In classic lands
Success and tragedy in the shadow of the ancient
ACROSS CYRENAICA
The training of the first units of the new 2nd AIF into a division that would be named the 6th was proceeding according to the traditions and cultural habits that had given the 1st AIF such a bad name with British generals and senior officers. A restaurant in Melbourne put up a sign reading ‘Officers Only’, but Australian other ranks entered the premises and played two-up there until, as one of them, Charlie Robinson, put it later, the ‘apartheid’ ended. By June 1940 it was considered that the 6th was ready for the war front. The convoy set out without as much concern as had marked the first convoy of 1914. There were German raiders operating, but not on the scale of the threat posed by the German Pacific flotilla in the old days. It became known that the 6th were being sent, like the first of the 1st AIF, to Egypt, but one of its brigades found itself for a time in England, which feared invasion. It would soon be replaced by a new draft and sent to North Africa with the others.
When the 6th Division first arrived in Egypt, and travelled up by truck to the military camp in Beit Jirja in Palestine, General Archibald Wavell, the British commander, addressed them in severe tones. He was not a bad fellow, Archie Wavell, a published poet and, according to later research, a homosexual. It was as well the homophobic AIF did not know that. In any case, he told them that he had found Australian troops undisciplined in World War I, and hoped that in this war they would be better behaved on leave and in their relationship with the local population. The sons of the ‘undisciplined’ Australians of the past certainly showed a sometimes loutish sense of entitlement in their behaviour towards Arabs. But so did the average Tommy. It might have been that, above all, the Australians lacked the parade-ground crispness of the British, and did not go to great pains to acquire it. As well as that a Department of Defence book of advice for Australian servicemen in the Middle East, a copy of which the author recently found in the effects of his late father, hopefully stated, ‘It is not true that Australian soldiers do not salute officers’, a sure confession that it was true, particularly where British officers were concerned. And then ‘Officers Only’ bars were a welcome challenge to Australians and provoked a gleeful and loud intrusion, again to the disapproval of professionals such as Wavell. Questions of liquor and sustenance had the capacity to bring out the egalitarian and the democrat in Australian private soldiers, and they were unjustly considered bad soldiers because of this.
From Palestine, the Australians moved down to Egypt to the scenes they had heard of from uncles or fathers. To the west, in Libya, lay Mussolini’s Italians. In the 1930s, Libya, made up of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, was touted as the new America for Italian immigrants and in 1934 it had been incorporated and united as a colony of Italy. By then good roads had been built and attempts at irrigation made. Sophisticated concrete fortifications for the Italian army were thrown up. There were over a hundred thousand Italian immigrants in Libya by the time World War II began, and many of them, having faith in the huge Italian military presence, were still in place at the time Italy decided to advance into Egypt in late 1940 to capture the Suez Canal and deprive the Empire of its great artery of trade. In that move across the Egyptian border, Italian generals drew parallels with ancient times, when Rome controlled the Lower Kingdom of Egypt. Such hopes as existed in the breasts of Mussolini and his generals would never quite be matched again as they were when the Italian infantry and mechanised units advanced along the coastal plain.
In September 1940, as the Italian invasion began, the troops of the Australian 6th Division were still enjoying the bars of Cairo and being greeted in the Rue des Soeurs in Alexandria by women calling, ‘Come in, George’, and ‘All the same Queen Victoria, all pink inside’. Now they were mustered, marched and convoyed out westwards to the Egyptian–Libyan border to take up the fight against the Italians. They passed through the coast port Sidi Barrani, where they found the Italians had already been repulsed by the British, and saw their first war dead. The desert weather was turning cold, and as the season wore on, newsreels of Australians advancing in overcoats would confuse Australian citizens watching in picture palaces at home, their ideas of North Africa being derived from the flicks, in which the desert was always sweltering.
The footage of the first Australian attack against the Italian fortress of Bardia (Bardiya) in Libya was taken by the young Australian cinematographer Damien Parer. Parer, a Melbourne boy and devout Catholic, had been appointed official cinematographer on the basis of his work with film director Charles Chauvel on the classic Australian Light Horse film Forty Thousand Horsemen, shot in the Cronulla sand dunes. He intended to get as close to the combat as possible, and came up with the idea of filming from the front of advancing troops, a practice that many would come to think foredoomed him.
Late in December 1940, the 6th Division, under the much-admired (compared to his World War I namesake) General Iven Mackay, former headmaster of Cranbrook School in Sydney and called ‘Mr Chips’ by the troops, positioned themselves at the western end of the fortifications that ringed the town and the harbour of Bardia. Around Bardia the Australians got used to the khamsin, the dry, hot wind that blew grit into their stew, Libya itself becoming part of their diet. The town lay beneath a steep headland that then dropped off to the Mediterranean. The Italian defensive strongpoints that encircled the town and its harbour for 30 kilometres were of complicated design and armed with 47-millimetre guns and machine guns able to be fired from concrete emplacements connected to deep bunkers. From the high points, and running into the port itself, was a huge wadi or creek bed, usually dry. Above the west side of this, facing the Australians, the Italians had erected one of their strongest of strongpoints, Post 11. Six battalions of the 6th Division were allocated to attack posts 3 to 11.
On 3 January 1941, after a number of patrols, the Australians went forward, supported by machine gunners of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. The subsequent victory would be depicted by Australian propaganda as a walkover, and in some ways it was. Though better armed and supplied, the Italians were not willing to perish for Mussolini. As a sort of military plebiscite on Il Duce, the nos far outnumbered the yeses. The Australians suffered 130 casualties and captured some thousands of prisoners, and were delighted with the Italian equipment they found abandoned, so much more sophisticated than the gear with which they had been equipped.
Except for those killed or badly wounded, nearly everyone was jubilant. Private Joe Gullett was wounded in the face but would recover to the extent that at the aid post he used the bullet hole through his cheek for a party trick: ‘He amused us by dragging on a cigarette,’ remembered Charlie Robinson, a member of the Field Ambulance, ‘and puffing out smoke through the wound.’ The behaviour of the Italian prisoners and wounded was a matter of cultural mystification. They were not given to stoicism but to exuberant lament. ‘They produced photographs of their families or holy pictures from their wallets which they kissed fervently,’ said Robinson. ‘As we dressed their wounds they would attempt to kiss our hands. Language presented difficulties, as when given water they would take their fill and then say “Basta” [Enough]. We thought they were calling us “bastards” and were getting very irate until an Italian who spoke English explained.’
Walking the town after the capture, the Australians particularly liked the Italian officers’ quarters—‘silk sheets, pomades, perfumes, gaudy dress uniforms and colourfully lined capes.’ They also found cheese, canned delicacies, pasta and coffee, together with a supply of wine and cognac.
The Australian commander, General Thomas Blamey—sensual, clever but unpopular with troops, a former aide to Monash and also a former Victorian police commissioner—had his headquarters in Gaza in Palestine when Bardia fell on 5 January. His plan was that the AIF and the British 7th Armoured Division, grouped as the I Australian Corps, should launch a new desert offensive in the summer, but General O’Connor, the overall British operational commander, who was headquartered in Egypt, intended to travel at a faster rate than that. Blamey had, in fact, been under pressure from his subordinates, generals John Lavarack and the red-haired Horace ‘Red Robbie’ Robertson, either to become fitter and visit the troops more, or else resign. Even his friend from World War I, Eugene Gorman, in the Middle East working for the Australian Comforts Fund, supplying extra clothing and non-army-issue luxuries to the troops, approached him to make that point. He also warned Blamey that the junior men were after his job and that the time had come ‘to conciliate or exterminate’. Behind every campaign, successful or otherwise, was a jockeying for control of which the soldiers at the front were blessedly ignorant.
