The War Memoirs of A.H. BORTHWICK

The great and startling adventures of Sgt. Borthwick in the course of an altogether outstandingly dull military career encompassing several continents and innumerable training camps, but only one battlefield.

This story begins very early, indeed almost as soon as I do, for reasons I shall explain. My grandfather was the commanding officer of the Victorian Mounted Rifles, a formation that went out of existence when the Australian colonies accepted Federation and a national army. His own grandfather had I think served with the British army in India, and his father-in-law had been an officer stationed with a British unit in Jamaica until he came to Australia and became a mounted police officer on the goldfields. My father who was his eldest son had served with the Eighth Light Horse at Gallipoli, along with his next brother Keith who was killed at Lone Pine. His next brother Malcolm had a commission in the British Army and died (or more exactly shot himself) while on garrison duty at Aden. My father was wounded at Romani in the desert campaign. His troop was forward on a sandhill firing at the Turks, Light Horse being mounted infantry with one man in four holding their horses behind the crest, when a Turkish bullet came through the palm of his left hand and carried on past the stock of his rifle into his right shoulder. So he was in shock and rolled down the forward crest and got another bullet in his hip. They recovered him in a lull in the action, but at the advanced dressing station his right arm was amputated, and of course he was invalided home to Australia - to a military hospital where he was nursed by my mother, whom he married. His youngest brother had by then joined the regiment and although I had thought he had charged at Beersheba I now believe his regiment took no part on that day, although he certainly entered Damascus with Allenby's column.

My mother's father and brothers and a brother-in-law served in France with a machine-gun battalion. Her father and one brother were killed there. He was nearly 60 and was the second oldest Australian to be killed in that war. (Her brother Arthur, and brother-in-law Haven Ainley, are Charles Sage's two grandfathers.)

We grew up on a soldier settlers block near Sale where all our neighbours were ex-service men, many of them with war injuries. My school teachers, except the very young or the women, were ex-soldiers and all the houses we used to visit as children, apart from photos of old grandfathers with white beards, were stocked with photographs of men in uniform and pictures and posters from the war. So we were rather soaked in stories of the war, and reminiscences of the dead, and the misfortunes of widows and girls whose fiances had vanished from their lives, in a way that has no parallel nowadays, even if there has been another war in between. It meant we had a picture of a war full of violent action and overseas experience, from people all about us for whom it had been the biggest and most remarkable event of their lives so that the recollection stayed with them always and coloured their expectations of the future, particularly during the painful and unhappy years of the Depression.

At any rate my own experience of life in uniform began when I went at fourteen to board at Corio and was pressed into the Cadets. By that time in my last two years at High School in Sale, developments in Germany made World War II seem almost too probable. The cadets meant uniform, drills and inspections on a parade ground every Thursday afternoon as I seem to remember, every week of term. Our sergeant-major, with rows of ribbons came from a British Guards battalion. We formed fours, formed two deep, marched, wheeled, dressed in line and column, doubled, shouldered arms, ordered arms, presented arms, piled arms, fixed bayonets, unfixed bayonets, and were rigorously inspected, which meant polishing brass buttons and badges and buckles, leather belts and boots until they shone, and cleaned our rifle barrels until they gleamed like mirrors, which meant pulling them through eternally with a flannel rag. On field days we marched here and there, forward and back around imaginary strong points and machine gun posts. In annual camps we drew hessian palliasses with straw to fill them, lived in tents and endured impromptu latrines dug into the ground and screened with hessian. The school food was frightful, the cadet camp food was if anything better, and although nothing to do with it seemed to bear the smallest relation to the real war with recollections of which all the children of our generation were so familiar, I must say it made the A.I.F. later seem like a picnic and the discipline much less obtrusive.

The year I left school the prospect of war seemed quite unavoidable and Europe all too close. So that I enlisted at once in the Melbourne University's militia regiment, thinking it might offer some new and different training relevant to a modern army. Sadly it seemed only a cadet corps writ larger, although relieved by the circumstance that I joined the horse transport section in emulation of my brother Bill's introduction to the Gippsland Light Horse regiment, for which my father had bought him a remount. We provided officers' chargers, the water-cart horse, and teams for the limbers from W.W.I that ferried ammunition, weapons and rations to the troops in their training areas, in theory I suppose to their battle stations. I liked horses and was at home with them, which 90% of my new comrades-in-arms were not. It was messy work because the horse lines, for understandable sanitary reasons were some distance from the rest of the tented camp, and they had to be attended in tethered rows by head and heel ropes, fed, watered and groomed and great quantities of manure barrowed away. But while they were inspected we were not, and I felt I had said goodbye to parade grounds and spit and polish forever. The limbers were two boxes on separate angles and joined by a hinged pole - a bit like this,

and the driver rode the near-side horse with an armoured legging on the right leg to protect it from the pole, and with a linked rein to the offside horse. The internal combustion engine had not been invented before W.W.I and perhaps this pattern was not going to apply when we set off for our war, but the Army was making do with what it had.

