Anzac Day: the Rats of Tobruk who saved my Grandad’s life in Egypt
My family owes its existence to Reg Coyne and Johnny White, who saved Grandad’s life during Operation Bulimba in 1942.
“Thanks Reg and Johnny, dear Rats of Tobruk.”
Just a line I’ve been saying to myself lately whenever I catch my daughters dancing, singing, breathing. My private thanks.
“Who?” the girls asked the other night on the drive home from dinner.
Reg Coyne and Johnny White. The boys who dragged Grandad through the wire.
And I told the girls about my little quest: how I’d gone in search of Coyne and White’s surviving relatives because I had to say thanks for something beautiful they did for our family on the battlefield and how that search took me from the Rats of Tobruk Association in Melbourne to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and, finally, to a house in Keperra, Brisbane, just one suburb across from our own, where a 96-year-old Rat of Tobruk named Gordon Wallace told me exactly why Grandad never spoke about the war; about the hellfire haze of Operation Bulimba; about them glorious Rats.
This story is my public thanks to Reg and Johnny. This story begins in 2013 with an email my oldest brother sent me. He was a major in the army then, a keen military historian whose military career I reckon might have been formed, in part, way back in the mid-1980s when he first peeked through the crack in Grandad’s bedroom door and saw him wrestling a wooden leg on to the cold high white nub of an incomplete right thigh.
My three brothers and I lived in Grandad’s house for a year as kids and in all that time I never once summoned the plums to ask him how he lost his leg, mostly because he had a silent and intense personal depth to him that shadowed his being and this shadow was far beyond the understanding of a boisterous kid whose only knowledge of battlefield courage occurred a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Then Grandad died in 1986 and his surely thrilling story of the lost limb and Reg and Johnny and bloody Operation Bulimba was buried with him in a modest grave in Albany Creek Cemetery.
“Grandad’s Tale!” my brother wrote in the subject box of the email. “For your interest, found this excerpt from Grandad in a book about his battalion, the 2/15th. He joined the Bn when it was first raised and served through Benghazi, Tobruk, Syria, Palestine and eventually took one during Operation Bulimba.”
On September 1, 1942, the 2/15th, a battalion of Queenslanders, including timber getter and cheesemaker Vic Dalton from the Darling Downs, was thrust into a blood-strewn diversionary attack south of Tel el Eisa, Egypt — codenamed Operation Bulimba after a beer favoured by men of the 2/15th — during the interminable lead-up to the second battle of El Alamein. The battalion penetrated a German minefield and met the heaviest kind of battlefield resistance in largely hand-to-hand fighting, with many of our blokes hemmed in by near-impenetrable concertina wire, under enemy mortar attacks and sweeping and catastrophic fire from 88mm German artillery guns — the tank killers of World War II — that saw the 2/15th sustain 183 casualties and lose almost half of its fighting strength.
What followed in my brother’s email was a passage from an old book he’d found called Let Enemies Beware, a history of the 2/15th. It was, for the first time by my reckoning, Grandad in his own words.
“Vic Dalton was badly wounded in the BULIMBA action and later recounted his tale:
“ ‘In the confusion of the noise and dust, some of us lost contact with our Sections, and I remember finishing up with another Section led by Bill Anderson. We blundered into an 88mm gun which Bill immediately captured; whilst standing gazing at the tired-looking and dirty German gun crew, I was hit in the right leg. On recovering consciousness I found Bill Anderson wrapping a field dressing round the wound which bled fairly well. I was helped through the wire by Johnny White and Reg Coyne.
“ ‘Reg was killed outright but John got not even a scratch. After a short wait some of us were picked up by a 17 Battalion Bren gun carrier in charge of a Lieutenant who sat on top of the carrier directing his driver to where the wounded lay — all this time bullets were whizzing around his ears like bees. That afternoon I arrived at the 16th British CCS near Tel el Eisa siding.’ ”
I love the way Vic wrote. Bloke wrote like one of my heroes, Cormac McCarthy. All sparse and direct. Understated. You can bet your arse that leg bled well. No literary adornments to the language, none of the weepy schmaltz his youngest grandson would be guilty of spreading through The Australian decades later. Saying nothing of his own deeds, putting the spotlight where it belongs, on the men he saw around him while lying on his back in the red-blotched desert dust.
