FOURTEEN
ONE DAY in January 1945 an Australian company commander on the island of Bougainville, where his battalion had relieved an American unit two months earlier, telephoned his colonel. The men, he said, were “too tired” to carry out an attack which had been ordered. The colonel, named Matthews, insisted that the assault must be made. Half an hour later, the company commander telephoned again, to say that his men had refused to leave their positions: “They said they were all too tired629, they were cut off from the world and could not get casualties back and weren’t prepared to get any anyway.” Matthews told the officer he must make his men obey their orders. “He said he knew they wouldn’t, but would give it a go.” Shortly afterwards the company second-in-command rang to report that the officer had broken down in tears. He was relieved and sent to the rear. Next day, another of Matthews’s companies wilfully broke off contact with the enemy. A platoon commander reported that his men were “frightened.” A third company commander told Matthews that his men lacked all confidence in him, the CO. The feeling was mutual. A month later Matthews wrote contemptuously about another battalion’s similar experiences, observing laconically that they “must be no better than some of my companies.”
If these episodes seem astonishing, they were by no means uncommon during the unhappy travails of Australia’s forces in the south-west Pacific in the last phase of the war. From October 1944 to July 1945, Australian soldiers participated in a series of island campaigns. The evident futility of these embittered many men, drove some to the edge of mutiny and beyond. The last year of the war proved the most inglorious of Australia’s history as a fighting nation. In the Mediterranean during 1941–42, Australian troops forged a reputation second to none. In 1943, many of the same soldiers fought a harsh, vital campaign in New Guinea, while America gathered its forces in the south-west Pacific. Australian soldiers performed as splendidly at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Trail as they had done at Tobruk. Thereafter, however, the Australian Army seemed to disappear from the conflict. A trauma overtook the nation which divided its people, demoralised its forces and cast a lasting shadow over its memory of the Second World War.
The country had suffered deeply in the thirties’ Depression, and greeted the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 without enthusiasm. Military conscription was introduced for home service only. Two divisions of volunteers were sent to the Middle East, and a third was lost at Singapore in 1942; Australian aircrew served with distinction in every theatre, and the Australian navy made a valuable contribution. But most Australian soldiers chose to stay at home, languishing idly in the ranks of militia units. The country was racked with labour disputes, many fomented by Communist-dominated trades unions. The Communist Party was banned in Australia until Russia entered the war. The leaders of its 20,000 membership, thereafter legitimised once more, professed to support the war effort. But strikes persisted, above all in the dock labour force.
Remoteness had made Australia a parochial society, but this is an inadequate explanation for the behaviour of some of its people. The refusal to adapt to participation in a war of national survival, when Japan aspired to make them subjects of its empire, was extraordinary. Public alarm about home defence prompted the Australian government in 1942 to insist on the return of all its soldiers from the Middle East. Churchill with difficulty retained the famous 9th Australian Division in Montgomery’s Eighth Army until El Alamein in November, but this provoked anger in Canberra. When the Middle East formations returned home, they were committed to action in Papua New Guinea. There, through late 1942 and 1943, Australian troops under MacArthur’s command fought some of the fiercest actions of the war against the Japanese.
With every month of the campaign, bitterness mounted among those volunteers for overseas service towards the host of their fellow citizens who refused to leave home. Their own country, they said, had become “a bludgers’ paradise.” “Bludger” is a word denoting a parasite, loafer or scrounger. The country seemed burdened with a depressing number of all three, many in uniform. The government responded to the unpopularity of military service by cutting the army’s size by 22 percent in the last two years of the war, but its bloated officer corps meanwhile grew by 14 percent. War Minister F. W. Forde reported to Prime Minister John Curtin on the “deterioration in the morale630 of the Australian Fighting Forces that had obviously taken place…It would appear that this is largely due to their enforced stay on the mainland of Australia with no clearly defined indication as to when and where they may be likely to be called upon to take part in active operations.”