I no longer had to march, there was nothing to polish, we didn't mount guard because the horse lines had to be picketed, and one could show off by manoeuvring the limbers at a hard gallop and stopping with a flourish that rattled the ammunition boxes and the teeth of any rash passenger. So that I became a corporal and learnt nothing of any immediate use to a contemporary military machine, except and importantly what rubs off from being shut up with a handful of men and boys of different ages and background. Our first camps were only two weeks and we paraded for odd evenings in term time either riding in circles at the old South Melbourne stables behind Victoria Barracks or at the drill hall being taught bayonet drill or first aid.

When war was declared I went to the drill hall to see what was expected of us to find our bayonet instructor, a warlike sergeant with a bloodthirsty turn of phrase, immediately in front of me writing out his resignation. As he explained the army was all right in peace-time and he liked the uniform, particularly its formal mess rig that officers and sergeants then affected, but he was handing all that in and getting out to a job at Maribyrnong with the ammunition factory. A wartime job like that was sure to keep a man at home. In the event for the rest of us the University term was shortened and we went into camp for three months at Mount Eliza. Bill and his Light Horse brigade went into camp at Torquay with three thousand horses. Our time in camp was longer but everything else was much the same, apart from some who had left already to join the new A.I.F. at Puckapunyal, so there were new officers and new faces on our lines, and a full strength brigade of new recruits. I was only finishing the second year of my degree so most of us thought we should hang on till graduation; not much seemed to be happening in Europe. Indeed the only thing I now remember that with several months picketed on the same lines the horses dug themselves great holes and filled themselves with sand as they tried to pick up stray scraps of chaff and oats that got spilt from the feed bags we fastened on them three times a day. Once it rained so much and for so long the camp was closed and nearly all but the transport lines sent on leave, while we turned the horses loose to graze in the nearest paddocks.

I do remember a stroke of luck when a picket lost some twenty-five animals out of an open gate, plunging our officer and his adjutant into a panic at the prospect of an official enquiry into this loss of crown property. Some four of us were given the best four horses and told to scour the peninsular for them. We found them in twenty minutes but it was too good a chance to lose so we hunted them along a bit and adjourned to the hotel at Rye. That evening we checked on them again and reported back explaining we'd covered thirty miles and were still looking with news of a sighting by a baker's cart some distance off. So next day we set off with fresh horses and when at last our money ran out at the pub made an impressive return with only the problem of bringing our mob along the Nepean highway in the dark. Authority was very pleased with our detective work and gave us a pound for salvaging his reputation. At this point our sergeant found out that his brother-in-law had got him a job at Maribyrnong where he said he could use his degree in agriculture, so I became a sergeant as a reward for enterprise, but only for three days because I was going to enlist for overseas.

The news from France had got suddenly worse and all over Australia in May 1940 men were lining up for the forces and wondering would they be in time, so off I went and passed my medical, and got leave to go home (and meet Rosemary at Bindi for the first term vacation) before I finally signed up. Between the cadets and the M.U.R. [Melbourne University Regiment] I don't know that I had acquired such an insight into military matters so I went with my Trinity roommate, John Falkiner, to see a family friend who had left the ABC to become a staff officer in Army HQ, for an informed opinion on what combat role I might best be qualified for. (John and a number of others had been accepted by RAAF aircrew, but there was a waiting list for their intake and they were given time to finish their University year.) Hughes-Hallett assigned me to their opposite number as it were, saying anti-aircraft were the weapons of the future and depended on people able to master ballistics as such, so there my assignment began, and away I went on the 2nd/2 Hvy Arty Battery intake. How I cursed him next Christmas when I was still in Australia and most of the others were off with minimal delays to other adventures. As it happens almost all the aircrew of my acquaintance failed to survive the war, the casualty rate for bomber crews was appalling, so perhaps I was wise, but certainly lucky. The trouble with infantry was all that marching and drilling and I had never shone on the rifle range. Also A/A seemed so high-tech (a word that did not exist in 1940) and necessary, with all the accounts reaching us of German blitzkrieg supported by aircraft. Aircrew on the other hand seemed to require a mastery of driving skills I could not pretend to. Had I realized the room for navigators I might have been tempted.

