Honouring the last Rats of Tobruk standing
They were the first to puncture the myth of Nazi invincibility. This is the story Australians need to hear before it’s too late.
The third Friday of the month. They’ve started the meeting at Tobruk House without Bob Semple, and that’s not something to be done lightly. If the Rats have a standard bearer, it’s him, still sharp as a tack at 98, ramrod straight in bearing, his snowy moustache trimmed with military precision.
He’s late because he was held up at the Shrine of Remembrance: they all want to talk to him, you see. The kids from the school across the street, the people from the Australian War Memorial, the lady from the Polish veterans’ association. You need to hear his story and the stories of his mates before it’s too late.
There are only 53 of them left — 53 out of the 14,000 Australian soldiers who forged their place in history defending a dusty, flea-infested port on the craggy Libyan coast of North Africa that for 242 epic days in 1941 was a focal point of the Allied war effort.
The Rats of Tobruk showed what could be achieved with Australian ingenuity and doggedness. They prided themselves on being the first troops to withstand the German war machine, puncturing the myth of Nazi invincibility. They went bare-chested by day, as the shells and Stuka dive bombers fell on them, and got their own back at night, knife or club in hand, during hair-raising raids on the enemy’s lines.
Incredibly, some of them would later receive white feathers from those safe at home who had no inkling of what they had endured and sacrificed at Tobruk. But when that battle was over, there was the next: El Alamein, the turning point of the war in North Africa and harbinger of Hitler’s defeat in Europe as well as Milne Bay, that bastard of a place in New Guinea. There, some of the Rats earned the double distinction of also checking the advance of the Japanese towards Australia.
Others, Semple among them, chased the Japanese through Lae and Finschhafen in New Guinea and Borneo — bloody, muddy arm wrestles in the jungle that made them wish they were back in the desert. There was precious little recognition and all too much grief in the bitter fighting they did at the back end of World War II.
When the surviving Rats finally returned to Australia, it was to a country that had never seemed so far away, one that seemed intent on forgetting them. So they turned to each other, just as they had done in those holes at Tobruk. The Rats built homes for one another and stepped in when a mate stumbled. They delivered firewood in the depths of a Melbourne winter, Christmas trees in Cairns. When all else failed, they were there.
Now that there’s so few of them left, the brotherhood seems to matter even more. Semple quietly makes his way into Tobruk Hall, their spiritual home in Melbourne, while they’re winding up the meeting on this chilly Friday morning. He catches the eye of Keith Clarkson, 96, the only other Rat to make it to the monthly get-together. “It’s something special,” Semple says after they shake hands. “A particular affinity, I suppose. You don’t have to dress it down.”
Soon enough, they’re reminiscing about the men they knew, the ones who are gone, the few who remain. Among the surviving Rats, there’s Ern Brough, 98, of Geelong. He was wounded at Tobruk, captured at El Alamein and broke out of Stalag 18 in Austria with three other Diggers. Dodging German patrols across Slovenia and Croatia, they joined a partisan band to reach the Bosnian mountains, where they were flown to freedom on a crash-landed American transport plane. No, you couldn’t make it up.
But when he got home Brough couldn’t cope. One terrible night, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, jerking away in the final instant. “You get into a cloud of your own,” he says of that moment of madness. “You can’t stop it … it gets hold of your brain.”
Ernie Walker, one of the last Rats standing in NSW, never thought he would get out of Tobruk alive. But here he is, aged 102, talking about his worst memory of the war. “It was the first time I disembowelled a man,” he says in a hushed voice. Gordon Wallace, 96, of Brisbane, was an acting platoon commander when he tripped a jumping jack mine near the Salient, a hotspot on the Tobruk perimeter. There was a flash beneath his boot. But the force of the explosion was directed behind him.
“The thing went off on Harry Parker’s chest … it took his head and shoulders off. I will never forget that sight.”
