‘I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.’
Thomas Hardy
For those Australian soldiers who prolonged their leave, the most obvious handicap was the immediate suspension of payments. Many families were dependent on the soldier’s pay to supplement their income. For some it was their only source of revenue. Hundreds of other men were wrongly reported AWL, leaving wives and children with no source of income, and not a small amount of shame. Such was the situation for Pte Fullarton, a married soldier with a clean record after thirteen years of military service in both wars when he arrived home in Melbourne for two days’ leave. Mrs Fullarton did not appear happy to see him. When she curtly inquired about life in the training camps in Queensland, Pte Fullarton said it was going OK. Mrs Fullarton was not OK with his OK, calling him a liar and suggesting he head straight back to the arms of the woman he had been seeing during his two-month AWL. The poor woman had been stewing for some time. The situation had come to a head when their daughter had gone to the post office to pick up his allotment as usual, only to be advised there would be no money for Mrs Fullarton. Without money and assuming she was also without a husband, Mrs Fullarton had suffered a heart attack. The private was horrified—he had no explanation for the cessation of his pay. When he tried to plead his case, his wife presented her trump card. She produced an official statement from the accounts department charging that her man had been AWL, and ordered her husband out of the house. With that, Pte Fullarton left the premises, but not to return to any mystery woman. He went straight to the accounts department and made his complaint heard. It was soon established that Fullarton had never left his unit. He returned home, but not without arming himself with an official memo from the office proving his innocence. Mrs Fullarton made a complete recovery, and so did the marriage.
For bona fide AWLs, it wasn’t too difficult to obtain work in the country, as the rural industry was exempt from the necessity of obtaining labour through the National Service Office. Under the heading ‘Employment of Deserters and AWL Personnel’, a document marked ‘secret’ admitted to the ease with which men absent without leave could gain legal employment and avoid apprehension. The AWL men were not asked for identity cards, and civilians were shielding them.
While on official leave, Pte Tom Klein was helping out on the family farm west of the Great Dividing Range, near Parkes in NSW, when his father came down with kidney stones. Not wanting to leave his younger brother alone in charge of the farm, Tom applied for an extension of leave to complete the harvest. He needed a doctor’s certificate and the authority of Manpower to further his application. This was then rejected. Tom was ordered to return to camp in fourteen days, at the end of his official leave. His elder brother Alan was home on leave for two days, but Alan was army through and through and refused to join his brother and remain home until the harvest was done. After the two weeks had passed, Tom stayed on the farm and lived in fear of the Military Police arresting him. He was well aware that if he were to remain absent without leave for more than twenty-one days he would be charged with desertion. On day twenty of his absence, after a hard day carting and loading 730 bags of wheat onto trucks, Tom needed to be back in camp for the 8 a.m. roll call the next day to avoid a charge of desertion. He left on a mail train from Parkes, but the line was washed away by a severe storm and another train took him via Narromine, Dubbo and Orange. He eventually reached Granville, then changed trains to Liverpool, walked to the Moorbank camp and reported to the warrant officer there at 1.30 p.m. the next day. He was immediately charged with AWL and confined to barracks. Tom, being human, assumed the powers-that-be would be sympathetic to his case.
A week later he hit a wall—Major Wall, with a face like granite, who didn’t wait for any explanations and accused Tom of being an irresponsible young person, telling him that any such person who ‘defies his commanding officer’s orders, and treats the army with contempt, deserves the highest penalty, not only to teach you a lesson, but also any other spirited trooper’. Tom wasn’t a happy spirited trooper; he snapped at Wall, who snapped back, ‘Will you be tried by me, or a court martial?’ Tom chose a court martial. Wall turned to his aide and said, ‘Stamp his papers deserter.’