I must say I found the 2/2 enchanted with my mathematical antecedents. I had given my occupation as political scientist because 'student' seemed more appropriate to short pants. (As well as it happened Bill and I, who enlisted in the same week while our father was having a rare holiday in Queensland, had to put our ages up to 21 to avoid parental consent, but on comparing notes later we found he was officially my elder by several weeks, which cheered him up because he'd suffered until then from being my junior by one hour.) So my battery commander made me a lance-bombardier, with one stripe, and after a month or two, spent entirely in marching and drilling, I was put on draft for an officer training course at Middle Head Barracks with the school of artillery in Sydney, the only home then of 4.7 Hvy A.A guns.

I enjoyed the school, the instructors for the most part knew their job and the theory was novel and interesting in itself. The course made up a very decent if oddly assorted bunch from ours and a sister NSW regiment, mostly much older than me, and infinitely more experienced. As it happens I would not have made a good officer, I altogether lacked the self-confidence to command authority or exercise responsibility, but what did annoy me was that the chief instructor failed me on the academic part of the course though I passed in all the rest. The theory of ballistics, trajectories etc. is not all that hard, I had never failed an exam in my life, and he was an electric retailer from a Sydney suburb who had left school at sixteen, not that that was a criticism in itself, who kept one page ahead of us in a plodding exposition laboriously committed to memory. He said on my departure I had not condescended to take notes and had several times fallen asleep in his class - I should have sat in the back row! Still I must say and am bound to concede that if I missed out for the wrong reasons justice was done.

So I went back to my battery, at that time encamped at - of all places - the munitions factory at Maribyrnong, and became a bombardier and troop instructor on theory. We had a proper gun to play with, a big heavy and cumbersome 75 mm. generally thought in the British army to be unsuitable for mobile use so in practice it was mainly used in field defence. As it happens the Germans proved to have a most efficient 77 mm. gun they used as field-artillery, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapon and were always ahead of us in that department, so that we, or rather higher authority, could have been more adventurous in our eventual deployment. Eventually the regiment went back to Puckapunyal but without a full complement of guns (to be exact one instead of sixteen) so most of the time we were marching, drilling and mounting guard while successive drafts of other units left for the Middle East. They included Bill's field artillery battery which his Light Horse troop had joined almost to a man. Actually apart from the frustration of inaction I liked the men I was with and indeed we became as fit as I am ever likely to be, like a greyhound or a race-horse fed regularly and exercised remorselessly. By the time the Sixth and part of the Seventh Divisions had left for the Middle East, the Eighth had been formed, and we were accounted Corps troops which left us very much up in the air. So when the time came to move and we had our pre-embarkation leave we had no idea what our assignment would be.

Our own convoy left Melbourne on very crowded transports or rather luxury liners, ours being the Ile de France, but after Fremantle the Queen Mary with most of the Eighth Division on board left our destroyer escort for Singapore while we kept going for Bombay. We had a short leave there, one night in fact, although Bill had had several weeks in Deolali near Poona, and then transferred into a much smaller ship and went on in the Red Sea to Suez. What I seem to remember most about that ship, apart from the heat, was the rations we took on board at Bombay - goats about the size of a skinned fox, of an odd purple colour, and for some reason served nearly raw, but at least not fly-blown as sometimes happened at Corio. At Suez we entrained for Ismailia, then crossed the Canal for another train that took us on to a Palestine camp not far from Gaza - so we went through Romani and Beersheba in the dark. Quite soon after this, still with no guns or transport, we were turned out to build a camp for the Sixth Division on its way home from Greece. Sadly enough for every hundred tents we put up only thirty were needed; whole units had almost disappeared as prisoners or casualties. We spent most of our time, as you will guess, marching and drilling and standing guard, everything I had once hoped to avoid.

