shot. We hear them circling but are hidden from each other by the dust. Just once, we catch a glimpse of one flying low and away from us. Such easy game. So frustrating for the murderous bastards.

*

The
khamsin
is left behind at Sollum and the southerly – now become a westerly – continuing fresh. The night watch under Redpath protects us lubbers sleeping below decks.

Dawn breaks, the storm relents and the world looks a brighter place. Chewing figs, the chastened lubbers climb on deck and chaff the crew – a little shamefacedly, as their piety has evaporated with the danger. The sun rises on our played-out little band, sprawled on the upper deck or, chins resting on the starboard gunnels, deep in thought, searching the horizon for a glimpse of land.

Redpath swings the tiller and we head south.

Although weakened by our fig diet, elation fuels us. I climb the slanted deck in her lee roll and, clutching the shrouds, drag myself amidships in her returning ascent to windward. Leaning over the gunnels, my thoughts drift back to adventures so novel for one still young that will provide enthralling reminiscences, open paths that cross and re-cross in wonderful dreams and bewildering nightmares – with occasional re-runs to this day.

The game’s just about over. A few hours will see it played out to the finish. A steak to follow, washed down with beer. The relief is something to savour alone. Unbuttoning a top pocket, I withdraw the address in Tilsit of the sister of my friend Otto, Lance Corporal of German Military Police.

In my cell next to the brothers, her address had seemed so precious, the only thing I had to hang on to. Loath to let this thread to her go, I trawl it in the Med for a few minutes until, confident of those scores of Australian girls I’m yet to meet, I release it and, immediately regretful, watch a scrap of paper bob up and down a moment, then disappear in our wake.

A reflective Travers comes up beside me and that most undemonstrative of men rests an arm across my shoulders.

‘We’ve had a dream run, Charlie.’

Rollers furl the glass green water and, together, we stare across their foaming caps towards Crete, where Evangelia is imprisoned.

‘Land ahoy!’ the pointing watch yells for the second time. A wave of animation sweeps the deck. When she rises from a trough, between the blue water and the southern horizon, a white ribbon stretches from east to west as far as you can see. It’s the Promised Land.

Redpath makes a few calculations.

‘We’re about 15 miles west of Mersa. Jerry won’t be there yet.’ As usual, he’s sanguine.

‘How far off shore are we?’

‘I’d say 20 to 25 miles, Charlie. If your eyes are good, land comes into sight at 28. It’ll take a while yet.’

‘What’s the date, Ben?’

‘Still 1941.’

‘We’ve been at sea seven days,’ says Redpath. ‘That makes it October the fifteenth.’

Gulls appear, circling overhead like Feisler Storch reconnaissance planes.

‘Look,’ the watch calls again, ‘over there.’

Barely visible in the distance, Bren carriers of the Eighth Army swarm across the sand dunes like enraged bull ants.

Should we expect a welcome? Or a salvo?

*

The Afrika Korps might have taken Sollum but Mersa Matruh is still ours. Soldiers of the 50
^th
Indian Division take us to their officers’ mess, whose British members shower us with hospitality. Their cameras click, steak sizzles and glasses froth but we are excited – some of us emotional – and our shrunken stomachs can barely manage a mouthful. A truck arrives and, in our new army shorts and shirts, we bundle aboard and drive to Alexandria for debriefing.

Next day, on leave with full pay books, Travers and I find ourselves unable to indulge in the pleasures that sinful city has to offer. Now, the adventure finally over, each sits over his beer in silence, staring into the bottom of his glass.

Two days later, we return to Palestine, our regiment and four more years of war.

Kenneth Slessor

Since his death in 1971, Kenneth Slessor has become one of Australia’s favourite poets. He was also a distinguished journalist and editor, and war correspondent.

He was born in London in 1901 and came to Sydney with his parents in 1903. He joined the Sydney
Sun
in 1918 as a cadet. Slessor wrote most of his major poetry while working on
Smith’s Weekly
(‘the Digger’s friend’), which he joined in 1927 and worked there until he was appointed war correspondent in 1940.

In the Middle East and later in New Guinea he provided in his diaries and dispatches (collected in two volumes by Clement Semmler and published in 1984) some of the most perceptive and descriptive writing about Australians at war.

He also had a dim view of General Blamey, who inspired one of the two poems he wrote during the war, the acid
Inscription at
Dog River
where the General earned everything from his men, except respect.

The other is
Beach Burial
, the result of Slessor’s observation and meditation on universality of death after Alamein.

In
Beach Burial
the dead are sailors of all nationalities washed ashore on the brilliant beaches in front of the cemetery at Alamein, buried in the sand hills under improvised crosses. They came to represent everyone.

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of the gun-fire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered piety,
The words choke as they begin –
‘Unknown seaman’ – the ghostly pencil

Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of the wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men’s lips,
Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,

Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.

El Alamein 1942

The Australian 9
^th
Division was the critical force in ‘crumbling’ – in General Montgomery’s phrase – Rommel’s Afrika Corps at El Alamein from July 1942 before the decisive breakthrough in September.