American and British officers arriving to serve in Australia were stunned by the industrial anarchy which prevailed, the difficulties of getting ships offloaded or repaired. “Many…laborers refused to work631 in the rain or handle refrigerated food and many other types of cargo,” an American official historian noted with dismay. “They objected, with some success, to the utilization of mechanical equipment.” U.S. Army quartermaster details had to be kept on standby at docksides, lest rain suddenly halt off-loading by civilian labour. Absenteeism among the workforce at Townsville, on the north coast of Queensland, for instance, averaged 18 percent. Some dock labourers reported for work only at weekends, when double or triple pay was available, until such practices drove the U.S. Army to halt weekend supply movements. An Australian docker handled just a quarter of the average daily cargo shifted by an American soldier.
In September 1943, after a succession of outrageous dockside incidents, MacArthur wrote to Curtin, Australia’s Labor prime minister, asserting that the Seamen’s Union “was directly obstructing the war effort632…Fifth column activities may be behind these occurrences.” Following a mutiny on board an American cargo vessel, the union displayed solidarity by refusing to allow another crew to board the vessel until the mutineers were freed from confinement. Australian meatpackers haggled shamelessly about wage rates for producing rations for the U.S. Army, and rejected streamlined working practices proposed by the Americans. Industrial absenteeism reflected what a Sydney polling organisation described to the government as “apathy amongst large sections633 of the people towards the war effort.” The black market, a feature of all wartime societies, achieved special vigour in Australia. Empty whiskey bottles with labels and seals intact were sold for five shillings apiece, to be refilled with adulterated spirit. Buying provisions “on the black” became a way of life.
Almost a million days’ production was lost through strikes in 1942 and the first half of 1943, many of these in the docks and mines. Coal output fell substantially. By November 1943, no Japanese submarine had launched an attack in Australian waters for five months, yet Australian ships’ crews refused to put to sea without naval escort, and downed tools to enforce their point. Americans were increasingly disgusted by what they perceived as Australian pusillanimity. MacArthur said: “I tell you, these Australians won’t fight.” The U.S. minister in Canberra, Nelson Johnson, wrote to the State Department in June 1944: “The Department may be surprised634 to know that the Legation has no record of even so much as a telephone call of congratulations from any official or private Australian following on the news of an American victory.” In September 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald published a dispatch from India, saying that British and American servicemen were asking whether Australia was “pulling right out of the war635.” This report provoked a question in the Senate in Canberra on 13 September, demanding “whether the Australian Army was to take any further part in the war.” In October 1944, the Sydney Daily Telegraph suggested that industrial strife in the country had reached “civil war or very near it636.”
In some degree, Australian behaviour reflected a crisis of national purpose and identity. Beyond this, there was frustration that, while their country’s men were expected to fight, its leaders were denied a significant voice in Allied decision-making. “The Australian government tried637 to force an entrance into the higher councils of war, but had limited success,” in the understated words of an Australian historian. The 1941–42 British débâcle in Malaya and Burma prompted a major political and cultural swing in Australian allegiances. “I make it quite plain,” said Prime Minister Curtin on 27 December 1941, “that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” Australians’ theatre of war was overwhelmingly dominated by, and dependent upon, the United States. Their historic British mentor and protector had been found wanting in the hour of need. With notable abruptness, they embraced the United States. In the case of their womenfolk, this was not merely figurative. American servicemen, of whom a million staged through Australia, were delighted by the warmth of their welcome from Australian girls, to whom the war granted a new sexual freedom. U.S. Navy crews were amazed to perceive crowds of teenagers—“pogey-bait”—waving in frenzied welcome as their ships approached Sydney harbour.
Yet, as the war advanced, grateful as were the Allies for Australia’s huge contribution towards feeding their soldiers, there was sourness about the limited combat contribution being made by this country of seven million people. In January 1943, Curtin with difficulty steered through the Australian Parliament a militia bill, which made all Australian troops liable for overseas service—but only in the south-west Pacific, the theatre in which the nation’s interests were directly threatened. This was the best that a weak government could do, with political and social stresses racking the nation. “The mainspring of Curtin’s leadership638…was a conception of the welfare of the Australian people which was limited to their life at home,” wrote an Australian official historian.