Some half dozen of us were sent off to a 75 mm. British battery, part of the Suez fixed defences and veterans of the Battle of Britain and the London bombing. We were there about six weeks and worked on the guns but not very hard. The unit had been raised in Edinburgh and they were very uncertain about these rough brutal Australians but we shook down quite well and it was an interesting glimpse of the British Army, as for instance their breakfast rations. To each six men a loaf of bread, to each twelve a tin of marmalade - Palestine was knee-deep in an unsaleable orange crop - and to each a pannikin of black tea. The loaf was sliced lengthwise, then three times transversely, which couldn't be sliced again without crumbling, to be dipped into the marmalade till one or both were finished. Also if I remember rightly they were paid one shilling a day against our six and could only get drunk on Saturdays. Most of Gaza would have mutinied for that, and even Old Geelong Grammarians were pained.

After that we went back to Palestine and waited for our guns. One battery, it included Uncle Philip, went to Haifa and was part of their defence. Then the Syrian campaign began and Bill's regiment was in it. At that point I was bitten on the eye-ball by some insect and went to hospital. It all swelled up like a hen's egg and the blood vessels broke down so it turned bright red but the ophthalmic surgeon said not to worry, time would fix it and I could make myself useful in the ward. There were RAMC orderlies and a sergeant but we never saw them, they stayed in their office and ate from the Red Cross parcels meant for us, and the considerable amount left after the remarkable quantities they ate, they sold to restaurants around about and as far away as Tel Aviv. So that after a day to get over my anaesthetic I became a medical orderly and made my rounds with the surgeon. The nurse did the dressings but I carried the light to shine on the wounds while he explained about the muscles behind the missing eye-balls, and tear ducts and such. Clinically one became used to it, but not to the patients' reactions. Some were accidents, and sometimes only one eye, from a tyre lever or something, but I remember two casualties from Syria, one blinded by a bullet transversely through both eye-balls and another from a shell splinter over the bridge of his nose, only just coming to terms with their misfortune. The first was a boy of nineteen who cried a lot of the time, and it was never quite clear at that stage if the second was brain damaged as well. He never spoke and only muttered and roared, and he was a strong, heavy man. If I lifted him onto a bed pan he'd sink his teeth in my arm or shoulder and thrash about, and when I fed him he would bite the spoon or fork. I could see why the orderlies stayed away. Not all the patients were as bad. Several of the longer stayers started a competition to hatch an egg in their armpits, and really became quite broody, but it was a nuisance if they moved at night and broke an egg and needed a clean sheet, apart from the fact that we could give the eggs, especially those that they had become tired of after a few days, to Kibbutzim ladies next door who sold us cakes, a continental kind with holes in the middle.

I forget how long I was there, perhaps only ten days or so, but on discharge I found myself just back in time because our battery was moved to Beirut to take over previous French A/A defence of the airport. We got there the day after the armistice and were put in some French barracks just vacated by Senegalese troops and a mountain battery served by mules and Percheron horses. The troops immediately sold the beasts and harness and indeed everything that wasn't nailed down to Lebanese outside but they didn't fetch much and I saw none of it myself. It was annoying to find that in different quarters our ordnance section of Battery H.Q. had sold several staff cars and truck loads of tyres and spares for real money. I think the Free French who stayed on spent some time on their recovery, but not very effectively.

Our troop went to a gun site in a small pine forest - we had to account for every tree we cut down to the owner. The French guns were old with a control system we never completely mastered, and a long fuse assembled round the nose-cone of the shell that had to be punctured according to a special setting that determined its time of flight and hence height of detonation - so that though we could load and fire them we never really knew what happened next. They were in fact no use at all. Our troop commander declared his authority by keeping us on that site with leave for not more than four men, out of nearly 120, every night and none at all by day. It was provoking to find later that others of our battery were less conscientious or more sensible depending on how you looked at it, and after the first fortnight maintained only token manning and that most ranks spent most of their time at ease in the city, swimming in the Mediterranean and acquiring local interests of a wide variety.

I remember three particular events. Once was our only red air alert. The sirens went. The lights went out all over Beirut. We jumped at the chance and fired a sighting box barrage of some twenty rounds. The sirens stopped, the lights came on, none of the other batteries had fired, and we heard next day that three people had been killed in a cinema by somebody's falling shells. Later I was told that after a heavy night in a Cyprus mess a RAF pilot had taken off in a small plane and buzzed Beirut; our few rounds persuaded him to try Haifa, where there was another alert and a more general barrage, so he flew off again, ran out of fuel, and fell into the sea. So you might say those were our first successes!

