HMAT Themistocles (28th July 1916)

Thank you very much for your reply & what your saying about the cramp conditions resulting in sickness, such as diarrhoea & dysentery. And also unfortunately meningitis’s.
I have my Grandfathers 1st War Diary of WW2 in an email & his 2nd War Diary which I’m slowly deciphering & I would like to find someone to help me publish the book, as it’s a great read & story from a gunners life in Egypt, which is sometimes funny, interesting, exciting & also frightening, but all in all a great read that should be shared. Which I truly believe that my Grandfather had returned from war suffering PTS.
Following is a little bit of an account of what he experienced in his own words….

SYRIA – PALASTINE 1942
Once again I am back in the fighting forces & I am quite satisfied that once an infantry man, anyway this is what has been happening these last few months. I put in several applications for transfer into the 2/32 Battalion, each time I was claimed from the 82 end, but each time the transfer was refused by the railway unit.
At last Major Joshua went personally & now Brigadier Pulver at A.I.F H.Q & Pulver got me pulled straight out of the Rlys & put into the 2/32 Battalion, so on the 17th August 1942. I went to Bilbarah & I said goodbye to all my friends, who put on quite a turn about my going at all, even going so far as to ask me to pull out all together & they would hide me until the war was over, when I could get a good job in Syria, but I told them that I had other responsibilities, but I would come back & see them some day perhaps.
18/8/42
The following day I moved off with all my gear & stayed overnight in the transit camp at Beirut.
19/8/42
The following day I moved off in a bus for Haifa, where we arrived at a Tommy Konsit camp at midday. This camp is situated about a mile south of Haifa & at the time when I was there, it was stocked with Tommies fresh from the boat, in fact they had only arrived about a fortnight & when you read on a list you might understand why bitterness runs between the ANZAC & the English soldiers. The first I noticed was when I lined up four men with them started to talk to me about something, & when I answered him, he asked if I was a Cockney, I said “NO! I’m an Australian” he formed the word onto his mates & straight away I was blackballed & for several hours I can hear them joking muck at the Aussie’s in general & I am getting wilder & wilder. After a while seeing I’ve only got five Piastres, Syrian ( 1 1/2D ) I reckon I’ll go around & draw some pay. So around I go. Hand over my pay book only to get it chucked back in my face some cheap slum bred Sargent, who bellowed “No Australian’s will draw pay here” By this time sparks are flying off my hair & I make up my mind to bash the next Pommy & tear open his filthy mouth.
Just around the corner I run into a Kiwi, he says “What’s wrong Aussie? You look like your going over the top” “I am” I says, right into the next Pommy Barstads that opens his mouth. He says “Their onto you too are they? They’ve been like that for two days to me as well.” So he says he’ll string along & between us we’ll quieten them, at that moment, thank goodness! Along came a hundred or so Scotties, & talk about a change of tactics, they came over to us, slapped us on the backs, shook our hands, demanded that we go & sleep in their hut & be damned to these English Bastards, it would of only wanted a pin to drop & lord help the sons of old England.
I got my own back a little while after. I was standing near the pay office & a Kiwi officer came up, produced a payroll & demanded £30 to pay his men who we’re outside on the road, the Pay Seargent saluted him smartly & said “Certainly Sir.” An hour or so afterwards they find out that he was a fake, & the Seargent had £30 to make up.
I thought it my duty then to go up to him & say “Was it dinkum, a bloke done you for £30 quid a while ago?” He snorts, murders me with his look & I walk away laughing like hell. I was supposed to wait there for a couple of days, but on the following morning I went through, got out on the road, paid a traffic cop a tin of bully beef to get me a ride, which he did & I traveled down through Palestine sitting on the top of a truck. It is just starting to get dark when we get to a place called Rehovot, I get off here & ask the military police if they will put me up for the night, they are only too willing, feed me in their seargents mes, pay me, & give me a royal time. The next day they drive me all the way to Nuseirat, where the Infantry Training Battalion (I.T.B is located.
Now on I.T.B is a soldier’s idea of hell, it breaks the heart’s of strong man & is run by a staff who are intlec B class? & can’t go up the lines, or are man who have been up the lines & have been sent back because they were failures in action, mind you there are some genuine chaps there, but they are well in the minority.