In the course of the entire war, some 691,400 men were conscripted into the Australian Army. In 1944, however, almost all of these languished in barracks at home—bored, fractious, in an almost intractable condition of indiscipline. It is hard to overstate the contrast between the superb performance of 9th Australian Division in the Western Desert in 1941–42 and the shameful condition to which the national army was reduced two years later, absent from any significant land battlefield. The question of where Australian troops might be deployed was bitterly contested. MacArthur, who had become a national hero in 1942, never reciprocated Australian warmth. Australian forces were under his command, but he had lost faith in them. He had no desire to make his major thrust in the Philippines with any save American soldiers. Australian militia units—the “Chockos,” or “chocolate soldiers,” as they were known—were plainly unreliable. MacArthur’s solution was to employ Australian troops to replace American units “mopping up” surviving Japanese garrisons where these still held out, on Bougainville, New Britain and parts of Papua New Guinea.
“Mopping up” was immediately identified as a thankless task, similar to that delegated by Eisenhower to Free French units in 1944–45, besieging German garrisons isolated in the French ports. On 18 October, Gen. Vernon Sturdee, commanding the Australian First Army in New Guinea, wrote to his commander-in-chief: “The Jap garrisons are at present virtually in POW camps but feed themselves, so why incur a large number of Australian casualties in the process of eliminating them?” Why, indeed? As early as August 1944, MacArthur had asserted: “The enemy garrisons which639 have been bypassed in the Solomons and New Guinea represent no menace…The actual time of their destruction is of little or no importance and their influence as a contributing factor to the war is already negligible.” If this was so, if it was deemed unnecessary for American soldiers to engage these impotent but savage remnants, why now should it be desirable for Australians to do so, when the enemy had grown six months hungrier and more desperate?
The Melbourne Herald wrote in January 1945: “American public opinion640, which is inclined to write off Australia as a fighting force for the remainder of the Pacific War, now sees the Digger in the humblest of secondary roles—mopping up behind the real fighting, slogging Yank.” There was Australian anger, as well as bewilderment, that MacArthur insisted on deploying far more Australian troops for “mopping up” than their own commander-in-chief, Thomas Blamey, thought necessary. There was speculation that the Americans were embarrassed by Australian proposals that tasks which had occupied six U.S. divisions should now be fulfilled by the same number of Australian brigades.
Japanese garrisons on the disputed islands still numbered some tens of thousands, but possessed no power to injure the Allied cause. They were cut off from home, woefully understrength, racked by starvation and disease. Any rational strategic judgement would have left them to their own devices, screened by token Allied forces until their nation’s defeat enforced their surrender. The notion that Australian soldiers should risk their lives merely to achieve a body count of impotent yet dangerous Japanese disgusted their commanders—and soon, also, soldiers on the ground.
After much debate, however, in October 1944 three Australian divisions were committed to Bougainville, in the Solomons; New Britain; and New Guinea. There they passed the last eight months of the war in frustration and discomfort, sometimes misery and fear. There was special dismay that while the Americans in these areas had pursued a passive strategy towards the surviving Japanese, Blamey decided that instead the Australians should actively pursue the enemy. He believed that offensive action would enhance morale. The Australian government also wished its troops to be seen to liberate territories under Australian colonial guardianship. This was a policy which might win some headlines, but was certain also to cost lives.
