Great Anzac Stories Read online

  In the M.O.’s tent Sandy’s first action was to pick up a couple of sheets of paper from the table and examine them, putting them back down with a shake of his head. The M.O. couldn’t get much out of Sandy. All he would say was that he hadn’t found what he was looking for.

  ‘Acute neurosis.’ Was the M.O.’s verdict. He recommended that Sandy be sent down to have his case examined by a medical board. This was arranged and Sandy went south.

  In due course the board considered his case. Obviously acute neurosis. It was agreed that Sandy should be discharged medically unfit.

  As the Officer at the G.D.D. [Genearl Details Depot] handed Sandy his discharge certificate, he remarked with a grin, for he’d heard all about Sandy’s case. ‘Hang on to THAT bit of paper, won’t you!’

  ‘By cripes I will!’ said Sandy, laughing as he folded up the form and put it in his pocket. ‘That’s the bit of paper I’ve been looking for!’

  Baldy becomes mobile

  Those things that amused the diggers do not necessarily amuse everyone, though this story shows how the Anzacs dealt with the impositions of officialdom in a characteristically straightforward manner.

  About the end of March, 1918, when the wilting flower of England’s Fifth Army was doing a marathon for home and mother, pursued by the beastly Bosche, the heads broadcasted one hateful word throughout the A.I.F.

  ‘Be Mobile!’ was the official edict. Every five minutes, it seemed, some bird of brass-hat plumage would flutter in gasping as if he’d brought the news from Ghent. Then, he’d cast an eagle eye over the collective water-bottle and the blancoed bandolier, and swoop off to some other harassed unit twittering, ‘Be Mobile!’

  After the first few days the whole place came a hot-bed of mobility. Everyone from the boss to the last bandsman wore a mobile look. ‘Are you mobile?’ became a form of greeting. The very stew we ate seemed to have a mobile flavour. Such a positive nightmare did the word become that many a brave soldier shuddered at its sound.

  After the first few days the only living soul in our unit that couldn’t be quite called mobile was Baldy, the mule, whose fairy footsteps were usually guided by Blackie Crayton. Blackie himself was sufficiently mobile to pass muster. As a combination, however, he and Baldy delayed every ‘mobile’ exercise, and held up every ‘mobile’ route march.

  ‘Can’t you make the mule more mobile, Crayton?’ the Sergeant-Major used to roar.

  Late one night on the way up to Ypres Sector, Baldy who had been respectably mobile for the greater part of the day, suddenly became immobile. Baldy just stubbed his toes, so to speak, in the pave and stopped dead. Blackie was at his wit’s end. A desperately cold night, another three or four kilometres to get to the prepared billets and a hot meal, and Baldy reneging!

  For nearly two hours Blackie, wet through and finished, struggled— coaxing, bullying, blaspheming and getting madder every minute. His frantic efforts proving futile—the jibbing animal never budged an inch—Blackie went absolutely berserk.

  ‘You bald faced atrocity!’ he howled. ‘I’ll lay a shade of odds THIS’LL shift you, you ——— that’s what you are!’ With which solemn incantation he placed a couple of Mills’ [small bombs] beneath the noble beast, and fled. By the time he reached safety, the bombs had made their presence felt, and Baldy shifted according to forecast.

  The first person the fed-up Blackie met as he trudged along wearily into the village was our dear old friend and soul-mate, the Sergeant-Major.

  ‘Where’s that cranky mule?’ he questioned. The almost hysterical Blackie stood silent for fully thirty seconds before he responded.

  ‘Baldy?’ queried Blackie in tense tones. ‘Baldy? Baldy is mobile. Mobile at last. In fact, he’s so blanky mobile that he’ll be on the move from now till the Resurrection, pulling himself together and collecting his scattered remains. Baldy’s gone to his long home. An’ it’s so darned long he’ll never reach it. Yes! Take it from me, Baldy’s more blinkin’ mobile than any of us! Now, tell me where’s the mobile cook-house?’

  Characters

  They come in all shapes and sizes, with many different names, from ‘Happy Henry’ to ‘The Section Dope’. What they all have in common is the ability to raise a laugh, whether through their wit or their stupidity. Here are just a few of the many ‘character’ yarns that diggers have enjoyed telling one another.

