Anzac Day in Tobruk: 'What we have, we hold'

Australians will be aware that Wednesday was Anzac Day. Non-Australians may need enlightenment: ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and Anzac Day commemorates their landing at Gallipoli at dawn on 25 April 1915. The ‘Anzac spirit’ is legendary in Australia and generally viewed as a mix of endurance, resourcefulness and mateship, with a healthy dose of contempt for authority thrown in.

Tobruk could be called the Gallipoli of World War II, where the Anzacs, the rats of Tobruk, dug in for eight months against Rommel and his Africa Korps to hold the strategically important harbour. Tobruk by Peter Fitzsimmons gives a thoroughly researched popular account of the campaign. Here’s an anecdote from that book that captures something of the larrikin aspect of the Anzac spirit: The Italian officers discovered their night patrols were not actually bothering to patrol. They commanded them to build cairns at specified points, so that in the morning the officers could check with binoculars and confirm the patrols had really been out. Once the Australians realised this, they started sneaking over and dismantling the cairns before morning…

Another anecdote describes how a German POW, believing the Anzacs to have moved on, insists his captors are actually English, ‘just dressed up in Australian uniforms to scare us’.

Anyway, this is a photo of the war memorial at the Australian and New Zealand cemetery in Tobruk. There’s also Polish and Czech forces buried here, as well as, of course, British (there’s also a larger cemetery, Knightsbridge, which holds more of our war dead). The saddest inscriptions are the ‘Known unto God’ ones…of course that means they’re unknown unto us. The strangest inscription I saw was a simple ‘Redeemed’, which makes me wonder what exactly that soldier did in pre-war civilian life.

Sometimes you’d find two or three grave markers right beside each other; that signifies that the men there died from the same event (not necessarily on the same day, as not every injury was instantly fatal); seeing air crew buried in this way was not uncommon. This run of eleven gravestones at Knightsbridge, almost all from the royal medic corp, is then a poignant testimony to some forgotten tragedy within tragedy.

This is the fig tree, site of a front line hospital for the allies – there’s a cave under it where the injured could be kept safe.

And a trench, with some of the landscape they were fighting in. The trench was invisible till you were on top of it.

We also visited the German memorial, and Rommel’s underground bunker, to be turned into a war museum eventually, inshallah, as well as the current small museum, sited in an old church.

Here’s my favourite anecdote from the book, from the aftermath of WWI. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes was insisting Australia be given control of the former German colony in New Guinea. US President Wilson favoured Japan and questioned Hughes’s influence at the negotiating table: ‘You speak for only five million people’. Billy Hughes said: ‘I speak for 60,000 dead. For how many do you speak?’

Now I’ve made a conscious decision to avoid politics and feminist issues on this blog (or, oh boy, would you have gotten a rant on ‘uncovered meat’), and I especially don’t want to turn Anzac Day into an opportunity to score politic points since it’s misused by our politicians enough as it is. So I will make only one comment on this anecdote: for whom does our current Prime Minister speak?