OUR HEROES – THEIR STORIES

Robert Steele, NX4831, was virtually a gangplank away from not serving with the 2/33rd Infantry Battalion in World War II.

He was among the first to answer Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ call to arms soon after the outbreak of war in September, 1939.

He left his job at Wongawilli coal mine, near Dapto, and enlisted on October 19.He was so eager to serve his country he turned up at the Wollongong enlistment office the day before it opened. He had to go home and return the next day. He was drafted into D Company of the 2/3rd 16th Brigade 6th Division. After three months of intensive training at Ingleburn camp, near Liverpool, he left with the battalion to ship to the Middle East on the S.S. Orcades. He was almost on the gangplank at Sydney’s Darling Harbour when he heard his name being called out. He was told to fall out and return to Ingleburn. Bob had no idea why.

Back at Ingleburn he was transferred to the A.A.S.C. transport unit. He was puzzled but assumed it was because at one time he mentioned he was a truck driver, which in fact he wasn’t. He didn’t have a driver’s licence and had never driven a car, much less a truck. He didn’t get his licence until after the war.

He did, however, have a motorbike licence. During the Great Depression Bob rode his Triumph motor cycle to Victoria where he found work cutting firewood for a power station, also splitting posts for farmers, at 6d per post. They were hard times. Bob well remembered families living in roughly made shanties in the hills of the Wollongong escarpment.

They were simple frame wooden frame structures with dirt floors covered in whatever could be begged or borrowed. Hessian bags painted with whitewash served as walls.

Bob’s turn to leave Australia finally came on May 4, 1940, when, as an 18th Brigade replacement, he embarked on the R.M.S. Queen Mary bound for Scotland. He was one of 5,000 troops on board.

The voyage wasn’t without incident. One amusing incident involved a former merchant seaman who liked to air his knowledge to anyone prepared to listen about his former shipboard life, including putting dirty clothes into a bag tied to a rope and tossed overboard to be washed by the sea. To demonstrate, he gathered a number of mess kits, put them in a large hessian bag, tied the rope to a railing and threw the bag overboard, except he didn’t take into account the high speed of the Queen Mary. The rope broke and everything was lost.

A sad incident on board involved a soldier who died after diving into one of the ship’s swimming pools just as the ship rolled. He hit his head on the bottom of the pool. The trooper was buried at sea. Bob was in the official burial party. When the Australian troops eventually disembarked at Gourock, near Glasgow, in June, 1940, local children thought they were cowboys because of their slouch hats. Most of the troops went on to the Middle East but enough were left behind, including Bob, to form three battalions to help defend the South of England in the event of a German invasion. Bob was placed in the 72nd Battalion which a short time later was renamed the 2/33rd Battalion as part of a new 25th Brigade, 7th Division. The first tasks of the 2/33rd Battalion at their new camp at Salisbury Plains, near Tidworth, were erecting tents, digging slit trenches, establishing anti-aircraft Bren gun-pits, and building command posts.

On July 2, 1940, Bob was transferred to A.I.F. Austral Force School H.Q. at Tidworth Park. After studying aircraft identification he was transferred to the battalion’s newly-formed Anti-Aircraft Platoon.

By chance, while stationed in England, Bob corresponded with a Scottish girl, Margaret Kerr, whom he had never met, but married at the end of the war. He came to know her through a mate who had given him a letter of introduction to Margaret’s family before he left Australia. Bob posted it in England. Margaret answered it, eventually leading to their first meeting.

While in England Bob witnessed first-hand the life-and-death battles for air supremacy between the R.A.F. and the German Luftwaffe. The Tidworth camp and nearby airfields came under constant attack by German bombers.

Lance Corporal Bill Crooks, author of The Footsoldiers, and Private Les Skivvington, members of Bob’s Ack-Ack Platoon fired the 2/33rd’s first shots of the war, at a German Dornier flying low over the camp after a bombing run.

In a letter dated August, 1940, well before Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, Bob expressed concerns about the Japanese threat in the pacific.

“The latest turn of the war doesn’t look too good,” he wrote. “Japan could cause a lot of trouble in the Pacific unless the Americans come into it.” Along with his 2/33rd mates, Bob’s baptism of fire was against the Vichy French in Syria. The Battalion was given notice in December, 1940, that a move to the Middle East was imminent. Steele’s Anti-Aircraft Platoon was amongst the first troops to travel north to the embarkation point at Gourock, Scotland. The troopers took two days leave and went out on the town to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Bob’s son, Neil, takes up the story. Dad recalled walking amongst the crowds in Glasgow with Margaret on one arm and one of her girlfriends on the other. A couple of seven-foot policemen (as he described them) walked past mumbling about Australian soldiers.