Before that I had been called into Battery H.Q. and sent by them to the District Military H.Q. who asked me to confirm that I was some kind of scientist. Of course I was, it was in my papers. So I was asked to draw up a box barrage for the A/A defence of Beirut according to some handbook prepared in London. This was too good to miss. I explained that to get it right the ground co-ordinates would need to be surveyed ie. distances between gun sites - the ordinary ordnance maps were not good enough for a proper job. Also for my ballistic and trajectory calculations I would need a Napier's log book - available as it happened from a schools' supplier at their front door. It was agreed they would commission a survey from the Engineers which meant going to Army H.Q. in that theatre, and indent on Cairo for a log book. So there I was marched out from my own unit and answerable to no-one so long as I came back in seven days to see if my requirements were fulfilled. I took a bus to Damascus and spent a couple of days there. I remember there was a parade of Arabs on horseback in the bazaar, waving their rifles and shouting and firing occasional rounds in celebration, followed by a little tinkle tinkle of glass fragments from the roofing over the soukh, since they only had live rounds to play with. On the way back I hitch-hiked, once stopping a staff car with a flag on it. It was General Maitland Wilson, a frustrated Field Marshal to be, who was Army Commander for the area between Iraq and Egypt. I must say I found him a man of few words, though he sat me in the front seat with his driver, and I had the presence of mind to give him a wrong name and number when he dropped me in Beirut. (By that time I was a sergeant, and I have rather forgotten when that happened.) Later when I was back with my battery General Blamey put out a general order to all the A.I.F. saying he had a complaint from the highest level about undisciplined Australians roaming Syrian roads and soliciting rides from superior officers, so I count that as another success. As for my barrage it took nearly three weeks to assemble my data, all of which I spent on leave, and one morning to complete the calculations, and to make it look better I got some graph paper and made rather a clumsy sketch of how it might look in practice. That I think was a mistake because the colonel I surrendered it to said only 2/10 for neatness and was not impressed. But I happened to know it was no use anyway because only one site in three was consistently manned, and none of us knew enough about our ammunition to reproduce that sketch or any other in an operational exercise.

The third event was getting jaundice. I went to a Beirut hospital for three days of which I remember very little except that I lost 10 pounds, and then went for two weeks to a convalescent camp in the hills above Beirut, with two thousand British troops all suffering from jaundice and waiting till our eyeballs stopped being yellow and our dark brown urine cleared. We lived on dry toast and tea and when I left they said especially no fried or greasy food for the next six months, so I kept going on dry toast and tea.

The war on the Russian front had broken out in the year we went to Beirut, and at first everybody had it that the Germans would be through the Crimea and down to Turkey and fighting to Tripoli before we could count ten, but by Christmas it was clear that that was not on. In December of course there was Pearl Harbour and Malaya and by the fall of Singapore we were all to be called home. Instead I found myself with half a dozen from our site and similar groups from the 2 Regiment, hardly known to each other because its batteries had been so far apart, drafted out to form a new Light A/A 40 mm. regiment, along with another draft from a second A/A regiment that had partly survived Crete and been with the garrison in Tobruk, and made up for the rest by field and other artillery reinforcement in the theatre, to take over a unit of British guns on the Beirut waterfront. It was all very sudden and a disappointment with everybody else on the way home, but in the Army in effect you surrender any control over your movement and have to fall in with whatever dispositions some incalculable staff may decree, and there was a certain novelty in what seemed an interesting and useful weapon.

We didn't stay much longer in Beirut, though we were for several weeks at our old site under a new officer who had come from the 2 A/A, an ex-New Guinea patrol officer called Ian Skinner which accounts for the next thing I remember. For some weeks we had encamped beside us part of a railway construction unit drawn from black South Africans and with a couple of decidedly fourth rate pom officers, one of whom in a high state of excitement roused Ian one evening to say he had a mutiny on his hands. In his best boong-bashing mood Ian got my neighbouring gun detachment and its sergeant and set off to restore order. The detachment fixed bayonets and the sergeant waited at the back of the supposed ring-leader's tent while his officer and Ian burst in at the front with pistols drawn. The poor man burst out the back of the tent to be spitted on Ian's bayonet, after which the wounded man had his hands tied behind his back with telephone wire and his feet also and all the unit was ordered out of their tents to sit on the ground outside. It was a cold night and they were surrounded by our armed guard which was regularly changed. He died about four a.m. and all his comrades groaned with him but there was no thought of fetching a doctor. The whole detachment was moved next day and I suppose any enquiry passed lightly over the judgement of the officer concerned or indeed the grounds for whatever dissatisfaction may have flourished under his control.

