ScorpioVI
Member
Saw this in another forum and enjoyed it:
...to be continued...
If you want to read a bit about one of these Aussie No1MkIII* HT rifles in action, here's an article written by Andrew Rule of The Age:
No one knows exactly how many of the enemy Ian Robertson killed in Korea - picking them off one by one through the sights of his rifle. Andrew Rule asks the former sniper about living with his memories.
The deadliest man in Australia comes from Melbourne, but he is not a gangster or a hitman. He is more a foxtrotting man, these days. He can do the modern waltz and knows a lot of fancy dance steps - Miami rumba, Buck's Fizz jive - but his slow foxtrot slays them down at the senior cits'.
He and his wife of 51 years glide across the floor like Fred and Ginger - him in neatly pressed slacks and comfy zip-up black pumps, trigger finger gently touching the small of her back, left arm out in front, steady as ever.
At 77, they are among the oldest couples here, but they can show the youngsters a few moves. A watcher would never guess they took up dancing only in their 60s and that, for him, it's therapy for the effects of the battering his body took on the battlefield.
It's the Friday night ballroom dancing class at the Evergreen senior citizens' club in Balwyn, a suburb so respectable that people joke about it. A portrait of the Queen hangs next to an Australian flag. In the foyer, a table of sandwiches and cakes ("ladies, a plate please") is ready for supper, with tea bags and instant coffee in styrofoam cups.
The regulars greet the old digger by his nickname, Robbie, when he arrives with Miki, his wife. Florence, the Chinese woman who runs the dance with her husband, beams at him and sings his praises. Robbie has "a heart of gold", she says. Others chorus agreement, and line up between dances for his famous neck massages. "He's very good - and never charges," says Florence. She thinks he has healing hands.
In his other life, healing wasn't part of the job description.
In fact, in all of modern warfare, few were more fatally efficient than this kindly grandfather. No one knows just how many dozen enemy soldiers he killed in eight bone-chilling months in Korea, except the man himself. And he's not saying much.
Ian "Robbie" Robertson was born in Melbourne in 1927. His mother toiled over a boot-stitching machine from age 14 to 74. His father had been a teenage rifleman and bugler wounded at Gallipoli. One uncle was killed at the Anzac landing in 1915; another won a Military Cross as an airman in France. The family was self-employed but not wealthy.
On weekends the men used to go shooting.
When Hollywood made a film, Enemy at the Gates, about a sniping duel at Stalingrad between a German marksman and the Soviet propaganda hero, "noble sniper" Vassili Zaitsev, the opening scene showed Zaitsev as a child, shooting a wolf in his native Siberia. Zaitsev - famous for shooting hundreds of Germans - was a skilled hunter before joining the army. It was the same with young Robbie Robertson, and a lot of other Australian and American snipers.
Growing up in the Depression in the struggling northern suburbs, the boy learned to shoot at a young age. The countryside
close by was crawling with rabbits, which were meat and money for battlers. Rabbit traps, ferrets and a .22 "pea rifle" meant survival as well as sport.
Robertson's father was a crack shot - he had been a sniper at Gallipoli - and his uncles were good hunters. They taught the kid to stalk, freeze and watch, scanning the ground until he spotted a rabbit by the shine of its eye. He had a keen eye, a steady hand and lots of practice. A head-shot rabbit could be eaten or sold, a gut-shot one was dogs' meat and its skin worthless, so he had to shoot quick and clean.
Robertson went to Northcote State School, then left Collingwood Tech at 13 to be a carrier's "jockey" on a truck, working around the boot trade. Later, he was a storeman.
In 1943, at 16, he almost bluffed his way into the army - which would have meant fighting in New Guinea - but the recruiting sergeant told his father, who told Robbie that if the Japanese invaded he should be home to protect his mother and sisters. He finally enlisted when he was 18, missing the end of the war, and was sent to the occupation of Japan in 1946.
If communist North Korea, tacitly backed by the Soviet Union and China, had not invaded South Korea in June 1950, Robertson might have served out his time without firing a shot in anger. But when the United Nations agreed to immediate retaliation by its members, led by the US, Australian troops were among the first sent to Korea to join a thinly veiled struggle between the world's Cold War superpowers. Once China joined North Korea, the UN "police action" would become a three-year war costing more than a million lives, including 33,000 Americans and 339 of the 18,000 Australians who served there.
In Japan, Robertson had been working as the battalion photographer, but with war looming he was made a sniper because he was one of the 10 best marksmen among the battalion's 600 troops. It was like being picked for the school sports, but more dangerous.
He went to Korea in the autumn of 1950. Days were crisp but nights freezing, a taste of the cruel winter ahead. If an enemy bomb or bullet didn't kill you, the standard-issue Australian uniform might: it was hopeless for northern winters. To survive, diggers had to beg, barter or steal extra gear - woollen caps, gauntlets, mittens, waterproofs - from the Americans, who had plenty of everything.
