‘Remember…it is not the man with the gun that gets shot; it’s the rabbit that is running away’
—One account of General Blamey’s speech to the troops at Koitaki
With Blamey in charge, and the completely loyal Lieutenant-General Ned Herring installed as his deputy, the war was allowed to resume. This is not meant flippantly: some certainty prevailed after a week of confusion. Troops were apprised of their new lines of command; fresh orders issued; and US regiments deployed along tracks parallel to Kokoda to the east. A stream of ‘Rowell men’ left Port Moresby, casualties of Blamey’s ‘purges’. The most prominent scalps were Brigadier Arnold Potts and Chester Wilmot.
Wilmot, the acclaimed Australian war correspondent, made the mistake of writing an honest analysis of the Kokoda campaign.1 Rowell had appended it to a sitrep, unwisely noting that he’d be happier if more officers understood the war as well as ‘this civilian observer’. Blamey was unimpressed.
A marked ‘Rowell man’, Wilmot complained about press censorship and was overheard criticising Blamey’s ‘profitable rackets’ in the Middle East. And, of course, he dared to ask irritating questions about the lack of jungle greens. Wilmot had to go. Blamey activated a simple expedient: he withdrew Wilmot’s press accreditation, and thus froze him out of the Pacific War. Australia’s finest war correspondent went to Britain, where he covered the greatest story of the war in Europe, the D-day landings, for the BBC.
Potts met a swift and ignominious end. It saddened the troops, who looked on this man as a father figure, and a hero. He’d salvaged their self-esteem as soldiers in a desperate situation. Brisbane had a different opinion. Potts had failed, Blamey concluded. MacArthur, who ‘needed scalps’,2 agreed: his own scalp was looking decidedly vulnerable. In October the Americans were hard-pressed at Guadalcanal; if the Japanese gained control of the island, they could sever the vital US–Australia link and throttle the Allied counteroffensive. MacArthur had to clear Papua and New Guinea of the enemy as soon as possible. In this atmosphere, brigadiers whom MacArthur perceived as having failed were finished.
Before his dismissal, Potts wrote a series of fascinating letters to his wife, Dawn, in which he shared his contempt for Blamey (Dawn was aware of Blamey’s youthful attraction to Potts’s sister): ‘He’s a difficult cove and hard to talk to, as he butts in to any statement and sidetracks with savage criticism…’And in a letter on 11 October: ‘[Blamey] screams and interferes terrifically and the axe is held over any head that doesn’t bow to superior wisdom. I’d love to have one hour of authority and ask who is running the bloody war…’3
The axe was for Potts. There are various accounts of his dismissal. The most credible tells of Blamey simply phoning Potts on 22 October, with a few blunt words: ‘Change of climate for you, Potts. You go to Darwin. Your successor…will meet you tomorrow and take over.’4
Lieutenant-Colonel Ken Murdoch gave a more dramatic, if unconfirmed, account: Blamey visited Potts’s office on 23 October and ordered everyone out. Murdoch, working in an adjacent room, did not hear the order. He did hear the conversation, and claims that Blamey said, ‘failures like the Kokoda Trail…could not be tolerated—the men had shown that something was lacking…’
Blamey, so the account goes, added that he was ‘relieving Potts forthwith’. During the row Blamey reportedly barked, ‘I’ll see you’re finished in the army!’ To which Potts is said to have replied, ‘Good! I can go back and tell the country what a mess you’ve made of things!’5
Potts was not permitted to meet his successor Ivan Dougherty; he was ordered to ‘make himself available’ immediately for transfer to Darwin.
The news raced through the brigade. The troops were outraged. Many officers tendered their resignations, which the brigadier, deeply moved, refused to accept.
Potts wrote a brief farewell message to ‘Officers, NCOs and men’ on 23 October 1942: ‘…saying goodbye is the hardest job in my life…This much I can say: that I regard this Brigade as the best fighting formation in the AIF and second to none in this war or the last…I’m proud that I was one of you, Thanking you and goodbye.’6
Not all senior commanders deserted Potts. General Tubby Allen later bravely commended Potts’s fighting withdrawal—‘with the resultant extension of the enemy’s line of communication’—as the right decision in appalling circumstances. This infuriated Blamey, who complained that he’d never heard of a reversal on the field of battle ‘explained away so ingenuously’.7
Regardless of who, ultimately, was to blame for the circumstances that led to Potts’s retreat, the brutal facts, as Bill Edgar points out, were these: Potts had gone backwards when he’d been told to go forwards, he’d disobeyed orders; and he’d been innovative (perhaps his most dangerous tendency).8 He’d also saved the lives of many young men (for which, no doubt, their parents were later grateful).
In this, Blamey’s actions must be seen within the context of the army culture of the day. ‘That an officer should be sacked when he has done his best,’ explained Australia’s official historian, Dudley McCarthy, ‘may be cruel, but it is merely one of war’s cruelties…The only way to stop it and to stop the other cruelties…is to stop having wars. To protest against it is like protesting against the Laws of Gravity.’9 In the dignified manner of his exit, Potts understood this.
The men formed up in ranks, resplendent in slouch hats and their best uniforms. Blamey appeared in his broad-rimmed hat, long khaki coat and baggy shorts, with a handkerchief at hand to wipe his sweating brow. Droplets of moisture gathered on his moustache as he prepared to speak from a little wooden dais.