Anyway we had no regular manning to do and every night off if we wanted leave, until the time came to move on to our own guns and down to Palestine to bring the regiment together. Then I remember I joined a sergeants' mess, something that the gun site had never furnished in Beirut. The point mostly about a sergeants' mess or indeed an officers' one is that it brings a larger group of colleagues together and makes effective comparisons possible, members can provide funds for extra rations, tomato sauce being the one I remember best, and that other ranks' respect is not forfeited by too close acquaintance with their drunken habits.

Not a great deal happened until in July the Division was ordered to Egypt after some significant British reverses in the desert extending to the South Africans' surrender of Tobruk. A division on the move is quite an impressive sight, particularly when as then our immense columns of guns and trucks and men and weapons in one direction were passing seemingly endless convoys of Air Force units and rear detachments withdrawing in the other. We stopped the last two nights at Ikingi Mariut, just this side of the Alamein box and just past Alexandria, and I remember Ian coming round to me to say that we all had to supply from each gun team a left-out-of-battle member to be held as cadre should the unit have to be reformed. He said in practice the CO said to turn in whomever we felt we could most easily spare in battle so I gave him a name and a truck collected him half an hour later. The next morning I found we had a new troop commander which was a bit hard on Ian, he was a good soldier but not a likeable man. So we went on that day to take up our new position, with our troop of four guns each with its own sergeant flanking a field artillery battery, and our gun as it happened besides an underground battery head quarters that was linked by wire to the forward observation post with the infantry and with the gun sites. At this point I should say that a Bofors has a very light exploding-on-impact shell, and an effective range of only about 3000' from memory. Measuring it out on the ground it is not very far. Measuring it in the air is impossible. We got to know that site very well because we lived there from the July to the November battle and I think only twice in that time was I more than 500 yards from my gun-pit. Our food came up at night. It was mostly biscuits and tinned fish or tinned meat but sometimes a hot dixie of stew. Once a week we got a half dozen books. All day we were on duty. All night we could use no lights. So the twelve of us got to know each other very well.

The first day I don't remember that much happened. The infantry in front was deploying and the artillery fired a few sighting rounds. The next the artillery was well away and from the other side we got some counter-battery fire. We had dug down a couple of feet in the sand or rather less with a sandbagged parapet all round and a couple of slit trenches outside and I was pleased to see how little the desert seemed to care for shell fire, you could see the barrage making a little line of bumps in the sand and when I walked round that night and found a couple of holes it seemed to me that not much but a direct hit could hurt us, the Germans were a bit like people throwing halfpennies onto a numbered square at the Sale show with not much chance of taking out the big prize. And we were bombed twice that day. We had had endless classes beginning at Puckapunyal, in aircraft recognition and I was always hopeless at telling one profile from another. It was a great comfort to find that in the desert there were only two planes, a Stuka and a Messerschmidt, likely to be hostile, and we knew they were hostile when they came from behind the sun and dived on us. What was a surprise too was to find that you could see the bombs when they left the plane though once they started falling I can't pretend the eye can follow them all the way down.

So our first raid was a Stuka one and we fired our first fifty rounds or so. With all the subsequent months to think about it and I don't know how many rounds later I came to the conclusion that the bomb load was probably released at rather more than 3000' because they knew our range, and of course they gained altitude and cleared out from that point on. All that blitzkreig talk about choked roads in Belgium and come to that others' reminiscences of Greece must have involved undefended targets where the Germans had air superiority or at least reasonable control and had only machine gun fire to worry about. The comfort for me was that accuracy depends on closeness of range and that as far as our gun was concerned the poor pilot was like a child throwing a stone from a speeding train at a sparrow on a station platform. My comrades-in-arms never quite acquired my conviction but I liked to think it left them easier in their minds. That week I must say we fired a great many rounds but it became almost a regular system, they only came mid-morning and early afternoon when they could fly out of the sun, whereas our own artillery and their counter-battery fire began earlier in the morning and went on in the evening when infantry support was involved. Only once or twice did their bombing and shelling coincide, and we were so busy firing with the first we had no time to worry about the second. In the front line our infantry were having a hard time but our own troop had no casualties then or later, though some men on the field guns became casualties from shelling. This was in short much less wearing for me than for most others, including Bill as an o.p. signaller and Paddy as an infantryman in New Guinea. I think that battle lasted about ten days. Our troop commander came up every day, our battery commander once in six months and the chaplain every now and then. At night I could walk over to one of our other three crews. We were shelled about once a day but saw no hostile aircraft for weeks at a time.