As the nation counts down to Remembrance Day tomorrow week, November 11, marking the 100th anniversary of the day the guns fell silent in World War I, consider the fate of the original Anzac generation: it faded away before we knew it, before we could appreciate what the living presence of those old soldiers truly meant. The same is happening now to the Rats and the rest of our World War II veterans. This is the flesh-and-blood story of five of these great Australians, as told by them. Understand what they have to say — because they were the making of us.
Good Friday, 1941, the Tobruk perimeter. Wallace’s war changed the day they buried Kelvin Croker. He was the first man in their company to cop it. The 19-year-old had been blown to bits by a landmine up Benghazi way. Wallace and Sergeant Passmore dug the grave on a rise, but as they were finishing the job a fighter plane swooped, guns blazing. “We ended up in the hole with Kellie,” he says. “He wouldn’t have given a bugger … we were friends.”
Until then, his time in the Middle East had been a bit of a lark. Wallace had joined up as soon as he could in 1939, after the balloon went up, throwing in his job as a lad porter in the railway at El Arish in north Queensland. His dad, a machine-gunner in the first war, didn’t say a word; he never did when it came to that subject.
Wallace and his new mates from the 2/15th infantry battalion boarded the Queen Mary in Sydney on December 29, 1940. Their division, the 9th, relieved the Australian 6th Division after it captured Tobruk, 25,000 Italian prisoners and mountains of equipment on January 22, 1941, and chased Mussolini’s men up the Libyan coast towards Tripoli.
As he dusted himself off, Wallace realised they had been strafed by a Messerschmitt 109. What were the Germans doing in the desert? It quickly became evident.
Erwin Rommel had landed with his crack Afrika Corps, turning the tables on the British-led army that had trounced the Nazis’ hapless Italian allies. The Australians fell back on Tobruk where Major General Leslie Morshead, commander of the 9th Division, a soldier’s soldier who had fought at Gallipoli, declared there would be no further retreat, no surrender.
So now, on this bloody awful Easter weekend, Wallace’s 10-man section was dug in near El Adem Road, on the southern edge of a 50km perimeter that snaked out to Hill 209 before cutting back to the coast north of the township and its prize port. Old Italian pillboxes, hastily constructed zigzag trenches, holes and shell craters were linked into the Red Line, the outer fortifications. Behind this, a second ring of defences known as the Blue Line was supported by artillery and what was left of the British armour.
The 14,000-odd Australians from Morshead’s 9th Division and elements of the 7th made up the bulk of the fighting troops. The opening German attacks went in on Good Friday, April 11. By the Sunday night, 50 Panzers had breached the perimeter west of El Adem Road. Like most of the Australians, Wallace and his men were armed with .303 rifles and grenades, backed by Lewis or Bren light machineguns. Unable to stop the German tanks, they got stuck into the infantry. “Luckily, we had a couple of troops of British Royal Horse Artillery behind us which took care of the bastards,” Wallace says. “If it wasn’t for the RHA, it would have been the shortest siege in history.”
Semple came in on HMAS Vampire, an Australian destroyer employed on the “spud run” to supply Tobruk. An Essendon boy, he had joined the cadet corps of the Scottish Regiment in Melbourne before volunteering for the army. His maternal uncle, John Knox Adams, had been among the first to fall at Gallipoli, killed on the opening day of the landings in 1915. Semple had trained as an artillery man. There was just one problem: his unit, the 2/15th Field Regiment, had no guns.
Instead, he was assigned to a captured 75mm Italian field piece and was told to get on with it. Never mind that it was calibrated in metric rather than the imperial measures used by the Australians, or that the ammunition was haphazardly fused, liable to explode.
The men made do. They stripped to their shorts beneath the unyielding sun and cut down their army boots, sandal-like. The Germans and Italians shelled and mortared them from dawn to dusk while the Luftwaffe piled in, especially the vulture-like Stukas, their sirens wailing in full dive.
