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Jim Scott was among the last of the famed Rats of Tobruk. His parents were Isabella (nee Gray) from Port Pirie, and Clarence Scott of Clare. They farmed and worked in the Mid North before moving to Adelaide.
At 14 Jim started his first job – delivering ice on his buckboard ute. When Clarence took up an irrigation block at Glossop, in the Riverland, Jim joined him.
In 1939, despite poor health, Jim volunteered for the Army with three of his mates. They trained at Puckapunyal, in Victoria, and he became a truck driver for the Army Service Corps.
They sailed from Melbourne in 1940, ending up in an encampment on Salisbury Plain ready to defend England which was reeling from defeat at Dunkirk, in France.
Jim rated the nine months he spent in England – mainly running military petrol supplies around the country – as among the best times of his life.
In early 1941, he was shipped to the Middle East. At Tobruk, on Easter Monday 1941, they faced a massed German Panzer tack attack.
Jim and his mates took cover in a large and smelly former Italian Army latrine made of petrol cans full of dirt.
At the height of the battle, he saw a shell bouncing towards them across the desert before shouting to his mates to get down. The shell took out one side of the latrine but they were uninjured.
They were defending the Allied artillery positions and, on that day, saw many tanks hit at point-blank range.
The Australians followed up by surrounding and capturing 105 German soldiers, giving Jim his first chance to meet and exchange words as he guarded them.
The Aussies were embarrassed by the perfectly clean dress of the German infantry compared to their own ragged uniforms.
However, the battle was the Allies’ first significant victory against the Germans, and Jim said it gave them a lot of confidence that they could resist the long campaign that followed.
His service unit was turned into infantry for the 15th Battalion. They were bombed so often that Jim said they could judge whether or not to take cover.
Nevertheless, in one incident, he was buried by one bomb which landed three metres away, surviving only because his mates dug him out.
He also survived “recce” patrols although he was hospitalised after a “jumping jack” mine killed the men in front of him. Jim carried badly wounded mates on improvised slings.
On one occasion, while collecting soldiers killed on the battlefield, he ended up chatting to and exchanging cigarettes with Germans also picking up bodies.
“We stayed there for nine months and we were starting to crack up, health-wise,” he later told historians from UNSW Canberra which chronicled his exploits. He also took photos.
The Rats, as the Germans and other Axis nations described them, were eventually redeployed in small boats.
They were rested before being sent to Syria to fight and defeat the Vichy French. Jim conveyed military supplies for Russia as far as the Turkish border, where they left the trucks, never seeing who took them onward.
After the Germans finally recaptured Tobruk, Jim’s 9th Division was rushed back to take part in decisive Allied victories at El Alamein.
Back in Australia, he was trained for amphibious landings and tropical fighting. He saw two tours, taking stores to New Guinea before suffering from malaria.
He was able to catch up with his Berri girlfriend, Dot, also now in the military, and they married in 1944.
Living in Loxton, they established a contracting business before moving with their three daughters to Adelaide in 1963.
Jim suffered the effects of what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but spent the rest of his long life working for the Agriculture Department and Potato Board before retiring to Normanville to focus on fishing.

Published in the Tributes Section of Adelaide Advertiser - Saturday, 14th July 2018