‘Moresby is going to fall. Send Blamey up there and let him fall with it!’
—John Beasley, Minister for Supply, Australian Government
In Blamey, MacArthur had found his ‘biggest scapegoat’.1 The supreme commander resolved to shoehorn the only Australian general on his staff into the most politically dangerous job in the war: commander of New Guinea Force. Blamey would be released into the wild at a critical moment: if he succeeded, MacArthur would bask in the accolades of an inspired appointment; if Blamey failed, Blamey would get the blame. There can be few less edifying examples of powerful old men worrying about their reputations and careers, while the nation’s youth were giving their lives in battle.*
The Australian Labor Government dutifully acquiesced. Curtin’s Cabinet displayed an embarrassing strain of sycophancy towards the American commander. There were several toe-curling examples. One Australian minister drooled over ‘this best-dressed and most handsome military leader I’d ever seen’, in whom there was such confidence that ‘we should comply with what MacArthur requested in the special circumstances’.2 John Dedman, Minister for War Organisation, described MacArthur as ‘one of the greatest generals thrown up in WW2’.3 The general’s charm captured Curtin, too, though the Prime Minister’s willingness to suspend disbelief at least had the honourable intention of securing the American lifeline to Australia.
The decision to send Blamey to Port Moresby was well received. MacArthur explained that the Allied land commander should be in the vicinity of the main land offensive, since the decisive US victory at the Battle of Midway had removed any naval threat to Australia. The idea impressed the War Council: one cabinet minister later unwittingly echoed MacArthur’s own personal insurance policy: ‘Moresby is going to fall. Send Blamey up there and let him fall with it!’4
The job was a poisoned chalice, and this explained the politicians’ glee. Many in the Labor Party—with the notable exception of Curtin—despised Blamey, whom they viewed as an oafish conservative, the lapdog of the Right. The Blamey haters derived a perverse pleasure from holding Blamey against the blowtorch of defeat.
His political antennae on alert, Blamey saw he was entering an extremely volatile and dangerous situation. The Allied land commander obviously knew that Macarthur had set him up as a scapegoat. There was tremendous backpressure on Blamey, explained historian Lex McAulay.5 His career was in great danger.
Blamey didn’t believe he was necessary in Port Moresby. He dismissed Canberra’s eagerness to fall in with MacArthur’s knee-jerk demands, in three words: ‘Canberra’s lost it.’6 And initially he dragged his feet. Curtin was reduced to threats—‘if you value your position!’—to get him on the plane. The Allied land commander departed the next day, 23 September, ‘to take personal command’ of New Guinea Force.7
None except Blamey foresaw the real ramifications of his new appointment: the private impact it would have on the proud, prickly Rowell. And as he flew over the Coral Sea he reflected on their bitter past relations, notably in Greece. The scene was set for a supremely ugly clash of the generals.
Blamey landed in New Guinea, cornered and dangerous. In Australia, baying members of the War Council and jumpy American commanders relished the prospect of his demise; there, the exhausted, irate Rowell, commander of New Guinea Force, deeply resented his second coming.
‘[Blamey’s] every move is watched,’ William Dunstan, VC, general manager of the Melbourne Herald, warned Rowell. ‘He had made…statements which neither the Cabinet nor the public will swallow.’8
Curtin was unaware of the military repercussions of confirming Blamey’s appointment (and later acknowledged his own naivety). As he saw it, he was giving Blamey a last chance to redeem the Australian army and save Port Moresby. In so doing, the Prime Minister unwittingly helped to ignite a titanic confrontation between two of Australia’s most important soldiers—at a time of grave military crisis.
With baying politicians and the knives at his back, the beast within Blamey stirred. He shed the affectation of unhurried calm that had so irritated MacArthur in Brisbane; the jolly assassin and ruthless troubleshooter emerged.
Blamey knew exactly what was at stake: he was being sent to replace his most senior field commander in whom, days ago, he had expressed his full confidence. Blamey’s very presence in Papua, he knew, would ‘outrage Rowell’s precise ideas of how the command system was intended to function’.9
The two generals went back a long way; unfinished business smouldered between them. Rowell had lost all respect for Blamey after the withdrawal from Greece. He’d refused to join the hasty evacuation until Blamey sharply reminded him ‘to obey an order’.10 After Greece Rowell said, according to Sir Keith Murdoch, that he would never again serve on General Blamey’s staff.11 Blamey wrote of Rowell at the time, ‘I found him very difficult…and, as Commander, had to exercise considerable tact. Rather a reversal of what it should be…’12
Whatever tact Blamey once possessed, it had worn thin since Greece. He wrote portentously to Rowell before he left for Papua: ‘The powers that be have determined that I shall myself go to New Guinea…I hope that you will…not think that it implies any lack of confidence in yourself…it arises from the fact that we have…politicians who are inclined to panic.’13
To a character as sensitive as Rowell’s the message implied a total lack of confidence in him—which was possibly Blamey’s intention.