While in the confines of close arrest after their recent AWL, Stanley and Gordon would have found themselves among friends. Quite a few of the boys from the 2/17th Battalion didn’t make it back to camp until the winter of 1943. Pte Alfred Henry Harrison was a Roman Catholic born in the same year as Stanley, and judging from the somewhat undisciplined handwriting on his attestation form, Alfred’s enlistment had most probably been assisted by generous amounts of alcohol. After enlisting at the same time as Stanley, Alfred left for the Middle East in late 1940, contracted a bad dose of the mumps on arrival, then spent eight months in Tobruk, whereupon he was wounded in action but stayed on with his unit. He then copped a stray shrapnel blast, leaving him with first-degree burns to the right leg and right elbow.
Pte Harrison arrived back in Australia on 27 February 1943, the same day as Stanley, took his Liddington leave and didn’t return to camp until 11 June. Alfred was not a newcomer to AWL. He had eight charges to his credit, mostly small offences, a day off here and there, and after what he had been through, surely he had earned the right to take the odd break. For his latest absence he was court-martialled on 19 July, found guilty and sentenced to six months’ detention. It would appear Pte Harrison was not comfortable in the detention centre, and by the end of August he was AWL again. This time he made it back by 2 October 1943, just in time to embark for Port Moresby. He was home again for Christmas, and that’s where he stayed, remaining AWL from 25 December 1943 until his arrest on 22 May 1944. He escaped from custody three more times between June and October. He had proved himself a loyal soldier in the battles of the Middle East—the man was no coward, so surely he had a reasonable excuse?
In his defence, Harrison told the court:
In civilian life I am a farmer. It is a rented farm and it belongs to my parents. I have a brother and two sisters. My brother is eighteen. He was in the army but he is discharged now. My father is dead. Prior to his death he was seriously ill for a long period. During the last two years he has been ill at different times over that period for about twelve months. With my brother in the army that left my mother and two sisters to run the farm and one of the sisters is going to school. My mother and sister had applied for help to run the farm but they could not get it. It is a dairy farm with about seventy cows. They had to milk the cows on their own. I decided that as they could not get help, it was my duty to go and try and give them a hand.
It would appear that once back on home ground, Pte Harrison was torn between duty to country and duty to family. The end result for Harrison was that on 23 October 1944 he was sentenced to two years’ detention to be followed by a dishonourable discharge, which meant that his application for his hard-earned campaign medals for service in Tobruk and the Middle East was refused. In 1949 Harrison was still trying to clear his name. Following a request from the Returned and Services League as to the nature of Harrison’s dishonourable discharge, a letter from the central army records states that ‘by reason of his numerous Army convictions he is deemed to be incorrigible’.
Pte John ‘Jack’ Wilson was a 2/17th soldier from B Company who found himself at the centre of a major but little-remembered event that occurred on the home front. The 28-year-old had embarked for the Middle East in October 1940, some eight months before Stanley. Wilson saw action throughout Tobruk as well as El Alamein. He also arrived home on Aquitania and took more leave than was on offer. He returned to the camp at Narellan in June after a total of fifty-four days absent without leave. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine months’ detention.
Wilson’s reputation preceded him. His previous convictions included the following: sentinel sleeping on his post, striking a superior officer, conduct to the prejudice of good order (five times), two previous counts of AWL, failure to appear on parade, drunkenness, disobeying lawful command with wilful defiance, and stealing regimental mess property. All in all he had racked up one hundred and sixteen days’ detention while in the Middle East. He had covered most offences, except for one: desertion from battle. Wilson was no shirker on the front line. Lt Col John Broadbent, commanding officer of the 2/17th, would later describe Wilson as ‘an audacious soldier, rather than a courageous one’, who always required ‘a special measure of attention’. It was while serving his detention that Wilson’s audacity landed him in a far more serious predicament. On 19 October 1943, after serving four months of his sentence, Wilson was court-martialled again, a new charge added to his list: mutiny.
