CHAPTER ONE

For King and Country … and the paid adventure

High in the air

a dustcloud from their scuffling rose, commands

rang back and forth — to man the cables, haul

the black ships to the salt immortal sea

The Iliad, 2.51–54

On the evening of Sunday, 3 September 1939, Frank Reid listened to the radio as prime minister Robert Menzies performed his ‘melancholy duty’, advising his people that, as a result of Britain’s declaration of war on Hitler’s Germany, Australia was likewise again at war. More than 60 years later, it occurred to Reid that Menzies might first have referred the matter to the Australian parliament, but such was the tenor of the times.1

In 1939, Reid was an unemployed accountant. Having lost his city job, Reid rolled his swag and headed bush, finding work first as a general hand in Bathurst for a pound a week plus his keep, and then as an overseer on a property near Brewarrina, where he listened to Menzies’ fateful speech. Like many others of his generation, Reid had spent time in the militia — the Citizens Military Force (CMF), the reservists of the day who constituted the bulk of Australia’s army. With few entertainments to call on, the militia provided young men with something to do, and the modest pay helped in the dark days of the Depression. Reid had progressed far enough to sit and pass the officers’ exam, before economic necessity forced him onto the dusty roads of outback New South Wales. On the outbreak of war, he wrote at once to the Military Board offering his services; but it would be May 1940 before he was called up, as the army expanded rapidly in the shadow of calamity in France.

Across the Tasman, 20-year-old Felix Chevalier Preston was likewise what we would now call an army reservist. Following British practice, New Zealand’s reserve force was known as the Territorial Army, and Preston had joined its Black Watch regiment after service in the school cadets. His father died at an early age and, after Preston’s mother remarried, his stepfather, a successful Christchurch barrister and solicitor, sent him to the prestigious Christ College. There he excelled in football and rowing, but did rather less well academically. Known as ‘Peter’, in deference to an uncle also named Felix who was killed in the First World War, Preston attempted to join the air force, but was rejected on account of slight colour-blindness. Preston found the army not so particular, and the outbreak of war rescued him from the drudgery of a job in the grain and seed department of Dalgety’s. Already commissioned in the Black Watch, Preston was made a lieutenant in the 26 Battalion of New Zealand’s second expeditionary force, and given command of its 15 Platoon, which drew its men from the rugged west coast of the South Island.2

The appeal of a military pastime before the war was not confined to young men like Reid and Preston. Mollie Edwards had pursued nursing as one of five careers considered appropriate at the time for young women; the others she deemed socially acceptable were teaching, typing, shop work and, only in desperation, domestic service. The daughter of a North Sydney bank manager, Edwards trained at the Prince Alfred Hospital. Her family was fiercely patriotic: on family outings to the cinema, Edwards remembers her mother poking people in the back, forcing them to stand for ‘God Save the King’. With war looming, Edwards and many of her nursing sisters looked to register for service; but it was 1938, when she turned the requisite age of 25, before she was accepted.3

Edwards recalls her family discussing the rise of Hitler through the late 1930s, particularly in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Half a world away, in his village near Grevena in central Greece, George Tsioukanaras looked on the events of September 1939 with deep, and perhaps more immediate, foreboding. His father had died when he was just two weeks old, and his mother then passed away in 1937, leaving George and his siblings to lodge with friends and family. Bequeathed a tiny land holding, the Tsioukanaras children scratched out a living on the back of a horse, four cows, and some goats. Eager for knowledge, but denied schooling by the grinding reality of peasant life, Tsioukanaras recalled thinking, nearly 70 years later that, on the outbreak of war, the German invasion of Poland was but a prelude to a wider conflagration.4

The popular imagination has it that Britain and her empire began the fight against Nazi Germany weakened by years of military neglect, prompted by electoral distaste for all things defence-related after the horrors of the First World War. In fact, planning for the global war feared by the young George Tsioukanaras began almost as soon as the guns fell silent in 1918. Whether they were the right plans would be a question tested by events.

Between the world wars, defence policy in Australia and New Zealand was defined by the concept of ‘imperial defence’. As British ‘Dominions’, they agreed to participate in a strategy designed to defend the empire on a global scale, and not merely confine themselves to the protection of their own territory. This planning was conducted at a number of levels, at the peak of which were the ‘Imperial Conferences’, inter-governmental gatherings held routinely through the 1920s and 1930s.

These conferences were invariably portrayed as evidence of the solidarity of the imperial family. However defence policy, in both Australia and New Zealand, was a hot political topic, albeit with different points of emphasis. In Australia, the issue was whether imperial defence constituted sound strategy from a local perspective; in New Zealand, debate turned over whether enough was being done as the world drifted to war.

After the social trauma of the conscription debates in 1916 and 1917, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) maintained that its obligations to imperial defence were limited to the territorial defence of Australia. To give substance to that position, the ALP built its policies in the 1930s on a strong air force, arguing that this was the one military technology available to the country that could feasibly defeat an invading force. This posture was ridiculed by successive conservative governments, who contended that only command of the oceans could guarantee Australian security, and that, accordingly, local plans had to be integrated with those of the Royal Navy. With conservative governments dominating office between the wars, Australian defence plans were built around this ‘blue water’ strategy crafted around Britain’s navy.