Norman Carlyon, Blamey’s loyal ADC, stood beside the platform, and remembers, despite the intense heat, breaking out ‘in a cold sweat’: ‘I realised that [Blamey] was in a most aggressive mood.’10
Blamey spoke without notes. He got straight to the point. Carlyon recalls him saying: ‘The men had been defeated, I had been defeated, and Australia had been defeated…this was not good enough. Every soldier…had to remember that he was worth three Japanese. In future he expected…advance at all costs.’11 With every word, the troops grew restless.
There are several accounts of what he said next: ‘Remember…it is not the man with the gun that gets shot; it’s the rabbit that is running away’,12 is one version.
The troops thought they were being compared to terrified rabbits. Some dared to protest, to shout out. Blamey ‘couldn’t believe anyone would interrupt him’, recalled one lance-corporal.13 The feeling among the troops approached mutiny, said Frank Sublet. Major Steward described the men as ‘almost molten with rage and indignation’.14 Only the officers’ restraining influence prevented an ugly scene.
Nor were the officers spared. The same day Blamey summoned the 21st Brigade’s senior brass to a private meeting (several refused to attend, including Steward). He began, ‘I wonder if you are worthy of commanding such magnificent troops?’15 They emerged severely demoralised. They were inadequate to the task, Blamey told them. They had let down their men and, by implication, their country; some had failed miserably. They were not worthy of the troops, he said.
Extreme resentment met these charges. One lieutenant swung a punch at Captain Robert Porter, a Blamey staff member. The wrath of the men pursued Herring out of the camp. After tactlessly lobbing in his tuppence worth—‘soldiers must not be afraid to die’—the startled Herring ran the gauntlet of ‘a booing and jeering exit’.16 Blamey himself went ‘strangely quiet’ as his staff car drove away. He was on the point of weeping, observed his ADC.17
The charge of cowardice was an intolerable psychological burden for young men who’d endured the Kokoda withdrawal. They were not cynics; they believed in noble motives such as courage and self-sacrifice.* They saw themselves in heroic terms, as the saviours of their nation. Friends had died in their arms; they’d witnessed the wounded crawl off into the jungle. Posthumously decorated mates had flung themselves in the path of the enemy. They were in their twenties.
The brigade boiled with indignation. A deep disrespect for the commander rippled through the ranks. Blamey’s ‘rabbit speech’ spread like ‘a grass fire borne on a summer gale’.18 When he heard of it, Potts said that he’d fry Blamey’s soul in the next world for ‘passing the buck’. The wounded heard of the speech in their bunks at the Australian General Hospital in Port Moresby. When Blamey visited, the men nibbled on lettuce leaves and sang ‘Run, Rabbit, Run!’ as he walked down the lines of beds. Blamey gave no sign that he’d heard them.19
No copy of Blamey’s speech survives, only the recollections of those who were there and the muted reinterpretations of those who were not. The speech is glaringly absent from battalion histories, whose associations were threatened with the loss of their War Memorial grants if they mentioned it. The 2/14th’s battalion history derisively alludes to Blamey’s ‘lectures of considerable interest’.20 There were attempts to leak the speech to the press, but wartime censorship forbade publication. Men vented their bitterness in other ways.
Padre Fred Burt (2/16th Battalion), on his return to Perth in 1942, delivered a sermon about the injustice of Koitaki. Summoned to Army HQ in Melbourne on suspicion of a breach of security, Burt told Major-General C.E.M. Lloyd, the adjutant-general, ‘You can put me out of the army; I’ll resign my commission.’ To mollify the angry cleric, Lloyd explained that ‘mistakes are always made’ in war, to which Burt replied: ‘On this occasion, the men who saved Australia in spite of your mistakes, are the men who are blamed.’ The padre then got up and walked out.21
Could it be that Blamey was misunderstood? Or misheard? This possibility is often raised. Some attempts have been made to exonerate Blamey. Brigadier Ivan Dougherty, Potts’s successor, believed the men misinterpreted him; their sensitivity to criticism had led them to draw conclusions that weren’t intended.22
He claimed Blamey was referring to the Japanese, and killing them was ‘like shooting rabbits back home’. Dougherty added that ‘listening to him I thought what he said was quite a good description of the tactics needed to deal with the Japanese. It never occurred to me that he was having a crack at the brigade…’ The official historian Dudley McCarthy used a tangle of zoological metaphors to portray Blamey as misunderstood: ‘[Blamey] said the Jap was like a gorilla; he would get into a hole and he would not surrender…he had to be got out of his holes and put on the run. Blamey added that it was like shooting rabbits.23
Perhaps the last word ought to go to the man least likely to embellish, edit, fabricate or mishear Blamey: his adjutant and friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Carlyon, a most fastidious man, who stood beside his boss during the speech. ‘The rank and file assumed that they were being described as rabbits. It amazed me that Blamey should deal so insensitively with the men…Blamey had spoken, as usual, with complete candour. I see this as one of the rare times when his judgement was hasty and wrong.’24
Whatever the truth, Blamey’s ‘rabbit’ speech lives on in the minds of a dwindling number of war veterans. Time has not healed their bitterness. Every soldier interviewed for this book expressed hatred and bitterness towards the man—only a few senior officers were forgiving.