But I’d kill for more details. He was too brief in the lines about Coyne and White, the two blokes who allowed those beautiful daughters of mine to dance to their own reflections in the windows of the comfortable home in suburban Brisbane those two blokes allowed me to enjoy. Vic needed his youngest grandson to help him write that bit. I would have fleshed that out for him. I woulda written the shit out of it. They came to Vic’s aid when they probably weren’t supposed to; they lowered their weapons for a moment and turned themselves into two easy targets hauling the dead weight of a Darling Downs cheesemaker through Jerry’s razor wire.
“You reckon Reg Coyne was shot saving Grandad?” I asked my brother over a beer, days later. He didn’t doubt it. I didn’t either. I’d heard whispers of this growing up. My aunt Joan Murphy, second oldest of Vic’s four children, was all but certain of it. “I definitely had that sense that Reg Coyne got that bullet helping Dad,” she said. “Dad was hard to read. He was so close-mouthed but one of the few things I do remember him saying about the war was that when he got back the first thing he did was visit Reg Coyne’s parents and say thank you. I think he felt responsible for this bloke being killed.”
“I know he had the nightmares,” said my other aunt, Monica Lewry, Vic’s first child. “I’d hear Mum in the night: ‘Wake up, Vic. Wake up.’ But he never spoke about it. Ever.”
And then I went on my little quest. “I pretty much just want to say thanks on behalf of my family to any living relatives of Reg Coyne and John White,” I told the Australian War Memorial. They helped with Reg’s war details.
“COYNE Reginald Andrew Pte KIA 21/09/1920 1/09/1942 QX11613 2/15 Bn EL ALAMEIN A I. H. 1.”
There were two Rats named John White in the records.
“WHITE John Augustus Pte Vale 4/03/1912 9/03/1988 NX36700 2/13 Bn.”
“WHITE John Cpl Vale 17/03/1904 WX3848 2/28 Bn POW MIA 15/9/42.”
The memorial led me to the Rats of Tobruk Association, Melbourne, and the association’s tireless secretary, Karolina Sevcikova (daughter of a Rat), led me to David Laurie, son of Jim Laurie, a member of the 2/15th. David runs a remembrance website dedicated to his father’s unit. “I’ve done a bit of digging re ‘Johnny’ White,” he wrote back a day after our first chat. “The best bet might be Pte John Clarke WHITE QX8682? He joined the 2/15th Battalion before Alamein, but his records are not yet publicly available.”
David said I might struggle to find Reg and Johnny’s living relatives. Records are lost. Histories are muddied. Stories are forgotten.
I asked David if he could paint a picture of what it might have felt like for Grandad inside that Bulimba action.
“I can go one better,” David said. “I know someone who was in it with him.”
“Vic Dalton!” said Gordon Wallace. “He’s there in my mind. He was a four-figure (army) number. He was one of the originals.” He remembered Reg Coyne, too; remembered him around the age he was when he died, 20 days short of his 22nd birthday. He couldn’t recall John White.
Gordon is 96 now. “Ninety-nine on the army records,” he said. “I lied about me age.” He reckoned he might be one of the last of the 2/15th. If there’s more around, he said, then they’re not knocking on his door anytime soon.
“I’ve lived too long,” he said. “My eldest bloke died about 2½ years ago at 71. I never wanted to outlive any of my kids.”
He sat at his kitchen table in a two-level brick home in Keperra, staring at an Australian War Memorial oil painting of a scene from Operation Bulimba. It was a terrifying image. Bodies everywhere. Gunsmoke and dust. Men in the process of dying. Men in the frenzied and unsettling process of killing other men.
“We lost 58 blokes in 3½ hours,” he said. He shook his head, took a long breath.
