‘These blokes came around and said they wanted to make a battalion up to guard the tropics. They said “you can take your tennis racquets and cameras and all sorts of things”. So all six of us in my tent said, “Oh yeah, we’ll go.”’
—Private Laurie Howson, 39th Battalion
Laurie ‘Smoky’ Howson joined the 39th Battalion at the age of nineteen. A tall, skinny, amiable bloke, Smoky belonged to that rowdy, iconoclastic breed of Australian men who scythed their way through tall poppies over last rounds in the local. He was raised in difficult circumstances, in Oakleigh, Melbourne, one of nineteen children: ‘Yes, twelve boys and seven girls, and the rest are better looking than me!’1
The family expanded at a terrific pace, and soon found itself in a state of extreme poverty. During the fag end of the Great Depression, Smoky worked 60 hours a week on his father’s small garden allotment, the family’s chief source of food. He was fourteen. ‘We ate a lot of vegetables,’ he recalls. ‘We were so poorly educated that we believed babies came from under cabbages.’2
He enlisted to escape this crushing existence and break the hold of a dominating, dipsomaniac father. In 1940, aged eighteen, Smoky ran away to sea. But the navy rejected him because, he claims, ‘I was too old.’ They advised him to join the army.
Smoky took their advice, and volunteered. He joined the Australian militia, a kind of national home guard. He had no idea how he would be used; he knew as a militiaman he could not be sent outside Australian territory. One morning, ‘These blokes came around and said they wanted to make a battalion up to guard the tropics. They said “you can take your tennis racquets and cameras and all sorts of things”. So all six of us in my tent said, “Oh yeah, we’ll go”, which was stupid. It was all propaganda.’3
Howson was one of 4000 militiamen who departed Sydney’s Woolloomooloo docks aboard the Aquitania, a converted troopship, in December 1941. Like Smoky, none had combat experience, or any proper training. Few had fired a gun in anger; most had never fired a gun. Some thought they were bound for Brisbane or Townsville, or surely Darwin, whose harbour Japanese Zeros would destroy in February. A few did bring their tennis racquets, anticipating a spot of R&R in Australia’s northern climes.
As ‘militia’, the law limited them to the defence of Australian soil. That did not exclude the territories of Papua and New Guinea, which were then part of Australia. At sea, the troops learned their destination, a nearby country of which they knew little. The Aquitania crossed the Coral Sea untroubled by Japanese submarines and on 3 January 1942 moored in Basilisk Bay, Port Moresby.
Osmar White witnessed their arrival: ‘issued with weapons they hardly knew how to fire, 2000 of them poured from the decks of a single transport onto Moresby’s solitary T-jetty. They were charged with the defence of a base vitally important to the fate of their homeland.’4 In truth, they were little more than a token force, a tremulous gesture towards the defence of Port Moresby from an anticipated seaborne invasion.
The first of many supply disasters struck at once. Tents, medical equipment and extra clothing, mistakenly or indifferently stored at the bottom of the ship’s hold, would not be unpacked for ten days. Smoky and his mates—the Zorro Gang—slept in the open bush, on the Seven-Mile aerodrome, or near the wharf. They ate with their fingers and they stank. They had no mess tins, plates, pannikins or mosquito nets.5 Some lacked waterproof groundsheets, in a place where torrential rain was a near daily occurrence, even in the ‘dry’ season. Such conditions had a grave effect on morale ‘and contributed in no small measure to the disorderly and undisciplined conduct’.6
It was as though they were expected to fail, and the disdain in which the Australian authorities held them seemed to hasten the inevitable. The militia was ‘grossly undervalued’, observed Sir Paul Hasluck.7 The Australian Quartermaster’s store did not concern itself with jungle camouflage and tropical hygiene: the troops were issued with khaki shorts easily visible in the jungle (no jungle greens or green dye were then available). Mosquito nets were scarce; quinine was unavailable for the initial weeks; and malaria tablets were reduced to mush by the damp conditions.
‘We camped in the middle of a paddock,’ said Smoky, ‘out in the scrub, with no mosquito nets, no tucker, nothing. The tucker when it did come was dumped in a heap, in the hot sun.’8 Two hundred men drew washing and drinking water from a single 3/4 inch pipe. Within five weeks, a third had succumbed to disease.9 Clouds of mosquitoes tormented them day and night: ‘Their faces and arms and legs became grotesquely swollen and infected…’10 Within a month, dengue, malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers had reduced their effective strength by 25 per cent.