El Alamein was the single most costly battle in the two years Australians fought in the Mediterranean theatres. From July to November 1941, 1177 Australian were killed, 193 were missing and 3629 wounded. In all, 5794 casualties from a force of 15,000. Australia suffered 20 per cent of the Allied 8th Army casualties with only 10 per cent of its strength.

*

Alexandria, 20th November
. The road to ruin runs from Alamein to Gambut and points west. It is ruin, literal and absolute, a corridor of dusty death, lined with ruin, leading to ruin. But, although this endless avenue of dead and wrecked things is littered with the material ruin of guns and vehicles and war machines, more than a mess of German steel lies ruined here. A dream has been smashed as well.

It is, indeed, difficult to realise in its full three dimensions what the disintegration of an army means until you have travelled (as I have done for the past two days) through hundreds of miles in the wake of the German retreat. For hour after hour, mile after mile the coast road is flanked at every 20 yards by the gutted wreckage of motor transport or the holes into which the dead have been thrust. From El Alamein to Gambut, for 200 miles, I drove past this continuous mortuary of burnt metal and buried men. Now in the rain which has come up from the sea it is beginning to smell sour and acrid. The track of a defeated army is always one of horror, yet this retreat is different from most.

There were no houses or homes to wreck because there are no houses or homes in this abominable waste, except in such battered villages as Mersa Matruh or Sollum, where they have been pounded five campaigns ago to roofless walls. Nor is there a civil population here to massacre or stampede. It has been a battle in a vacuum, a campaign of mechanised destruction, full of the fury and humiliation of machines.

Yard by yard along this road to ruin, air-power has written the terrible testament of what bombs and bullets from the sky can do to men fleeing on the earth. You go past tanks that have been split open, their metal curled up with the heat, like smoke-blackened cans. You see what at first seems to be a line of traffic filing down a sidetrack, then realise with a shock that none of these silhouetted trucks is moving. All are still, dead and broken, stopped in their tracks. Vehicles are halted everywhere at all angles just as their drivers abandoned them to explosion and flames when they leapt for cover. Some are mere shapeless tangles of calcined wire and metal, reduced to such a confusion of ash that it is impossible to guess what they were. Some are just a blackening of the earth, a charred stain on the desert’s face, surrounded by tiny scraps of iron.

Here is an eighteen-wheeled troop-carrier with the clumsy vertical lines of an old-fashioned car. A tattoo-pattern of bullet holes punched through the back of the driver’s cab – fourteen in a neat cluster – shows what happened. So do the seven mounds of stone and sand close by, with seven German rifles stuck in vertically and seven German helmets dangling on their butts.

The dead are buried in all degrees of graves. There are lonely cairns of stones hastily thrown together where the earth has been too hard and time too short for ceremony. A mile further on you come to the precise geometry of a German war cemetery with its pedantic straight lines and heavy Gothic crosses. But the crosses are everywhere – some made of packing-case sides, some only broken propeller blades or splinters of rough wood, or helmets on sticks.

They are outnumbered only by the blackened ribs and vertebrae of ruined vehicles. They lie in ruts gouged where they have ploughed almost at right angles from the road. Some are on their sides, some on their noses, hubs or rear axles, some upside down, some right side up. Most are resting with their axles on boulders or petrol tins but here and there a wheel still adheres at an angle, like a gammy leg.

You pass a truck snapped in half with a gush of soot-black tins spilling from its middle. Once they held food. At the side of almost every ruined vehicle there is an indescribable trampled litter of clothing and papers on the ground, as if its entrails were pouring out. Many of these trucks bear Italian markings but the documents scattered around them are written in German. Italian vehicles carry a squat painted oblong of red, white and green. German vehicles are marked with a black and white cross or the feathery palm tree and swastika of the Afrika Korps.

Here and there you see where the enemy has camped or made a headquarters. The ground is covered with a mess of papers and tins like the remains of a series of demented picnics. In the dugouts and pillboxes (where they haven’t been pulverised by shells) you find chairs pushed back from tables with half-eaten meals. Everything has been transfixed in the middle of activity, like the cabin of the
Mary Celeste
or the paralysed palace of the Sleeping Beauty.

But outside, amongst the wrecks of transport, there is grimmer evidence. Hasty burrowings and scoopings and ramparts of shallow stones show where the enemy tried to hide in his agony. Nothing escaped the fury of our air squadrons. Even a steamroller lay capsized near Bug Bug, where badly needed roadwork had been in progress and the labourers had fled, leaving their hats, picks, shovels and heaps of stone.

