Chapter 8 - ‘Gyppo Land’

Summary

Egypt was the first country that most Australian soldiers visited in the Middle East. It was also the last place where the AIF fought in the region, and the site of the Australians’ most significant battle in that theatre. When the 9th Division returned to Egypt and the Western Desert in July 1942, there was a real prospect of Britain losing the Suez Canal, one of the foremost Axis objectives of the war. Tobruk had fallen in June, to the chagrin of its former long-suffering Australian defenders. Captain Bob Douglas, recently appointed medical officer of the 2/2nd Machine Gun Battalion, said:

The news of the fall of Tobruk is but three days old and the division as a whole takes a poor view of it. This was the division mainly involved in that siege but I have heard very little said against the Tommies by these men. They all realize how difficult a place it was to hold especially against a full scale attack with armoured forces. Many of them left their best friends buried up there in the blue. I daresay there will be a lot of criticism of the Tommies in Australia, especially by some of the armchair critics. Make no mistake but the Tommies are a jolly fine lot and good soldiers too so are the South Africans – they would never have surrendered unless absolutely overwhelmed.

Douglas and his battalion had not been in Tobruk in 1941, and those who had been there were not always so sympathetic to the Allies who lost it. Trooper Bob Sykes, a British tankman who had been there during the original siege, claimed that some Australians on hearing of the fall of the fortress ‘swore revenge on the South Africans if they ever met them’. R.E. Dean told of a fight in an Alexandria bar between Australian servicemen and South Africans, probably later in the year, over this issue.