Singapore was the focal point for this global naval strategy.5 The construction of an ‘impregnable’ fortress there, to protect the base that gave Britain the capacity to wage war in Asia, was begun in 1923. By the 1930s, however, doubts within the Australian military about Singapore provoked dissension. When General John Lavarack became head of the Australian army in 1935, he mounted a sustained campaign to overturn the Singapore strategy, and to base Australian defence plans instead on building an army large enough to defeat an invasion. The result was a period of instability within the Australian services. At the other pole of Australian military opinion, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) served as an operational arm of the Royal Navy, exchanging commanders and ships as an integrated force, as did the Royal New Zealand Navy. For the RAN, local defence against invasion was a logical impossibility, and Lavarack’s thinking a kind of heresy.

Unfortunately for Lavarack, his strategic acumen was matched only by his political ineptitude. In a contest over the direction of Australian defence policy, which implicitly brought with it emotional questions of attachment to the ‘Mother Country’, Lavarack needed allies, and he succeeded instead in making enemies of virtually anyone who might have joined his cause. Lavarack’s political master was defence minister Archdale Parkhill, who showed enough independence from Britain to push through plans for the local manufacture of military aircraft, against the wishes of London and a fair portion of the Australian cabinet, including future prime minister Robert Menzies. However, Lavarack failed to see a potential benefactor in Parkhill, and noisily campaigned for the reintroduction of conscription to build his anti-invasion army.

For a conservative politician of the 1930s, conscription brought with it the certainty of political oblivion, and Parkhill fought a long battle to keep a lid on Lavarack’s activities, which included some judicious leaking of information to the press and the ALP by junior officers sympathetic to their general. Just as he alienated Parkhill, so Lavarack estranged potential bureaucratic allies, in the shape of the Munitions Supply Board (MSB). Before the widespread industrialisation of the country, the MSB had been established to provide some munitions manufacturing capacity in government factories. However, in planning for war, Lavarack proposed to marginalise the MSB, drawing up grandiose plans for the mobilisation of Australian industry. Given that the country had little mass-production industry or precision engineering, there was not much to mobilise, and as such these plans were hopelessly premature. In squabbling with the MSB over them, Lavarack passed up another opportunity to build a constituency for national defence.6

Indeed, Lavarack made such a nuisance of himself that he was shunted sideways, and effectively replaced by an ‘Inspector General’. Between the wars, when conservative Australian governments were faced by controversy within or around the armed services, they invariably responded by appointing a British officer to conduct a review. In the case of the army, the officer was Lieutenant General Ernest Squires, who graced Australian shores in June 1938. Surprisingly, Lavarack and Squires managed to co-operate successfully, and Squires went on to make sound recommendations on the organisation of the Australian army, although Lavarack was not to be forgiven for his indiscretions.

A similar process had less-fortunate consequences for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). The RAAF had maintained its independence as a separate service since 1921 by carefully avoiding doctrinal conflicts with the army and the RAN, and when necessary, calling on the support of the Royal Air Force (RAF) for political backing to support its continued existence.7 The head of the RAAF, Richard Williams, lost that British support through his advocacy for the Australian production of American-designed aircraft, something that infuriated the British Air Ministry, which thought of the RAAF as a market for British industry. As war approached, Williams planned to extend these moves to national self-sufficiency through the development of local designs to suit the particular requirements of Australian conditions. When a series of training accidents prompted a public debate over the efficiency of the RAAF, the government of prime minister Joseph Lyons appointed a retired British officer to conduct the now-standard review, which Williams did not survive as a military leader. To get him out of the way, the government posted Williams to Britain in January 1939.

With Lavarack neutered and Williams in exile, the scope for ‘national’ defence options in Australia was coming to an end. In early 1939, local production of aircraft was re-integrated into British plans through a program to manufacture in Australia an obsolete bomber, the Bristol Beaufort. For the RAAF, worse was to come with the outbreak of war. At the suggestion of the Australian high commissioner, Stanley Bruce Melbourne, the British put forward to the dominions a plan for an ‘empire air force’, in which recruits from around the empire were trained and used as crew by the RAF. The government, led since April 1939 by Robert Menzies, thereupon scrapped plans for an Australian air expeditionary force of six squadrons, with associated higher command structures and base units, and, along with New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, signed up instead to the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS).8 In this way, the RAAF became principally a training arm of the Royal Air Force, with important consequences for its ability to organise large-scale air formations in support of Australian operations.9 The Australian troops who eventually went to Greece in 1941 would have cause to regret the emasculation of the RAAF.

Within the Australian army, the outbreak of war saw a similar orientation toward British policy. The apostle of national defence, Lavarack, was overlooked for the plum command of the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF), the all-volunteer army raised for overseas service. Rather than appoint him, the Menzies government opted for General Thomas Blamey. Before his entry into federal politics, prime minister Menzies had served as Victorian attorney-general, and in that role had come into personal contact with Blamey. The new commander of the AIF also had an influential ally in the minister for supply, Richard Casey, who had served under Blamey as a junior staff officer at Gallipoli and later in France. Blamey’s was an explicitly political appointment: as Lavarack lamented, the command arrangements had been settled ‘without reference to anybody’ in the military.10 Indeed, the military chiefs advised the government not to send a full expeditionary force overseas at all, until the attitude of Japan was resolved.