What would later be referred to as the Grovely Mutiny occurred in E Compound at the 2/1st Australian Detention Barracks at Grovely, in Brisbane, on 7 October 1943. At the time, he still had five months of his sentence to serve. Wilson pleaded guilty to ‘Joining a mutiny to resist by combining with other soldiers of the AIF then under sentence, his and their superior officers in the execution of their duty’. He was sentenced to be imprisoned with hard labour for five years and to be discharged with ignominy from His Majesty’s Service. Wilson was accused of being one of three ringleaders of the mutiny, along with privates J.J. Derrick and A.L. Chalmers. The charge of mutiny has a ring of notoriety to it, a legendary term, mostly associated with bearded men on boats. But there were no oceans near Grovely. So what exactly did this mutiny entail? Basically the charge against Wilson was: ‘When on active service, causing a mutiny in His Majesty’s Forces, in that he . . . addressed other soldiers under sentence then assembled, in mutinous language, by advising them not to turn out for parade in consequence of which language they . . . and other soldiers under sentences refused to fall in on parade.’
The mutinous language consisted of two sentences: ‘We have complaints, but what guarantees do we get? How do we know that our complaints will be rectified?’ Hardly an offence of Fletcher Christian proportions. It appears Pte Wilson was guilty of no more than engaging in a stop-work meeting. He was guilty of speaking up. Audacious? Yes. But mutinous? A cause for ignominious discharge? And just what was Jack Wilson complaining about? In early November 1944, a year after her husband had been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for mutiny, Lily Wilson, wife of Jack and mother to their two children, read that there was to be an inquiry into the case. She wrote to the acting Prime Minister of Australia, F.M. Forde, also Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Army at the time, in regard to the severity of her husband’s sentence. In the six-page letter, neatly handwritten on lined notepaper, Lily states her case with the utmost courtesy.
Dear Mr Forde,
I hope you will not think it presumptuous of me, for writing you a personal letter, I just want you to understand my feelings toward your position, in having my husband’s case reopened . . . I want to explain about that bad record, as you described it of my husband. The worst offence being to hit a sergeant, well, I have a letter from him telling me he hoped I would not think that he had made that charge against Jack, as he was a mate of his. He said he had told the two M.P.s to ‘skip’ the charge, but of course they like to show how important they can be I suppose, anyway, the boy is very sorry that this charge is being held over Jacks head . . . Mr Forde, if you could just talk to my husband for ten minutes, you would have the faith in him that I have, of course I know you are much too busy to bother over just one soldier, but I think if I made that plea to our King, to just give the minutes of his time to a soldier who had fought for him and been recommended and done numerous other things that have never been in the papers he would answer my request, I know he would. Jack is very popular . . . I have heard the following phrase dozens of times since the boys returned from the Middle East; ‘Wilson, is not just one soldier, he is eight rolled into one, the gamest bloke that ever went onto a battlefield.’ Referring back to those convictions, one was having a button on the tunic undone, and simple little things like that . . . I know the army has to be severe, and discipline maintained but, have you ever been late at the office on unimportant days . . .
Lily maintains his earlier two charges for AWL were nothing more than being late for roll call and underscores his courage on the battlefield. She argues that the nine-month detention for his AWL on the home front was not just, that he was never AWL to start with.
Do you think they deserve detention after what they have suffered, it was reading this mornings paper and feeling for the boys, that I suddenly realised my husband has gone through some hell & suffering too, that I there upon sat down to write to you. Mr Forde, when the case reopens, I want you to know, that we all have the highest admiration and esteem for you, and do not hold you responsible for what has happened to Jack. I have in fact cut your photo out of the paper to paste with one of your letters in my scrap book of cuttings about the case, which I am keeping for my two sons benefit so that some day they may read about what their father did, it may discourage them to enlist in any further wars we have, I pray we do not, but if democracy is the way my husband was treated after fighting for it, well we will always have wars. I do hope my letter hasn’t bored you . . . I felt I had to sit down and let some of it out on paper. I had once considered being a journalist, but I got married instead.
Lily, the ideal of the devoted wife, paints a very different picture of the audacious private, and F.M. Forde responded with sympathy for Wilson’s plight. On 21 November he replied to Lily Wilson:
The circumstances which have caused you to communicate with me are very much regretted. You will, no doubt, have read a statement in the press to the effect that I have arranged for the appointment of a Judge of the Supreme Court of South Australia, Mr Justice G.S. Reed, to conduct an inquiry into the case.
