HARD TIMES 8

(C) Helen McAnulty

There has been much talk lately about the mental health of people coping with enforced lockdown during the present pandemic.

While I am not downplaying the problems of those who have lost jobs and incomes during this period, I feel we must take comfort in the fact that we are mostly being looked after. We have been helped financially and, apart from the problem of the virus, we are not facing the horrors of war as we have done several times in the 20th Century.

Quite a few years ago when I was living in a small country town in the Central West, I was researching an article that I wanted to write about people who had grown up in the town, gone away and returned after some years. I thought to discover what changes they noticed and how the town had progressed.

But I found myself gathering material on an entirely different subject.

One group who had left the town and returned after some years were the young men who had enlisted to fight for their country in the Second World War.

I asked eight of these men, now the backbone of the community, to meet me in a room at the local RSL club.

They were willing to come but made it clear to me that they would not talk about the war -or if they did, it was only to give me their names and serial numbers.

I agreed and when I arrived at our meeting place, I found them seated on chairs as far away from me and my tape recorder as possible.

They were definitely not going to give much away!

In that first meeting they described the farewell they were given by the townspeople as they marched to the railway station accompanied by the town band.

They told of the excitement and anticipation they felt at the thought of leaving for far away places at the age of eighteen!

These were the young people who had grown up in the Great Depression, who had never known luxury and had possibly never had quite enough to eat.

They were ready for anything!

They landed in North Africa where they were required to fight an enemy they didn’t know in a country they had never seen.

They were all volunteers and not compelled to go overseas but as they told me “It never occurred to us not to go. It was just the thing to do.”

As we talked they were still very reluctant to describe the conditions in North Africa, but I noticed that their chairs had gradually moved nearer to me and when I suggested that we meet again they agreed.

The next time it was a different story.

Desert training began in Palestine. The Italian dictator, Mussolini’s plan was to dominate North Africa and its rich resources. The Australians confronted the enemy and went to war near Bardia.

“You were too busy to worry about yourself. We knew there’d be casualties and just hoped it wouldn’t be you,” the men told me.

Early in 1941, General Rommel and the celebrated Afrika Corps confronted Australia’s 9th Division and pushed them back to Tobruk where they fought with their backs to the sea.

The Australians held out in Tobruk for eight months earning the derisive name from a frustrated Rommel “Rats of Tobruk.”

For weeks they went without a bath or change of clothes. They grabbed sleep during daylight hours in dugouts.

They were beset by flies, fleas and dust they were under constant bombardment and mates were killed beside them—but still they held on.

In Tobruk they sustained almost 4000 casualties.

When the 2nd 13th Battalion broke through Rommel’s defences at El Alamein, Rommel finally withdrew.

This was nowhere near the end.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941, Singapore fell and the British Empire in the Pacific collapsed.

The Australians were sent home to confront invasion.

They were given a short leave to train for jungle fighting.

It was here that my group became restive.

“By this time we knew what war was like,”they told me. “We had to fight again against a new enemy and in entirely different conditions.”

In fact they didn’t want to go but that was not an option.

They fought in steaming jungles and on mountain ridges that could scarcely be climbed.

But they mastered jungle warfare and by the end of 1942 the Japanese were brought to a standstill. The Australians pushed them back over the Owen Stanley Range to the coast.

Again there were huge casualties, not only from hand -to-hand fighting but from tropical diseases.

One of the group described the dreadful “scrub typhus” when he was unconscious for 23 days and his weight dropped to 47 kilos; there were skin diseases and malaria and the continual danger of jungle warfare.

The fighting continued and the price was high. Five and a half thousand Australians were killed in Papua New Guinea.

Finally on August 6th the Japanese surrendered. The war was finally over.

The men I had talked to returned to their peaceful little town to take up civilian life again.

There was little counselling to help them in those days.

They had changed from the innocent teenagers who had left so full of optimism and thirst for adventure.

But most of them were able to carry on and become the strong men they continued to be.

There is something to be learned from their story.