Blamey had little experience as a combat commander, having spent the First World War as a staff officer, in which role he excelled under the brilliant leadership of John Monash, commander of the AIF in France in 1918. After the war, Blamey left the regular army, and was appointed chief commissioner of police in Victoria in 1925. In this capacity he was immediately swept up in a scandal of the ‘bishop and the actress’ variety, which would surely have claimed a less well-connected figure. Mabel Tracey, the apocryphal former actress, advertised herself in the mid-1920s as a teacher of elocution in inner-city Fitzroy. Tracey’s establishment actually dealt in more than good diction — it was a bordello. Unfortunately for the chief commissioner, his police badge was found on the premises during a raid. Blamey’s explanation that it had been ‘surreptitiously removed’ from his office, and later returned, was accepted by an official inquiry, but a senior police officer claimed he had seen the badge on Blamey’s desk during the time of its mysterious absence. Stanley Savige, a close friend of Blamey’s, and one of his brigadiers in the Second World War, later claimed that Blamey had lent his key ring, complete with badge, to an ex-army man, who was in search of an out-of-hours bottle of liquor. Blamey, with just such a tipple in his locker at the Naval and Military Club, lent the man his keys and badge, and the latter’s subsequent assignation at Mabel Tracey’s brothel left the chief commissioner carrying the proverbial can. Savige completed the alibi by suggesting Blamey then protected his old army chum, a family man, by declining to mention the real facts to the inquiry.

Blamey rode out the storm that swirled around the saga of the badge and the brothel, and even negotiated a period in which his political persecutors in the Labor Party held office in Victoria. Blamey exhibited his own political colours in those early Depression years, by allowing his command to serve as a training ground for a militia force, the Old Guard, which was committed to fighting not only a communist uprising, but also to deposing Labor governments if it believed the circumstances warranted such a coup.

Blamey’s hubris and flexibility with the truth would eventually be his downfall. By the mid-1930s, Blamey’s brusque manner had alienated virtually the whole of Melbourne’s press corps. The Fourth Estate took its revenge in 1936. When a leading police officer was wounded in a shoot-out with bandits, the chief commissioner issued a public statement claiming that the officer had merely been wounded cleaning his weapon. The lie was apparently designed to obscure the fact that the policeman in question had been accompanied by two unknown women. When the discrepancy between the actual events and Blamey’s media statement were exposed, the Melbourne newspapers combined as one to hound him into resignation.11

At this point, Blamey’s chances of holding public office appeared negligible, until the outbreak of war set the Menzies government in search of a politically more reliable commander than Lavarack. Blamey’s claims to command of the AIF were modest given his lack of battlefield experience. This deficiency was not one that could be levelled against Lieutenant-General Bernard Freyberg, his counterpart as commander of the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) — like the AIF, an all-volunteer force recruited for overseas service with the British. Indeed, so wide was Freyberg’s military experience, he qualified as a real-life incarnation of the swashbucklers then popular in Hollywood. By distant ancestry, Freyberg was related to Austrian mercenaries who had fought for the Russian tsar against Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. Freyberg’s branch of the family then immigrated to England, from whence his father, an estate agent, moved to New Zealand in 1891.12

A champion swimmer in his youth, Freyberg’s subsequent adventures did his Austrian forebears proud, even if his chosen profession — dentistry — seemed at first a quiet-enough vocation. He actually began his fighting career on the streets of New Zealand, participating in the violent suppression of the strikes that afflicted the country in 1913.13 These strikebreaking activities included time spent working as a stoker on a ship, and in this way Freyberg made his way to the United States. (Accounts that he then decamped to Mexico, to fight in that country’s civil war, may have suited his larger-than-life personality, but they do appear to be journalistic licence.)14 Freyberg eventually made his way to England, where he enlisted in the Royal Naval Division (RND). This curious unit was a creation of Winston Churchill, then head of the British Admiralty, who intended to give the Royal Navy its very own army so that he might prosecute the war on a larger scale than even his stewardship of that mighty service offered. As befitted Churchill’s dilettantism, the RND attracted a range of gentlemen soldiers, looking for commissions in a glamorous setting. In keeping with the image, each of the RND’s battalions was named for a hero of yore — Freyberg himself served in the Hood Battalion, titled in honour of the admiral who had served with distinction in the wars against the French in the eighteenth century. Among Freyberg’s comrades in the battalion was E. W. Nelson, a survivor of Robert Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1912. His friendship brought Freyberg into a glittering social circle, which included Scott’s widow, and James Barrie, the creator of ‘Peter Pan’.

Freyberg’s first contribution to the war effort was suitably heroic, and would later give Barrie material for his essay ‘Courage’, delivered to St Andrew’s University in 1922. The RND was part of the Gallipoli invasion force, but on the first disastrous morning was used as a feint to confuse the Turkish defenders. To round out the masquerade, on the eve of the landings, Freyberg swam ashore in the darkness to light fires on the Dardanelles coast, hoping to divert the Turks from the real invasion beaches. Freyberg then went on to win Britain’s highest award for valour, the Victoria Cross, at the Battle of the Somme, in November 1916. Taking command of his battalion when 13 of its 18 officers were killed or wounded, Freyberg led the unit on to take 800 prisoners, before he was wounded by shellfire. This would be among the nine occasions on which Freyberg was wounded in the First World War, not counting an elbow broken in a fall from a horse. He rose to command a brigade in 1918, and enlivened his regimental service in the British army between the wars with a number of attempts to swim the English Channel, one of which ended just 500 yards short, beaten by the tides.

