Rats of Tobruk still white-hot over WWII feather injustice

All these years later, the insults sent from home still anger Gordon Wallace. This is the unknown part of the Tobruk legend.

One of the last remaining Rats of Tobruk, Gordon Wallace, at his home in Keperra, Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

When he thinks about Tobruk, Gordon Wallace remembers the blood and tears his mates shed to hold the forsaken outpost in North Africa in the darkest days of World War II.

Then the thanks they got from home: white feathers.

All these years later, the injustice of it still animates Mr Wallace, 96, one of the last men standing among the fabled Rats of Tobruk.

This is the unknown part of the Tobruk legend, forged by dogged, determined men who fought their hearts out for their country only to be branded by the mark of the coward because some Australians, fearful of a Japanese invasion, ­believed the cream of the army was facing the wrong enemy.

As the nation prepares to mark the centenary of the armistice that ended WWI on November 11, 1918, the surviving Rats are speaking out before this great generation of Australians fades into history as well. Of the 14,000 Diggers who fought in the longest siege in ­British military history — 242 days in 1941 while German and Italian forces pounded Tobruk’s defenders, their backs to the Mediterranean — only 53 Rats remain, aged from 95 to 108. Four have died in the past month.

The white feathers of cowardice began to arrive from Australia when the Rats regrouped after ­Tobruk in 1942 and were hurled into the thick of the decisive ­battles at El Alamein that changed the course of the desert war.

At the time, the home front was gripped by fear of Japanese invasion. As the enemy advanced on the Kokoda Track in New Guinea and Japanese raids hit Darwin, Newcastle and Sydney Harbour, the Rats received hate letters telling them they were shirking their duty to defend Australia.

Bob Semple, 98, president of the Melbourne-based Rats of Tobruk Association and, below, during the war years. Picture: Aaron Francis

No wound was more cutting than the white feathers that arrived in the post, Mr Wallace said, speaking for the first time of their outrage.

“My reaction was like everyone else — not so much anger as scorn,” he said. “To think people from our own country would do something like that when we were fighting for our lives in the Middle East. Had we lost there, we could have lost the whole Second World War.”

Mr Wallace didn’t receive a white feather but he knew of men who got them, and they were ­devastated. Another Tobruk veteran, Bob Semple, 98, president of the Melbourne-based Rats of Tobruk Association, said the episode was disgraceful.

“I do recall the occasion … we were all disgusted,” Mr Semple said. “After what we had been through at Tobruk I was horrified that people at home could think like that.”

Historian Karl James, of the Australian War Memorial, said the practice harked back to WWI when perceived shirkers were shamed with white feathers for staying at home.

By 1942, the polarising debate in Australia on whether the army in the Middle East should be recalled for homeland defence was playing out in tense exchanges between prime minister John Curtin and Winston Churchill. Mr Curtin stood his ground when the British war leader sought to divert returning troopships.

Gordon Wallace in 1940.

“From the Australian home front — both in 1942 and also today, probably much more so today — there just isn’t an awareness or appreciation of the size of the actions that were fought in the desert, the significance of Tobruk in ’41 and certainly not the appreciation of El Alamein in ’42,” Dr James said of the battles that smashed the German Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel.

“El Alamein was a key battle … a turning point of the war in the Mediterranean and the ­Australian forces were there, playing a key role. However, that element of the story seems to have been lost.”

The remaining Rats are determined to tell their side of it while they can — the good, the bad, the saving grace of mateship that saw them through war and the hard times after they returned home.

At Tobruk, they prided themselves on holding out against a Nazi war machine that had been unstoppable until then; some went on to the 1942 Battle of Milne Bay in New Guinea to inflict on the Japanese their first land defeat of WWII.

Bob Semple in World War II.

But the Rats are falling fast. The deaths in the past month of Jack Caple, 99, of Victoria, John Wade, 100 of Western Australia, William Corey, 101, of South Australia, and Allan Skerman, 101, of Queensland, took to 18 the number to have died since May.

When the Rats of Tobruk ­Association appealed nationally for veterans to make contact in 2016, for the 75th anniversary of the siege, 110 answered newspaper ads and a shoutout from the RSL.

The chapter in Melbourne — which meets on the third Friday of the month at Tobruk House, an old billiards hall in bayside Albert Park they call the “Rat Hole” — is the only active branch of a high-profile veterans’ organisation that once boasted a national membership of thousands and overseas affiliates.

Mr Wallace, who joined up ­underage in 1939, closed down the Queensland branch a year ago.

“It got to the stage where we were more or less acting illegally because we were supposed to have a quorum of seven,” he said. “I regretted it to some extent but I realised these things can’t go on forever.”

Mr Semple, who met up with fellow Rat Keith Clarkson, 96, at the monthly association meeting in Melbourne, said: “This has ­become the anchor for helping a lot of people out.”

Honouring the last Rats of Tobruk standing