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David Elliott (1905-1942) was an Australian who went to New Zealand to work as a motor body builder. He volunteered for service in the NZ Army. Killed in action, El Alamein, September 1, 1942
David Albert Clarence Elliott was the eldest of four surviving children of Albert Edward Elliott and Hannah, nee Gleeson. He was born in York, Western Australia in 1906. David grew up in Victoria, wh...ere he was apprenticed as a wood machinist, went rabbit trapping during the Depression and served two years in the citizen military forces before marrying Vera Olive Connelly in 1938. They migrated to New Zealand where he was contracted to work in Hamilton, building motor cars. Later they moved to Johnsonville, Lower Hutt where their son, Ian Douglas Elliott, was born in late 1939. David Elliott enlisted as a private in New Zealand Army on 31 May 1940, embarked for Egypt on February 1st, 1942 and was killed in action at El Alamein on September 1st. The Elliotts seem to have been unusually patriotic. David Elliott's only surviving brother, John Ivan Cuthbert Elliott, somehow managed to join the Australian Army and served in Crete as a signalman, despite the loss of a leg when he was 13. John was captured in the defeat of the Allied forces in Crete in 1941 and ended up in a Bavarian POW camp. Their father Albert Edward Elliott, a man lacking in almost every other human virtue, enlisted for service in World War 1 at the age of 42, but was quickly discharged as medically unfit. David was dearly loved by his younger sisters and brother. No letters by his hand survive, though he cabled his sister Gwendoline and Vera, to tell them that he had survived the first assault by Montgomery's forces at El Alamein on August 31. There is a letter to David from Vera, written six days before he embarked for Egypt which was never meant to be sent to him. It is inscribed in the back cover of her Bible: Vera to David: 25/1/'41 To David Tomorrow I am going to see you, perhaps to say goodbye. I do not know, but I do know that goodbye will have to be said, if not tomorrow, then another day, not far distant. And I do not know why, but I do know, dearest, I love you. Whether or not there will be a reunion after the parting, again I do not know. But I do know that you will live in my heart forever, and that these last three years have marked out the path which I shall follow to my life's end. The end of that path is love for you, just as it is the road to be followed. So I write it, before we part - I love you forever. Your wife, Vera Aftermath: Death changes everything. After El Alamein Vera and her child returned to Australia. She married again. It was an unhappy union with a desk sergeant, Charles Herbert Round. She divorced him and married yet again, even more disastrously. Vera died by drowning while swimming at King Island in 1960. Read More