Freyberg eventually retired from the military in 1937, having been denied appointments for the previous two years after being diagnosed with a heart murmur. Hoping for a career in business, he was appointed a director of the Birmingham Small Arms Company, a major munitions supplier, but that would prove his only employment before 1939. Desperate for a wartime posting, Freyberg succeeded in being medically upgraded. During his fitness check, he diverted the attention of the consulting physician and his stethoscope by talking loudly throughout the examination.15

It fell to prime minister Michael Joseph Savage’s Labour government to bring Freyberg back into military harness. New Zealand conformed to British plans for an imperial air force in the shape of EATS, but Savage did insist that the 2nd NZEF would be organised as a national force, rather than as a sub-unit of larger formations led by Australian or British officers.16 With Savage’s health failing, deputy prime minister Peter Fraser — whose career had included a stint in gaol for anti-conscription activities in 1917–18 — went to the United Kingdom in late 1939 to coordinate war plans, and from there cabled Wellington with a recommendation to appoint Freyberg commander of the 2nd NZEF on 15 November. The public announcement of this appointment followed on 23 November.

The Labour government came to these issues of national policy having survived a bitter political skirmish with elements of the army in 1938. The previous year, defence minister Frederick Jones had re-organised the army, and in the process had abolished brigade commands. This enraged the territorial officers affected. One of them was Neil ‘Polly’ Macky, a veteran of the Western Front in the First World War, who in the 1930s combined a legal practice with part-time soldiering and the post of commodore at the helm of the Auckland yacht club. With three colleagues, Macky launched a ‘revolt’, in which the ‘four Colonels’, still serving officers, published a manifesto critical of the government. Jones rode out the storm, assisted by the adjutant-general, Edward Puttick, who adroitly defused the issue by dismissing Macky and his co-conspirators without giving them the court-martial they coveted as a stump from which to harangue the government.17 Puttick probably knew that he was dealing with a political problem as much as he was a policy debate — Macky was later happy to let it be known that ‘I am afraid I am too much of a Tory. To kow-tow to a bootmaker as a minister of defence [that is, Jones], was too much for me.’ To its credit, on the outbreak of war, the government rose above such pettiness. Macky was given command of 21 Battalion, and another of the rebellious colonels, H. E. Barrowclough, was favoured with the command of 6 NZ Brigade.

These appointments reflected the organisational structure of the Australian and New Zealand armies inherited from the British, the basic unit of which was a division of about 18,000 men. This was led by a lieutenant-general, and organised in three infantry brigades, each with three battalions of approximately 800 soldiers. To each brigade was attached an artillery regiment, equipped with 24 field guns. To round out the fighting element of each division were specialist units, including an anti-tank regiment with 24 specialist guns to fight armoured vehicles, field ‘companies’ of combat engineers, and a machine-gun battalion with heavy Vickers machine guns.

Both the 2nd AIF and the 2nd NZEF had such a division as their principal formations: for the AIF, the 6th Division; and for the NZEF, the New Zealand Division. A long administrative and supply ‘tail’ — including everything from post offices to hospitals — then filled out the establishment of each force. In Blamey’s case, he commanded the 2nd AIF as a whole, and General Iven Mackay held the divisional command separately. This arrangement was intended to allow for the expansion of the AIF, which duly followed in February 1940 with the decision to form a 7th Division. In Freyberg’s case, the smaller size of the likely New Zealand contingent meant he commanded both the New Zealand Division in combat, and the supply components of the 2nd NZEF as well.

To join the AIF and the NZEF, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders flocked to recruitment centres in late 1939. They did so with a certain amount of naivety. In a world not yet shrunk by jetliners, war was the only opportunity to travel that the vast majority of young men would get. Working on New Zealand’s North Island for a farmer known locally as ‘Cast Iron Smith’, Eric Davies nominated his reason for enlisting as the ‘adventure, pure and simple’. Cast Iron Smith himself was a Kiwi veteran of the First World War who was so badly wounded in the groin on the first morning at Gallipoli that he never got off the beach. Davies recalled that his employer remained a childless bachelor, leaving the local imagination to ponder the grievous nature of the old farmer’s wound. Smith refused to allow Eric to drive, on the grounds that such mobility would only encourage a harmful competition between dancing in town and hard work on the farm. On one of Davies’ few days away from the farm after the outbreak of war, Smith demanded to know whether his young worker had enlisted; when he got a reply in the affirmative, he added, ‘Just as well, or I would have sacked you, otherwise.’18

Australia’s young men were motivated in exactly the same way as Davies. When Jim Mooney, a farmhand from Kerang in northern Victoria, stood on the troopship that was taking him to the Middle East, watching the dolphins surf the bow of the great ship as it ploughed through the vastness of the Indian Ocean, he mused that, until then, the longest stretches of water he had seen were irrigation ditches in the outback.19 Edwin Madigan from Newcastle, New South Wales, had at least begun his hoped-for world tour when the war broke out: he had got as far as New Zealand on a football trip, but was stumped by the prospect of raising the funds to get any further. The war looked like solving the problem until he returned home hoping to enlist, only to find that preference was being given to volunteers from the militia. Not to be undone by this kind of bureaucratic trifle, Madigan talked his way into the army, pointing out to the recruiting sergeant that, as a champion surf lifesaver, he had to pass the local army barracks every day to get to the surf club. This, Madigan maintained, established his familiarity with military affairs. Convinced or otherwise, the recruiting sergeant relented.20