“Between the heat and the explosions you were in a stupor,” says rifleman Walker, who grew up in a well-to-do home near the University of Sydney before his father’s carrying business hit the wall in the Depression. “We would sit in our holes, waiting to be hit. We were on very limited water, a single canteen a day. I’d drink mine as soon as I got it because I saw too many dead blokes with a full bottle left.”
Semple lost 10 mates in a single instant of horror when their truck was spotted by a German reconnaissance aircraft. “They called up their artillery and bracketed the vehicle on the move with shots back and front. Then it didn’t take long to get on to the truck,” he says. “The shell landed amongst them, killed the lot. They were all buried in a row.”
One night, Brough, an apprentice butcher from Gippsland, Victoria, who had to get his rotten front teeth replaced before the army would have him, was sent on “what was basically a suicide patrol”, into the enemy-held Salient with two other men. As they left the dugout, he called to his mates: “You won’t see me again.”
Sure enough, the Germans opened up with a machinegun when they were just outside the wire, killing Private Martin instantly. The other man, Hargraves, took a bullet through the foot. Brough was hit in the left arm. Then he felt a sledgehammer blow in the buttocks, “as if someone had laid into me with a log”. He raised his Tommy gun and let rip, and hurled a grenade, silencing the enemy fire. “So I grabbed Hargraves and I can tell you his foot and my arse were no impediment to getting out of there.”
Clarkson, a bush mechanic who had joined up in 1940, drove into the minefields to recover damaged equipment and weapons. A bullet came through the sandbags lining the truck cabin to strike his legs, though the round was nearly spent: “A few little burns, nothing to worry about.”
By now, one full German division and the best part of four Italian divisions were tied up, delivering breathing space to the hard-pressed British forces regrouping in Egypt. How the besieged Diggers laughed when German propaganda broadcaster William Joyce, the turncoat Irishman otherwise known as Lord Haw Haw, snidely referred to them as “rats”. That’s what they were, all right. The Rats of Tobruk.
The dead of night, August 1941. Another raid on the German lines. Another stomach-churning wait to grab a prisoner and hopefully get away with it. You had to be quiet or you were dead. So was any German who made a noise.
Walker had become good at this. Often as not, he didn’t take his rifle, just the knife. If the show went pear-shaped, it was kill or be killed. Walker did some terrible things, things he couldn’t talk about for years, but which he now will. Like many of the Rats, he has come around.
When people ask him about Tobruk he tells them what it was like to kill with that wicked blade. “This German, he wasn’t going to go quietly,” he says. “I was lucky. I was standing behind him. I got one arm around his neck, a knee in the middle of his back, and my other arm free with the knife. I got him … I was sick after it, sick for days.”
Back home, incoming Labor prime minister John Curtin was increasingly focused on the military menace of Japan. By late March 1941, eight months out from Pearl Harbor, and with the United Australia Party-led government of Robert Menzies starting to crumble, Curtin had reached the conclusion the threat was sufficiently serious to warrant the return of Australian troops from the Middle East. The politics were diabolical. Curtin could be, almost certainly would be, portrayed as abandoning Britain in its lone fight against Germany and Italy to guard against a Japanese attack in the Pacific that might not happen. (Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was still months away.)
The Rats, of course, had more immediate concerns. By the time Curtin took over as PM on October 7, Brough was back in Tobruk, a fully fledged sergeant. His platoon was a shadow of what it had been. The lieutenant, Jimmy Downes, had been killed by a bomb on the beach. “Everyone was sick and tired,” Brough says.
Part of the beleaguered Australian garrison had been relieved in August, but Winston Churchill had prevailed on Canberra to keep most of the troops in place, so well had they performed. But there was a limit, and the men had reached it. “The wear and tear on us all was terrible … you’d get an odd meal of stew, but half the time those infantry boys starved,” Semple says.