Rowell succumbed to dark, melancholy moods ahead of the inevitable clash. His very language presaged his fall. He confided in his close friend Cyril Clowes ‘that [Blamey] hasn’t enough moral courage to fight the Cabinet on an issue of confidence in me…He comes here when the tide is on the turn and all is likely to be well. He cannot influence the local situation in any way, but he will get the kudos, and it will be said, rather pityingly, that he came here to hold my hand and bolster me up. Shades of Greece in April 41!!’14
Rowell’s rather petulant nature assumed a self-destructive trajectory. The war seemed to fade into the background as the generals moved into each other’s orbit. For Rowell, dealing with Blamey posed ‘a problem more difficult to me than fighting the enemy’.15 He wasn’t being flippant: Blamey arrived in Port Moresby just as the Japanese army showed every sign of physical collapse.
The Japanese threat had dramatically receded since Horii captured Ioribaiwa Ridge in mid-September. Horii’s battered supply line—under constant danger of Allied air raids—writhed and twisted like a headless snake. Australian reinforcements were moving up the trail. And in the Solomons the Japanese were facing strong resistance from the US marines.
Blamey arrived with a small entourage—he intended to use Rowell’s staff—on 23 September and pitched his tents some distance from Rowell’s on the hillside near Rouna Falls. The icy atmosphere ‘belonged more to arriving in Antarctica than the tropics’, observed Blamey’s adjutant, Norman Carlyon.16 After dinner, Blamey immediately repaired for talks with Rowell.
He began with the chilling assurance that Rowell’s difficulties in New Guinea were the first ‘bumps’ in an otherwise exemplary career. Rowell, not a man to endure damnation with faint praise, swiftly concluded, ‘for all practical purposes I was being supplanted in my command’.17 The mood rapidly deteriorated.
Rowell suggested that Blamey’s faith in him no longer existed. Blamey silently agreed. He could not have found a better amanuensis in Rowell who, though a superb soldier, was no politician.
Blamey could be insufferably upbeat. Much as the tyrant moulds history in his image, it was not beneath him to construe the latest good news as a consequence of his arrival. In fact, the day Blamey got to Moresby was ‘the key date in the entire South West Pacific campaign’, his PR men would write. On this day, they claimed, the ‘elimination of the enemy’ began, leading to the ‘eventual re-conquest of the whole of New Guinea’.18
An ugly and drawn-out command crisis resulted. Officer morale plummeted; lines of command got confused: to whom should the brigadiers report, Blamey or Rowell? To whom should the battalion and company commanders look to as their ultimate leader? As Rowell wrote, ‘The position had to be made clear to my subordinates, who were as much in the dark as I was.’19 For five days the leadership lurched in limbo, as the two generals thrashed out their understandings of power.
The clash cannot be dismissed as the grandstanding of vainglorious men with one eye on their place in the history books. Nor can their battle of wills be reduced to a crude question of who gave orders. Blamey, as the most senior officer in New Guinea, indisputably wore the purple. Their feud was subtler, and the repercussions, immense. Blamey and Rowell both had brilliant records. They were two of Australia’s most accomplished soldiers, utterly dedicated to the nation’s defence. They understood the consequences of military power; the lives of millions of people ultimately hinged on their making the right decisions.
The row was ostensibly about military etiquette and intelligence. Would Blamey work through Rowell, as he proposed, or bypass him completely? Would Rowell ensure all intelligence went straight to Blamey? Why did Blamey not bring his own support staff? In truth, these flash points were superficial manifestations of the deepest personal animosity.
From the start an upbeat Blamey seemed intent on tapping this raw nerve. Rowell was furious when, on 25 September, Blamey ‘suggested’ to the commanding officer at Milne Bay that a battalion be flown to Wanigela on the north-east coast of New Guinea. Blamey planned to open an easterly line of attack on the northern beachhead, and capitalise on the Allied victory at Milne Bay. Rowell interpreted this move as a deliberate provocation that circumvented the proper chain of command—in a word, him.