Some erstwhile warriors had to force their way into the services through sheer, bloody persistence. Bill Jenkins had been orphaned when his father passed away from miners’ lung, and his mother died when he was but fourteen. Raised by his sister, Jenkins was under-age in 1939, but with his mate ‘Bluey’ Bentley he presented for enlistment and was at first accepted. Jenkins got as far as the army barracks at Ingleburn in Sydney’s west before the authorities tumbled to his age. Tracked down by the base adjutant (Jenkins thought at the time that this was the bloke responsible for agitating people), the young soldier was marched back into civilian life. When Jenkins saw the first echelon of troops parade through Sydney to go aboard their ships, he was determined to try again, and had what he thought was the brilliant idea of putting up his age, and taking another name. Unbeknown to Jenkins, his stroke of genius was, of course, very commonplace. Christened Clement, but known to his mates as Buffalo Bill, Jenkins thought this nom de guerre as good as any, and as William Jenkins he successfully re-enlisted in May 1940.21

Some under-age warriors had more official assistance in their efforts to join up. G. M. ‘Max’ Rice was one such — having passed himself off at the recruiting centre, he got as far as the Victoria Barracks in Sydney before his mother and sister appeared in hot pursuit. However, the captain on duty persuaded Mrs Rice to allow her boy to remain under arms, pointing out that if Max were discharged he would only re-enlist under another name, and thereby be lost to sight in the event he was wounded or killed. Confronted by this emotional pressure, Rice’s mother relented, and Max remained in the army. He himself explained his decision as ‘just a matter of being young and silly’, but he did have family ties to the army — his father had served in the 1st Battalion Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and Max was even recruited to its successor, the 2/1st Battalion. Before he got overseas, he had to deal with the legacy of his father’s service — gassed on the Western Front, his father died from his injuries at the age of 53, soon after Rice enlisted. When Rice went on compassionate leave, his battalion embarked for overseas service without him, and he caught up with his comrades later in Egypt after burying his father at Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery.22

Honouring earlier sacrifice was an incentive not just for Australians and New Zealanders. While Rice buried his father, on the other side of the globe a 14-year-old called Dimitris Tsiaousis was tending his father’s bee-hives on the slopes of Mount Olympus. Tsiaousis was the son of a veteran of Greece’s war with Turkey in Asia Minor in the early 1920s. His father had returned home to fight, after a successful career in the United States, in a war that redefined the Balkans. Up to two million people were displaced in mass deportations that saw Christians moved to Greece from Turkey, and Muslims in the opposite direction.23 Having survived the fighting, Tsiaousis’ father went on to modest prosperity as a village tailor and apiarist. The young bee-keeper could never have imagined how he would be joined to the Anzac experience.24

Apart from the adventure, and the desire to serve as their fathers had done, enlistment also offered another benefit — cold, hard cash. One new recruit thus motivated was the larrikin Don Stephenson. Jumping a rattler in country Victoria in late 1939, Stephenson was nabbed by the railway police, whereupon some passing soldiers intervened on his behalf.

‘Why don’t you enlist?’ they asked, pointing to the pay of ‘35 bob’ a week. Stephenson and his mate, at that time trying to get by packing tomatoes on the farms around Shepparton at four pence a case, decided the offer had some appeal — especially when their commitment to join up liberated them from the long arm of the railway law.25

The 1930s were indeed economically troubled times, in ways that are difficult to imagine today. The loss of family fortunes was not uncommon. In New Zealand, Murray McColl’s father was a typically dour Scotsman, and a successful timber merchant. The Depression treated the family business badly. The McColl clan lost their big home, cutting rights to several areas of prime timber, a saw mill, and a holiday home by the sea. Murray himself left school early, working first in a radio factory for ten shillings a week, and then as an apprentice fitter and turner. Along with his elder brother Alan, McColl joined a territorial unit in Auckland formed specifically for those of Scottish descent, and from there enlisted in the 4 Company, 27 Machine-gun (MG) Battalion, which was also originally reserved for recruits of Scottish origin.26

For others, the fall from economic grace was not far, because they had never flown near the heights of prosperity to begin with. In Western Australia, Roy Herron spent the pre-war years eking out a living were he could. He was forced to leave school at 12 in search of work, first as a delivery boy for a bakery, and later as a kitchen hand, before finishing as a prospector at Boulder on the Western Australian goldfields. Along the way, he enlisted in the militia — ‘Everybody else was joining up,’ he remembered, and the pay helped tide things over.27 When war came, Herron took the logical step: he enlisted in the 2nd AIF, joining the 2/11th ‘City of Perth’ Battalion.

The depth of economic disadvantage, and especially the political turmoil that went with it, was one reason that not everyone in Australian and New Zealand flocked to the colours. The Depression gave momentum to the Communist Party of Australia, which, with its growing influence in the trade unions, fell in behind Stalin when he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler — the volte-face that paved the way for the joint Nazi–Soviet invasion of Poland. To give this act of convenience some ideological coherence, the communists labelled the new war a conflict of capitalist imperialism, and campaigned against it.28

Others turned their backs on the empire for cultural reasons. Bob Slocombe was a student teacher, a member of the militia, and at the time a staunch political conservative with a family history dating back to the original settlement of Melbourne. Despite his patriotism, he did notice that few young men of Irish descent from his district rallied to the colours. A generation before, Irish–Australians had helped defeat the conscription referendums of the First World War, enraged at the British treatment of the Sinn Fein rising in 1916, and the bitterness lingered still. The political Left, too, had resisted conscription in 1916–17, leading to some strange conversions in 1939.

