Old men remember: reliving the horror of Tobruk

‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter Hart quotes the St Crispin’s Day speech aptly, for as an oral historian at the Imperial War Museum, he’s done his bit over the years to record memories. By the 1980s the IWM’s sound archive had amassed an impressive collection of interviews with veterans of the first world war, and so began on those of the second. At Close Range weaves the recollections of 50 veterans (an unusually high number for a single unit) from what, as Hart puts it, some might consider a relatively obscure regiment, into a continuous narrative of five years’ campaigning — ‘from the traumatic excitement of action to the banalities of life as a soldier at war’.

That was the 107th Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery (South Nottinghamshire Hussars), former Yeomanry cavalry who’d been converted to artillery in 1922. As territorials, ‘weekend soldiers’, the yeomen-gunners were local men who knew each other and their families, but with the passing of Leslie Hore-Belisha’s (universal) Military Training Act in April 1939, they were suddenly joined, says Hart, by men who knew that if they didn’t become territorials they’d ultimately be conscripted and probably end up in the infantry. Coming from families who’d perhaps lost men in the Sherwood Foresters in profligate Great War offensives, who could blame them?

The South Notts Hussars were embodied (the equivalent of ‘mobilised’ in the regular army) in September 1939 and sent the following year with the 1st Cavalry Division, who were still mounted, to Palestine. Equipped with the first world war 18-pounder, modified with pneumatic tyres and hauled by mechanical- rather than horse-power, but facing no German threat, they spent the Phoney War in relative comfort. But when Mussolini threw in with Hitler in June 1940 they moved to the Western Desert and converted to the new 25-pounder howitzer.