On January 7, 1941 the platoon boarded the S.S. Pennland, a Dutch ship of 15,000 tons, which was carrying mainly British soldiers. The 14-strong A.A. Platoon members were the only Australians on board. The rest of the Battalion was on another ship.

Robert Steele.

The convoy left on January 11. It took two months to reach the Middle East. In a letter to Margaret dated March 15, 1941, Bob wrote: “At last I have arrived in the Holy Land and must say if this is holy then Aussie is surely Heaven … the Arabs are very canny, in fact they are cannier than Scotsmen. Suez is not a very attractive place and right through Egypt is real desert, but once you cross the Palestine frontier the country improves.” The battalion was stationed at various times at Mersa Matruh in North Africa, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

Bob had many funny experiences while serving in the Middle East. One was the occasion he and two mates were on a sand dune marvelling at the endless expanse of the desert. One of the men was sitting on a ground sheet. Bob noticed a small snake slither under it. He warned his mates who promptly replied he was “bull dusting”.

There was much yelling and a few choice adjectives soon afterwards when his mates lifted the ground sheet to reveal a highly venomous asp. They blasted Bob for not telling them.

Bob remembered two other odd experiences when the Ack AcK Platoon was quartered in two-storey barracks in Palestine. The first involved a soldier heading for his first floor bunk, which was beside an open window. A bit worse for wear after returning from leave, he staggered towards his bed but lost his balance and fell out the window, landing heavily on the ground. Some of his mates rushed to the window while others ran down stairs to see if he was all right. To everybody’s amazement he jumped to his feet, climbed the stairs again and went to bed
seemingly unperturbed.

The other incident involved a trooper standing on someone else’s bunk running it through with a bayonet. While on leave in Beirut Bob recalled having coffee and pastries at a roadside café with Bill Crooks. They commented on how modern the city was, noting it was a “far cry” from others in the region. Bob was amazed at the physical labour women undertook. He said it was common to see the man of the family riding on his donkey, with his wife following dutifully with a load balanced on her head.

A Syrian experience he never forgot was on July 10, 1941, when he, Bill Crooks and Ern Francis had a grandstand view of a spectacular air battle 1000 feet below them between Vichy French fighter planes and 7 RAF bombers returning from bombing Beirut.

The fighters had been strafing 2/33rd Battalion troops when they turned their attention to the bombers, which were flying in formation along a valley between two mountains. The fighters shot down two of the bombers, After the Syrian campaign Bob was transferred to the Bren-Gun Carrier Platoon.

They thought their next action was going to be somewhere else in the Middle East, but on January 12, received word the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, had called the 7th Division home to fight the Japanese.

The 25th Brigade boarded the U.S.S. Mt. Vernon, a converted luxury passenger liner of 24,000 tons, on February 9, 1942, eventually docking at Adelaide on March, 10, 1942. On board the Mt. Vernon Bob was given a lesson in shipboard language. He offered to help one of the sailors “mop” the floor.

The sailor gave Bob a stern look and replied: “You don’t mop the floor, you swab the deck.” While in camp at Woodside, near Adelaide, Bob broke an ankle playing his first ever game of football. After a hospital stay and rehabilitation, he rejoined the Battalion in Queensland. To regain his fitness and increase his leg strength he trained on sand dunes, which he said aided him greatly going up the Kokoda Trail. The battalion embarked for Port Moresby on September 1, arriving on September 9. The troops were immediately disembarked and transported to Ower’s Corner, the western starting point of the Kokoda Trail.

Members of the Bren-Gun Platoon, including Bob, became Vickers machine gunners, the only Vickers crews to go up the track with the battalion.

One thing he never forgot was having to survive on bully beef and biscuits, the main diet for all Australian troops. Bob said rumour had it the biscuits were leftovers from WW1. He likened them to dog biscuits and said they were as hard as rocks. They either had to be added to the bully beef in a dixie and heated to soften them or soaked in cups of tea, otherwise they’d break your teeth.

At one spot along the track the troops came across a Japanese camp that had been abandoned in a hurry. There were cooking fires still burning with dixies full of rice on them.

Bob said the dixies were soon confiscated. Some of the troops ate the rice. Bob grabbed two of the dixies but tipped the rice out, thinking it may be poisoned.

The Japanese were notorious for leaving booby traps. He brought the dixies back to Australia. In the advance up the trail they came across previous battle sites. Bob recalled the smell hit him well before graves were spotted. At one spot he saw a roughly made post with Japanese writing on it stuck into the ground. The post had been knocked sideways. Just below the surface was the skull of a Japanese soldier staring upwards.