When Blamey ‘bounced in’ to Rowell’s office and announced the Wanigela decision, Rowell, who happened to be removing his boots, got so angry he almost hurled one at the general.20 ‘I fairly rose. I then got off my chest what I’ve been storing up since April 1941. I told him he’d already dumped me twice and was in the process of doing it a third time, as I hoped he would.’21
Rowell did not help himself. He failed to control his temper and seemed to be willing his own demise. To be fair, this underestimates the excruciating effect of Blamey’s unprincipled, transparently self-seeking personality on an exhausted, high-minded man.
Blamey fired a second shot on the 26th. It was a ‘directive’, which laid down the new law of the land: ‘1. I have been directed by the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief, South West Pacific Area to take control of the forces in the NEW GUINEA area.’22
Blamey would ‘exercise command’ through Rowell’s own HQ. Whatever it gained in efficiency, the usurpation of Rowell’s staff crudely underlined the latter’s subordination. Contemptuously sidelined to the meaningless role of ‘deputy field commander’, Rowell felt humiliated in the eyes of his hand-picked staff. Blamey added a string of demands: ‘I would be glad,’ he wrote, ‘to be promptly furnished with all tactical, supply and administrative information’.23 Brittle hopes of a modus operandi forming between the two men collapsed. Though their tents were within walking distance, they often chose to communicate by hand-delivered mail.
This then, was the state of Australia’s High Command with the Japanese not 30 miles from Port Moresby. Both men were under huge pressure: they were defending three fronts: the Kokoda Track, at Wau and at Milne Bay. They were answerable to the nation; and responsible for the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. And they were, of course, proud, arrogant, ruthless commanders.
It got worse, far worse. Rowell refused to accept Blamey’s terms. If so, said Blamey, early retirement was the only option. It was a crude provocation, but Rowell took the bait—interpreting it as a threat, not a warning. Had he swallowed Blamey’s demands he may have survived, and completed the job of defeating the Japanese to which he was dedicated.
Instead, Rowell became openly insubordinate and nakedly contemptuous of Blamey. This eased his executioner’s task. On 27 September, after ‘three first class brawls’, Rowell confided in a colleague, ‘I would never have believed a senior officer would have taken what I said to him.’24
On the morning of the 28th the generals clashed for the last time. It was an argument of such ferocity that neither would speak to the other for years. Rowell, driven to his limit, exploded. Something of unmentionable squalor passed between them. It seems Rowell accused Blamey of cowardice in Greece; if true, it was an astonishing accusation to level at a superior officer.*
Blamey responded that afternoon with a peremptory missive, the clipped tone of which suggests the clash had ended thoroughly to his satisfaction. Having tormented Rowell to the limit, Blamey put him out of his misery:
Dear General Rowell,
…I regret that I feel it my duty to relieve you of the Command of New Guinea Force. You will please arrange to return to Australia at your early convenience…A copy of the message sent to the Prime Minister and the Commander in Chief dealing with the matter is available…at my office. I would be glad if you would…initial it. [Signed] T.A. Blamey25
Blamey’s subsequent message to the Prime Minister and MacArthur was nothing short of a character assassination: ‘Rowell has taken my coming here as personally against himself…he would be seriously disruptive influence if retained here…Rowell is…of a temperament that harbours imaginary grievances. He has had very limited experience of command…In view of circumstances I have relieved him of command…’26
A proud officer, Rowell felt acutely Brisbane’s loss of confidence in him. It was doubly wounding to be relieved of your command just as the war turned in your favour. But to have your career casually jettisoned in such terms was intolerable to a man who placed such store by his professionalism and sense of duty.
The charges contained in the ‘dreadful document…could not be justified’, protested Rowell, to whom Blamey, with infuriating smugness, replied, ‘I don’t have to justify it to anyone.’27
By now a visceral hatred simmered between the two men. His sacking was just the beginning of a long feud, as Rowell revealed to Clowes: ‘Well the blow descended…I am sacked. So the fight is on and one of us will go down. I pray that…this bad man and his rotten influences will be put out of public life forever. Like all crafty gangsters he got his blow in first…’28
He was ordered home, ‘to what job I do not know, if any,’ he told Tubby Allen. ‘I have tried not to let personal matters get on top…but I am not able to go beyond a certain point in eating dirt.’29
In sum, one of Australia’s finest military strategists was put out to graze in the nation’s hour of crisis.
