The tag “survivor” is used often, but Tomakin resident and World War II veteran Herbert “Nick” Emery has earned it.
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Mr Emery, 92, is one of the legendary “Desert Rats” who fought the seemingly invincible German Army in North Africa, and also an escaped prisoner of war.
Far from running away from duty, he lied about his age to do it.
Born in 1924 in Sydney, he grew up in Tamworth with three sisters and one brother during the Great Depression.
He never met his father, but his mother spoke of him as “a good man.”
“It wasn’t easy for us,” he said.
He had to leave school at 14 as his mother couldn’t afford to look after all of the children and he moved to Sydney to work for Stromberg Carlson Radios. In 1940, when Mr Emery was 16, his 18-year-old brother asked him to get him an enlistment form to join the army from the Sydney barracks.
“I must have looked older than I am because they asked me to join up,” he said. “I said ‘ooh yeah that’ll do me’,” he said.
He passed his medical but was told he needed his mother’s permission to join up.
“I signed my mother’s name on the form and brought it back,” he said.
He served with the 3rd anti-tank regiment of the 9th Division of the Australian Army in the successful defence of Tobruk. He doesn’t like going into detail about the action itself on account of it being “too sad,” but as an anti-tank gunner, you can imagine the carnage he witnessed. He and his fellow Allied troops were ordered to defend a bridge and this they did gallantly, until being surrounded and captured by the Germans. Mr Emery and many of his fellow soldiers were taken by a cargo ship to Italy.
“The ship was hit by a British torpedo,” he said.
“Quite a few were killed where it hit but we up the top because we all had diarrhoea.”
The ship limped into Italy and Mr Emery was taken to an Italian prison camp on the Yugoslav border and then another, from which he and a group of fellow Allied soldiers escaped and made an epic journey, aided by sympathetic civilians, to get over the Swiss border.
He sailed home on an American troop ship.
“My mother and younger sister were waiting for me in Melbourne,” he recalled. “My sister said ‘who’s that?’.”
Mr Emery and fiance Enid were married in Sydney in 1949. They had four sons, two of whom have passed away, and they now have eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, with another on the way.