In New Zealand, conscription had been enacted by the Massey government in 1916 without parliamentary fuss — only four members for parliament voted against the bill — but thereafter resistance hardened. Socialist and Labour leaders were imprisoned for opposing the draft. As it happened, one of them, Peter Fraser, would serve with great distinction as New Zealand’s prime minister in the Second World War.

The scars of the conscription debates were still so strong in 1939 that no serious attempt was made to revive it, at least for overseas service. The second Anzacs, like their forefathers, would be volunteers, and not all of the new recruits were the children of disadvantage. John Crooks, a cadet engineer with the Postmaster-General’s Department in Hobart, left a comfortable middle-class family in Launceston to begin his career. Young men like Crooks offered the army ready-made and highly useful technical skills. Also a keen ham-radio operator, Crooks was quickly commissioned and posted to a signals unit.29

As the first intakes were marched into camps around Australia and New Zealand in late 1939, not many were like Crooks, because most found the army needed time to build their military skills. Sent to Puckapunyal army base, north of Melbourne, Slocombe and his comrades grubbed tree stumps from the newly tilled parade ground. With his militia training, Slocombe was considered an old hand, and was soon put to work as an instructor for the less-experienced volunteers. His qualifications were more apparent than real: he spent many nights in late 1939 reading up on the subject matter for instruction the next day.30 The equipment matched the pedagogy. The most advanced infantry weapon available was the Lewis gun — standard issue in 1918, but long since rendered obsolete by modern automatic weapons. Across the Tasman, technical training was not even a matter of antiquity, but one of imagination: a squadron of the 4th Reserve Mechanical Transport (RMT) Company was formed at Trentham and, without trucks on which to practise, men stood on parade as make-believe substitutes, while their comrades pretended to check oil, petrol, and water levels by reference to various parts of the anatomy.31

John Anderson was another Australian militia man who stumbled along with the rest of his army onto a war footing. He joined a militia artillery unit in Melbourne for the standard reason: it provided a paid hobby. He was lucky enough to have finished his schooling to Year 12; but, even then, it took nine months to find work at the offices of wool brokers Goldsborough Mort for ‘19 bob’ a week. The militia pay helped, but Anderson had to give away his peacetime artillery career when night-time accountancy studies and his commitment to the church choir on Sundays got in the way. Re-enlisting, he passed through Puckapunyal along with Slocombe, sleeping on a straw palliasse for want of a proper bed. The artillery was no better equipped than the infantry. Anderson’s unit, the 2/2nd Field Regiment, went through its paces with 18-pound guns (named for the weight of shell they fired), with which the armies of the British Empire had gone to fight the kaiser in 1914. When Anderson and his gun crews got hold of these weapons, they were still complete with wooden wheels.32

Away in Western Australia, Ken Johnson, a member of the local militia unit, the 16th Battalion, joined up as a matter of duty to the empire, and as a chance to see the world. He went into camp in November 1939, and was promptly put onto the drill square to hone his martial technique — with broomsticks substituting for rifles. Johnson recalled that there was not much battle dress, either, or even something as fundamental as boots. Then a 19-year-old lieutenant, Johnson found the lot of a junior officer hard work. His platoon was made up of men mostly older than he, and a number of them were tough nuts from the goldmines of Kalgoorlie. ‘They were out to make or break me,’ Johnson remembered. On the drill square, ‘twenty times a day they’d right turn instead of left, or about turn,’ he said. Johnson took little comfort from the advice of his company commander, who was patient enough to recommend perseverance, averring that ‘a month on a troop ship will knock the stuffing out of them’.33

Johnson was not the only young subaltern with problems disciplining older men in the ranks. Peter Preston, struggling to get his platoon in order at the Burnham camp outside Christchurch, was as badly dressed as Johnson. In New Zealand, denim uniforms took the place of battle dress. Preston, then just 20, also found his new charges as unprepared for military life as the army was for them. As a private-school boy from Christchurch, he had to contend with the hardened bushmen and miners from the West Coast, most of whom were handy in a fight, but considerably less enamoured with military etiquette. When the first train discharged its recruits at Burnham, New Zealand’s finest decamped to the nearest hotel — from where the youthful Preston had to prise them out, naturally, in a state of high ferment. Unluckily for Preston, having herded his charges back to Burnham, the wet canteen at the camp itself happened to be open, allowing his new platoon to carry on, sir.

Alcohol was often a trigger point for the tensions generated by the transition from civilian life to the military, and in New Zealand, the 21 Battalion even endured a minor mutiny over the issue. It formed at Papakura on 12 January 1940 as a second echelon unit (New Zealand’s overseas force was organised according to successive despatches of troops, known as echelons). The battalion took its recruits mostly from Auckland City and North Auckland, and the balance from Waikato and Hauraki. It was commanded by ‘Polly’ Macky, and even with his glittering leadership the 21 Battalion got off to a rocky start: when its troops were denied the right to carry liquor from hotels, rebellion stalked its ranks. Placards defiantly declaring ‘no beer, no drill’ were posted around the camp, and Macky had to gently disperse a protest meeting on the parade ground before training resumed.34