“For some reason, I don’t recall being afraid. The thing I hated was the jumpin’ jack mines and the mortars. The Jerries are firing on you and you hear that hoowoopf propulsion sound and automatically you start to count and when you get to 17 seconds, if it’s not on you then, well, it’s not going to you. It’s going to your mate next to ya. It always happens to the other bloke, not to you. These are the things that become part of your life.
“We’d been in actions, we’d been fired on and done patrols, but we hadn’t been in a pitch battle like this. We’d been in positions of defence mainly, keeping the Germans out. This was real frontal attack.”
He kept talking about the battle and I kept seeing Vic inside it.
“You’re trying to kill the enemy,” he said. “You’re not actually going in there with the idea of killing people — anybody that believes that has something wrong in the head — but you’ve been put in a battle and the enemy are trying to kill you and you’re trying to stay alive and achieve the objective.”
He paused for a moment, thinking back. He kept saying the date like it was the three words on his mind every day he woke and went to bed.
“First of September,” he said, shaking his head. “First of September, first of September.
“We got pinned down and held up in the wire and couldn’t get through.”
Gordon has long believed the battalion was abandoned by supporting British tanks that he expected to mow through and flatten the deadly rolls of wire.
“We were supposed to have Pommy tank support but they wouldn’t go in,” he said. “With that Dannert (concertina) wire, the general way to get through it is either to have a tank go over the top of it, which we didn’t have, or somebody’s gotta lie down on it to make a path for the other bloke to walk over it. They flatten it with their body weight and the other blokes walk over the top of them.”
Gordon had a strong suspicion that Johnny and Reg employed this method to drag Vic over the wire he refers to in the book passage. One Rat laying flat on the wire — razor-sharp barbs digging into his skin — and the other Rat somehow shouldering or dragging Vic over the wire to a future where he gets to father four kids.
And I suddenly got the sense that Gordon admired Johnny and Reg even more than I did. They weren’t supposed to be so brave. They were trained, he explained, not to be so gallant.
“You’re walking into this mash of weaponry and you know blokes are falling alongside you but you can’t stop to assist them or see who it is. It could be your best mate, but you can’t stop to assist him because you’ve gotta go on.
“But these blokes, they would’ve slung their weapons over their shoulder and they would have been there to assist your grandfather. Because he was their mate and he was injured badly. They were mates.”
He stressed that word “mates” and his lip trembled, but he shook his head like he felt there was folly — beautiful folly, but folly all the same — in Reg and Johnny’s actions.
“And that’s what you do. But you can’t go to his aid in the middle of an action and forget what you’re there for. Because you can end up gettin’ killed yourself.”
I asked Gordon how Grandad would have felt if Reg did indeed take that bullet saving him. He thought about this for a long moment, then he told me a story about something that happened some days after Bulimba, when he was on a night post with an artillery unit that spotted a German ammunition transport at the bottom of a desert valley. He shot this German truck up with a long blast of anti-tank gunfire and one of its passengers was left lying in agony about 20 yards in front of his post.
“I went out and went through this bloke for his papers and he was crying for his mother,” Gordon said. “He was an officer but he was crying for his mother because he was in a bad way.
“If I’d have done him a good turn I’d have shot him straight away, but once you got him lying on the ground it was murder to do that. I went through his papers and there was a photo there of his wife and two girls with long blonde hair in plaits, probably nine or 10. The poor bastard. I’ve never forgotten him. I was out there two hours holding his hand until he died.”
What Gordon was saying with that story was that these old wartime waters have their ripples. Gordon had four kids, just as Vic had four kids.
“We weren’t easy to live with,” he said.
Gordon wondered what effect the telling and, maybe worse, the not telling of all those war stories had on the next generation of Australians.
These old war ripples build and bleed into other people’s stories.
My own beloved and late old man had a firm grasp of the bottle for a good stretch of his life and a long lost old mate of his who was a national serviceman alongside Dad told me around the time he died that some of that bottle stuff was tied to the fact the course of Dad’s life didn’t go to plan. He was supposed to go to war, as Vic did, he was supposed to do his bit like Vic did his bit, but he never got his chance because they pulled our boys out of Vietnam before Dad’s Nasho unit got their tour.
