Extracts from
Laurie Cheeseman's Memoirs

Page 6

4. Peace and war

Along with hundreds of others who had enlisted, Laurie was sent to the Caulfield race course in Melbourne where he queued for hours for clothes, equipment, inoculations and food. 'Days and weeks went by and it was bitterly cold, there was plenty of duties as well, about all I could write home about was - "Dear Mum, I've been on mess-orderly duty again today"'. The frustration of waiting for something to happen was compounded by the fact he had met and fallen for his future wife, Elsie Cheeseman, and 'would have been quite happy at any time to walk out of the Army and back into civvy street'. After about six months he and his section at Caulfield were allocated to the Army Medical Corps. They were then sent to Dandenong, where Laurie and Elsie would later live, and where the Army was running a twenty-bed hospital in the local Scout Hall. 'We learnt the rudiments of first aid there and some hospital and field work. I have vivid recollections of the beautiful food there . . . and of playing cricket and tennis against high school teams. The hospitality of people everywhere, towards the men in uniform was just marvellous.' Six weeks later they were transferred to the AMC Training wing at Broadmeadows and then went on Xmas leave. Laurie had applied for and been granted an extra weeks leave to help with the harvest at Walpeup (and spend time with Elsie who was then working at the Railway Rest Rooms in Ouyen). On returning from leave he found his unit had moved to Balcombe, a brand new camp located on the foreshores of Port Phillip Bay and where, 29 years later, I would undergo my initial specialist officer training for the Royal Australian Corps of Signals. At Balcombe, Laurie suffered from a bout of chicken-pox that he had picked up from his brother, Lance, while at Walpeup. He was placed into an isolation ward and when released two weeks later, found that most of his colleagues had been posted out, mostly to units of the Australian Eighth Division. 'We watched the second twenty-first and second twenty-second battalions march out. They were bound for Rabaul and other Pacific Islands. I recognised a few old friends amongst them. We never saw them again'. The 2/21st battalion was posted to Darwin and, in December 1942, to Ambon Island in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) as part of 'Gull Force'. It was captured by the Japanese soon after and its surviving members imprisoned on the island for the duration of the war. One of its members was William Beresford Chibnall, a second cousin of Laurie on his father's side, who was among the hundreds of Australian and Dutch troops who were summarily executed by the Japanese shortly after they took Ambon.

The photo on the left is of Laurie and Elsie at Walpeup in 1940. The one on the right is of Laurie and two of his 2/2 Field Ambulance
colleagues at Balcombe Camp (on the back is written: 'Leaving Balcome [sic] Camp for Middle East early 1941).

Five days later the convoy anchored for a short time off Freemantle before heading away from the Australian coast. The weather gradually got hotter and the sea becalmed as they crossed the equator. 'We were issued with canteen orders which were popular, and had everlasting boat drills which were unpopular, and orders were that the convoy would not stop under any circumstances, even for a man overboard. On the fifth day the "New Amsterdam" broke off and sailed due north with the men of the ill-fated Eighth Division, and so the rest of the convoy split up and we sailed into the Ceylon Harbour - Columbo, through the submarine barrier and up to a gigantic sign which read "Ceylon Tea"'.

Laurie with some locals in Ceylon and the city of Tel Aviv in Palestine (both taken in 1941).

At the Gaza Ridge Camp Laurie finally got to join his unit, the 2/2nd Field Ambulance, at Hill 69 where the Australian 6th Division was being regrouped. The 6th Division had been first formed in 1917 in Britain during the First World War but was disbanded in September the same year and its members deployed to the other existing divisions to cover the heavy casualties they were continuing to suffer on the Western Front. It was re-raised in September 1939 following the declaration of war against Nazi Germany. Like its First World War predecessors, the division was an all-volunteer force. It comprised three infantry brigades - the 16th, 17th and 18th (which was later replaced by the 19th Brigade when the 18th was deployed to the United Kingdom) - plus supporting artillery, armour, medical and other units. The Division left Australia for the Middle East early in 1940 to undertake training there before joining the British Expeditionary Force in France. The fall of France led the Division to be deployed against Italian Forces in North Africa as part of the British advance to Benghazi and the battle of Bardia. In April 1941 the 6th Division was withdrawn from North Africa and sent by Prime Minister Menzies to Greece to help defend it against a likely German attack. This began on 6 April and quickly outflanked the allied forces which fought a series of desperate regard actions to allow the bulk of the force to be evacuated to Crete. Not everyone got away, the 6th Division's casualties alone in Greece were 320 killed, 494 wounded and 2030 captured.

The division fared even worse against the German airborne assault on Crete, losing 274 killed, 507 wounded and 3102 captured. The 2/2nd Field Ambulance was involved in both the battles for Greece and Crete where, according to Laurie's memoir, 'they were taken off the island in a ship called the "Costarica" but it was torpedoed and sunk in the mediterranean. Out of some 240 men only one hundred or so reached Palestine so we were only about half strength . . . [moreover] the ambulance corps reached Palestine without any equipment except what had been stored in Egypt'. Perhaps because of the losses suetained, 'there was some friction between the "originals" and us, the reinforcements, because we had missed the"big shows"'. Part of 6 Division's 17th Brigade, the 2/2nd Field Ambulance comprised a headquarters company, two field companies and a transport company. Laurie was allocated to one of the field companies (B Company) where he would eventually serve as the company's principal carpenter. While the rest of 6 Division were resting and recuperating, elements of its 17th Brigade joined the divisional cavalry regiment in fighting against French Vichy forces in Syria and Lebanon. With the capitulation of the French in July 1941, the remainder of the, by now, full strength division began deploying to the area to undertake garrison duties there. Laurie and his unit's destination was Baalbeck which was known as Heliopolis in Greek and Roman antiquity and is located some 45 miles north of Damascus.

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