The Canberra Times announced on Wednesday 29 November that ‘The enquiry into the case of Private Jack Wilson, who was sentenced to five years imprisonment for mutiny at Grovely detention camp, will commence in Sydney today’. On 23 December the same newspaper, reporting on the inquiry, revealed that Pte Wilson’s brigadier commander described Wilson as a brave man under fire who did his duty well. But Lt Col Noel William Simpson was not so kind. He had recommended Wilson be discharged on the grounds that the private was an inefficient soldier of no value to the army or the country in general. So far the score was Wilson 1, Army 1.
The inquiry resumed in the new year with the Melbourne Argus reporting on 17 January 1945 that Wilson had stated at the inquiry that on the night he began his detention, the staff of Grovely detention camp were obviously half-drunk and roaring like maniacs. He denied all charges of promoting trouble or inciting others. He stated that he, J.J. Derrick and A.L. Chalmers were thrown into a six-by-eight-foot verminous wooden cell, with no straw in their palliasses. He said he knew trouble was brewing before the alleged mutiny but he kept his head down. Wilson 2, Army 1.
The score went up again on 20 January when The Canberra Times reported that ten of the Grovely staff were known to inmates as ‘the Bloodhounds of Jerusalem’ and that soldiers at Grovely learned early not to complain. The plot thickened when The Argus picked up the story on the twenty-third with reports of independent allegations of persecution by the guards. Leslie Milton Giles, who had been detained at Grovely for 147 days, made the most startling allegation. He stated that when thirty-nine members of the 9th Division arrived in the camp to serve their sentences, the staff came out of the sergeants’ mess roaring and screaming, and repeating over and over that they hated the 9th Division. Were the conscripted guards jealous of the fierce fighting these men had seen? Having never seen action overseas themselves, were their actions the result of resentment or shame? Or were they just permanently drunk?
Giles further stated that when the prisoners left the trucks the guards came at them, punching and bashing them and pushing them forcefully over barbed wire. Anyone who said they returned to Australia on Aquitania was knocked to the ground and kicked. Grovely detention camp was certainly not the place Stanley Livingston would wish to wind up after his court martial. There were further reports that prisoners were stripped naked and forced to stand for hours under the shower in a form of vertical waterboarding predating Guantanamo. Guns were fired towards prisoners, and everything was done to intimidate them. Another ex-serviceman, Jack Bright, said the guards did their best to make the camp a hell on earth for those under sentence. While the guards gloated, the prisoners had to live in vermin-infested cells, and the conditions were unsanitary and deplorable.
The tables were turning in the Army vs Wilson case as the press revealed more of the realities of life in the Grovely camp. Word even spread to Grovely itself. On 26 March The Sydney Morning Herald reported another uprising by soldiers detained at Grovely. A mass escape attempt resulted in the facility being set on fire. The same article reveals that as a result of Justice Reed’s interim report, Pte J. Wilson, Pte J.J. Derrick and Pte A.L. Chalmers had been released from gaol on 4 March after serving two years of a five-year sentence. Justice Reed found that they had not been the ringleaders of a mutiny. In December 1945, The Canberra Times reported that the Minister for the Army, Mr Forde, had not yet acted upon a recommendation that the three servicemen implicated in the Grovely mutiny should be given honourable discharges. The article further attests that the men were having difficulty in civilian life because they could not produce an honourable discharge, and were denied rehabilitation rights and gratuities and their children were denied dependants benefits.
Meanwhile, Lily continued her correspondence with Forde. She was not one to give up easily. In The Sydney Morning Herald on 23 March 1946 there appears a tiny article of just one paragraph, reporting that the sentences of discharge with ignominy for privates Wilson, Derrick and Chalmers for their part in the mutiny at Grovely had been revoked. The men would now be merely discharged. It had been quite a battle for the merely discharged Pte Wilson. Still, his kids got a great scrapbook out of it.