The 21 Battalion was not the only New Zealand unit struggling with the unyielding regime of army life. The 2nd NZEF included a battalion specifically reserved for Maoris. Formed in January 1940, the 28 Battalion was organised on tribal lines: A Company took its recruits from Ngapuhi and its sub-tribes; B Company, mostly from the Awara confederation and Tuhoe tribe; C Company, from the Ngatiporou and Rongowhakaata; and D company, mostly from Taranaki tribes and the Ngati Kahungunu. To these new soldiers, military discipline was a mystery of superfluous European rules, as the battalion history later recorded: ‘The right number of men would parade for a fatigue, but not necessarily the right men if there was something they wanted to do more than attend that particular parade.’ In the communal consciousness of the Maori, accounting for kit and equipment was particularly illogical: ‘To be charged for shortages discovered in kit inspection when the article was probably being put to good use by somebody else was, in the opinion of the Maori recruit, an erratic pakeha custom.’35

At a time when Australia did not consider Aborigines worthy of counting for the purposes of the census, the establishment of the 28 Battalion was testament to the very different status of indigenous people in the two countries. A Maori battalion had already served in the First World War, but only after the initial offer by Maoris to enlist just after the outbreak of the conflict was refused on the grounds that ‘native’ units were not welcome in a war of the white races. This argument evaporated when news reached New Zealand of the despatch of Indian troops to France in late 1914. Thus legitimised, the Maori unit began life as a contingent numbering 14 officers and 494 other ranks, which sailed from New Zealand in February 1915. Known as Te Hokowhitu a Tu, ‘the 70 twice-told warriors of the war god’, in honour of the favoured size of the traditional war party, the Maoris served with distinction at Gallipoli, fighting in the August 1915 battles to seize the heights above Anzac Cove. The unit was re-designated the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion in September 1917; by war’s end, 336 of its members were dead and 734 wounded.36

Not all Maoris were behind the war effort — when conscription was extended to the Maori community in 1917, it was resisted by some who considered the war a problem for the pakeha. With the outbreak of war in 1939, senior figures in the Maori community were determined to avoid the fissures in their ranks revealed by the First World War, and pressed their demand that they ‘not be subjugated in a New Zealand at war any more than [they] had been submerged in a New Zealand at peace’.37 Sir Apirana Ngata’s calls for a new Maori battalion were taken up by Maori members of parliament E. T. Tirikatene (Southern Maori) and P. K. Paikea (Northern Maori). The government responded by establishing the 28 Battalion on 4 October, but then attracted controversy by insisting that European officers lead the new unit. In early 1940, the battalion had made enough progress to furnish a ceremonial guard of honour at the celebrations for the Treaty of Waitangi, the constitutional instrument that provided the Maoris with at least some official recognition. At the Waitangi centennial, Private Anania Amohau led a haka — the Maoris would later put their famous ritual to good use on the battlefields of Greece and Crete.

In Australia, the treatment of indigenous recruits was very different. Entry to the Australian military was defined by race, courtesy of the 1909 Defence Act, which required recruits to be of European ancestry. This legal position was then reinforced by policy decisions made in 1940, at the behest of the services, to exclude Aboriginal recruitment as neither ‘necessary nor desirable’ and ‘inimical’ to white morale. Nevertheless, a few Aborigines slipped through: one was Reg Saunders, whose father was one of the handful of black diggers from the First World War. Saunders joined the 2/7th Battalion, and made such a useful soldier that he was promoted to sergeant within three months.38

Gradually, the units being formed for the new war acquired both more equipment and a deeper military consciousness. In January 1940, the 6th Division of the 2nd AIF and the first echelon of the 2nd NZEF embarked for overseas service. The British Empire mobilised its impressive merchant marine for the purpose, assembling convoys of the greatest ocean liners of the day to carry the new Anzacs to the battlefields of another war. Throughout 1940 these convoys shuttled from Australian and New Zealand ports to the Middle East, stopping at Colombo in what was then Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Mumbai (Bombay) in India.

Embarkation marked a turning point in the war experience of the men and women aboard the great ships, something evident in the vast crowds and escorting flotillas of pleasure craft that came out to farewell them. Attempts to bring something from home to share the journey sometimes succeeded — Peter Preston managed to smuggle a camera into his kit on leaving Christchurch, much against regulations. More often, the disciplines of military life prevailed. When impetuous soldiers of the 21 Battalion attempted to smuggle the unit’s mascot, a snow-white terrier known to all as ‘Sergeant Noodles’, onto the troopship Empress of Japan on embarkation at Wellington in May 1940, they were discovered and the dog was ordered ignominiously ashore.39

Some of the departing soldiers had friends and family to see them off. Many others, from the hinterlands of Australia and New Zealand, had already left families and sweethearts behind, and faced departure only with their comrades. For them, perhaps the farewell from military bands served to remind them of things familiar. Leaving Wellington Harbour, the 21 Battalion rollicked into Cook Strait to the strains of ‘Roll out the Barrel’. The 28 Battalion provided their own rendition of the famous Maori lament ‘Po Atarau’ (‘Now is the Hour’) as they left the same port:40

Pö atarau
E moea iho nei
E haere ana
Koe ki pämamao

On a moonlit night
I see in a dream
You going away
To a distant land

Haere rä
Ka hoki mai anö
Ki i te tau
E tangi atu nei

Farewell,
But return again
To your loved one,
Weeping here

Mollie Edwards heard that same evocative song five months later. Her family were aboard a small boat on Sydney Harbour when she left for the Middle East aboard the mighty Queen Mary in October 1940. On the sort of sparkling Sunday morning that Sydney Harbour specialises in, Edwards lined the deck with her nursing sisters, resplendent in scarlet caps, white veils, and grey uniforms, and listened to a battalion band play. Here and there, troops and nurses sang along to the Anglicised lyrics, ‘Now is the Hour’, and these no doubt spoke for the hopes of many:

Now is the hour when we must say goodbye
Soon you’ll be sailing far across the sea
While you’re away please remember me
When you return you’ll find me waiting here.