Generals Lavarack and Gordon Bennett each believed that Blamey was appointed to the command instead of himself because Blamey was from Melbourne and part of a Melbourne axis. Menzies had been attorney-general in the Victorian government during the time that Blamey was Victorian police commissioner, and Frederick Shedden, the crucial public servant, was also Victorian. At that time the traditional hostility between Melbourne and Sydney and elsewhere was more than a joke.
Blamey had resigned as police commissioner in 1936 due to a scandal that concerned the shooting of a police officer, John O’Connell Brophy, Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Branch. Brophy had taken two women friends along with him to a meeting with a police informant. While they were waiting for the informant they had been approached by armed bandits and Brophy had opened fire and had himself been wounded. In order to cover up the identities of the women involved, Blamey initially issued a press release saying that Brophy had accidentally shot himself. The premier gave Blamey the choice of resigning or being dismissed, and Blamey chose resignation.
Tobruk (Tubruq), the next Italian fortress along the coast road, was surrounded by 48 kilometres of entanglements and tank traps. Tobruk needed to be captured so that Wavell’s soldiers could be resupplied by way of its port. Its garrison was believed to be twenty-seven thousand in strength. As the Australians came forward in trucks fraternally provided by the New Zealanders, the road itself barely avoided falling away into the wadis running down to the coast from inland. The British divisions were to attack from the west, and a British armoured division also anchored the end of the Australian line to the south. The tanks hoped to exploit places where the anti-tank ditch was not yet finished. Number 3 Squadron RAAF was to give air support, along with British squadrons of bombers and one of fighters. But General Mackay complained that his Australians were behaving as if it were ‘all a picnic . . . civilianisation is about to break out’. Men had adopted pet stray dogs, and were wearing items of Italian uniform, and shooting at desert gazelles with captured weaponry. As patrols went out on those cold January nights and captured Italians in the outposts, there was fraternisation.
The men lived hard, as they always did on desert campaigns. The dust storms blew grit into their eyes and their food; they lived and slept in holes scraped in the earth; desert sores began to break out on limbs and faces; and three-quarters of a gallon of water a day was provided to each man for all purposes. They cleaned their mess tins with sand.
Patrolling into and beyond the tank ditch was a nightly affair. The night of 13 January was bright, and helped the Italians pour a fury of fire against the Australians’ patrolling 4th Battalion. On these patrols men ran into Italian booby traps, explosives stuck on low stakes and connected by trip wires. Sapper Kendrick from Albury died of his wounds after setting one off and receiving its cargo of metal fragments.
The Australians were to attack Post 57 on the eastern side of the port town and use the wire before it as the point of entry from which they would fan out. They deceived the Italians as to their intentions by setting Bangalore torpedoes to destroy the wire outside every other post but 57. On the night of 17 January, a party under Captain Hassett and Lieutenant Bamford, a baker from Bowral, trying to mark out the start line for the attack, set off the booby traps; Hassett, Bamford and three other men were badly wounded. The following night, Major Campbell, the brigade major of Brigadier General Tubby Allen, who would later taste glory, horror and military injustice in New Guinea, successfully felt out and cut the wires connecting the booby traps and set a starting line for the coming assault, marking it unobtrusively with bits of gun-cleaning flannel tied to the branches of neighbouring shrubs.
While waiting to make the final attack, the 17th Australian Brigade was allowed to go down to the coast east of Tobruk for a swim. On the night of 21 January, the attack went in from a taped line Campbell had made with his earlier gun-flannelled shrubs for guidance. On the right of the line soldiers blundered into the wire nonetheless. ‘In the flash,’ one soldier said, ‘you could see twenty or more men peeling back like a flower opening.’ Three men were killed. The picnic was over.
The Italians resisted and one of the posts fell only after every Italian had been killed. Australian brigades fanned out within the wire, and post after post fell to them. They were supported from behind by Australian guns and the Royal Horse Artillery, and a machine-gun regiment of the Cheshires. Italian tanks captured at Bardia and now sporting a kangaroo on their sides and crewed by the 6th Australian Cavalry Regiment took part in the assault against the inner fortress called Fort Pilistrano. Sergeant Burgess, who had worked in a flour mill in Melbourne, was killed while attacking a defending Italian tank with a grenade. Bypassed Italian outposts joined the fight too. But by 2 p.m. some troops had advanced across the escarpment so far that they could see down into Tobruk harbour. Another fort, Fort Solaro, had fallen easily, with six hundred prisoners taken. Forty-nine Australians died, however, and there was, given the pace of the advance, a problem getting the wounded back to the hospitals.
By the morning of 22 January, the town was theirs though some Italian batteries still fired from outposts. The Australians found Tobruk pleasant and full of delicacies, but the British, to the north-west, were still dealing with a determined stand by the Italians. Eight thousand prisoners at various posts had been taken. Dumps burned around the harbour. The following morning, the remaining outposts cracked and General della Mura, the Italian commander, surrendered to Australian Lieutenant Phelan and two of his men. All along the front the Italian outposts were also surrendering, so that there was no final bloodbath for possession of the harbour itself, as scattered Italian troops hiding in the wadis were rounded up. Major Eather, in a troop carrier, found three thousand Italians drawn up as if on parade, their officers’ luggage packed and ready for movement. He accepted their surrender. At naval headquarters, Admiral Massimiliano Vietina and fifteen hundred officers and men surrendered. It was made clear to Vietina by the Australian brigade commander Robertson that if a single Australian soldier died of booby traps in the town, there would be unspecified but serious punishment.
Damien Parer dressed appallingly and was once barked at by a colonel, ‘Tuck your shirt in, man, you look like a wog.’ He had begun by filming the attack on Bardia and then raced to catch up with the advancing Australians with Frank Hurley, veteran cinematographer of Shackleton’s endurance expedition to the Antarctic. Chester Wilmot, the broadcaster, found that when he arrived at the outskirts of Tobruk early one morning in this advance, Parer was already there, filming the breakthrough of the 7th Battalion near Post 65.
Parer and Hurley got many effective shots of shell fire, Italian prisoners, and burning oil installations around the harbour. Parer was there to film an Australian private hauling down the Italian flag over Tobruk and hoisting his own hat to the masthead. He shot his first material of advancing with infantry when he went along with the 11th Battalion in their attack on the airport at Derna. He blamed himself for missing the best footage by ducking whenever a shell came over. The men around him, however, yelled, ‘Get down, you bloody fool!’
Parer always argued that his job was not to film the ‘pretty-pretty stuff ’—triumphant marches into a town already captured, troops’ football matches, the cleaning of guns when the battle was over. He wanted to ‘convey the moment of truth when a soldier charges, to kill or be killed’. Cameraman Ron Williams declared, ‘There was no doubt that from then on Parer was doomed.’
It became nearly impossible to provide proper medical care and blankets to the compounds of the nearly thirty thousand who had surrendered. Only five of the twelve proud Italian divisions stationed in Libya were now left. In late January, at Derna, a further coast fortress, a rearguard of Italian Bersaglieri were near-surrounded and pulled back towards the stronghold of Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica. Fifty-five Australians were buried here after the Italians simply abandoned it. The Axis’s grand strategy had been reduced to debacle.
And by now the 7th Division had arrived in Egypt. The 6th was withdrawn to pursue other, as yet undisclosed purposes.
