By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
AUSTRALIAN soldiers, posted for the last-ditch defence of England in World War II, were armed with little more than jam tins, beer bottles, gelignite and fuel, says Hallam veteran Henry Penny.
With the German army having rolled through western Europe, Mr Penny and other members of the Australian infantry were waiting for an anticipated land invasion of England in 1940.
He said they were trained in guerilla tactics but had no weapons except for “two-pound jam tins” filled with gelignite and steel-topped beer bottles converted to Molotov cocktails.
“The British Expeditionary Force had left behind all their equipment when they evacuated France,” Mr Penny said.
“We later got .303 rifles from Canada. They were still in boxes in their grease paper from World War I. They were much heavier than guns these days. The only thing we used them for was for opening tins of bully beef.”
Mr Penny, 90, said there was virtually no air defence of Britain when he arrived. Its squadrons of slow bombers were outdated compared with the agile German planes.
But the Brits had developed Spitfire fighters and Lancaster bombers to more than match their enemies during the Battle of Britain.
He said morale was “quite good”, even while central London was burning from sustained bombing raids in the German ‘blitzkrieg’ or lightning war.
Mr Penny’s personal war effort ended in El Alamein in the Middle East in 1942, when a German bomb landed above his dugout while he was playing cards with mates. He was lucky to survive third-degree burns to his legs and arm from a petrol fire that spread in the trenches.
What surprises Mr Penny is that the Australians’ presence has been unheralded – “there has never been any mention of support troops landing in England in the Second World War”. He thinks it may have been a ploy to confuse German intelligence.
There are five surviving members of Mr Penny’s 32nd Battalion, as far as he knows. He used to catch up with them in Perth each Anzac Day, but the last Victorian branch of the battalion folded several years ago.
Since 1945, Mr Penny, a former president of three RSL sub-branches, has attended an Anzac Day dawn service every year except for two occasions when he was in hospital.
To him, Anzac Day is the “greatest day on the Australian calendar”.
ANZAC DAY
Wednesday, April 25
5.45am: Service at Pillars of Freedom, Dandenong RSL, 40-50 Clow Street, Dandenong.
10.30am: March and service at Pillars of Freedom.