‘Bon voyage’ cries out the seabird
As you depart for a distant land
Farewell, but return again
To your loved one, weeping here.

Away out to sea after this emotional farewell, Edwards travelled in some style. Her cabin was still largely unaltered from the comforts of peacetime cruises, the conversion of the Queen Mary into a troopship having been made at least initially with little change to the ship’s fittings. On her first night at sea, Edwards dined regally, and completed the experience with sweets on the sun deck.

Frank Reid, who went overseas aboard the Aquitania, enjoyed a similarly comfortable passage. With five other officers, Reid happily took up residence in a bridal suite equipped with its own bathroom. Reid’s troops might have endured sleeping in hammocks, but he and his fellow officers enjoyed the wine cellar still on board, and the cheap but palatable French vintages it contained.

In the same convoy, but behind Reid and the Aquitania, came Peter Preston aboard the liner Orcades. Whether fuelled by the French wine or not, Preston quickly concluded that the Australians in front were having a high time, surmising that only some wild parties could explain the amount of furniture floating by in the wake of the Aquitania. Preston’s men at least waited to get ashore before indulging themselves. When the New Zealanders landed in Fremantle on their way to Egypt, Preston found a number of his troops had swapped uniforms with Australians in the various brothels and bars of the port; thus co-mingled, they went on to war. Like Edwards and Reid, Preston found conditions on board very agreeable, meals being taken at tables of four, with a separate waiter for each. During this part of the voyage, Preston’s most pressing decision was whether to choose between champagne vintages with a ‘noisy or a quiet pop’, and how to keep his alcohol consumption down to modest limits with gin on sale at half-a-crown a bottle. When his convoy reached Bombay, Preston put the poor clothing issued at Burnham behind him, courtesy of Indian tailors who quickly measured and made his drill uniforms. The quality of the Indian work was such that Preston ‘never saw the like again’.

Better equipped, at least sartorially, Preston nevertheless found that his leisurely progress to global conflict came sadly to an end at Bombay. Transhipped to the Ormond, a much more austerely appointed troopship, the 26 NZ Battalion was distinctly unimpressed. The troops, having noted the fly-blown condition of the meat taken on board as rations, took spontaneous action: another minor mutiny broke out. A delegation from the ranks went up to the bridge and demanded the ship turn around, declaring that they would not go on with maggots in the meat. ‘They got away with it,’ mused Preston, 60 years later. The Ormond turned about, and re-victualled with fresh provisions.41

Mollie Edwards suffered no such indignities, because the nurses of her unit, the 2/5th Australian General Hospital (AGH), were treated like visiting dignitaries when they disembarked in India. Invited to dine at the residence of the British governor of Bombay, the young Australian women, in their special mess dresses of grey crepe de Chine, red capes, and veils, were ‘pop-eyed’ with the whole experience, feted by British officials and waited upon by Indian servants in gowns and white gloves.42

Women going to war in 1940 were always likely to receive the best of official courtesies, but otherwise the quality of the passage depended on the luck of the embarkation draw. Don Stephenson had the misfortune to embark on a slow convoy of smaller ships in April 1940. On the modest Neuralia, Stephenson and his comrades found the going hard work, the roughest leg of the trip being between Melbourne and Fremantle. Stephenson recalled that ‘80 per cent of us were sick as soon as we got out the Heads,’ and that, on a closely packed troopship, thousands of men could produce a lot of vomit.

Nevertheless, the irrepressible Stephenson made the most of the experience when he could. On one of his last leaves in Melbourne before departure, he and his mate Alan Erskine went down to Frankston because the more puritanical licensing laws of the age deemed that only commercial travellers could get a beer. The publican, however, considered the slightly built Erskine under-age, a prohibition the young boy bluffed his way around, pretending to be a famous jockey of the time, George West. When Stephenson and Erskine then went to the races in Colombo while their convoy refuelled, they found the real George West in the saddle. They duly met the great whip, and Stephenson was grateful for the introduction — ‘He gave us a tip and it won, too.’43 As punters have long suspected, at each meeting there’s always one race for the jockeys.

In these years, Britain prided itself as an empire on which the sun never set. As they journeyed through it on their way to war, the experience for the second Anzacs depended partly on their identity. The Maori Battalion called in at Capetown, where the troops were entertained by the notable ladies of the city. A staff officer wrote that this was the first ‘native’ regiment afforded such an honour, and the bearing of the men was such that he hoped it would ‘remove the objection to Maoris being included in … Rugby teams for South Africa’. If the regard of the British Empire for their race was doubtful and highly qualified, the Maoris might have found small consolation in knowing that Nazi racism was another thing altogether. When German intelligence tumbled to the despatch of the Maoris, Nazi propaganda broadcasts lambasted them as ‘savages’, ‘cannibals’, and ‘headhunters’.44 Time would tell as to whom these appellations best applied.