Anyway: they train you as if you were a raw recruit, four or five roll calls a day, twenty mile route march’s bayonet & rifle drill, target shooting & a thousand other things that make an old soldier miserable, while I was there I was there I did a mortar school & got a fairly good pass.
On 30th September, a mob of us left for the front, we went to Gaza to board the train which came in with eight first class carriages & these animal trucks & a van, six of the carriages were full of tommies & two were empty, we went to get in these two but were hauled out & told to get in the dirty cars at the rear, we promptly sat down on the rail & refused to move, finally we decided it would be better to ride like animals then go back to the I.T.B, so we got in.
The two empty first class cars were reserved for tommies 150 miles down the line. We had to do the 400 miles to Alexandria sleeping in filth, with bugs & fleas crawling all over us & eating us to hell. You couldn’t see much of the delta on account of a heavy fog, but when the fog started to lift it was a wonderful sight as far as the eye could see was a crop of maize averaging about nine feet in height & stretching for miles & miles, it is wonderful soil this Nile delta but don’t believe all that you hear about it, because all the stable & farmyard manure which is accumulated throughout the years goes into it with each crop.
You cross the Nile several times, or I should say you cross it’s channels. Alexandria (in my opinion) is easily the pick of Egyptian City’s & is quite up to date & has some wonderful shopping centres, the main one I think is “Mohammed Ali Square” we’re a statue of Muhammad Ali is mounted on a high pedestal in the centre of the square. Cairo is certainly the biggest city having, I’ve heard a population of 3,000,000 million people including wogs, but Alex is cleaner & not as jammed together. You have to be very careful in Alex of a night time or you will finish up with a bashed in head & your pay book missing, we reckoned it was wogs who did it, but the Kiwis reckon it is not & I won’t mention here who I blame. Unlike Cairo were houses of ill fame by name of “the birka” cover two whole blocks & house not hundreds of naughty women, but literally thousands of them, Alex has only it’s so called “sister street” which is well out of the shopping centre.
We were camped at Sidi Bishr over night & next day we went on convoy to join or respective battalions.
The moment you get passed the tanneries which stink like blazes & are situated on the outskirts of Alex, your in the Western desert for the whole of the seventy or eighty miles to Tel el Eisa the road runs along the top of a narrow limestone ridge which lies parallel to the sea, this ridge is only about a chain width across the top & averages a couple of hundred feet in height, you have the sea on one side & the vast expanse of undulating desert spotted with camal bush on the other.
It is just rolling dusty treeless hill, when it blows there, which it does at best two or three times a week, and sometimes for a week at a time, you can’t see half a chain in front of you for dust, it gets in your eyes, hair, mouth & everywhere.
When I arrived at the battalion, they tried to shove me into a mortar platoon, but I kicked up & asked to be put into the vickers gun platoon, so they relented so here we are once again, blast the mortars!
I liked to live. That was the place to see dog fights (aerial combat) never a day went past but you would hear a series of Biiiiiips & the high pitched scream of fighters aircraft in power dives, it was very interesting & exciting & we used to forget everything & stand up & barrack, one day I am watching one, & all of a sudden spurts of dust started flying up pretty close to where I was, I must of been in line when the bloke up above let go a burst.
For the next two hours I’m burrowing like a wombat into the side of a mound, & when I had finished it I had a hole that I could sit in & look out, it was alright where the dog fights were in the south, I could see them, but when they were on the other side of the mound I had to get out to have a look I did think of burrowing right through the mound, but got tiered or something.
Our bombers would go up generally 18 at a time, escorted by 40 or 50 fighters, they would drop their eggs & turn for home, Jerry would be sitting up above waiting for any stragglers or planes that were crippled & were limping home, should there be one, jerry would pounce on it like sharks, I always noticed that if a plane was damaged, it would have to make its own way back as best it could, they never seem to help each other, it was a case of “blast you george! I’m alright”, it was generally to bad if an ME got onto the tail of one of the crippled blokes.
We arrived at this camp on October 3, & moved forward undercover of darkness on October 14th, nothing much happened at this camp except jerry came over one night in a lone bomber & dropped some large size eggs near Don Coy, & another day half a dozen of his fighters dropped a load of anti-personal bombs, but they missed us by a 1/4 of a mile.