Once I remember gaining an undeserved reputation for coolness under fire. We had been gathered up a crew at a time to go to the beach about two miles away for a swim, and after mine I found a man with an Argosy he promised I could read till the truck came back. Reading matter was of course very hard to come by. So I settled down, and heard some aircraft and someone shouting "German", so I said rubbish I'm not on duty and there was a clatter of some sort of small arms and a stone or something hit my page and I got up to find I was alone on the beach and some idiot in a Messerschmidt had just machinegunned that strip on his way home. I gave the man back his magazine and was sorry about the hole in it, but he was quite pleased and said he would keep it and tell everybody it had happened while he was reading it. After the July battle which was fought under General Auchinleck the 8th Army was taken over by General Montgomery. At the time and since all sorts of people have said what a lift this gave to the spirits of troops in the field. For us this was nonsense and still is, we could not pretend to know what impression he made on his corps and divisional and brigade commanders, he made none at all on us, though I suppose after November we could say we were in with a winner.

At any rate the buildup for the November battle was impressive. The Diamond track (lit by lights in petrol cans with a diamond cut in the rear panel) ran right beside our post and the British Highland Division took up position just inland from us with our own divisional infantry at Tel el Eisa in front of us. The field guns seemed almost axle to axle when we moved up to the edge of the minefield, and we had a couple of guns firing tracer shells on a flat trajectory to guide the infantry in, sadly not mine. Then when the guns started it must have been like France twenty-five years earlier (when we got to Tel Eisa at the end we were walking on shrapnel on a five mile front) and in between the firing we could hear the pipes of the Highlanders playing the infantry through the first gaps in the minefield. For the rest of that battle we were intermittently busy, some shelling and some bombing, but somehow the novelty had gone out of it and though it was nice to have been part of that performance our share was so small and the casualties of our infantry so great one couldn't take much personal pride in it. For a day or two after the battle we went forward to do some half-hearted cleaning up, liberating a stock of chianti at some point, also I acquired some very serviceable German paratrooper boots which some people later said I had taken from a body, of which there were plenty, but I do insist that I hadn't. They were part of a collection of clothes, including a couple of shirts I also fielded, I found in a gun pit. In fact I brought them all home and wore them for some years thereafter.

So we went back to Egypt and had a Divisional Parade under General Morshead for General Montgomery, and made our way through Egypt to embark again and come back to Australia to Sydney, and catch a train to Spencer St, and go to look for my mother in a new house in Barker's Road. Then eventually we finished our leave, marched I think through Melbourne as a Division, and entrained for North Queensland. We went up to the Atherton Tableland near Mareeba, tobacco and timber growing country, with no guns, and routine of marching, drilling, and guard duty again, knowing that Japanese air power in New Guinea was inconsequential and that prospects of re-deployment there were fairly remote. Then they published in orders a new scheme of recruitment for External Affairs and I thought I might as well have a go. I remember I was called into the adjutant who said there were two papers, a junior and a senior. The junior he said must be for N.C.O.s, the senior for officers. I said that it might mean that junior was under 21, and senior was older and he said don't be impertinent, but you can do both papers but I can't give you any more time, I have work to do. So the silly man sat at the same table and watched me scribble for three hours after which he kindly gave me an extra forty minutes. Just like the Army I thought, Invigilation means Invigilation, surely he can see I can't telephone to an accomplice for extra information, or consult occult messages on my wrist, for papers of which I could have no previous knowledge whatever. Anyway both papers went forward and at some more sensible level the unnecessary one was discarded, and eventually someone came down one evening from the Salvation Army tent to tell me my name was read out on the wireless to say I was one of twelve who had been successful. After that it came through officially and eventually again I was paid off at Sydney Showground and issued with civilian clothing to begin a short course at Sydney University. The war was still on and I was out of uniform and very sorry to be so. Still had I stayed it would not have been won a day earlier.