Arrival in Tobruk Bob Semple
We were shipped in to the place.
I personally went in and we shall ever be grateful to our Navy.
The destroyers and those ships that supported and kept us alive because without the Navy
we would not have seen out the distance.
Hautrie Crick Ten o'clock at night we got in to Tobruk and
all we did was just, the trucks pulled up and we jumped off and all we did was just
sort off dug a little depression in the ground and laid a groundsheet on the ground and laid
on that until the morning.
And woke up in the morning and we were half buried in sand.
There'd been a storm through the night.
The way the sand drifts over there, it just travels, and we were just pushing the sand
like that to get up in the morning.
Living Conditions Bob Semple
One bottle of water for all purposes.
No trees and you are just out in the bare sunlight.
Scrubby stuff a bit like sort of saltbush around the area.
Can get cold at night, it can be 45 degrees [during the day] you know, or more sometimes,
the sandstorms come up and they just shut down the book for two or three days at a time,
or a couple of days anyhow.
Just like pulling the blind down from sky to land, and they're vicious sort of things
come up out of the desert.
Hautrie Crick Well the water used to be bought up in petrol
drums that were emptied that day or whatever and the water used to taste like bloody petrol.
And that's all we used to have to drink, and do a bit of a wash and a shave and that.
Oh it was shocking.
Jack Caple You put about that much water in (holds up
tin cup), do your teeth, then shave, and your hands and face, and that for three weeks.
And when you came off the red line you'd get down to the blue line and nick down to the
beach and have a wash up Of a night time the truck would come up with our dinner and these
are our dixies.
You'd use that for bully beef stew (holds up Dixie tin), and that one (holds up smaller
dixie tin) for prunes and rice that was your sweets.
And two buckets of water.
One was supposed to be hot, and one's cold.
And no teatowel.
That's about the size of a tin of bully beef (holds up tinned meat), and we were sharing
three of those between three men for lunch for a long time.
The rations were pretty scarce.
Bob Semple Dealing with disease and fleas.
You couldn't imagine the fleas would gather in multiples in like a tin hat.
And flies.
That caused an awful lot of problems.
Desert sores and hard rations all the time.
I think old Bill Angliss wouldn't have been too proud of his bully beef in the tins.
We turned the key in them just like the sardine tin or whatever, the package they were in,
and hot fat would just run down the side of it and you had that for breakfast, dinner
and tea, and hard rations a lot of the time.
And water.
That was precious.
John Fleming The English ships were from the Indian squadron.
They used to come in and they would park.
There'd be two or three of them and they'd come in and park in on the stream.
I can remember this particular time they came out and they had boxes of oranges which we'd
never seen, you know?
And a couple of officers said hello.
What are you fellas doing here?
And as it happened we had our white and blue scarves on and they said "oh despatch sides.
Okay fellas, keep going".
But we had this box of oranges in the car, pinching stuff.
But when we got back to the camp we had this box of oranges.
When we lifted them in the camp, you could smell them for miles.
They lasted about two ups, you know.
You couldn't keep them and hide them.
Everybody smelt them.
Bob Semple A fig tree was a tree that was over a coral
sort of foundation with a big hole underneath it.
It was used for all sorts of things, casualty clearing station for the perimeter of course
we got alot of injured and casualties.
A headquarters, all sorts of things over its time.
The three weeks we were supposed to be there lasted really for 242 days I think, which
was 8 months.
Under Fire Jim Price
I suppose the most scary part was the shelling at night.
The mortars and the shells, you know.
Some of them flying over and others that just heard whip-bang and you know, that was pretty
close.
And sometimes you would hear a thud and one would hit the ground-didn't go off.
John Fleming After you've been there a few years you get
to the stage where it doesn't worry you.
Cause you reckon if you're gonna get hit you're gonna get hit.
But in the first place, yes, used to be worried about it, and looking for a place to hide.
And that went right on through there, through El Alamein, you know.
Hautrie Crick What the Germans did, they had Alsatian dogs
on top of this big tunnel where the gun was.