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4 thoughts on “HMAT Themistocles (28th July 1916)”

Robert Strang says:

April 26, 2022 at 11:22 pm

My Great Grandfather Erwin Mallette Spencer would of been boarding this ship also on this day 28th July 1916, Erwin was in the 58th Battalion, 6th Infantry Battalion, 19th Reinforcement & he died on this boat from Meningitis aboard HMAT Themistocles on the 17th August 1916 & buried at Sea on route to France age 30.
Erwin join the imperial forces on the 16th February 1916.
Was there a Meningitis outbreak on board the ship? Where the soldiers on board travelling in filth as I have read my Grandfathers War diary where the Australian & New Zealand Soldiers were treated like scum in WW2 by the English

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1. 22ndaif says:
  
  April 29, 2022 at 12:49 pm
  
  Thanks Robert for sharing this sad story regarding your Gt Gt Grandfather. I am not aware of there being a specific meningitis outbreak on board the ship but as a general comment sicknesses of various types, especially respiratory infections, were difficult to contain on board due to the close proximity of the soldiers and cramped conditions. For example my grandfather was admitted along with a number of his mates to hospital with diarrhoea and dysentery when they arrived in Egypt in 1915 off the RMS Osterley. It was also important to isolate the newly arrived soldiers from those already in the camps in England that were preparing to head off to the front. As for the Themosticles it remained in service until 1947 so I believe it must have met certain standards.
  Regarding how the Australians were treated by the English in WW1, a lot of the Australian resentment was really aimed at the British high command after early failures / heavy losses at Gallipoli, Fromelles, Pozieres and Bullecourt. The turning point came in 1917 when Australian Divisions began fighting alongside each other, eventually as a Corps, and with Australian senior officers, plus the overall better tactics used by the British Army, at Messines, Ypres and then later on the Somme in 1918. Amongst the ordinary Tommy, and the German soldier too, the Australian infantry (along with the Canadians) was looked up to as one of the fiercest and most effective on the Western Front. Regardless of the conditions they faced, they were there to do a job and they were up to it!
  
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  1. Robert Strang says:
    
    April 30, 2022 at 11:25 am
    
    Thank you very much for your reply & what your saying about the cramp conditions resulting in sickness, such as diarrhoea & dysentery. And also unfortunately meningitis’s.
    I have my Grandfathers 1st War Diary of WW2 in an email & his 2nd War Diary which I’m slowly deciphering & I would like to find someone to help me publish the book, as it’s a great read & story from a gunners life in Egypt, which is sometimes funny, interesting, exciting & also frightening, but all in all a great read that should be shared. Which I truly believe that my Grandfather had returned from war suffering PTS.
    Following is a little bit of an account of what he experienced in his own words….
    