As commander-in-chief of the Australian Army, Gen. Thomas Blamey inspired little confidence within his own society, and less outside it. Argument persists in Australia today about whether Blamey bears responsibility for some of the army’s worst wartime misfortunes, or merely faced difficulties which reflected the schisms besetting his nation. He was a conceited, corpulent, devious autocrat, sixty in 1944. Like most of those who served under him, he was a citizen soldier. He started life as a teacher and lay preacher, then found his way into the First World War through service in cadet and militia units. With the dramatic wartime expansion of the Australian Army, by 1918 he was a thirty-four-year-old brigadier, chief of staff to a corps commander. Between the wars he served as commissioner of the Victoria Police. In this role he earned an ugly reputation for corruption and politicking, which prompted his sacking in 1936. In a small world, however, this small man secured the appointment of army commander-in-chief in 1939, and kept it to the end. The legendary Australian war correspondent and historian Chester Wilmot wrote of the troops’ attitude: “Knowing that Blamey had the reputation of being a crook, they did not serve happily under him.”
Blamey’s reputation was further diminished as deputy to Wavell during the 1941 débâcle in Greece. Not only was he himself accused of cowardice—a charge levelled by his own chief of staff—but he earned bitter enmity by securing the safety of his son, a staff officer, who was flown to Egypt from the stricken battlefield while a host of other men were left behind to the Germans. Sir Arthur Tedder, then senior British air commander in the theatre, described Blamey as “a rather unpleasant641 political soldier…a tubby little man with a snub nose and expensive complexion, high blood pressure and a scrubby little white moustache. He has a certain amount of common sense and 20 years ago may have been fairly useful, but—!” Likewise Auchinleck, writing from the desert: “He wasn’t a general I should have chosen to command an operation.” Sir Alan Brooke found him “not an impressive642 specimen. He looks entirely drink sodden and somewhat repulsive.” Yet Blamey kept his job, returning to Australia as C-in-C, and riding stubbornly on the waves of controversy about the Australian Army’s deployment. His conspicuous enthusiasm for women and alcohol even in combat zones disgusted many officers.
So unpopular did Blamey become that a demonstration was staged against him in the streets of Sydney. His willingness to commit forces to futile operations which cost hundreds of lives earned him the lasting animosity of many Australians. “On his head descended643 perhaps the strongest vituperation to which any military leader in that war was subjected by people on his own side,” the Australian official historian wrote later. The best that can be said644 for Blamey was that his government deserved the real responsibility for tolerating his weakness, incompetence and self-indulgence, when he provided a host of reasons to justify dismissal.
The Australian Army’s operations in the south-west Pacific became a wretched experience for those reluctantly obliged to take part. A private soldier named J. H. Ewen wrote from his Pacific island: “We are all just about had645. Living on your nerves in mud and rain, sleeping in holes in the ground wears a fellow down. I have watched the boys’ faces get drawn and haggard, and their movements slow and listless.” There were long, nerve-racking patrols, on which monotony and discomfort never suppressed fear of an ambush or booby trap. The Japanese might be shattered strategically, but to the end their survivors retained the power to steal men’s lives. Peter Medcalf described a man who broke down before a patrol on Bougainville: “A feeling of terrible sadness646 and compassion touched all of us. We gently helped him up and led him to Perce the Boss, holding his hands and guiding him like a small and helpless child. Among us were men of many backgrounds, hardened men who had seen the worst in their fellows; but the same feeling affected all of us—there but for the doubtful grace of God or providence go we.”
“The political and grand strategic647 elements of the 1945 campaigns…drew the ire of Australian participants, who soon became aware of the dubious value of the operations, and that lives lost were wasted,” wrote an Australian historian. “Consequently, they tried to minimise risks. In this, they were strongly encouraged by most commanders.” A deep divide persisted between units of the old Australian Expeditionary Force and those of the despised militia. One soldier wrote home describing allegations of large-scale theft against militiamen, who he asserted were “capable of anything648 except fighting the enemy.” For small units, these jungle deployments were desperately lonely. A platoon commander in New Guinea, thirty-five-year-old Victorian schoolteacher A. H. Robertson, wrote to his wife: “When you get into action649, you don’t see much of any troops except those of your own company, and very little of those not in your own platoon.” They suffered chronic equipment shortcomings, not least boots. “Cross two rivers and what have you?” an Australian chaplain demanded bitterly. “A pair of uppers.”
