It was a circular area about fifty yards across where nothing grew above ankle height—the jagged upthrusts of what used to be tree trunks were like spikes on a porcupine, and covering it all was a carpet of mosses that led the way as the jungle strove to reclaim the land. In the very centre was the crater, fifteen yards wide and perfectly concave with a surrounding rim of soil of even height all the way around into which, as you approached, you sank into up to your knees, so light and pulverised was that soil. Nigel deployed the section about the clearing and you sat, exhausted and soaked in sweat, smoking and waiting for the platoon and then the rest of the company to move up.

In the Second World War, the Australians managed a remarkable pair of achievements—something hardly remembered these days. First there was the German Blitzkrieg crashing its way through all of mainland Europe and along the coast of North Africa with all that Middle East oil in its sights. No force could stand against their might—until they ran into the Aussies at Tobruk. There, for the first time, Nazi power came to a shuddering halt as Rommel’s invincible Panzas were harassed and bewildered by the Australian refusal to give up their rat-infested stronghold. The siege lasted a hundred days, which allowed Montgomery time to get his artillery into position to ambush Rommel at Al Alamein.
    Then later came the Japanese, swarming down through South-east Asia and out across the Pacific virtually unopposed and again no force was able to stop them—until they ran into the Aussies on the Kakoda Track. Now admittedly the Japanese supply lines were over-stretched and their army exhausted by all those incessant victories, but the fact remains: both the Germans and the Japanese were halted in their respective onslaughts for the first time by the Aussies.
    The Desert Rats tells of the former instance, and the likes of Chips Rafferty and Bud Tingwell are there to play diggers, but because of the apparent lack of Australian actors of sufficient quality, Robert Newton was thrown in as an Aussie and then, travesty of travesties, Richard Burton added as a British officer put in charge of the unruly Australians. Which is just exactly what did not happen—any such officer would have been shot pretty quickly by his own men. True, the Australians were regarded as part of the British army, their Generals were subordinate to the British, and they were called British Dominion troops and fought under the Union Jack but the whole reason they had been dumped at Tobruk in the first place was because the British couldn’t handle them and wanted them out of the way. And thought them totally expendable anyway.
    The lie spoils what was otherwise a fairly accurate depiction of these events, but for the rather silly and very improbable scene when the briefly captured Burton wins an argument with James Mason’s Rommel. I suppose we can be thankful that the Americans never bothered to make a movie about how they won the battles of Tobruk and Kakoda.