A POET TO THE FRONT
Ken Slessor was both a practical working journalist and a major poet, born in the year of Federation in Orange, New South Wales, as Kenneth Adolf Slessor, son of a civil engineer of German descent, who had changed his name at the outbreak of World War I. In 1920, Slessor became a journalist, first for the Sydney tabloid The Sun, and then he jointly edited Vision, a literary magazine. In 1924, he published his first book of verse. His early poetry was illustrated by his mentor Norman Lindsay, but somehow Lindsay was more hidebound a man, and Slessor’s poetry pushed its way out into a brilliant, modern eloquence that was all his own. Three years later, in 1927, he joined the staff of Smith’s Weekly, where he would remain for the next thirteen years, until the outbreak of World War II. He considered Smith’s Weekly the Diggers’ paper—it had fought for the rights of Diggers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Slessor would later eloquently write, when appointed as official war correspondent, that soldiers were endangered by more than wounds. Their experience was chaotic in battle, ‘their acceptance into civil life hazardous, their rehabilitation as breadwinners problematical’. He combined being editor-in-chief of this hard-hitting, populist and irreverent magazine with the sophistication of his 1939 poem ‘Five Bells’, and all without becoming a man split asunder by his two tasks, but instead remaining a companionable and genial fellow.
Slessor seemed to find his own entirely modern voice, one not totally neglectful of Lindsay’s goddess Aphrodite but also finding its fascinations in the loss of friends, the deeps of the harbour, the mysteries of country towns and the strange contours of the Australian landscape. He was a devout city boy, and had written of William Street, Sydney, as a place of glorious squalors.
Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish
and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,
of grease that blesses onions with a hiss;
You find it ugly, I find it lovely.
The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze
(death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)
Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;
You find this ugly, I find it lovely.
His classic was the elegy ‘Five Bells’, the most eloquent, mourning evocation of a Sydney Harbour at that stage still full of moored ships and the clang of their bells.
Deep and dissolving verticals of light
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells
Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.
His ultimate view of Blamey, whose appointment as Australian commander Smith’s Weekly had attacked, and whom Slessor despised, was perhaps reflected in his ‘An Inscription for Dog River’. He describes troops as:
Having bestowed on him all we had to give
In battles few can recollect,
Our strength, obedience and endurance,
Our wits, our bodies, our existence,
Even our descendants’ right to live—
Having given him everything, in fact,
Except respect.
Slessor was thirty-nine when appointed Australia’s official war correspondent. The Sydney Morning Herald had always thought it had a mortgage on the official position, and Slessor would become very discontented with the way it and other dailies would butcher and rewrite his copy. Slessor was in England from July 1940, waiting for the troops he was to accompany to move off to the Middle East after training at Salisbury. Although at Salisbury he was a little removed from London, he saw something of the Blitz. His wife Noela, a Sydney girl of Catholic background who had married Slessor in the Methodist parsonage in Ashfield in 1922, also arrived in Britain. Their relationship was volatile.
In London, Slessor visited the eccentric journalist Eric Baume of the Sydney Truth, who lived in splendour in Cadogan Place and with whom he attended a spiritualist séance. But he was shocked by English social and military stuffiness. The old complaint of Australians when visiting ‘Home’ was uttered by him when he said that English newspapers mentioned Australia ‘about as frequently as Tierra del Fuego’. He met many Cabinet members, from Churchill to bluff Ernest Bevin, Labour leader, whom Slessor instinctively liked for speaking unapologetically about ‘the Ome Hoffice’, and Duff Cooper, writer and politician, who would later be a less than galvanising British Cabinet representative in Singapore before its fall.
On the way to Egypt from England in the Franconia, Slessor pleaded with the 9th Division troops aboard, who had been training in England and whom he was invited to address, in these terms: ‘Please don’t give me all the blame if you see one of my despatches that you don’t like. I have to work through layers of censors, cable operators, sub editors and printers—and so far I’ve had to struggle only with small beer.’ He concluded, ‘As for warfare in general, I am infuriated by the knowledge that for no reason or motive of any kind, except at the command of blind authority, working to satisfy the glandular cravings of an invisible oligarch, a Keats or Beethoven or Pasteur can be dismissed from existence by the mere motion of a man pressing a piece of iron which releases 2000 volumes of gas, which drives another piece of iron 3000 yards which perforates the abdominal cavity of an utter stranger between the fourth and fifth ribs.’
In the Middle East from March 1941, Slessor would write with similar disdain of ‘sleek young subalterns with shiny hair and shiny Sam Brownes skipping in and out of bars, squiring lovelies, hailing each other in BBC voices—perhaps it’s all part of the war effort’. He was highly outraged when in a Cairo hotel lounge he heard ‘two pompous old goats of English colonels talking in loud voices about disreputable doings by Australian and “colonial” troops . . . Good God, no wonder the English of a certain type are detested by Americans, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders.’ However, he disapproved of some Australian soldiers’ ruthless and loutish souveniring of goods, and their ‘reckless mixing of liquor’. His dislike of Blamey was enhanced when he saw him in a Cairo cabaret ‘jazzing fatuously with a blowsy Egyptian girl’. Wives were not permitted to go to the Middle East but Olga Blamey went as part of the staff of the Australian Red Cross. Ordered to send her home, Blamey declared she was a free citizen travelling on an Australian passport and that he lacked the power. This created further the idea that Blamey operated by different rules.
Sergeant Roland Hoffman, a former Sydney journalist who had written an excellent brigade diary on the voyage to the Middle East, had already been put in charge of producing an Australian soldiers’ newspaper in Egypt, the AIF News. Poor gentle-faced Hoffman was a good soldier who would be captured by the Germans in the calamitous campaign for Greece, and who would take his own life soon after his prison camp was liberated by the Allies in 1945.
The ABC also sent a unit made up of Charles Myer, with Chester Wilmot as his chief assistant. The latter, a young Victorian, was soon to be recognised as one of the best broadcasters in the English-speaking world; his reports aired on both the ABC and the BBC. Before going to the Middle East he had already clapped eyes on the enemy, having seen a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. On the North African battlefields, he would broadcast with temporarily assembled equipment and with the sounds of the guns in the background.
General Wynter, commander of the 9th Division, whose health was bad and who did not have long to live, attracted Slessor’s approbation: ‘He is admired and respected by all officers and men here.’ Again, General Blamey was another matter. He profoundly disliked war correspondents unless he was able to control them. His dislike had begun in World War I with the turbulent journalist Keith Murdoch, and Murdoch’s intrusion in 1918 into the question of who should command the Australian Corps. Blamey feared a repeat of such behaviour, and spotted wayward opinions in some of the correspondents now joining him in the Middle East—not least in Slessor’s fellow feeling for the Digger. Indeed, on the ground in Egypt, Slessor led deputations of journalists to both General Blamey and his chief-of-staff Brigadier Rowell on the lack of information correspondents received during the North African campaigns. But the general had a special reason for disliking Smith’s Weekly. In 1925, the year Blamey became police commissioner in Victoria, news got out that police had raided a brothel and found there a man in possession of Blamey’s police badge. Blamey denied it was his and claimed that it had been stolen from him or, in one version, lent by him to a friend. The Weekly had inflicted a great deal of suffering on Blamey over it.
For his part, Slessor suffered agonies over what befell his copy. He avoided reading his despatches in print because of ‘the inevitable mutilations, manglings, misreading and idiocies which accompany their publication’. The Sydney Morning Herald ‘vilely sub-edited’ him and did not mention his name. A master of grammar, he was particularly upset at the fact that the Melbourne Herald had quoted him as saying that Christmas hampers may eventuate for the troops—‘As if a hamper can eventuate!’
TO CLASSIC LANDS
In early April 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was still dreaming of a great alliance between Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey, which would altogether put up seventy divisions against the Axis. The technological shortcomings of all the equipment involved on the Allied side was one aspect that made the concept a fantasy—even if the Yugoslav front had not collapsed, and even if Turkey had consented to join. The Italians attempting to invade Greece from the direction of Serbia and Macedonia in October 1940 had been driven off by the Greek army, but on 5 April 1941 the Germans entered Greece, and now the Anzac Corps—the 6th Australian Division and the New Zealanders, commanded by Blamey—together with a number of British units, were to be committed to an operation that was hopeless, not least because they would have hardly any air cover.