Around the airfields of Daba, Sidi Barrani and Gambut, the gaunt cartilages of Junkers and Messerschmitts lay rusting like the bones of prehistoric monsters. For 200 miles the trail of ruin led to the west. Wrecked tanks made landmarks in the distance, breaking the flat emptiness of the plain like the black hulls of derelict ships. Field-guns and anti-aircraft guns, smashed and shattered, lay with their snouts buried in the sand. The roadside was scattered with their shell-cases squashed flat like tubes of toothpaste. Piles of unsown mines waited by the wire, looking like giant rusty rissoles. Near Mersa Matruh I saw a captured Australian truck lying forlornly on its back, still painted with the kangaroo and boomerang of the 6
^th
Division.

The desert is filled with hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed German petrol tins. By this time every British vehicle must carry at least two. It will take our salvage units months to collect and sort the German equipment left behind. I noticed at random a complete searchlight installation and a mobile water-tank trailer expensively lined with enamel. Near Sidi Barrani I stopped to look inside the turret of a burnt-out German tank. Nothing could have survived in that little steel box of fire. If you can imagine your radio-set chopped to pieces with an axe, then soaked in petrol and set alight, and multiply this a hundred times, it will give an idea of the chaos of melted metal and charred wires at which I gazed.

Far into the west the sediment of Rommel’s retreat stretches on and on. It is possible to tell at a glance where the Germans have camped and where the Italians. The Italians leave straw-covered wine flasks, postcards gaudy with pinks and purples, groundsheets and capes and pith helmets with gay red, white and green rosettes, dirty clothing and old boots. The Germans leave Nazi magazines with grandiose pictures of the Russian front, waterproof leggings, tins of
Bohnen in
naturlich
and other doubtful delicacies, copies of the
Litzmannstadter
Zeitung
, round cartons of
Scho-ta-tola
(an ersatz chocolate), silver cardboard bottles of
Sanden motoren oel
, scuttle-shaped helmets, flares and long, slender, yellow-nosed anti-tank shells spilt at random on the roadside.

I spent my first night at the cookhouse of a prisoner-of-war camp which resounded like an aviary with the chatter of Italians. The next night I slept in an abandoned German hospital at the top of the Sollum pass. The shelves in the ward were stacked with thousand of tubes of specially prepared Afrika Korps eye-salve and foot-salve, another hint of the thoroughness of German war equipment.

What I have written can give only a scattered impression of this incredible trail of destruction along which the 8
^th
Army is advancing. It is the road to ruin. But few of the British troops who pass its dreadful evidence of airborne death and annihilation can feel any pity for the victims. I, too, had seen our men dying in ditches on the bloody road from Thermopylae and felt no pity.

As darkness fell suddenly over the escarpment, I picked up a scrap of paper from a flutter of Italian documents blowing across the sand. Its message was written in spidery purple ink and the writing was that of an old woman. ‘
Mio carissimo figlio,
’ it began, and there was much news of Cousin Maria and Uncle Vincenzo, and the last words were, ‘Oh, come quickly, day of victory and universal peace, and put an end to all our suffering.’

*

El Alamein, 9th December.
Here at this little speck on the map, between the huddle of stone huts which is El Alamein railway station and the lonely coast road which they helped to guard so stoutly, they are burying Australia’s dead. Patiently and carefully for the past few weeks the soldiers of the A.I.F. who gave their lives in this last and fiercest campaign of the Middle East have been gathered together into a common bivouac.

Close to the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean, a British war cemetery has been established and a section put aside for Australians. Day after day the living battalions of the A.I.F. have gathered their dead comrades from the battlefield and brought them here to simple burial and makeshift memorials. It has been left temporarily for each unit to honour its own fallen, to recover them from the sandy waste and carry them to this last resting place where graves had been dug and gravestones erected. The men themselves have dug the graves and fashioned the rough stones.

There have been services of all kinds. Some have been attended by whole battalions, listening stiff-faced and silently to the age-old words of burial, now loud, now faint, in the wind from the sea which flutters the white surplices of the chaplains. Others have had an audience of only two or three, clustered with a padre round a solitary grave. Australians mixing cement for headstones close by, and men from other units, down tools for a moment and stand to attention, joining in the familiar hymns with hushed voices. Then the Last Post, with its utter finality and long echoes over the sandhills, a brief inarticulate pause, and work starts again on the headstones and cement.

The graves are laid in orderly rows, some already complete with granite stones on which inscriptions have been deeply cut, others marked by white wooden crosses with the names clearly painted awaiting the time when all will be done in permanence. Nearly all have full-length concrete surfaces and most have the rising sun of the A.I.F. badge moulded at the head with the words ‘Ever remembered’ across the centre. All this has been left to the craftsmanship and skill of the men themselves and the time at their disposal. The units have worked unceasingly to make sure that none of their dead has been forgotten.

Only since the great breakthrough a month ago has ‘Ruin Ridge’ been accessible. The moment they could reach it, the men of the New South Wales anti-tank regiment scoured the ridge and the sand surrounding it, searching for their comrades who had fallen on that fateful July night when they went in to support the West Australian battalion and fought so gallantly against tremendous odds. They found the scattered graves of eight who had died there. Today they rest with all the other Australians who have been brought ‘home’ to Alamein.