Wallace would dig from the earth discarded Italian garlic packets to flavour tinned bully beef that liquefied in the heat. He went in to Tobruk weighing a strapping 12 stone (76kg) and lost a third of his body weight; unwashed for months, his hair grew into an untameable tangle. Finally, in October, his orders came through. Clambering up the gangway of HMS Abdiel was like entering heaven. The British minelaying destroyer had fresh-baked bread and hot showers. There was Queensland beer at the rest camp in Alexandria, Egypt. “I don’t know about the other blokes, but I got pissed,” Wallace says.
El Alamein, 1942. It was hard to keep up with this rollercoaster war. Having bombed Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had run amok, taking down Hong Kong, The Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Singapore went and with it the Australian 8th Division, captured when the island fortress fell. The Soviets and the Americans had come in on our side. We needed all the help we could get. In New Guinea, outnumbered and poorly trained Australian militiamen had clung to the Kokoda Track until veteran troops from the Middle East arrived in the nick of time, stopping the Japanese short of Port Moresby.
Some of the Rats, 7th Division men mostly, were at Milne Bay, where the Japanese had landed to seize the eastern approaches to the PNG capital. They would be thrown off the beachhead by the Australians — their first, bloody, defeat on land, compounding the Kokoda reversal. But the homeland remained threatened.
Darwin had been bombed, and the Japanese had sent mini-subs into Sydney Harbour.
Semple had finally been let loose on the British 25-pounder, the field gun he had been trained to use, and was digging in with the 2/12th at El Alamein, a fly-blown railway stop near the Egyptian coast. Rommel was on the charge again. The Australians long gone, Tobruk had surrendered on June 21 with 33,000 British and South African troops taken prisoner. Churchill called it a disgrace.
The battles at El Alamein culminated in a titanic clash of arms in late October-November 1942 that smashed the German desert army. The Australian 9th Division was in the thick of the fighting, including Wallace’s battalion. The 2/15th lost 59 men in three hours of combat. “If anyone got knocked you had to leave them. We just had to keep going,” he says.
Brough came across a German soldier with a mangled right foot. He thrust a cigarette into the man’s mouth, hoisted him on his back and carried him to an aid station in no-man’s land. For some reason the Germans there let him go. But later that night his luck ran out: trapped by German tanks at a place called Barrel Hill, with no way to fight them, he surrendered with 15 other men.
Life as a prisoner of war was relatively easy. The potato soup at Stalag 18 was better than the fare at Tobruk, and the Germans usually let the Red Cross parcels through. Still, he was ashamed to be a prisoner. His escape in Austria and escapades on the run across central Europe meant he would not get home until September 11, 1944.
Sydney showgrounds, winter 1943. Three days with his then wife, Jean. That was all the time Walker got after three Christmases away at war. The troop ship had docked in Adelaide and he had to hitchhike home to North Ryde, Sydney.
For the Australian troops, cooling their heels in rest camps in Egypt or the Gaza Strip, the wait had seemed interminable while Curtin argued with Churchill about bringing them home. The British war leader had originally wanted to divert Australian troops to Burma, where they well could have shared the fate of the 8th Division men doomed at Singapore. But Curtin stood his ground. As we reveal today in the paper’s news section, some of the men received white feathers from Australia, the mark of a coward, posted by people who believed they should have been in New Guinea fighting the Japanese. The Rats bristled.
When Walker reported to the Sydney showgrounds, as he had been instructed, he had expected to see Jean for tea to enjoy the leg of lamb they had picked out on the way to the railway station. Instead, trucks were waiting to take the men to waiting troop ships. “I felt really angry when I realised they had planned it that way,” he says. “I didn’t get to say goodbye, it was just, ‘get in the truck and go to the islands’.”
Finschhafen, north coast of PNG, September 1943-44. This was a different kind of war, more terrible than anything the Rats had known. The 9th Division had come ashore near Lae and then Finschhafen as part of the biggest amphibious landings made by Australian troops since Gallipoli. The Japanese were on the back foot, their troop undersupplied and often starved but all too willing to fight to the death. “The blokes were trying to get up these great bloody hills, hanging on vines and that,” Wallace says. “The Japs were sitting up there, rolling their grenades down on us.”