There were certain undertakings the British had made to Greece, in spite of the fact that its prime minister Iannos Metaxas, had been a dictator until his death in late January 1941, but these promises were not Churchill’s total motivation. He wished by intervention in Greece to impress Roosevelt with a compelling, if doomed, British resistance, and brave and perhaps inevitable defeat, which would prove how desperately the Allies needed America to involve itself in the conflict. The soldiers shared the lack of faith in the operation—the Australian Charlie Robinson said that ordinary soldiers spoke of the futility of the coming campaign. For Churchill was weakening the garrison in North Africa, including Australian and New Zealand components, to put men in the way of assured harm in Greece.
Churchill had worked hard on Menzies since February 1941, when intelligence said the Germans would soon invade, to persuade him to allow Australian participation in a Greek campaign. On the last weekend of the month, Menzies, visiting Britain to confer with the War Cabinet and pursue his ambition of belonging in it, was invited to Chequers, the prime ministerial country residence. He did not think that Churchill was a good listener, but he mentioned ‘momentous discussion later with PM about defence of Greece, largely with Australian and New Zealand troops’. Churchill depicted the proposed Greek campaign ‘as a rather hypothetical matter’, as if it mightn’t happen. Menzies did not know that the decision for Greece had already been made two days before.
When it occurred, the Greek campaign would take place against a background of continuing Australian obsession with Singapore, with offhand British assurances that, if necessary, the Mediterranean would be abandoned by the Royal Navy to protect Singapore, but with the refusal of Britain to send modern Hurricane fighters to that fortress. Where would the abandonment of the Mediterranean put the Australian troops in North Africa? Menzies reasonably enough asked. Nonetheless, in early May, two days before he left London to go home, he was even persuaded to approve a (successful) request to the United States government to move elements of its Pacific fleet to the Atlantic Ocean. Menzies assured his Cabinet in Canberra that America’s increasing belligerence would in any case probably deter Japan from beginning a war in the Pacific. So Greece went ahead, and Menzies hoped it would really shake the American tree. Some historians believe that had Blamey and Menzies both objected strongly enough, the calamity could have been avoided.
The Anzac Corps then, along with some British units, was nonetheless committed to the saving of Greece. When the 19th Brigade AIF, having landed at Piraeus, later moved up beyond Thermopylae, where in 480 BC the three hundred Spartans under Leonidas had stood against the Persians, ensuring by their valour the ultimate defeat of the invader, the Australians intended to emulate them. The only problem was that, unlike the Spartans, the Allies would face superior (and more numerous) German aircraft that exercised utter dominance in the air and over the souls of the defenders.
Kenneth Slessor, who came to Greece to write despatches, was inevitably impressed to be in classic lands and under the shadow of the Acropolis. However, German propaganda was telling Greeks in the front line that the Australians were back in Athens dancing with their wives, and so all dancing in Athens was banned to the Australians. As sceptical as anyone about the hopes of the campaign, Slessor interviewed Blamey in that city. Blamey had arrived in Greece even before the German invasion, to inspect the terrain and the narrow passes the Australians would have to defend and, he was sure, retreat through. Lieutenant-Colonel Wells, commanding the Australian advance party, told Slessor he had been up to visit the northern defence line and saw little hope of holding it.
General Robertson, until recently the commander of the 19th Brigade, had been hospitalised in Alexandria for vein problems. When an officer from Australian Corps headquarters visited him and told him he had better get well to command his brigade in Greece, Robertson is rumoured to have said, ‘I am a successful commander, and Greece is going to be a disaster. I’m not going to Greece.’ The source for the story is the war journalist John Hetherington. If true, Robertson’s was a choice the ordinary private soldier was not in a position to make. Blamey is said to have heard the story and it is true that Robertson did not achieve a combat command of any importance until April 1945.
In the meantime, the Greeks were consoled by the presence of the Australians, New Zealanders and British into believing that their country would be saved. But Blamey—and Slessor—knew there were no grounds for the slightest confidence of that, for the experience of going off to the front told another tale. Slessor found ‘roads full of refugees streaming down from the mountains . . . It was pitiful to see Greek soldiers, lame and tired, plodding painfully back a long road—no transport or food for them’. It was fondly hoped by the Australians and New Zealanders that the line could be held from Larisa in the central north of Greece to Thermopylae, and Slessor and other journalists were told that the Larisa line would be virtually impassable, the 17th Brigade protecting the left flank, the 19th the right.
It is interesting to get a sense of the campaign from a unit diary, in this case that of the 19th Brigade. The diary keeper found as the brigade passed north through villages that the attitude of the Greek people was most amiable and grateful: ‘Flowers were thrown into vehicles.’ The 19th Brigade met up with the Greeks they were relieving and its general, George Vasey, and his staff inspected the portion of the line they were going to occupy. By 7.30 on the evening of 8 April, the Divisional Command told Vasey that he was to occupy a delaying position at Thermopylae to allow time for the Serbia Pass—one of the three passes through the northern mountains—to be garrisoned. The Australians took their position in front of the pass, on either side of the road, and their engineers blew up the bridges over which the Germans would have come. The only Allied plane they saw in the next two days was a Hurricane that crashed in front of their lines and whose pilot they rescued. They heard from their men posted forward that forty German tanks were now approaching, but the attack was beaten back by Australian artillery and small arms fire, and the German infantry and artillery began digging in as snow began to fall. In a raid over the snowy ground the Australians snatched two Germans from their trench, but one was wounded in the exchange and died at the dressing station. From them Vasey realised that he was up against the 1st SS Der Führer Regiment, the Praetorian Guards, part of Das Reich Division.
The British armoured brigade fighting with the 19th had been hard hit from the start with mechanical breakdowns and battle losses, and was soon as good as non-existent, and six of the British anti-tank regiments’ guns had been knocked out. The under-equipped Greek divisions were perforce giving way in their thin uniforms and disintegrating boots.
Orders were received from divisional headquarters for the 19th Brigade to withdraw to a position on the Aliakmon River. The enemy, having broken through the Serbia Pass, bloodily infiltrated the forward artillery observation posts. The British Rangers and the Australian 8th Battalion on their right were given a line to defend until that evening. At 5.30 on the gloomy afternoon of 12 April the First Batallion Rangers’ front broke. As the Rangers moved back in disorder, in that terrible fear of the bewildered front-line soldier, the Germans got in behind one of Vasey’s battalions and cut it off. The rest of the brigade was ordered to withdraw further. And so it went on.
Vasey would later write that though the 8th Battalion escaped the Germans it was utterly disorganised. The commanding officer was completely exhausted and ‘a large percentage of the men had thrown away their weapons’. The combination of severe terrain and cold surely provides some justification for such a move.
At first light on 13 April at the Aliakmon River, ‘a lively machine gun and small arms battle took place for three hours, involving the Australian 2nd/4th Battalion, the British Rangers and armour’. The line was joined by New Zealanders of the New Zealand 26th Battalion who had come back across the Aliakmon River by ferry. On about 18 April, when Vasey took up his Thermopylae command, he uttered sentiments that were in their way similar to those of the Spartan commander, Leonidas, in 480 BC: ‘Here you bloody well are and here you bloody well stay. And if any bloody German gets between your post and the next, turn your bloody Bren around and shoot him up the arse.’ To the west of the pass Vasey could see the Germans massing in the Brallos Valley, and it was while he held that position that, ingloriously, he heard that Greece was to be evacuated, and that to cover the evacuation, the brigade was to hold this position until dark on 24 April.
