2
Ralph made his oath to the King and collected his uniform on 24 June. He’d joined the 2/43rd Battalion of the AIF, but when he learned Ted and Tom were in the 2/48th he succeeded in getting a transfer. With a few months’ training they progressed from marching practice with broom handles for rifles in the Adelaide Showgrounds to bayonet practice in the local park. Weekend visits to Ronte were like gold dust, but Ralph had only a short stint as a footslogger. He had far more education than most enlisted men, and battalion staff picked Ralph out and sent him to train as a mapmaker. Private Churches became the map specialist for A Company, 2/48th Battalion, and so a very junior member of military intelligence. Other privates, with less education, but taller heads and broader shoulders, were being raised to sergeant, and then commissioned as officers, with more pay.
Every soldier got six days pre-embarkation leave, and when he received the call, Ralph spent a few days at a seaside guesthouse with Ronte, then went by train to Rita’s farm, which he had promised to visit before he left the country. Rita had been a second mother to him, protecting Ralph from his brothers and the world beyond. Her heart had become much weaker in the past few years. When it was time to leave, Ralph said, ‘Well, I’ll see you when I come back, darling.’
‘Oh, Ralph,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’1
Ronte took the impending departure of her husband quite philosophically. Ralph’s parents had retired and moved to Adelaide, so Ronte found work at a munitions factory there and moved in with them. ‘In truth, I didn’t know Ralph when we got married,’ she admitted later. ‘He seemed nice – but he was my ticket off the farm.’2 Ralph had married a kindred spirit.
He said his last farewell and marched in the parade to Port Adelaide. On Sunday 17 November 1940, they boarded the Stratheden, a luxury liner that had been gutted to be a troopship. Ralph was well down below the waterline in hammocks, but if he didn’t like the hammock, he could sleep up on deck in the open air. The Stratheden pulled out in the early hours of the next day and steamed to Fremantle. They remained there for six days due to a German merchant raider scare in the Indian Ocean. Then they headed north-west until they reached port at Colombo. Ralph had a day’s leave: a ride in a rickshaw, and a curry – food hotter than he’d ever tasted before. No matter how much he had read, he was still a boy from the Mallee. Everything about Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) was exotic to Ralph, yet (apart from the heat) his barracks, Galle Face Green, was very British. On the next leg of the journey Ralph had a first taste of what might lie ahead. During the nights, as they crossed the Arabian Sea, some unpleasant sergeants disappeared overboard – a story he told later in life, still shocked at some of his comrades’ behaviour.
Arriving at the Red Sea strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, Ralph had his next sight of land; he could see the coastline on either side of the ship: Somaliland to one side, Yemen the other. The Stratheden sailed right up to the northern entrance of the Suez Canal, El-Qantara, and there they disembarked and got on a train that took them to Dimra in Palestine. There, practical combat training began.
Ralph’s war then separated from the mates he had made the previous July. He was transferred on temporary secondment to Corps Headquarters just outside Alexandria in Egypt, and never returned to his battalion. Now he was a clerk for the Allies’ North Africa campaign to push the Italians back west along the Mediterranean coastline. His job was to correct the existing military maps of the Western Desert, Egypt, and the two provinces of Libya the Allies had advanced in to. It was a long way from parading with broom handles at the Adelaide Showgrounds.
A map of the countries around the Mediterranean Sea in 1941. The location of the Battle of Cape Matapan is marked south of Greece.
.Map 3. The Mediterranean, 1941
After a few weeks at Corps HQ, he was sent to Marsa Matruh, a dowdy Egyptian port halfway along the coast between Alexandria and Tobruk, which was now the British headquarters. Here Ralph became a driver. In civilian life his boss, the Captain, was a licensed surveyor in Sydney; Ralph described him as the wildest man he ever met.* The days became just the two of them, in a small Chevrolet half-truck, driving the stony desert on surveying missions, usually on goat tracks, far from the coast, camping under the African stars. Often Ralph didn’t know whether he was behind the enemy line or not.
The recent British advance had captured over 200,000 Italian prisoners of war. They didn’t want to fight, and many spoke excellent English as a result of living in the USA before the war. This gave Ralph his first experience of a phenomenon he would call ‘the eternal Yank’: wherever you were in the world, there would be someone speaking English with an American accent. He got talking to a group of prisoners who were being kept occupied digging a trench in the desert, then filling it in again. ‘Well, look,’ an Italian captain said to him, ‘if you want to scrap over all this rock and rubble here, be my guest. But you know, I’ve got Mum and the kids back home, and we’re not interested. I mean, we know you are civilized people and we’ll get back after the war, but we’re not fighting. It’s Mussolini’s idea.’3 Ralph knew many of his mates thought of the Italians as cowards. He didn’t; he was sure it would be different if they were fighting for the defence of their homeland.
At this time, Ralph drove immense distances in Northern Africa: out into the desert with the Captain, then back to HQ to pass on their mapping intelligence. He would never know accurate details, but at HQ he could track his old battalion and find out what his mates were doing and roughly where they were. They were advancing in their training but had not been moved to the front line yet. Knowing these vague details enabled him still to feel connected to them and wonder what they were going through.
Then the orders changed. Ralph and the Captain were to finish all calculation and mapping details and leave. Ralph packed and drove the long stretch back to the docks of Alexandria, where Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, Cypriots, and Palestinians were loading into ships. There were so many rumours. Was it Syria, Cyprus, Crete? Most troops agreed Greece was the destination.