Where were Australia’s main forces? Two years earlier the nation’s most experienced soldiers, the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF), had been sent to fight the Germans and their allies in Africa, Greece and the Middle East. In their country’s darkest hour, 60,000 of Australia’s best troops were abroad. Men who did not enlist for overseas service were eligible for, or conscripted into, the citizen militia. This ‘two-army’ structure was deeply divisive, organisationally unsound and poorly administered: ‘the greatest mistake of the Australian war effort’, concluded military historian David Horner.11
The militia were almost sent abroad too—such was the clamour for men in the European war, and the public enthusiasm for the mother country. On 2 May 1942 the House of Representatives, after a heated seven-hour debate, rejected by just four votes a conservative motion that the Government should have the power to send the militia overseas.
The press, too, supported the dispatch of the militia to the Middle East. It was ‘an intolerable anomaly’ that these men should stay in Australia, declared the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘We could not honourably ask others [the Americans and British] to help us in our extremity, and then withhold any part of our strength which might contribute to victory.’12
The Daily Telegraph curiously seemed to think sending the militia overseas was the best way of saving Australia: ‘Are we fools? A populous, powerful enemy is about to invade our country. Yet we refuse to change one word of a law which prevents our own soldiers from hitting the enemy outside our own soil…Instead of saying, “We will kill the German, the Jap or the Wop wherever we can find him”, our own politicians insist on a law to restrain the greatest part of our army from killing its enemies anywhere except in our own backyard…’13
Curtin rubbished these and the Opposition’s arguments with the simple observation that the line of true defence of Australia should not be established a long distance from Australia. Curtin saw, as few did, that the defence of the nation depended on bringing home the troops and uniting them.
Of the many damaging consequences of a divided army, the worst—at troop level—was the impact on morale. The Australian Imperial Force ridiculed the militia. This went beyond mere cajolery. The militiamen were branded ‘chocos’—chocolate soldiers, who would melt in battle—or ‘koalas’, because in the 1930s you couldn’t shoot the cuddly, endangered marsupial.
True, many militiamen laughed this off in the Australian way. But the stigma stayed, and the insults stung. The militia were derided as cowards and somehow unAustralian for refusing to volunteer to fight for the mother country. The chocos, it was felt, were sub-standard, poorly trained, without the stomach for combat.
Tom Keneally, the Australian novelist, remembers growing up in Kempsey in New South Wales, when the militia were camped at the town’s showground. ‘My father and my older cousin—who were volunteers in the army—used to get me to go out on the verandah as these militia blokes passed by, and yell “choco”.’ Keneally was a little boy at the time and, later, when the facts of Papua emerged, his father said he was ashamed of having ‘wound me up to do it’.14
Many civilians derided the militia in Australia—notably the World War I veterans who were too old, and pugnacious boys who were too young, to fight. Women, too, were disdainful of these apparently half-formed troops. Chocos like Smoky Howson were acutely conscious of their second-rate status, painfully revealed in the ballad ‘The Unwrapped Chocolate Soldier’:
You saw him in the town, a’strolling down the street
You saw him in his uniform that always looked so neat,
You heard him in the dance hall, with your hand upon his shoulder,
Cursing fate and his bad luck; ‘The Unwrapped Chocolate Soldier’.
You labelled him a choco because he did not fight;
You thought he didn’t have the guts to stick up for the right;
You heard him in the bar, and if you felt a little bolder,
You didn’t hesitate to say, ‘another chocolate soldier’.
Yet these were the only men available to defend the country against the Japanese. Australia’s national security relied on a motley crew of untrained reservists, volunteers and boyish conscripts, in whom the nation’s military leaders had little, if any, confidence. Indeed, the most vicious condemnation came from the military itself. The generals who consigned the bewildered young men of the militia brigades to the New Guinean jungle openly belittled them. They were treated with a sort of arm’s-length embarrassment all the way to the top. Generals MacArthur and Blamey, who never set foot on the Kokoda Track, were dismayed by the quality of the militia. Not once did they observe the peculiarly awful conditions into which they were soon to send these scorned young men to die—and not until the final phase of fighting did Blamey acknowledge the militia’s courage. By then the survivors were too disgusted with the Australian army to care.