The Greeks to the west, caught in a salient, were engaged in a fiercely fought withdrawal of which Blamey and General MacKay, commanding the 6th Division, had heard possibly exaggerated reports—that some of the Greek divisions were in utter disarray. Indeed, Australian troops encountered fleeing Greeks without weapons. With this uncertainty, and Germans probing the Australian line by way of the Olympus Pass as well as more frontally, and with enemy aircraft dominant in the skies and strafing and bombing them, the Australians of both the 16th and 19th Brigades concluded they might be forced to retreat sooner than 24 April. In fact, on the evening of 15 April and on through the night, the orders reached the troops either side of the Aliakmon, and they began to move out in their overcoats, carrying on their backs the one-blanket-per-man that was their chief but inadequate protection against the high altitude air.
By that time most of the small forces of British tanks had been destroyed or were in imminent danger. The German armour dominated along the entire line. ‘At one stage a group of fifteen to twenty men were round a tank firing rifles and L.M.Gs [light machine guns] to no apparent effect. This tank crushed two men, Privates Cameron [of Condobolin, NSW] and Dunn [of Murwillumbah, NSW]. The feeling of helplessness against the tanks overcame the troops and they began to move back in small parties.’
Tubby Allen, the forthright, thickset commander of the 16th Brigade, posted further west of the Anzac Corps line on swampy ground near Larisa, with his men spread thin and watchful about being flanked and surrounded, wrote of the attempt to hold the line and provide a rear guard to the last moment possible. ‘It was a fantastic battle. Everybody was on top (no time to dig in) and all in the front line, including artillery. Bren carriers, infantry and various unit headquarters. If you saw it at the cinema you would say the author had never seen a battle. We held this position till after dark [on 18 April].’ Then they retreated to join the rest of their corps in the Thermopylae line.
From 18 April, the Anzac Corps began a retreat southwards in good order over five days. The passes they went south through held deep beds of snow and were impassable to trucks. So they were ‘using donkeys as at Gallipoli’. They fought rearguard actions against highly mobile and better-equipped German troops in the countryside south of the Aliakmon River. The Australians had been harassed day and night, and were completely defenceless, as no RAF planes appeared above them. The Luftwaffe over Greece had at first outnumbered British aircraft ten to one, and the number of British planes quickly destroyed had made things more uneven still. ‘All along the road, at almost every mile,’ wrote Australian Colonel Klein, there were ‘scores of trucks and cars lying smashed or with wheels up at roadside’. ‘Fenton convinced that we are to have another Dunkirk,’ wrote Slessor of his former fellow journalist and now press censor, Major George Fenton. As the Australians retreated, Slessor saw posters deriding Hitler and Mussolini being covered up by Greeks who wanted, understandably enough, to survive the coming occupation. The villages did not want troops to stay for fear of attracting the Luftwaffe. Every movement along the road by daytime was subject to air attack.
Vasey argued that the choking up of the roads south deteriorated due to the officers’ lack of involvement in controlling the traffic, and the fact that vehicles did not pull off the road at stops. His 19th Brigade was engaged in a delaying action at Vevi, holding a front of thirteen to fifteen kilometres bounded on the east by difficult mountains and two large lakes, and on the west by further mountains. For lack of men and armaments, there could not be any ‘defence in depth’. On 24 April the enemy began to move down the south slope of the Thermopylae position about which Vasey had made his piquant speech. Vasey guessed that they were battalions of the German mountain troops. Though the brigade’s guns heavily shelled the enemy when they came within range, the brigade had been given a front of twenty kilometres to hold. It was doomed to cave in. Because of the mountainous country, the heavier artillery was restricted to a range of just under three kilometres wide. Motor transport was unable to deal with mud and steep grades, and the troops had been issued with the wrong type of clothing and equipment. ‘Had it been possible for us to take the offensive,’ said Vasey, ‘we would have found great difficulty because we had nothing similar to the mountain regiments of the German army capable of attacking in this type of country.’ And last of all, the telling sentence: ‘The Army was sent to GREECE well equipped to fight in LIBYA.’ At last Vasey’s brigade reached the olive groves of Megara, near Athens, and rested.
By then, on 22 April, Colonel A. Rogers, a haggard-looking intelligence officer, would tell Slessor and the other journalists, about sixteen kilometres east of Athens, ‘Gentlemen, I have a statement for you. The AIF is to leave Greece . . . the fact of the matter is that we seem to have been left with a job which is too big for us.’ Slessor knew the men of the 16th and 19th brigades were still engaged with the enemy.
Blamey had in the meantime impressed his staff by his capacity for work and clear thought. He was getting by on perhaps four hours’ broken sleep a night, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop defeat becoming a rout. Contrary to later press reports, he was in some personal peril while in Greece. He and his staff officer N.D. Carlyon were close to a tree hit by a bomb while five or six New Zealand gunners were sheltering beneath it. All the New Zealanders were obliterated.
Damien Parer had travelled to Greece for the campaign and had fallen in love with the place. On a hill above a town named Elasson, he filmed a raid by the Luftwaffe. Ron Williams and Parer both later said they were frightened, but Williams admitted he could not hold Parer down, and characteristically, as he would do on other battlefields, he prayed for the victims while he went on filming. Much of the footage of that campaign, of refugees and beaten Greek soldiers, is still used to illustrate the sadness of it all. Parer’s film is part of the stock of war footage for every campaign he would participate in. Once, under attack, he was forced to leave his beloved camera gear in a truck, but could not tolerate the separation and ran onto the road, bracketed by bullets from Stuka dive bombers, to retrieve it.
Parer and Williams filmed the evacuation before escaping on a tiny trawler carrying three hundred German POWs. They returned to Alexandria, Parer grief-stricken over Greece, reviving from depression only when he went with the 7th Division, at that stage novices, into Syria on 8 June. He was the only cameraman covering that campaign. He sailed in a destroyer that was shelling the coast, he shot footage of the RAF bombing the headquarters of the collaborating Vichy French in Beirut, he was with Australian gunners and engineers at work, and advanced with infantry attacks. At one stage his film was ruined by shrapnel from a Vichy French mortar bomb at Merdjayoun. He had dashed ahead of the company assigned to capture the old fort at Khiam. Some of the men were angered to be lagging behind a civilian, and so Parer unwittingly increased the pace at which the attacking soldiers now moved.
Back in the desert he flew in RAF bombers because there was no room for a cameraman in single-seater fighters, but he was already working on the idea of how he might manage to film in the cramped space of a fighter cockpit by placing his camera on his head. During the siege of Tobruk he ran the gauntlet of ‘Bomb Alley’, sailing in a destroyer between Alexandria and Tobruk, and filmed Stuka raids on Tobruk. But the narrative gets ahead of itself.
More than seventeen thousand Australians had marched up to northern Greece, along with New Zealanders and Britons, to face the Germans, and the total Australian casualties there were about three thousand men, of whom over two thousand were captured. One victim of failed policy and foredoomed military gesture, Barney Roberts, a Tasmanian bank clerk who suffered from asthma, had been cut off with other members of his unit and was without transport, ammunition and food. He had been bypassed by the German advance in the Brallos Pass area. Such men could do little by day but lie under the leaves of olive trees for protection from sun and aircraft, and wait for night so that they could go and get water. Ultimately they surrendered to a German officer who spoke English with an American drawl. By the time Roberts was captured, on 27 April, Blamey was three days gone from Greece—on the orders of his superior, General Heny ‘Jumbo’ Wilson. Notoriously, he took Tom Blamey, his son, a major in intelligence, aboard his plane.
