The Salvo at Tobruk

“Thrive on thrills, and have GO!”   Brigadier Arthur McIlveen.
 
The worker hefting a crowbar making a hole for a telegraph pole snarled at the Salvation Army officer peddling past on a country road with an arm load of Warcry newspapers, “Go and work you loafer!” He’d picked the wrong man, because Arthur McIlveen was a bushman used to digging fifty postholes a day. The feisty Salvo dropped his bike, fronted the heckler demanding the crowbar and, in a flurry of dirt, proceeded to out dig him - much to the amusement of his workmates!
 
‘Pugnacious’ was the word used to describe the chaplain whom the Diggers at Tobruk declared the best known Australian during the bitter six month siege of April to December 1941.  Coming from the legendary 9th Division ‘Rats of Tobruk’, that was highest praise.
 
Arthur was known for covering dangerous miles between trenches just to be there handing out tea and coffee to men returning from bloody fighting patrols. As did other chaplains, he simply materialised out of the dust of battle carrying the wounded, offering comfort and counsel, burying their dead comrades, listening and helping them write letters home.

The tenacious defence of that isolated North African port was the thorn in the side of the previously undefeated German Afrika Corps led by General Rommel. Under Australian General Alan Morsehead, Allied defenders dug into the unforgiving desert. It was rated some of the most ferocious fighting of the Second War.
 
Fifty three year old ‘Padre Mac’ later described conditions he shared with the troops; “Smothered with dust, pestered by flies and fleas, famished with thirst, sometimes tightening belts and at others devouring food permeated with dirt, bombed and shelled, weary and sleep-starved, the garrison grimly and defiantly held on.”
 
One tough Rat sent a Tobruk testimonial that should be read at every ANZAC Day Service, “… but us boys over here have learned to treat it (religion I mean) as a necessity and if any bludger tries to run down The Salvation Army when I’m home and I hear him, I’ll stub his nose back down his neck, for one does not realize how big a help religion is to us until you get to know the real meaning of it.”

Padre Mac never thought of himself as a fighting soldier carrying a gun, but the ‘secret weapon’ the Salvo officer lugged everywhere he went, is now proudly displayed alongside armaments in the Australian War Museum in Canberra. It’s a beaten up old gramophone and a bunch of chipped and battered records. It brought music to crowded troopships, air-raid shelters, docks, lonely trenches, hospital wards.
 
There was such a constant demand for Australian tenor Peter Dawson singing the hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’ at Tobruk, that when the disc was shattered by a bomb blast, Mac lovingly gathered the bits and stuck them together on the flip side with sticking plaster! He admitted there were “a few lost chords!"

One soldier wrote; “None can deny that many a man was homesick … Every week, bombs withstanding, the Padre would play many request items in the devastated wards of the Tobruk Hospital … There were men of many nations and the Padre’s action in visiting the captured POW’s was summed up thus by him, ‘I hope that someone will be kind enough and Christlike enough to give our own prisoner comrades some songs in their mother tongue.’”
 
A veteran later used C.J. Dennis Aussie-style verse to capture the effect of Padre Mac and his ‘secret weapon’ during traumatising Luftwaffe bombing raids.
 
So ‘e just sits there busy turnin’ the ‘andle
 Of ‘is battered gramophone,
While over ‘ead the hate was flyin’ and ‘e
Talks ter us of ‘ome.
And as we listens ter ‘Abide with me’ we
Fergets the things we’ve seen,
Our throats get kinda lumpy wishin’ that
Better blokes we’d been.

​The humble bush-bred Brigadier Arthur McIlveen, received the MBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace in 1961, six years later The Salvation Army’s highest honour The Order of the Founder, and in 1971, a Knighthood for his distinguished services. But the praise he cherished most came from his comrades – the ‘Rats of Tobruk’ of the 2/9TH Division.
 
“You had so little to give yet your constant smile, faith in victory, courage, the complete disregard for your own comfort at all times, your humility and self-effacement, the driving force which took you far beyond the call of extraordinary duty, the refining influence you brought upon the hardened and weary soldiers of many nations, the comfort you gave to the wounded and the dying - friend or foe - all these things stand for all times as a symbol of a Christian and a soldierly gentleman. Your mark of a valiant Australian.”
 
In the years that followed the War, Padre Mac maintained strong links with the veterans, often visiting them in the Repatriation Hospital. Their personal tribute to their chaplain was to acquire a house for him and his family at Bexley, Sydney. He named it ‘Tobruk Cottage.’