When the battalion got into the high country, they would be walking along the track through clouds that hung only about a metre above the ground. If the troops bent down they could see everything plainly, but walking blind upright gave everyone the creeps not knowing if the enemy was close by. Bob said being number one on the Vickers gun meant sitting in the open like a “shag on a rock”.

At Gona on November 22, 1942, he was wounded twice during fierce fighting in which the officer commanding D Company, Captain Tim Clowes, was killed soon after ordering the Vickers crew, including Bob, to re-locate to another position.

The crew was moving through a kunai patch to the new position when machine-gun fire opened up and mortar bombs started going off all around them. All went to ground as. One mortar landed between Bob and another soldier. Bob received shrapnel wounds to his buttocks and lower back.

With bullets crackling through the Kunai Bob said his toenails were doing overtime trying to dig a hole. He said the bullets just about parted his hair. He said he could never understand why more men weren’t killed that day.

Bob was wounded in the right shoulder setting up the Vickers gun in the new position. Also wounded were Dick Lewis and Bill Green. Bob said he didn’t really feel the bullet wound but the shrapnel from the mortar “burnt like hell”.

Anyone not seriously wounded, including Bob, walked to a Medical Dressing Station at Soputa, inland from Gona. While he was outside the dressing station a Japanese Zero flew over at tree top height. He could see the pilot looking down with a “big cheesy grin”. Bob said he moved behind a tree. Bob was flown back to Moresby Hospital a few days later. Shortly after that the Japanese strafed and bombed the same dressing station killing 22 people. Along with other troops Bob was shipped back to Australia in January 1943.

He returned to Port Moresby for the Lae campaign in September, 1943, but, luckily, was left out of battle for the first airlift and wasn’t at Jackson’s airstrip on the morning of the Liberator crash. However, he was called on to help with the burials.

Bob rejoined the battalion for the Lae and Ramu Valley campaigns. At one point he and his crew made a trailer out of discarded Japanese push bikes to carry the heavy Vickers gun. Some of the foot soldiers tried riding other bikes dumped by the Japanese but couldn’t. Bob said: “The miserable buggers had slashed the tyres.”

In December 1943 Bob was sent with a crew of fuzzy wuzzy angels to pick up a wounded soldier. While sitting on a log one of the natives gave him ayam to eat. That was his last memory until waking up back at camp. Bob had a malaria relapse and blacked out. The natives carried him back to camp. It was yet another example of the devotion and care fuzzy wuzzy angels gave Australian troops in Papua and New Guinea.

Bob’s war ended in January, 1944, when he was flown back to Australia. Throughout the conflict Bob spent months in hospitals due to his broken ankle, battle wounds, skin infections, dysentery and malaria. At times the battalion was decimated by sickness. Many more months were spent convalescing or in general duties. Although the physical injuries took time to heal the mental scars took much longer, and some never.

Back in civilian life Bob leased a dairy farm, Brisbane Grove, at Wongawilli just west of Dapto, NSW. At the time family and friends were living in Dapto, Wongawilli village and on surrounding farms in the district.

Margaret Kerr arrived in Sydney as a war bride in January 1947. Bob and Margaret married soon after and lived on the farm at Wongawilli for seven years. Farm life was initially a bit of a shock for a girl from Glasgow. The farm had no electricity, a kerosene refrigerator, hurricane lamps, and a chip heater to warm water for the bath. In later years Margaret always spoke fondly of farm life.

Between 1947 and 1952 Margaret and Bob had four children. As well as being kept busy raising them, Margaret tended a sizable vegetable patch and helped around the farm, including looking after the hen house and feeding poddy calves.

They had to move on, selling their cattle and machinery, when the owner decided to sell the farm. The family had six months in England before returning and buying a house at Dapto in 1954. Bob found employment at the nearby Huntley Colliery where he worked for 20 years.

In their new house Bob and Margaret continued their farm life to some degree. The front yard was a vegetable garden. The back yard had a vegetable garden the width of the block. There was a very large hen house, with at least 30 chooks and roosters, and a never-ending supply of eggs. There were fruit trees with the standout being a very large mulberry tree. Margaret was a member of the local Presbyterian church and volunteered in the school canteens.

Years later one of their daughters, also named Margaret, and two other girls were the first girls in Australia to be awarded the gold Duke of Edinburgh award. Margaret and Bob travelled to Canberra for the presentation in 1967, Bob reluctantly wearing a suit. The Governor General, Lord Richard Casey, presented the award. It was a proud moment for both father and mother. Margaret died in 1989 just short of her 70th birthday after a long battle with cancer.