Blamey, on the way to Alexandria, was able to read the British newspapers, which gave a glowing account of resistance in Greece. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘we’ve been to the wrong war.’ Blamey wrote in his report: ‘The outstanding lesson of the Greek campaign is that no reasons whatever should outweigh military considerations when it is proposed to embark on a campaign.’
ESCAPES, VARIOUS
In the flight from Greece, the British commandeered a large number of Greek caiques—fishing and trading schooners—manned them with army sappers and armed them with machine guns. These were used to ferry men out to the rescue ships. Once the ferrying job was over, the caiques were to make a dash for Egypt themselves.
On the night of 18 April, most of the 2nd Australian Battalion, trying to hold the Tempe Gorge, a position on the coast of Thessaly in eastern Greece just below Mount Olympus and due north of Athens, were driven into the hills. In the foothills of Mount Ossa the next day, Major P.A. Cullen, a Sydney accountant, collected 152 men, including some New Zealanders, and led them to the coast near Karitsa, hoping to be picked up. There was no ship in sight, so after two days, Cullen broke his force into groups to hide in small Greek villages. The Greeks usually refused payment for food even though the Anzacs had plenty of money from the regimental funds Cullen had distributed to officers.
On 25 April, most of these men were taken aboard Greek boats to the island of Skiathos, and thence by caiques across the Aegean to Chios, an island just off the Turkish coast. Here the Greeks were hospitable again, arranging a meal in the public school. Many of the Australians ultimately joined the complement of a ship that was taking four hundred Greek soldiers from Chios to Crete. It sailed on 29 April, gusted along by the cheers of Greek civilians at dockside.
On 1 May, the Greek ship with Cullen and his Australians aboard encountered another steamer carrying a party led by a Captain D.R. Jackson, who had been captured by the Germans but then escaped and seized a steamer at gunpoint. Jackson was using the ship he had taken over to evacuate 280 men, including one hundred Australians, one hundred Greek soldiers, and some Greek and Jewish–Greek citizens. The two ships reached Heraklion on Crete on 5 May. Cullen would in turn escape Crete and command a battalion in New Guinea, and so would the indomitable Captain Jackson.
For lack of space, some Australians had had to be left on Chios under Captain E.H. King; 133 men accumulated there. No caique had enough fuel to take them to Crete, so they sailed to Cesme on the Turkish coast opposite Chios. At Cesme they avoided internment through the good fortune of being met by an Australian officer, Colonel C.E. Hughes, a Tasmanian World War I veteran who had been working in Turkey on World War I graves for the Commonwealth Graves Commission. With his help they found a Greek yacht capable of a long voyage, sailed right through the Italian-held Dodecanese island group, and landed on Allied-held Cyprus on 7 May.
Back in Greece, Colonel Fred Chilton, commander of the 2nd Battalion, his command now scattered and eroded by heavy fighting, was moving south with his remaining men, mostly at night, being joined by other stranded soldiers. Some were former railwaymen who had by night fired up a locomotive and left its fire door open so that German aircraft would attack it, while they escaped in another engine on a parallel track. On 8 May, this railway group found a boat and sailed to Skyros. There they met a further sixteen men who had been dropped off by a Greek ship on 7 May. The Greeks treated them with tenderness and generosity—the tenderness being recorded by Sergeant Pierce of the 3rd Battalion: ‘We arrived at Zagori amidst much weeping by the fairer sex and were then taken to a house where we were more or less put on exhibition. Most of the people who visited us left something for us to eat.’ By the time they left Skyros they knew that the nearby islands of Chios and Mytilene had now been captured, so they headed for the Turkish coast near Izmir (the former Smyrna). There, Colonel Hughes once more intervened and the Turks showed little interest in enforcing the rules of neutrality to intern the Australian, New Zealanders and British. The men were put in civilian clothes and, as supposed civilian engineers, were taken by train to Iskenderun and put on a Norwegian tanker for Port Said. By these convoluted means, they rejoined the great conflict as combatants.
THE CRETAN FARCE
Slessor and his fellow press corps men would be bombed by ‘big Dornier [German] bombers’ during the retreat down the length of northern Greece. Like the retreating soldiers themselves, he and his colleagues sheltered from aircraft in small ditches by vineyards and olive groves. Every three kilometres or so, squadrons of German planes would pass over, bombing and machine-gunning with utter impunity.
Reaching the port of Piraeus, Slessor and fleeing civilians and soldiers coalesced on the chaotic Tromba wharf. They survived a bombing attack by five Junkers. At the dock was a ship named Elsie, and a crowd of people desperate to flee the German troops. Slessor’s diary places us there, on that fragile margin between freedom and capture, in that crowd of frightened and impelled souls, soldiers, civilians, refugees, men, women and children pushing, running and weeping. Between air raids, as babies sat on baggage howling with shock, women appealed to officers to find lost suitcases for them. A number of the German legation—officials and typists and so on—were being loaded aboard by soldiers to be sent to internment, and so were 160 captured German soldiers, still jaunty and confident of their chances of being liberated by the unstoppable advance of the German army. Private Murray, Slessor’s batman, wanted to stay ashore and look after the Chevrolet car in which they had retreated from near the northern borderlands. Slessor ordered him aboard. Murray delayed long enough to get a Bren gun and two thousand rounds from an abandoned British army workshop for use in case of air attack.
As the Elsie pulled out, Slessor found below deck ‘a curious mixture of haughty British matrons, complaining icily about the discomfort, and Greek families eating on the floor’. It seemed nearly a generation of gifted Australian journalists and writers were on the Elsie—as well as Slessor, there was Gavin Long, who would become an official war historian; Chester Wilmot, broadcaster now renowned in the English-speaking world; and the dangerously brave cinematographer Parer. On the two-day journey to Crete, Slessor and the other correspondents did duty creating a roster so that families below could come up on deck for a period to get some fresh air. At about 4 p.m. on 23 April, five German bombers appeared, and men with Bren guns and rifles lay down on the deck shooting as they passed over, while the civilians below screamed and children howled. As the ship put into Suda Bay on Crete the next afternoon, the Greek sailors heard that their government had now independently surrendered, and—fearful of the Germans—had to be persuaded to work the ship any more.
Slessor and his fellow pressmen did get ashore, and rested overnight in a field along the road to Canea, the town adjoining Suda village, where ‘we spread out under groves of fruit trees, in a field almost knee high with white daisies, lit a fire for tea, ate mutton and veal stew, and slept’. In the morning they were ordered to leave the island. The troops strung out to defend the north coast of Crete—the remaining Australian, New Zealand and British—were damned to a repeat of the uneven battle for Greece, of campaigning beneath a sky owned by the enemy’s air force. Before the journalists left, Gavin Long arranged an Anzac Day meal of chicken and roast potatoes at a local farmhouse, and then they went back to the port and prepared to leave by ship.
Private Murray was missing, however. Murray had at some stage offered to marry a Greek girl and make her a British subject and thus enable her to escape to Egypt with him. Murray had mentioned something of this plan while on the Elsie, on which the girl also travelled. Murray had in fact now married the girl, and been arrested in his marriage bed that Anzac night for being absent without leave. He was taken with his new wife and Slessor and others aboard ship to Alexandria. He left a doomed force commanded not by Blamey but by the New Zealand General Freyberg.
The remains of the 19th Brigade under Vasey, part of an Australian remnant force of a little over seven thousand men in two brigades, and field and artillery regiments, had meanwhile arrived at Suda Bay and were marched to a refreshment camp where they were given tea, chocolate, fruit and cigarettes. Then they were put in place near the coast and around the crucial airfield of Retimo to resist what would turn out to be an enemy parachute drop designed to capture the airport. They were part of a force made up of fourteen thousand British and nearly seven thousand New Zealanders, strung out along the north coast of the island, protecting airfields and coastline suitable for landings.