On 21 March 1945, Col. G. R. Matthews recorded that a senior officer had complained to him about the conduct in action of some militia units: “Troops when fired on rush back in disorder leaving their officers. They are frightened to move out of their perimeters. Patrols go out and do not complete tasks; sit in jungle and wait for time to elapse and then come in.” That April, Private Ewen recorded a mutiny in the 61st Battalion: “Today 9 from D Coy and 3 from B refused to go on patrol…If they send us in again the Coys are going to refuse to go. So things are in a very bad state. Already two officers have been sent back for standing up for the men. Nearly all the boys have a vacant look in their eyes and look dazed.” After coming out of action Ewen served three months’ field punishment for refusal to obey an order: “75 of us refused to go into action until we were again given our leave.” Defiant to the end, the soldier asserted that it was worth accepting court-martial to escape combat.
Back home, criticism of the military operations to which Australian troops were committed persisted to the end of the war, feeding off the testimony of those serving in the field, and intensifying their rancour. On 26 April 1945, as opposition leader Robert Menzies told the House of Representatives in Canberra: “I happen to entertain650 the strongest possible view that it is wrong to use the Australian forces…in operations…which seem to me to have no relation to any first-class strategic object in this war.” More than a thousand Australians died in New Guinea in the last year of the war, along with 516 on Bougainville. Each loss was bitterly resented. Australian forces killed some thousands of Japanese, but to what end? “In both Australian and Japanese history651 the offensives of 1945 [in New Guinea] will endure as examples of splendid fortitude, but whether they should have happened seems likely always to be in dispute,” wrote the Australian official historian long afterwards.
In the final months, two Australian divisions were deployed in an amphibious assault on Borneo. There, too, dissension focused upon whether an operation ordered by MacArthur served any useful purpose. The nominal objective was to regain control of the Dutch East Indies’ rich oil fields. Yet it never seemed plausible that these could be made serviceable in time to assist the Allied war effort. The American blockade already ensured that Borneo’s oil was doing little good to the Japanese. The view was widely held that the only purpose of the operation was to keep other Allied forces off America’s pitch for the last round of the Pacific war.
On 1 May 1945, an Australian brigade group landed on Borneo’s offshore island of Tarakan. This was garrisoned by 1,800 Japanese, and possessed an airfield thought likely to be useful for Allied operations on the mainland. Rugged fighting followed. By the end of July, three hundred Japanese remained at large on Tarakan, and the Australians had suffered 894 casualties. The prized airfield proved beyond repair. Ninth Australian Division landed in Brunei Bay on 10 June, and secured the immediate coastal area by the end of the month, for the loss of 114 killed. On 1 July, 7th Australian Division carried out the last significant amphibious landing of the war at the Dutch oil port of Balikpapan, in the south-east of Dutch Borneo. Over the week that followed, the Australians secured twenty miles of coastal territory around the port, leaving special forces and guerrillas to hunt Japanese through the inland wildernesses. Some 229 Australians died, and 634 were wounded. Once more, it was impossible to believe that anything worthwhile had been achieved—and every man at Tarakan and Balikpapan knew it.
The Australian Army lost 7,384 dead fighting the Japanese in the Second World War. This was fewer of the nation’s warriors than died as prisoners having been captured in Malaya and at Singapore in 1942; slightly more deaths than the U.S. Marines suffered on Iwo Jima. For a people whose soldiers, sailors and airmen won such admiration in other theatres, it was a tragedy that in their own hemisphere the wartime experience was poisoned by domestic strife and battlefield frustration. Churchill bore a significant responsibility for his cavalier treatment of a nation which he continued to perceive as a colony, and for whose domestic difficulties he had no sympathy. Whatever the mitigating circumstances, however, it seemed perverse that, having won so much honour far away in the Mediterranean, Australia’s share of the Pacific war ended in rancour and anticlimax.