Dissatisfied with merely sacking Rowell, Blamey sought to destroy him. In a private letter to Curtin on 1 October, Blamey accused Rowell of refusing to cooperate; failing to develop the new offensive; and persisting in a line of attack along the Kokoda Track that was ‘so difficult that it will be months before a force of 2000 could be supplied by this route. There is no hope of achieving victory along this route alone.’30 Rowell’s intelligence section ‘was very deficient in energy, initiative and enterprise’.
Rowell’s defence is well documented and just, if fatally flawed. He conceded his limited experience of combat command, but how, he asked, did this square with Blamey publicly praising him days before he was sacked, and the fact that his successor, Herring, had even less experience? On his loss of temper, he felt that ‘two statements, made in the heat of the moment, [were] divorced from their context…’31
On one point, however, Blamey drew blood. Rowell had withheld information vital to the prosecution of the war, Blamey claimed: ‘I had the greatest difficulty in obtaining information from the Intelligence Section’, he told Curtin. ‘It operates as though we were at peace.’
Rowell later conceded that Blamey’s accusation ‘may have had some degree of truth initially’.32 If so, this was certainly a sackable offence. For a short period—perhaps two days—the Allied land commander had not received the relevant intelligence. It looked like ‘a deliberate attempt to isolate Blamey’,33 and no matter how boorish the method, Rowell’s sacking seemed justified on this basis alone. Perhaps Rowell’s fury paralysed his judgment, and he allowed himself to be goaded into committing a sackable offence. In the terse conclusion of one brigadier, ‘Rowell sacked himself.’34
Banished to the Unattached List—‘a veritable Sargasso Sea of the army’s unwanted’35—Rowell confined himself to his Melbourne garden until he received fresh orders.* There can be few more humiliating experiences for a career soldier than to find himself pruning his hedge while his country is at war. Rowell waited for weeks as the War Council, in a manifest failure of political will, delicately negotiated his future.
Blamey pursued a bitter personal vendetta against the man. He literally sank his teeth into Rowell’s carcass and refused to let go. He demanded that Rowell be demoted. He vetoed Rowell’s chances of several senior overseas appointments. He refused to temper his animosity, inveighing against Rowell at every opportunity; ‘it would be quite impossible for me to accept him as a Commander in the field under me, and he would be a continual source of evil if he held an appointment in Australia’, Blamey told Curtin on 27 December.36
Blamey recommended Rowell’s early retirement and that he revert to his prewar rank of colonel.** Blamey was indeed ‘a great hater’, as Curtin dispassionately observed.***
*In one of the richer ironies of the war, MacArthur let it be known that he, in fact, had gone to Port Moresby at this time, in a book written by his staff members. In fact, MacArthur first set foot in New Guinea on 6 November, and only with great reluctance. He never once visited the front line. (See McCarthy p. 235.)
*According to David Horner in an email to the author: ‘My guess is [Rowell’s remarks] referred to Greece and Rowell’s claim that Blamey was a coward, but this is just speculation.’
*On his way back, Rowell dropped in on MacArthur, who bluntly said that Rowell ‘had not prosecuted the campaign as vigorously as he would have liked. His Intelligence system had not been good…He would be absolutely opposed to his return to New Guinea’ (see Rowell, Full Circle).
**In 1943, Rowell found himself ‘exiled’ to a post in the Middle East. He later assisted in drawing up the plans for the D-day landings. Britain, and not Australia, received the benefits of his experience. Before his departure he wrote a conciliatory letter to Blamey. The tone is intriguingly contrite: ‘Had you suspended judgement for perhaps a day I feel sure I would have gone a long way in withdrawing statements…which were made in the heat of the moment.’ Rowell added, ‘I know you considered that I was merely batting for myself and not for the team, but this was not so…’ (see Full Circle, p. 134). Blamey did not reply.
***Military historians, officers and battalion reunions are still dissecting this extraordinary row. David Horner has slightly changed his views. In Crisis of Command (1978), he concludes: ‘Rowell did not fail as a commander in New Guinea, despite Blamey’s later claims. His only failure was his inability to work with a man towards whom he felt only loathing and disgust.’ Blamey was the more culpable, Horner argued, not least for his unwillingness ‘to risk his own position by an affirmation of loyalty and trust in his subordinate’ (Crisis of Command, p. 187). Horner latterly argues, in his biography of Blamey, that, ‘Rowell took an unduly pure view of the responsibility of a higher commander to shield a lower commander from political interference. In practical terms that is just not always possible. Therefore, it was Rowell’s responsibility to get on with his superior’ (see Blamey: Commander-in-Chief).