At Retimo, Vasey divided his men into an anchor battalion whose job was to ‘directly protect the vital area’—the port and the nearby landing strip—and counter-attack battalions that would remain hidden. Weapon pits were to be dug by the anchor battalion on a ridge above the port and airfield, and the counter-attack battalions dug slit trenches. As Vasey’s orders read, ‘Concealment of those [counter-attack] battalions was of paramount importance.’ As they waited for the assault, Vasey’s men operated by code. The code attack was ‘Greta’, that for falling back was ‘Margaret’, that for the appearance of fighters was ‘Jean’, and ‘Gwen’ equalled parachutists. Margaret, Greta, Jean and Gwen would figure highly in cables. Because of reported infiltration by enemy wearing New Zealand battle dress, all ranks of the brigade were ordered not to wear battle dress jackets until further orders: ‘Troops wearing battle dress jackets after 1600 hours will be treated as hostile.’
One battalion report on the day German paratroopers appeared in the sky above Retimo airfield claimed 102 planes were involved in the drop, all with little to fear from Allied aircraft. Elsewhere along the coast other planeloads were dropped. The orders were that the parachutists be fired on while still in the air, and a number were killed while still descending. But they were followed, once the airfields fell, by troops flown in or else landed in the ports.
After the German assault, there were some local successes along the coast—one pencil-written intelligence communiqué based on questioning of German prisoners reads, in code, ‘Gong reports enemy paratroopers landed Casteli about 15 miles WEST BATH on 20 May all captured or killed by JEBB. Much material captured. Prisoners state sole intention to take Crete. Bombing raids over Germany worrying people.’ But gradually airfields and ports fell and new German troops were shipped in in unanswerable quantities. The uncertainty and desperation of the defence of Crete seems captured by a message to 19th Brigade headquarters from a major whose signature is indecipherable: ‘Approx. 200 Germans in village. Some coming down the road and some down the valley just east of the village. Second and third demolitions completed at 1130 hours. Have moved back behind second demolition and will hold on as long as possible. Have seen no further movement round the flanks.’
At Retimo airport, one of Vasey’s battalions, made up of Western Australians, and another of New South Welshmen (the 2/1st) were cut off and captured. Yet they and the counter-attack battalions hung on until surrounded. On Crete, of the Australian units assaulted by understandably aggrieved German paratroopers and their infantry and artillery comrades who followed, the Australians lost nearly four thousand men, just over three thousand of them captured. The New Zealand toll was as high. The casualties were thus nearly 40 per cent of those committed to the entire Greek campaign, and this had all happened in merely a few weeks. The Anzac corps that was formed in Greece had lasted less than a fortnight and had now been fatally diminished. Yet the German reports mention hand-to-hand fighting nearly everywhere.
A number of men who had been taken prisoner on Crete were marching in a column under guard to the port at Suda Bay when attacked by German aircraft. During the ordeal of this march, an Australian sergeant-major stepped out of the column, pulled an Italian Beretta from under his tunic and shot himself in the head. On the march, about sixty men died, collapsing on the side of the road with dysentery, or falling off the mountainous track. There were no huts in the compound where they were put, and dysentery was rife. Eventually the men were put on ships bound for Germany.
With the other forces, General Vasey’s men, on General Freyberg’s orders, withdrew through mountain defiles towards the port of Skiathos on the south coast of Crete. Near the beach the tracks were clogged by unarmed men so exhausted that officers had to harangue them to continue the trek to the beach as an alternative to imprisonment. In the dark, the beach was chaotic, but loading went ahead, Vasey himself at last boarding. Over five nights, the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy had evacuated fifty thousand men from Greek or Cretan ports. As at Gallipoli, the Allies had to be impressed not by victory but by the success of withdrawal. A number of ships were sunk in the process and the Australian cruiser Perth was heavily attacked while transporting troops back to Egypt.
There were also unlikely and informal escapes by small groups from Crete. An Australian, Private H. Buchecker, with two New Zealand companions, found an eighteen-foot (five-metre) dinghy in very bad condition. They knew nothing about boats but lashed oars together to make a mast and fashioned a sail out of blankets. To their astonishment they met with a stiff north-easter that gusted them along over 645 kilometres in ninety hours to Sidi Barrani on the Egyptian coast west of Alexandria. As soldiers stationed there came down to the beach to haul in the boat, it fell apart.
On his way back to Egypt from his Greek and Cretan adventure, Slessor had written, ‘At present I feel that a mere summary of the news and facts of the [Greek] campaign would be ridiculously beside the main and vital point, which is that either the British or Australian government or both was prepared callously and cynically to sacrifice a comparatively small force of Australian fighting men for the sake of a political gesture—that is, to gamble with Australian lives on a wild chance, wilder than Gallipoli.’ He was determined to get the story back to Australia and expressed his opinions when he met Blamey in Egypt on 30 April. ‘Blamey said that he deplored any adverse criticism of the campaign, since it would assist the German propaganda effort to drive a wedge between Britain and Australia.’ The general frankly told Slessor he would not get the story past the censor, and thus the general felt free to give information he might never otherwise have done. Blamey declared, ‘We went in with our eyes open, and the 6th Division was thoroughly well equipped. The guarantees were between Governments. We were told that the landing was tied with the Lease and Lend Act in the US—if we didn’t come to the aid of Greece, the Act [which empowered the US government to supply the British with ships, planes and other equipment] would not be passed.’ And indeed, in the middle of the offensive, Churchill had received a fillip to his hope, a very positive response from Roosevelt. ‘Having sent all men and equipment to Greece you could possibly spare,’ wrote Roosevelt, ‘you have fought a wholly justified delaying action.’ It was to attract such sentiments that the 6th Division were sacrificed in Greece and Crete.
Perhaps Slessor was influenced by such considerations into abstaining from writing his own account of the debacle for presentation to Menzies. Meanwhile, the story spread amongst British military officers that the AIF in Greece had behaved badly, throwing away their arms, losing all discipline. (It would be a picture later rendered in Evelyn Waugh’s sniffy trilogy, Sword of Honour.) Slessor wrote, ‘This is a filthy and malicious lie which, with great rage, I have heard British officers repeat myself, since the facts, as I know them are that whatever panic and disorderly withdrawal there was, was done by English troops and RAF men.’
BOB’S BIG AMBITIONS
The Greek adventure was damaging to Menzies, not least because he had failed to consult the Advisory War Council, a body made up of both United Australia Party ministers and Labor representatives, including Curtin and the Bathurst engine-driver Ben Chifley. The idea ordinary people had then, and which has persisted, was that Menzies had been bamboozled into agreeing to Greece. So strong was the outcry in Australia, directed chiefly at Menzies but also at Britain, that some American newspapers thought that Australia was likely to withdraw from the war, and the Japanese newspapers declared that the Empire was crumbling. There was rage and grief in the eight thousand households whose sons had been killed or captured in Greece or Crete. And one further question arose: why were the Australians withdrawn to untenable Crete when Greece had been such a fiasco?
Blamey would argue later that the Royal Navy had advised him that it was vital to hold Greece if the situation in the eastern Mediterranean was not to be compromised. Menzies, under political pressure and at Churchill’s urging, gave a speech on the matter in which he tried to imply that it was the sort of disaster that would never occur again now that General Blamey had been appointed deputy commander-in-chief in the Middle East, as indeed had happened. To have abandoned the Greeks, said Menzies, pushing a Churchillian argument, would mean having been guilty of ‘one of the infamies of history’. Australia would have been subjected to criticism from all over the world if it had not agreed to sacrifice its troops.