  Our prize Section Dope was trying to put the hard word on the Quarter Bloke for a tin of butter.

  ‘But I gave you a large tin of butter the day before yesterday,’ said the QM testily. ‘You don’t want to make it too hot!’

  ‘You didn’t give me a large tin of butter, it was a small tin.’

  ‘You dopey cow, I gave you a large tin of butter and a small tin of axle grease.’

  ‘Cripes! Then I’ve eaten the ruddy axle grease and put the butter on the axles!’

  ‘Dopey’ in our unit didn’t seem to have any liking for soldiering, so one day I asked him why he had joined up.

  ‘Well, you see, a cobber stole five pounds from me and ran away with my wife. There was nothing else to do but enlist.’

  ‘That was certainly tough luck,’ I sympathised.

  ‘Yair, it was every penny I had.’

  As soon as it became known in the battalion that Andy had been a kangaroo shooter before the commencement of war in 1914, a sergeant put it to him that he was the right man to do a bit of sniping. Andy declined without thanks.

  ‘Why?’ snarled the sergeant.

  ‘I just don’t like it, that’s why. I’ve shot kangaroos, wallabies, dingoes and brumbies, an’ I ain’t goin’ to finish up with men—at least, not sniped men, anyhow.’

  The sergeant seethed, but Andy was adamant. Sniping a kangaroo, he maintained, was a different thing from sniping a man.

  ‘Well,’ blew up the sergeant, ‘if you’re THAT finicky, I’ll go over and ask Fritz to hop!’

  They called him Happy Henry. He was one of those grim humorous Australians who could no more resist joking about anything than he could resist accepting a cigarette. A friend remarked that his dial was hard enough to dent a railway pie at half a mile.

  Happy Henry was well into the Somme scrap, and got out of it with a lump on each side of his head like young coconuts. He could hang his tin hat on either. He told the boys about it in the camp afterwards. He said:—‘I’d just sent a Hun over the Never Never with the sunning end of me bayonet, when another Fritz weighin’ about ’alf a ton swung the butt of his rifle against me block. Me head gave out a musical G. sharp, and as I made a smack at ’im I sez, ‘If yer do that agen, cobber, I’ll be rude.’ I missed him, and he swung agen and got me a clout on the other side of the block. His rifle smashed to pieces and of course I fixed ’im then. Y’see that was where ’e made the mistake.’

  ‘How mistake?’ asked somebody.

  ‘Well, he should ’ave lobbed me on the same place twice!’

  Sandy was attached to our unit, 1 Div., 1st A.I.F. Like most diggers from the outback he had unorthodox ways of doing things. One day we were on parade for inspection by the Colonel. Sandy was in the front rank and was highly conspicuous by having several buttons of his tunic undone. When the Colonel reached him he stopped, bug-eyed, his pink face rapidly taking on a purplish hue. His hand shot out to point to the buttons left undone, Sandy seized the Colonel by the hand and nearly shook it off. The old boy glared at him. ‘I don’t know you, my man,’ he roared.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Sandy, ‘I thought you was an old shearer bloke I knew out the back of bloody Bourke.’

  The Australian platoon was under heavy Japanese frontal attack.

  The commander yelled out, ‘Fire at will!’

  ‘Cripes,’ growled Chiller, ‘if you can pick Will outa that mob, you’re a better man than I am!’

  ‘Yes, Nugget, I tell you it was cold,’ said one of the ‘Diamond Dinks,’ [old hands] trying to impress an open-eyed ‘reinstoushment’ with his experiences of the winter on the Somme,
‘as cold as the gaze of the Quarter Bloke when yer put the hard word on him for a new Aussie tunic! Struth! I tell you at Bazentin it freezed so hard that you couldn’t blow a candle out! Y’ad ter knock the flame off with a stick!’

  ‘The Unofficial History of the AIF’

  Smith’s Weekly began publication on 1 March 1919. It was a weekly Sydney broadsheet, the creation of its long-time editor Claude McKay and cabin boy turned millionaire Sir James Joynton Smith. From the beginning, the paper was aggressively nationalistic and very much on the side of the returned soldiers. It was quickly dubbed ‘the diggers’ Bible’. At first, the paper did very well. But by 1939 circulation had fallen to 80 000, though World War II led to a revival in which sales reached 300 000.

