Today, Richard Burgess and Dennis Davis are both 100 years old and they can still vividly recall the heat and constant attacks from their time in the Libyan desert.

Mr Burgess said he never knew whether he was going to be “bombed, shot or run over by tanks”. He almost did not make it, surviving the long siege from April to November 1941 only to be hit by a shell during the battle of El Alamein.

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“On October 23, 1942, our army advanced on the German lines, and in my case it didn’t last very long because a piece of shell went into my sealed helmet and carved out a lump of my head,” he said. “I didn’t know anything that was going on until I woke up the next day in the 15th Scottish hospital in Cairo.”

After three weeks, he was moved to an Australian hospital in Palestine.

“They provided a vehicle for me to go up to our battalion’s Christmas luncheon, and I was able to find out what happened to me,” he said. “I didn’t know at that time and I was wearing a plaster cast hat from ear to ear.”

He was evacuated back to Australia on the hospital ship Oranje and was discharged in 1943 because of his wounds. He married Dorothy, who recently passed away, and spent the rest of his working life with the Post Office but stayed close to the mates he met in the desert.

“Our battalion bonded together more closely than our siblings because they were the people we lived with, sat with, trained with, went on leave with and fought with,” he said.

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“And those people were very close and post-war, for many, many years we met on four or five occasions a year until they all passed away,” he said. “I am the last one of the platoon.”

Fellow centenarian Dennis Davis also vividly remembers the eight months of dogged, often hand-to-hand fighting in the desert.

“We arrived in Tobruk about a week or two before the siege. We knew we were going into action, but we didn’t know when … I was nervous,” he said. “On Good Friday, sometime in April in 1941, we started moving to the frontline because we had no trucks … we had to delay the Germans in their attack into Egypt because they were going for the canal.”

As the fighting ground on and conditions worsened, Mr Davis relied on his Catholic faith to see him through.

“We couldn’t go to mass very often but I prayed every morning and at night that I would last and God was kind to me,” he said.

“The conditions were terrible,” he said. “We ate everything out of a tin, including hot meat. We ate like that for 269 days.

“We were eating bully beef and biscuit rations. There was very little water to drink, let alone wash in.”

But it was not the Germans who almost “broke” him. He received a letter from his 18-year-old fiancee, Margaret McNally, ending their engagement.

She told him she felt that he no longer loved her and it sent Mr Davis into a deep depression.

The 20-year-old soldier desperately wanted to get home to reassure her. But when the siege was finally relieved at the end of November, Mr Davis was sent to Palestine, then Syria, as part of a peacekeeping force driving ambulances.

He was then sent to drive ammunition to the front in El Alamein, then Egypt before finally leaving the Middle East in February 1943.

He rushed to Margaret’s side back in Australia, reconciled and proposed. They quickly wed and celebrated 61 years of marriage before Margaret died in 2004.

“I nearly lost her but the best thing I did was marry her,” he said.

Coincidentally, each was born with a twin and Margaret’s brother, who was Mr Davis’s best mate in the army, married his twin sister.

Like many veterans, Mr Davis did not speak about his exploits in the war for years and returned to work in the tax office in Sydney.

“I never spoke about the war and even Anzac Day, in those days I didn’t always go until my wife passed away,” he said.

“It’s the best years of your life, but it’s a sad time. You’re spending time in the army in the desert, but at the same time it’s a good experience.”

The grandfather of seven and great-grandfather of 19 last month marked 80 years since he enlisted in Sydney.

Reflecting on the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, he said: “It was part of life and it is now behind us. It was a terrible time to live through but I’m fortunate to have lived.”

Those sentiments were echoed by Mr Burgess, who said: “I feel like I have contributed a lot to Australia through the community and war years. I have had a happy life and, while a lot of my friends were killed, I was lucky enough to survive.”