Snipers were issued with a modified version of the venerable Lee-Enfield .303 rifle used by British Empire troops since the Boer War half a century before. The sniper model had a small telescopic sight and a heavy barrel, but otherwise was little different from a million others lugged by Allied infantry in two world wars.
Robertson could group 15 rounds in a space smaller than his fist at 300 metres, hit a target the size of a man's head at 600 metres, and was confident of hitting a man from 800 to 1000 metres if conditions were right. Not that long-range marksmanship helped much in his first engagement.
It was their first week in Korea. Robertson and his first sniper partner, a South Australian called Lance Gully, were escorting their commanding officers on reconnaissance - driving ahead in a Jeep to "clear the ground".
It meant they would draw enemy fire first, protecting the officers.
They stopped their Jeep and split up to scout on foot. Minutes later, Gully surprised 30 or more enemy soldiers hiding in a ditch. They showered him with hand grenades. He jumped in the ditch with them to avoid the blasts, then backed out of it, firing as he went. If he missed he was dead. After nine shots for nine hits, a grenade burst wounded him.
When he heard firing, Robbie ran to help. He saw a flap of his mate's bloodied scalp hanging off his head and a crazy thought struck him: "Lance looks sharp with that Mohawk haircut." The wounded man screamed: "There's a million of them in there, and they're all yours."
Years before, an old digger had told him how to survive superior numbers at close range: Keep both eyes open, point and snap-shoot, count the shots and reload after six.
And be aggressive: give them time to think and they'll kill you...
He ran up to the ditch, shooting anyone who opposed him, squeezed off six shots then ran back, jammed in another clip and ran at the ditch again. He did it six times, until no one was left alive.
Gully had shot nine. The rest of the jumble of bodies were down to Robertson. He could hardly believe he was alive, unhurt apart from a furrow across his wrist left by a machine-gun bullet. It was a miracle.
Officially, it was a "skirmish" at the start of what historians call the Battle of the Apple Orchard. Lance Gully returned to the line later, but the shrapnel in his body made him too sick to stay.
So the boy from Preston got a new sniping partner, a reputation and the first of a lifetime of recurring dreams.
They call Korea the forgotten war, but the old digger can't forget it. "Every battle happened yesterday," he says, his voice serious. "When people are trying to kill you, it concentrates your mind. You don't leave it behind."
Retired Warrant Officer Robertson easily passes for a happy man - a law-abiding, patriotic, devoted husband and grandfather with a lively mind hidden behind hearty humour. But only a fool or a psychopath could forget the things he's seen and done in the line of duty, and he is neither.
Sometimes, when he closes his eyes he sees the dead, and they are many. The memories turn into dreams when he sleeps. "You relive situations based on what happened," he says. "You are always going on to attack another hill. All the strain of it comes back..." His voice trails off.
He is sitting on a couch in the spotless living room of the couple's spotless 1960s brick veneer, in a street that could come from a Howard Arkley painting. The floorboards have been stripped and polished and every surface gleams, but there is a pleasant clutter of souvenirs. On the television set is a tiny teddy bear and a calendar with the words: "Show kindness to others."
Robertson's iron-grey hair is worn in a crewcut and his eyes are piercing. He wears glasses only when he has to read, looks tanned and fit for his age and still has the restlessness of a man of action.
The house is full of evidence of various hobbies - since retiring he has learned not only massage, but riding, saddlery and military drumming. He made the elaborately tooled Western saddle that sits on a stand near the front door. His study is crammed with reference books, military histories and biographies.
He is a good talker - but not about himself, for fear of being branded a "big noter". He keeps quiet about his wartime role except with a few ex-army friends.
"It's a bit like belonging to one of those lodges," he deadpans. "Nobody likes snipers, you know," he adds. "I'm not ashamed of it, but I don't want to be called a murderer by some bleeding hearts."
He doesn't want to be cast as "some sort of heroic figure", either: "I'm not. We just lived it." He finds it hard to explain what it was like - the fear, boredom, filth, cold and horror, and the guilt-edged elation at surviving - to anyone who wasn't there.
"It's like a seamstress talking to a bricklayer - there's nothing in common." Fragments of the real story emerge haltingly, and over several days.
His past hasn't caused him much trouble "because I didn't tell anyone", he says. But a few times during the 30 years since he left the regular army, someone told "the people I worked with [about him being a sniper] and it would rankle for a while. They'd call me things like 'trained killer'. I'd tell them it was a long time ago."
It's a sore point. He jokes he doesn't want to be seen as "Uncle Vinnie in the Mafia" - some sort of cold-blooded killer for hire.
Snipers often had to shoot in cold blood - rather than in the heat of an enemy assault - but that didn't make them murderers. They were doing their sworn duty, under legitimate orders and the conventions of warfare, against an armed enemy trying to kill them.
Still, sniping is the dark art of conventional warfare. In America's gun culture, it attracts a fringe celebrity status that supports a growing list of books and websites. Australians are more ambivalent.
...to be continued...