  The paper’s historian and one-time staffer, George Blaikie, wrote that ‘Smith’s’ created ‘what was generally called “The Smith’s Weekly Soldier”. And there was a very curious phenomenon associated with this figure. It looked completely different when viewed from different angles’. One of these angles provided the classic view of the digger as: ‘. . . an undisciplined larrikin who would not button his tunic, delighted in insulting his officers and dodging his proper duties, and made a virtue out of going AWL [absent without leave] and resisting Military Police’.

  Smith’s encouraged the submission of ‘pars’ or paragraphs and ‘gags’ from its predominantly digger readers. These became a regular feature of the paper under the title ‘The Unofficial History of the AIF’. The column ran most weeks throughout the 1920s, carrying a mix of personal experience stories, reminiscence and yarns. On 14 February 1925, for instance, the column carried the story of twin brothers who received exactly the same wound on the same day. The 28 March edition printed the yarn about the digger who was not worried about the dangers of trench warfare unless a shell had his regimental number on its base. A few days later the soldier was lucky to escape extinction as a ‘dud’ dropped near him. Upon examining the base of the defective shell the soldier discovered that it indeed bore his regimental number.

  But the most popular story that Smith’s ever published appeared under the heading ‘The Most Amazing Story of the War’. For the readers of the newspaper, this yarn about the toughness of the digger was hilarious.

  Here is told the amazing fact of a Digger who, to all intents and purposes, had passed into eternity; who returned from the brink of the grave into which he was being rolled. It is the closest thing to a resurrection from the dead in the 1942 years that have passed since the first Christmas.

  It is related by a member of Smith’s editorial staff who is an officer of the A.I.F. Names quoted are those who played parts in this real life drama, and are not fictitious.

  THE MOST AMAZING STORY OF THE WAR !

  Just before Christmas 1942, there wasn’t any peace and goodwill round Sanananda [PNG, then New Guinea] way. There was mud, heat, mosquitoes, hate, and the strong sweet, smell of death.

  ‘A’ Company, Thirty-six Bn. Attached to the Seventh Division, A.I.F., had attacked an unsuspectedly strong Nip position just forward of Kessel’s. A well-placed Woodpecker and two LMGs [machine guns] had driven our boys back with heavy casualties. Seven men were posted missing, and as the withdrawal had been for only a couple of hundred yards there was little hope for them.

  Three days later a corporal of ‘A’ Company volunteered to make a lone patrol into the Nip lines to locate the Woodpecker and LMGs. He couldn’t find them, but he returned with information that an Australian body was lying in a Jap slit trench under the corpses of two very High Nips. Accompanied by a stretcher bearer he went out and carried the body back to his own perimeter.

  Padre N. G. Anderson, chaplain of the Thirty-Sixth Bn., formerly Presbyterian minister at Moruya, New South Wales, was asked to perform burial rites. He ordered his batman to prepare a grave inside the wire. The grave was almost ready when the Padre arrived. The body lay beside it. No dead man is a pleasant sight after the jungle heat and the flies has worked on him. The one beside the grave was unusually horrible. The head was swollen to almost twice normal size. The eyes, wide open, stared fixedly. The body, clad only in tattered green shirt, was thin as a wafer and grey as dawn light.

  Padre Anderson felt under the shirt for the identity discs that should have been on the chest. There was none. Placing a hand under the hip, the Padre rolled the body on to its stomach. As he did so he had a queer sensation that all life had not gone out of it.

  ‘Do you think this man is really dead?’ he asked his batman who was busy digging.

  ‘Looks as if you’re going troppo, too, Padre,’ the sweating batman commented.

  Still the Padre was not satisfied. He sent for the battalion M.O., Captain W. J. Pullen. The doctor took one look at the grey still form and shook his head. However, he placed his stethoscope against his shirt.

  ‘Good God,’ he shouted, ‘the heart’s still beating.’ Hurriedly the body was carried from the graveside to the company first aid post. After half an hour the soldier had been cleaned up and his main wound located—a bullet had entered his right ear and stopped at the base of his skull. He was given a few hours at most to live.

