Along with many other troops, the Unit embarked for Palestine in December 1940, disembarking at Suez. We then moved up to Gaza, where the majority of Australian troops were located immediately after they arrived. A field exercise there a few weeks after disembarkation included an exchange of officers and other ranks between the 2/4 and the 2/6 Field Ambulances, during which I earned the wrath of the brigadier in charge of the operation. As far as I could ascertain, he was upset because I had followed the advice of the Officer-in-Charge of the 2/6 Field Ambulance, Lieut-Col. E. (Teddy) Beare, that officers should always ‘march with the men’. Thus, I left the decision about where to place an Advanced Dressing Station to the Staff Sergeant, who had gone ahead with the equipment on a truck. The brigadier arrived at the same time as I did, regarded the site that had been selected as very dangerous, and rightly blamed me for it. During that exercise we had the opportunity to visit many Palestinian villages, and see the threshing of wheat, camels at work, and so on. I still feel sympathy for the Palestinians ousted by the state of Israel.
A few weeks after this exercise I was transferred to Headquarters, First Australian Corps, where I worked closely with the Deputy Director of Medical Services, Brigadier W. W. S. Johnson, a fine physician and a fine gentleman. There may have been other considerations in my transfer, possibly related to my Diploma of Tropical Medicine, but for me it was a most fortunate change. Johnson took me with him when he visited Jerusalem and there I met Dr Saul Adler, FRS, an outstanding parasitologist and an expert on malaria in the region. I met Ted Ford again, he was responsible for a Mobile Bacteriological Unit attached to Corps headquarters. I also made the acquaintance of Colonel (later Brigadier Sir) Hamilton Fairley, Director of Medicine for the Second AIF, and Colonel J. S. K. Boyd, Director of Pathology for the British forces in the Middle East, both outstanding experts in tropical diseases.
Neil Hamilton Fairley, 1891–1966
Born in Melbourne in 1891, Fairley graduated MB BS with first class honours from Melbourne University in 1915. In 1916, he enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Service and sailed to Egypt as pathologist to the 11th Australian General Hospital. He was subsequently promoted Major and, in 1918, at the age of 27, was appointed Senior Physician to the Hospital, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He returned to Melbourne in 1920 as first assistant to the Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, but in 1922 went to Bombay, where he worked on schistosomiasis, dracontiasis and sprue. From 1925 to 1929 he worked again at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, studying snakebites and snake venoms.
In 1929 he went back to London as lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he worked on filariasis, leptospirosis and malaria. With the outbreak of World War II, Fairley enlisted again in the Australian Army Medical Service, with the rank of Colonel, and joined the Headquarters of the Australian Forces as Consulting Physician. I met him when he visited 2/1 Casualty Clearing Station in Nazareth. Returning to Australia in 1942, he was promoted to Brigadier and became Director of Medicine in the Australian Military Forces and Chairman of the Combined Advisory Committee on Tropical Medicine, South Pacific Area, and as such, directly responsible to General MacArthur. His major contributions in this role were ensuring that all available sulphaguanidine was made available to troops on the Kokoda Track, where dysentery was undermining their fighting capacity, and the setting up of the Land Headquarters Medical Research Unit (LHQMRU) in Cairns in June 1943. The latter consisted of an entomological section, which was sent 20,000 anopheline larvae from New Guinea weekly, a pathology section, and a clinical section, which supervised the use of human volunteers subjected to infection with falciparum malaria. Boyd (1966) notes that the keynote of success in all these experiments was the subinoculation test, which was carried out by my wife, Bobbie.
After the War, Fairley became Wellcome Professor of Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and followed up the experiments on the pathogenesis of malaria, but in 1948 he had a serious illness from which he never fully recovered. He continued to serve on many committees, but in 1962 retired to the country and died in 1966 (see Boyd, 1966).
Fairley, who had worked on malaria in Macedonia before the War, advised the Commander-in-Chief, General Wavell, not to send British and Australian Troops to Macedonia, a highly malarious area, to bolster Greek resistance to a German attack, as he had planned, but rather to send seasoned Greek troops. Wavell reacted violently, but after an interview he withdrew his criticisms. Knowing from our conversations in Nazareth that I had a Diploma of Tropical Medicine, he dispatched me to a staging camp in Alexandria to await shipment to Greece as a malariologist for the Australian forces. I was there, in a very dusty staging camp, for about five weeks. During this time I explored Alexandria, including the catacombs, where I met a South Australian anthropologist who was studying the burials there, and made friends with some very interesting local people. However, after about five weeks it became clear that the German stukas (dive bombers) were overwhelming the Allied forces, and my only participation in the Greek campaign was to go to Crete as medical officer on a ship evacuating civilians, some weeks before the German parachutists invaded the island. We returned to Alexandria with an imposing naval escort.