    SYRIA – PALASTINE 1942
    Once again I am back in the fighting forces & I am quite satisfied that once an infantry man, anyway this is what has been happening these last few months. I put in several applications for transfer into the 2/32 Battalion, each time I was claimed from the 82 end, but each time the transfer was refused by the railway unit.
    At last Major Joshua went personally & now Brigadier Pulver at A.I.F H.Q & Pulver got me pulled straight out of the Rlys & put into the 2/32 Battalion, so on the 17th August 1942. I went to Bilbarah & I said goodbye to all my friends, who put on quite a turn about my going at all, even going so far as to ask me to pull out all together & they would hide me until the war was over, when I could get a good job in Syria, but I told them that I had other responsibilities, but I would come back & see them some day perhaps.
    18/8/42
    The following day I moved off with all my gear & stayed overnight in the transit camp at Beirut.
    19/8/42
    The following day I moved off in a bus for Haifa, where we arrived at a Tommy Konsit camp at midday. This camp is situated about a mile south of Haifa & at the time when I was there, it was stocked with Tommies fresh from the boat, in fact they had only arrived about a fortnight & when you read on a list you might understand why bitterness runs between the ANZAC & the English soldiers. The first I noticed was when I lined up four men with them started to talk to me about something, & when I answered him, he asked if I was a Cockney, I said “NO! I’m an Australian” he formed the word onto his mates & straight away I was blackballed & for several hours I can hear them joking muck at the Aussie’s in general & I am getting wilder & wilder. After a while seeing I’ve only got five Piastres, Syrian ( 1 1/2D ) I reckon I’ll go around & draw some pay. So around I go. Hand over my pay book only to get it chucked back in my face some cheap slum bred Sargent, who bellowed “No Australian’s will draw pay here” By this time sparks are flying off my hair & I make up my mind to bash the next Pommy & tear open his filthy mouth.
    Just around the corner I run into a Kiwi, he says “What’s wrong Aussie? You look like your going over the top” “I am” I says, right into the next Pommy Barstads that opens his mouth. He says “Their onto you too are they? They’ve been like that for two days to me as well.” So he says he’ll string along & between us we’ll quieten them, at that moment, thank goodness! Along came a hundred or so Scotties, & talk about a change of tactics, they came over to us, slapped us on the backs, shook our hands, demanded that we go & sleep in their hut & be damned to these English Bastards, it would of only wanted a pin to drop & lord help the sons of old England.
    I got my own back a little while after. I was standing near the pay office & a Kiwi officer came up, produced a payroll & demanded £30 to pay his men who we’re outside on the road, the Pay Seargent saluted him smartly & said “Certainly Sir.” An hour or so afterwards they find out that he was a fake, & the Seargent had £30 to make up.
    I thought it my duty then to go up to him & say “Was it dinkum, a bloke done you for £30 quid a while ago?” He snorts, murders me with his look & I walk away laughing like hell. I was supposed to wait there for a couple of days, but on the following morning I went through, got out on the road, paid a traffic cop a tin of bully beef to get me a ride, which he did & I traveled down through Palestine sitting on the top of a truck. It is just starting to get dark when we get to a place called Rehovot, I get off here & ask the military police if they will put me up for the night, they are only too willing, feed me in their seargents mes, pay me, & give me a royal time. The next day they drive me all the way to Nuseirat, where the Infantry Training Battalion (I.T.B is located.
    Now on I.T.B is a soldier’s idea of hell, it breaks the heart’s of strong man & is run by a staff who are intlec B class? & can’t go up the lines, or are man who have been up the lines & have been sent back because they were failures in action, mind you there are some genuine chaps there, but they are well in the minority.
    Anyway: they train you as if you were a raw recruit, four or five roll calls a day, twenty mile route march’s bayonet & rifle drill, target shooting & a thousand other things that make an old soldier miserable, while I was there I was there I did a mortar school & got a fairly good pass.
    On 30th September, a mob of us left for the front, we went to Gaza to board the train which came in with eight first class carriages & these animal trucks & a van, six of the carriages were full of tommies & two were empty, we went to get in these two but were hauled out & told to get in the dirty cars at the rear, we promptly sat down on the rail & refused to move, finally we decided it would be better to ride like animals then go back to the I.T.B, so we got in.