A gallows humour grew among the militia ranks in those early months in Port Moresby. In January 1942 their self-confidence, never strong, hit rock bottom. ‘The Mice of Moresby’, as the 49th Militia Battalion were called—a play on the name, if not the military example, of the famous Rats of Tobruk*—dreamt up mad plans for escape in the event of a Japanese invasion. They half-jokingly envisaged a flight of 400 miles west to Daru—the Daru Derby—across the impassable swamps of the Fly River Delta. The evacuation plan reflected the mood of despair, as did their sad self-image in the poem:
Rats of old ‘Tobruk’
Or merely ‘Moresby Mice’,
We’ve had our fill of fighting
And of hardships—once or twice…’15
Few had seen any fighting when this was written. Nonetheless, Major-General Basil Morris, commander of New Guinea Force in Port Moresby, was prepared to give his troops the opportunity to show their mettle. In February, in case of seaborne invasion, he assembled his dubious officers and issued their orders: ‘No position is to be given up without permission…even the smallest units must make provision for counter attack…We have the honour of being the front line defence of Australia. Let us show ourselves worthy of that honour.’16
It was a generous display of confidence in their fighting condition. But a cursory glance at the Australian militia suggested Morris’s confidence was wildly misplaced. The troops were better equipped to serve the nation as wharfies than jungle fighters. Most had spent their time unloading ammunition and food from vessels moored at Port Moresby’s jetty and digging holes around the aerodrome, both of which soon became daily targets for Japanese Zeros.
There was one full-strength militia brigade, the 30th, in Port Moresby in January 1942, containing three battalions each of about a thousand men, none of whom had combat experience.** The battalions were the 39th, the 53rd and the 49th. We need not inquire into the historic meaning of these apparently arbitrary numbers. Suffice to say, they emerged from an earlier reordering of men and machines. Numbers festoon military organisations, and behind every number is a mob of anxious, impatient, bored and apprehensive troops.
The militia tended to come from inner city, working-class backgrounds in Melbourne and Sydney, during a time of extreme economic hardship. ‘We weren’t over-educated because from the age of fourteen we had to leave school and go out and work,’17 said Don Daniels, a veteran of Kokoda and retired interior designer from Melbourne. He volunteered at the age of seventeen—‘I put my age up a year.’ So did George Cops, who similarly left school at fourteen. Both volunteered for the 39th.
While most militiamen volunteered, a large minority were conscripts. Conscription for the militia came into force in 1941, in call-up waves of about 9000. (The Second AIF was an army of volunteers, like its Anzac predecessor.) His conscription papers gave the recruit five days’ notice before departure to army camp: ‘You will report to Drill Hall, Area X…prepared to proceed to a Camp of Continuous Training…PLEASE SHOW THIS NOTICE TO YOUR EMPLOYER IMMEDIATELY.’18
On entering camp, the men received a uniform and a free issue of singlets, underpants, socks and a towel. They were advised to bring toiletries and kitchen utensils, and sufficient food for two meals. Most received perfunctory lessons in parade ground etiquette and how to salute, and were bussed to the docks for shipment to Port Moresby.
Their average age was not eighteen, as many claim. It is impossible for any unit to have an average age of eighteen because the delay between call-up and action is usually a year, as Hank Nelson patiently explains.19 Only three of those killed in the 39th Battalion were under twenty. Their average age was closer to 23 or 24—and not only due to the skewing effect of a few fiftyish AIF officers too old to serve in the Middle East. There were quite a few 30-somethings. Indeed, a spin-minded statistician could easily construe some militia units as a Dads’ Army as much as a boys’ brigade. Some lied about their age. In the 39th Battalion, a handful were sixteen, and there was one fifteen-year-old, Arthur Bury, born 2 January 1927.*
‘There were quite a number who really shouldn’t have been there,’ said Daniels. ‘They were just very slow—not retarded—but slow. They should have been a cook’s off-sider. They should never have been at the front line.’20
The men enlisted for a variety of reasons. Many simply yearned for adventure. The allure of war as an antidote to boredom is gravely underestimated. A few were of the ‘biff the Jap’ school of patriotism; the notion of ‘King and country’ persuaded others. The King’s shilling was a more tangible incentive to the sons of the Depression. Some wanted a chance to prove themselves to hard-bitten fathers, veterans of the Great War, or to escape the family’s poverty.
Don Daniels and George Cops were both ‘Depression kids’ who, like Howson, enlisted because anything seemed better than the drabness of the 1930s. Signing up ‘was glamorous’, recalled Daniels. ‘And of course, they were calling out on the radio and in the streets, “Join Up! Join Up!”’21
A powerful motive was mateship—it was a time when the term meant something and had not been politically bowdlerised. Mates of the Australian stamp, circa 1942, got drunk together, chased girls together and ruined their lives together. It was a stamp of honour to stand by your mate through the worst excesses of peacetime. They enlisted together, too—and only in war did the term come to mean dying for your best friend. Smoky Howson’s Zorro Gang were six drinking mates who volunteered for the 39th. Gangs like Smoky’s were the binding that held the Australian army together.