  Nothing more could be done for him. A small group stood beside the stretcher discussing his identity. He certainly wasn’t a member of ‘A’ Company. General opinion was that he was from Seventh Division Cavalry.

  In the middle of the discussion a tiny voice squeaked, ‘I’m one of you!’

  Everyone spun around. The body still lay stiff and grey. The glazed eyes still stared into space, but the lips were moving very, very, slightly.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked the Padre.

  ‘Gordon!’

  That was the name of one of the ‘A’ Company men posted missing after the attack three days earlier.

  ‘What’s your number?’

  The squeaky voice whispered an NX [AIF identification number] number. It was Gordon’s number.

  But Gordon had weighed more than thirteen stone, and this man wasn’t more than eight. Several men from Gordon’s Company were called in and also his company commander. All agreed the man was not Gordon. The voice squeaked out the nicknames of numerous members of ‘A’ company while the eyes still focused on the canvas roof of the tent.

  ‘What happened to you?’ the man was asked.

  ‘I went in with the attack. Then I remember coming to consciousness with Nips tearing off my boots and pants. They ripped off my steel hat and hurt my head. I groaned and they bashed me with the helmet until I passed out again. The second time I came to I was alone and very thirsty. There was a Nip slit trench near by. I crawled to it hoping there was water in the bottom and fell in. I was so weak I couldn’t get out. A 25-pounder barrage from our guns came over and shells fell around me. Then came a mortar barrage. Two Nips jumped into the trench on top of me. A mortar bomb hit the lip of the slit and killed them both. Their bodies saved me.’

  ‘So you know where the machine guns are?’

  ‘They were moved this morning.’

  ‘In which direction were they taken?’

  ‘How was my body lying when I was discovered?’

  ‘Head north, feet south.’

  ‘The guns were taken west. The Nips stepped across my slit trench from right to left.’

  The voice stopped. For the first time the eyes closed. Obviously death was near. Next morning the Digger’s heart was stronger then ever. He was moved back to an advanced dressing station where he was again placed to one side to die quietly. His heart beat even more strongly.

  From the ADS he was sent back to a main dressing station where the bullet was removed from the base of his skull. Within a few days he was recovering rapidly, and soon after he was evacuated to the mainland.

  Eighteen months later, in Martin Place, Sydney, Padre Anderson met the man he set out to bury on the Sanananda Trail. ‘The body’ was thirteen stone again and perfect in all respects except for a deafness in the right ear.

  ‘Did you know I almost
buried you?’ asked the Padre.

  ‘Know it! I heard every word you said to the gravedigger.

  I couldn’t speak then but I wasn’t worried. I only hoped you’d get it over quick. Then the things the flies put on me wouldn’t worry me any more. Guess it was the merriest Christmas I ever had!’

  Please Let Us Take Tobruk

  During the siege of Tobruk in 1941, the ‘Rats’ were assailed with propaganda leaflets dropped from enemy planes. Addressed to ‘Aussies’, the sheets pointed out that Germany and her allies were closing in and that the ‘offensive from Egypt to relieve you [is] totally smashed’. The sheet went on to claim ‘You cannot escape. Our dive bombers are waiting to sink your transports’ and, finally ‘SURRENDER!’.

  The diggers thought the Germans had it all wrong. After finding a hygienic use for the propaganda sheets they wrote their own version of what the enemy should have said if they really wanted the Rats to surrender.

  AUSSIES

  We have been trying to get you out of your ‘rat holes’ for the past three months, and we’re getting a bit fed up with it. Every one of your chaps we get costs us about ten, and it’s getting a bit thick.

  Do you think that’s fair? Play the game, you cads! Come out and give yourselves up. The German beer is the best in the world, and we have millions of gallons of it here. And if you can’t stand our Sauerkraut, we’ll give you steak and eggs any time you want them.

  We look after our prisoners very well, and every Aussie is supplied with a Batwoman; this is on the instructions of the great and farsighted Fuhrer, who hopes in time to improve the fighting quality of the German race.

  Our prison camp is the most luxurious in the world—two-up schools every night, coursing every Wednesday, trots on Monday afternoons, and the gee-gees every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

  It’s all yours, if you....