Dad was aimless after that, this friend said. And being aimless was sometimes a dangerous way for young Aussie 20-year-olds to be in the early 1970s. And I always resented that battlefield dreaming stuff because I always wondered if he would have preferred getting blown to bits on a rice field over raising us four boys as a single dad who, for all his demons, I wouldn’t have wished replaced by anyone on this big earth. Dad knew more than most about Vic’s Tobruk years but I was always too much of a germy teen or a time-poor dad to hear his stories and now Dad’s stories are floating in the Pumicestone Passage, Bribie Island, along with his ashes.
“You can’t do bloody nothing about guilt,” Gordon said. “I know how Vic felt. We all think the same way. You go over to that cemetery now in El Alamein and you look along that line of bloody gravestones and there’s 58 blokes, ‘First of September, first of September, first of September, first of September’, and this is where you think, ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve had 70-odd years since then’, and these blokes were boys. A lot of those boys hadn’t even been with a girl. They never had the chance. Too young. These are the things you think about at night when you lay back.
“I know Vic would’ve felt guilty to a certain extent. Reg Coyne got killed and he came home. But at the same time, he would have learned to live a decent life because he’s been allowed a second chance. You learn to live a good life.”
My aunt Joan reckons Reg was drifting somewhere in every good deed Vic ever did — and he did many. He was a pious man, deeply rooted to his sea breeze community of Shorncliffe and Sandgate, north Brisbane. He ended up crunching numbers for the tax department but in his spare time he was always voluntarily balancing the books for his local church. He was president of his beloved Sandgate RSL, which I saw in the papers had to close down in January in the face of insurmountable debt.
Grandad spent a good chunk of his life pushing my nan, Beryl, around in a wheelchair because her body was locked up by polio. Dad once told me about the memories he had of Grandad chasing him around in the yard on one leg. He remembered Vic ripping off his wooden leg once and hopping along the brown sand of Moreton Bay and diving into the sea to splash around with his kids.
“He really did live a good life,” I told Gordon.
He really did earn it, Reg.
“I bet he did,” Gordon said.
Then, in the suburban quiet of his kitchen, Gordon read me one of the many poems he wrote in North Africa and all through his life. He read me a poem called Bulimba. Like most of his war poems, the genesis lines of it were scribbled on highly prized dunny paper between battles in the desert.
September first, ’42, the fellows there will say
Was a day as important as that first Anzac Day
Traditions formed at Anzac were maintained and enriched
As into a battle the Second Fifteenth pitched
In the back seat of the car my youngest daughter, aged eight, had worked out something about Reg Coyne and Johnny White that could apply to every name on the honour walls of the Australian War Memorial. “Without them, we wouldn’t be here,” she said.
The girl’s a deep thinker, like her great-grandfather.
My little quest continues. It really has only just begun. My wife has been digging with me and we’re close to tracking down Reg’s family. Parents: Mary Agnes Coyne and Michael Andrew Coyne. A 1937 electoral roll placed Mary and Michael, a cane farmer, in Ivanhoe, Ayr, south of Townsville, where their son Reg first enlisted. Birth records suggest Reg had a sister, Rita Kathleen Coyne, one year older than him. Rita, we figure from the increasingly intriguing records, might have married a William James Forbes Wiseman and she would likely be the same Rita Kathleen Wiseman who died and was buried in Ayr cemetery in 2010.
This story isn’t over.
“Panel 38,” my wife said just last night, smiling.
She had a nice idea. Our oldest girl has her Year 6 trip to the Australian War Memorial in July. She’ll have a handful of red poppies to place in that beautiful honour wall down there in Canberra — her other great-grandad was a Thai-Burma Railway prisoner of war, but I’d need a novel to tell that extraordinary story. She can take her time to see the names of these fine men in her family, and then she can go find Panel 38 and slip a poppy in beside “Coyne, Reginald Andrew”. And she can say a private thanks from all of us Daltons, including his old 2/15th mate, Vic.
“Thanks Reg and Johnny, dear Rats of Tobruk.”
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