Clarkson felt he had done his bit, but he went to New Guinea all the same, just as Semple did; both contracted malaria but otherwise came through unscathed. Walker was having a swim with his mates one day when a Japanese bomber appeared overhead, waggling its wings, evidently trying to shake loose a jammed payload. The next thing, he woke up in hospital, his lacerated belly a bandaged mess. “I got blown up … I was no use to them any more,” he says.
A sick and exhausted Wallace was posted to Cairns, but when the 2/15th was mustered to return to the war, in Borneo, he was determined to go. The medical officer wouldn’t hear of it. “You’ve had your war, old boy,” the doctor said. “You won’t be getting a reboard.”
Padas River, North Borneo, August 15, 1945.At last. The Japanese had thrown in the towel after the Americans dropped the second bomb, this time on Nagasaki. There was no celebration, just a few handshakes, a heartfelt moment here and there with one of the originals, of whom there were precious few. Getting home in one piece had never seemed as important as it was now. Semple told his mates to stay sharp. “We didn’t knock off too much at all because there were Japs wandering around … who didn’t know the bell had rung,” he says. “They were more than enough trouble.”
The third Friday of the month. After the war, they picked up the threads of their old lives, some better than others. Semple went back to his job in the Melbourne rag trade in Flinders Lane, rising through the ranks while he raised a family; Walker recovered from his wounds and went into spec home building, working his own hours, at his own pace, because “if I had the horrors I could stay home in bed”; Wallace returned to the railway, but it would take years for him to realise what the army had made him, “a bastard when I came home”; Clarkson became an electrician, married, and later went into real estate.
As for Brough, he did all right, too, after he tamed his demons, but it took the love and patience of an understanding wife and time in treatment. He wrote a compelling memoir, Dangerous Days. “I never worried too much,” he says of his extraordinary war. “You don’t fret … if you do that, you’re really in the shit.”
One way or another, the Rats were always there. The Tobruk veterans formed an association with branches around the country and the world, which became another way for them to have each other’s back, because when it came down to it, who else could you count on other than your mates and family?
They flexed their political muscle. When they heard the Polish Rats, veterans of the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade that had relieved the Australians at Tobruk in late 1941, were in strife after the war, unwilling to go home to a country under communist rule, unwelcome in Britain, they lobbied a deeply reluctant Australian government under Ben Chifley to take hundreds as migrants. Their proudly Aussie descendants today number in the many thousands.
The Rats performed acts of kindness great and small. Wallace organised Christmas tree runs in Cairns for the kids of impoverished veterans. Whatever happened, you were always a Rat. Walker couldn’t get far enough away from the military after he demobbed. But years and years later he was having a beer when the fellow across the bar, an aged Rat, called out: “Ernie … you’re a bastard. You’re clean, you’re tidy, you look like you’re doing all right. Have you thought about half your mates?” He stayed with his association branch until it closed last year: there was no else to come to meetings.
Graham Gibson’s late dad, William, knocked together a diving helmet at Tobruk, which he used to salvage supplies from sunken ships in the harbour. Back in Melbourne, he helped a gang of Rats fit out the home of an injured mate, Jeff Dunn, a quadriplegic from the war. Gibson would go with his father to Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital to see other men doing it tough. The bonds span the generations: today, he’s secretary of the Rats’ last active branch, headed by Semple in Melbourne.
A few years ago, Semple and some of the other blokes got talking. None of them were getting any younger, so what would happen to Tobruk House, the old billiard hall in Albert Park they bought in the 1950s, when they were gone? Someone said they should do something for kids, because the kids were the future, and wasn’t that what they had fought for? So they sold the place for $1.7 million and gave most of the money to the Royal Children’s Hospital.
Semple thought he had seen it all, but then something happened that touched him to the core.
The businessman who bought the hall, Bill Gibbons, asked to see the Rats. He told them: “We owe you blokes a debt we haven’t paid. You can keep the hall and use it for as long as you want to.”
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