And these dogs would give you a signal that there was people around.
And that's how we couldn't get it.
The Navy couldn't get it because it used to run out on rails out from the side of the
cliff.
And it was a bloody nuisance this gun anyway.
They couldn't get it.
It might be still there today, I wouldn't know, but anyway.
Ernie Brough I could smell the bullets going over my head,
that's what, you could smell them.
I was right up against this dug-out, and they poured it out.
When they stopped firing, I had one grenade and I had a tommy gun with 50 rounds in one
magazine, and 20 in another, you see.
So, when they stopped firing I poured 50 rounds into that dug-out where they were, and threw
a grenade in on top of them, and they went real quiet.
And I said, "come on, let's go while they're thinking about it".
And so I turned up, and then the next thing me mate turned up, Bert Cox from Nathalia,
he come up and he said "hello, hello, hello."
He said, "They got you at last have they?"
And I had a bullet in the bum, you see.
Bob Semple The hurley-burley of the action of course,
and the artillery, apart from what they call counter-battery fire.
Your enemy is on you all the time with the sound ranging and flash spotting equipment,
they can pin-point you pretty smartly, you know.
But you didn"t have the chance of shifting to another position sometimes, to give you
a bit of a temporary break, as you can in other territory.
That was a bit hard to take.
And our duty, which I always consider the infantry the backbone of the army in my book.
Our job was to give them every support we possibly could, and you stand to no matter
what.
Air Attacks Bob Semple
And the Stukas gave us a fair sort of attention.
Because they used this Stuka a pretty accurate sort of a thing.
It comes down if you imagine, and they scream and they open every door or whatever apparatus
they have got and they're screaming all the time.
They come, you watch the bomb come out under the plane and so forth, aiming straight at
you like that and then they pull away.
Jack Caple I was on guard on a waterhole which was not
used.
And there was an ack-ack post not far away.
And the Stukas used to come out of the sun, and they're at an angle.
And they pounded this ack-ack regiment.
There were sandbags and guns and bodies everywhere, my word they.
But there was an odd plane that didn't make it, but that pilot wouldn't know and they
used to go around and back to base.
They were very well trained.
John Fleming Anyhow we were sitting there and these five
Stukas came over.
And the first thing we knew, they were coming screaming down at this tent that we were sitting
in.
And outside we had holes dug, and that side, up in the hill area there it was that hard
that, if you had a shovel it was alright but if you didn't you couldn't dig because it
was too hard.
And they dug little slit trenches about this deep, you know, think,ing oh that's alright.
We built it along like that and then across like this see.
One could lie there and one could lie across here sort of thing.
Anyhow, when I ran outside, there was blokes beat me out and there was blokes filled up
the trenches all around.
See, so I dived in on top of one of the other blokes and I was still a bit above the floor.
And as these bombs were coming down, you could here they had these sirens on them, you know
they used to put these sirens on them.
And when they let the bomb go they'd just take 5 seconds, you know, 1,2,3,4,5 bang you're
got it you know.
Jim Price Another day we were there Jack and I decided
to go for a walk and we come to this big wadi, you know a wadi is a dry riverbed.
And we were walking along this and we heard a plane behind us and looked around here's
a Stuka dive bomber.
He was flying very low under the radar, and the next thing you know there's bullets all
around us.
And Jack and I, we headed for the bank.
There was no trees or anything, no rocks you could shelter behind but we broke the Stalwell
Gift getting to the bank I tell you.
I thought he might come back but he didn't.
We jumped out and bang-bang after him but.
Reflections Bob Semple
I reflect on these things, as, in your more sombre moments.
You have your time you reflect, and as you grow older of course, you never really forget.
Jim Price It's something to be proud of I suppose.
Ernie Brough But I was never frightened it's a funny thing.
Never, ever frightened.
No matter how tough it was, there was always a way out somehow or another.
Hautrie Crick The siege of Tobruk was the longest siege
that any British company or any British army had ever experienced, and I feel real privileged
to be a rat of Tobruk.
And I've always said that and always feel that way, and, until my dying days actually.