TOBRUK TO LABUAN is an account of Brigadier Colin “Hugh” Boyd Norman’s life, primarily told through selected letters from his service during World War 2.
Known as a soldier of unswerving integrity, he was a Captain of the 24th Anti-tank company at the 1941 siege of Tobruk where he won a Military Cross in the Battle of the Salient against German troops led by General Erwin Rommel.
“The Germans used 70 tanks in the attack. The ground mist lifted and after an air attack the tanks came over at 8.00 a.m.” Norman wrote in one letter home.
Eighteen months later, after the battalion’s devastating losses at Ruin Ridge, he would be an eyewitness to the third and final battle of El Alamein.
“All afternoon the battle of the tanks has raged rising to a hideous climax… Aerial battles rage back and forth, their noise almost entirely obliterated by the scream of the shells. A bomber is hit by an ack-ack shell and bursts into a ball of fire …” - recalled Lt. Maj. Hugh Norman.
By 1943 as Lt Colonel of the primarily West Australian 2/28th battalion, he won a Distinguished Service Order for the battalion’s courageous crossing of the Busu River in New Guinea and its surprise attack on the Japanese, contributing to the successful capture of Lae. The book includes one eyewitness account from Pte Loh of the 2/28th - “With the imperturbable charactership of the veteran Australian soldier, the first company approached and, once exposed, immediately drew fire.”
Later, in the final months of the WW2, they were sent to Labuan, Borneo where they would see some of their toughest fighting against the Japanese.
Yet in all these stories of his wartime experiences and those of his comrades, he attributes his courage to the unswerving love from his wife, Ethel. “…your letters are always there, always sought for, always loved, just as you in your dear precious constant self are…”
“This book provides an excellent background to Brigadier Norman’s amazing achievements throughout his life [and] Brigadier Norman’s letters make fascinating reading as do those he receives, particularly from the families he has had to write to inform them of the death of their son. There could be little more sobering task than that. Most evident from the letters is his deep love his wife and children. Brigadier Norman’s letters are beautifully written – so many would have been written under very trying circumstances.” Brig. Duncan Warren AM RFD (retd).