    The two empty first class cars were reserved for tommies 150 miles down the line. We had to do the 400 miles to Alexandria sleeping in filth, with bugs & fleas crawling all over us & eating us to hell. You couldn’t see much of the delta on account of a heavy fog, but when the fog started to lift it was a wonderful sight as far as the eye could see was a crop of maize averaging about nine feet in height & stretching for miles & miles, it is wonderful soil this Nile delta but don’t believe all that you hear about it, because all the stable & farmyard manure which is accumulated throughout the years goes into it with each crop.
    You cross the Nile several times, or I should say you cross it’s channels. Alexandria (in my opinion) is easily the pick of Egyptian City’s & is quite up to date & has some wonderful shopping centres, the main one I think is “Mohammed Ali Square” we’re a statue of Muhammad Ali is mounted on a high pedestal in the centre of the square. Cairo is certainly the biggest city having, I’ve heard a population of 3,000,000 million people including wogs, but Alex is cleaner & not as jammed together. You have to be very careful in Alex of a night time or you will finish up with a bashed in head & your pay book missing, we reckoned it was wogs who did it, but the Kiwis reckon it is not & I won’t mention here who I blame. Unlike Cairo were houses of ill fame by name of “the birka” cover two whole blocks & house not hundreds of naughty women, but literally thousands of them, Alex has only it’s so called “sister street” which is well out of the shopping centre.
    We were camped at Sidi Bishr over night & next day we went on convoy to join or respective battalions.
    The moment you get passed the tanneries which stink like blazes & are situated on the outskirts of Alex, your in the Western desert for the whole of the seventy or eighty miles to Tel el Eisa the road runs along the top of a narrow limestone ridge which lies parallel to the sea, this ridge is only about a chain width across the top & averages a couple of hundred feet in height, you have the sea on one side & the vast expanse of undulating desert spotted with camal bush on the other.
    It is just rolling dusty treeless hill, when it blows there, which it does at best two or three times a week, and sometimes for a week at a time, you can’t see half a chain in front of you for dust, it gets in your eyes, hair, mouth & everywhere.
    When I arrived at the battalion, they tried to shove me into a mortar platoon, but I kicked up & asked to be put into the vickers gun platoon, so they relented so here we are once again, blast the mortars!
    I liked to live. That was the place to see dog fights (aerial combat) never a day went past but you would hear a series of Biiiiiips & the high pitched scream of fighters aircraft in power dives, it was very interesting & exciting & we used to forget everything & stand up & barrack, one day I am watching one, & all of a sudden spurts of dust started flying up pretty close to where I was, I must of been in line when the bloke up above let go a burst.
    For the next two hours I’m burrowing like a wombat into the side of a mound, & when I had finished it I had a hole that I could sit in & look out, it was alright where the dog fights were in the south, I could see them, but when they were on the other side of the mound I had to get out to have a look I did think of burrowing right through the mound, but got tiered or something.
    Our bombers would go up generally 18 at a time, escorted by 40 or 50 fighters, they would drop their eggs & turn for home, Jerry would be sitting up above waiting for any stragglers or planes that were crippled & were limping home, should there be one, jerry would pounce on it like sharks, I always noticed that if a plane was damaged, it would have to make its own way back as best it could, they never seem to help each other, it was a case of “blast you george! I’m alright”, it was generally to bad if an ME got onto the tail of one of the crippled blokes.
    We arrived at this camp on October 3, & moved forward undercover of darkness on October 14th, nothing much happened at this camp except jerry came over one night in a lone bomber & dropped some large size eggs near Don Coy, & another day half a dozen of his fighters dropped a load of anti-personal bombs, but they missed us by a 1/4 of a mile.
    
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  2. 22ndaif says:
    
    April 30, 2022 at 9:29 pm
    
    Very interesting read, and I see what you say about the comments from the English Tommy! Looks like your grandfather was in the thick of it at El Alamein in Nov 1942. Good luck with the book.
    
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