Despite their inauspicious start, the 39th Battalion forged an unusually strong sense of camaraderie. They identified as a unit. This transcended their civilian friendships, and took the shape of an emerging esprit de corps. ‘The bond formed very quickly,’ said Daniels. ‘The ones I joined with in my hut I still see today [i.e. 2003]. And it’s still the same today as it was then. A very very close association.’22
There is no single reason why this should have happened to the 39th; no doubt the devotion and respect they owed to their brilliant leaders in battle would have a powerful influence. But that came later. From the earliest moment a mysterious bond seemed to form between these men. It was partly patriotic. They shared an impression of themselves as the first troops to defend Australia on Australian soil—a delicate flower of an idea for men unaccustomed to seeing themselves as heroes or saviours. If they thought about it at all, their self-identity was founded on negative role models and influences: they were chocos, the ne’er-do-well sons of remote fathers, the products of harsh experience, poverty and military indifference.
They spent eight months unloading ships, rolling drums onto the aerodrome and doing very little that might prepare them for combat. ‘We had no training whatsoever—no shooting, nothing,’ said Daniels. They had a couple of goes at throwing grenades—‘but most had forgotten how to pull the pin out’.23
Some of the 39th troops were ‘cast offs’ from other Victorian units; the battalion was a disorganised mob when they first formed up. A leavening of excellent AIF officers with combat experience in the Middle East perceived the unit’s gathering self-confidence, and built on it. One such officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, who commanded the 39th along the Kokoda Track and at Gona. Honner was an unusual example of superb leadership under whose inspiration the men of the 39th would discover something else within their ranks: a stoic quality, a rare self-overcoming, and, in time, a burning sense of their place in history as the first battalion to resist the Japanese on Australian soil.
The 53rd Battalion was not destined to share the glory of the 39th. The story of this unfortunate unit is one of the sadder episodes of Australian military history, and rarely told in the gung-ho accounts of the Kokoda campaign. They were similar men, with similar backgrounds, as those in the 39th. And many were as brave and as committed. But incompetent leadership and a splinter group of malcontents fatally compromised them.
The battalion’s hopes were poisoned from the start: in November 1941, eighteen existing militia battalions were ordered to supply a quota of men for ‘a new unit’ designated for a special task. Again, this was seen as an opportunity to cast off dregs and misfits. The result was a unit with a reputation for hard drinking, rebelliousness and chronic ill discipline—unfairly, in many cases, the label stuck. When their December 1941 embarkation date arrived, ‘many…were illegally absent, bitter because they had been given no Christmas leave’.24
To make up for the AWOL losses of the 53rd, a mob of vagrants and drifters was shanghaied off the streets of Sydney and virtually frog-marched to Woolloomooloo wharves for immediate departure. Many were refused leave to farewell their loved ones. Roy Wootten, padre of the 53rd, was obliged to write letters to their mothers to explain where they were, he said. Married men were excused; that was the only concession to civil society. It was a method of conscription the Elizabethan press gangs would have envied. ‘The whole incident,’ observed Lex McAulay, was ‘what members of the western democracies believe is normal in totalitarian regimes, not in our own armed forces.’25
If Curtin’s Labor Government spotted the irony, they didn’t act to prevent this injustice. At Garden Island wharves in Sydney, amid scenes of hysteria and anger, hessian walls were reportedly slung up to seal off the tearful eyes of families from the doomed, departing troops.26
‘These poor devils had no idea what was happening to them,’ observed a sergeant as the men of the 53rd came aboard the Aquitania. ‘They had received no final leave, were given no chance to let their families know what was happening to them…Most of them had never seen or handled a rifle.’27 They were crowded into F deck or G deck, in the ship’s boiling hold. Wootten recalls that no-one knew where they were heading. Even then, volunteers such as Daniels and Cops felt sorry for the conscripts of the 53rd: ‘They were shanghaied. The poor lads didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to their families. They didn’t know what was going on,’ said Daniels.
They were, in fact, lambs to the slaughter; and though they were unaware of how they would be used, many of the 53rd Battalion nursed a deep grudge against the Australian authorities. Unchecked by the morale-building influence of good leadership, this festered in their minds, and would soon find tragic expression along the Kokoda Track.
*The name was given to the early garrison troops of Port Moresby by the Japanese entertainer Tokyo Rose, in her radio propaganda (see Reveille, 7 December 1979).
**Part of the 14th Militia Brigade were sent to Port Moresby later in 1942.
*On 19 October, New Guinea Force decreed that no one under nineteen could be sent into combat: ‘No member of any combatant unit under the age of nineteen years shall be permitted in the forward areas. When any such Unit is ordered into a forward area, all such men shall be withdrawn and will remain with rear detals…’ (Blamey Papers).