Desert Diggers

Writings From a War Zone ‘Somewhere in the Middle East’ 1940-1942

By David Mitchelhill-Green

Published by Big Sky Publishing
RRP $32.99 in paperback  |  ISBN 9781923004849

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, with Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ grim announcement that ‘Australia is also at war’, a decision was made to raise a volunteer force of 20,000 men ‘sufficient for a single infantry division’ to serve locally and overseas.

By early 1940, the sixth division was the first of the Australian divisions to head overseas.

Desert Diggers captures the day-to-day experience of the first men to volunteer after the outbreak of war via their letters home.

Familiar names spring from the pages. Bardia. Tobruk. El Alamein. But often throughout this book there is a sad postscript to an excerpt from a letter.

Private Alan Hutchison wrote from Tobruk about using Italian money to buy food, saying ‘The Arabs haven’t woken up yet that it is no good…’. Sadly, Alan Hutchison survived his time in the Middle East only to be killed in New Guinea fighting the Japanese in late 1942.

Author David Mitchelhill-Green has gone to great lengths to assemble the material for this book. The bibliography contains, among other things, an impressive list of local newspapers where letters we often published and there is a list of individuals who are quoted in the text.

Through these letters, war becomes, not some abstract concept, but a tangible human experience, giving readers a remarkable insight into the Australian experience of war.

VERDICT: Insightful and sad in equal measure, there is nothing quite like the first hand accounts of the men who were there to tell us what their experience was really like.