Minister for the Army, Percy Spender, appealed for more men to enlist, but they did not do so in sufficient numbers to make up those lost. At the recruiting office in Martin Place, Sydney, 150 men per day enlisted in the first four days of the new recruitment drive, and the average age of these recruits was much higher than the military would have desired. The June recruiting quota fell short by three thousand men. With improved job opportunities at home, and given Britain’s hunger for steel and wool and wheat, men wondered why they should go so far away to be made fools of.
And there was a further crisis. A week before the German invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had attacked in the Western Desert, in the region of Cyrenaica where the Australians and British had recently been so successful. Such was the pace of Rommel’s advance now that the two senior British commanders, Sir Richard O’Connor and Lieutenant-General Philip Neame, were captured. The German attack in Cyrenaica also meant that there was no chance of reinforcements for Greece.
After Greece, and in view of the situation in the Middle East, Spender, a man not given to the same degree of Empire-centricism as Menzies, had been disappointed during a visit to Singapore to discover by interviews with officers, and on the basis of his own native intelligence, its indefensible condition. Along with much of the press, he began to urge an intensified war effort. Writing to Deputy Prime Minister Artie Fadden on 21 April, he had worried about the ‘extreme gravity of the present situation’. There were anti-tank men from the 8th Division who had been sent overseas without even seeing an antitank gun. Young recruit Russell Braddon would later describe the absurdity of performing the motions of deploying and loading and then firing utterly nonexistent guns. Spender and others were concerned that there was a possibility that with Rommel’s attack in the desert, and with Greece and Crete thrown in, the three Australian divisions in the Mediterranean could be destroyed, and then what of Australia?
The emphasis should be on local rather than Imperial defence, Spender believed. Yet the old campaigner Billy Hughes had discovered and complained to the Englishman Admiral Colvin that no mining of Australian ports had taken place. The first mines were laid off Port Moresby in New Guinea, but the approaches to Newcastle, Australia’s vital industrial city, remained unmined because the Australian navy lacked the materials to do it. After nearly two years of war, Australia possessed a total of ten light tanks to train its entire Armoured Division of close to twenty thousand men. Despite the inevitable complaints that those who criticise this stage of Menzies’ career and performance are sour leftists, on absolute terms and objective criteria, the Menzies of 1941 must be declared a failure, and his policies an endangerment of his country.
Menzies had been distracted all along by a glittering prize—the chance of being appointed the dominion representative on the British War Cabinet. But for that to happen, he had now to survive as prime minister, and despite Fadden’s hostility and disapproval. Thus he felt not only personally damaged by the catastrophes of 1941, but also oppressed by the possibility that Tobruk, as Rommel advanced, seeking a deep-water harbour to supply his troops, would fall and a great part of the Australian forces be consumed there. Hence Menzies’ powerful sense of destiny was at a crisis.
Meanwhile, the new question arose of Syria and Lebanon. By late May there seemed to be the chance of a German attack on Syria, which would leave the Allies in the Middle East flanked on the north-east and south-west. Syria was occupied by the Vichy French, those French who had remained loyal to the collaborating Marshal Pétain and who had come to terms with the Germans. German squadrons had been operating from French airfields there, and if the Germans landed in force, the Vichy French would fight alongside them. The Allies did not know that Hitler had no ambitions there—he was concentrated on the as-yet secret invasion of Russia to occur the following month.
The Light Horse of the Mounted Anzac Division had been amongst the forces that had captured Damascus from the Turks in 1918. Now two brigades of the 7th Division (the other one was besieged at Tobruk) and one of the 6th, under the overall command of spiky but brilliant General John Lavarack, were slated to take on the Vichy French in Syria, in a campaign that—except for those who fought there, and for the relatives of those who died—achieves little visibility in popular Australian history. British and Indian troops would also be engaged in the operation, as well as a small Free French division that had trained in Palestine and was ready to take on the Vichyists. So, on the French side, something of a civil war was to be fought in Lebanon and Syria.
Lavarack himself had already organised the defence for Tobruk against the Germans before being called away to lead the force of Australians, Indians, Free French and British against the Vichy French in Syria and Lebanon. Lavarack was not one of Blamey’s favourite men, although Blamey’s own ascent would leave room for Lavarack’s rise and rise as well.
The Vichy commander in chief in Syria was General Henri Dentz, who certainly had little time for the British. But many wondered if the way to deal with Dentz was through diplomacy instead of what a senior intelligence officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Rogers, would call ‘this cruel campaign’. General Wavell had decided to initiate the assault only under pressure from the chiefs of staff in London, who were in turn under political pressure. Blamey himself was dubious about the operation. On the one hand the Vichy French might collapse, but on the other the campaign might become a slow, cumbrous business. In a letter to Menzies on 7 June he described what lay ahead as ‘largely a gamble’.
The Australians were to move up through Palestine by truck and then push forward in three columns on a broad front—one column along the coast, one towards Merdjayoun in inland Lebanon, and one aimed at Damascus. For the first two days after the initial trip up from Palestine, the Australians found the going easy, but in the mountainous country away from the coast, the resistance set in at an area around Tzfat (Safed), north-west of the Sea of Galilee in present-day Israel. The Australians were told that they must move forward and attack.
One soldier described the beginning of their preparation for the assault as they lay under cover on 7 June. Their position, he said, was bounded on the rear by a low stone wall used by vendors displaying their wares. A soldier could buy anything from a boiled egg to a bottle of cheap wine. There was some danger of an Arab peddler speaking to the Vichy French, and it was all the more odious because of the care taken in other regards: vehicle bonnets were all beneath the cover of trees, wheel marks had been swept away to prevent detection by reconnaissance aircraft. Out of fear of Arab informants who might betray them to the Vichy French, the Australians sheltering in the olive groves had been ordered to alter the shape of their hats. They did, but it did not dent their confidence. One soldier declared that evening by the water truck, ‘All we’ve got to do tomorrow is walk in, wave our hats to the Frogs and walk on.’
The Australian soldiers would find that many of the troops they were to face were not metropolitan Frenchmen but Spahis—Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian troops. Whether against Spahis or French, the Australians of the 21st Brigade on the coastal wing of the advance found the French resistance at the Litani River intense. Churchill had spoken of the expedition being an ‘armed political inroad’ but it had become more than that, and the Australians had to fall back on their desert skills in outflanking, penetrating and—in that curious military term—‘reducing’—machine-gun nests and strongpoints.
On the night of 8 June, some Australian commandos from the 16th Battalion were to be landed by sea north of the Litani River which runs east–west below Beirut and Damascus. Landed, they found themselves on the wrong, southern side of the river, which was some fifty metres wide and flowing fast between poplar-lined banks. The bridge across had been blown up. They had to cross by rowboats they found along the shore, one of the first of which was manned by eight members of Lieutenant Sublet’s platoon, including ‘Pud’ Graffen, Len O’Brien, Blue Maloney, Chummy Gray and Chook Fowler. Most of them had grown up in Kalgoorlie and gone to school together and had never been in a small boat before. Each was laden with his gear and three hundred rounds of ammunition. It was obvious that if the boat tipped over they would all drown. Vichy French mortar shells were falling in the water and machine-gunners were firing from the opposite bank. In other boats, four men were killed, including two officers; Sublet was the only surviving officer in his company, but he got across, and moved with his men through the bamboo that grew on the north bank and into the orchard beyond, driving the defenders back and creating a bridgehead.
Lavarack’s force knew by now that the Vichy troops were expert in using the rocky coastal spurs to site their machine guns and cannons, and their destroyers were bombarding the Australians from the sea. Albert Moore, the Salvation Army truck driver who accompanied the soldiers as a ‘comforts man’—meaning that he served tea, coffee and cocoa, biscuits and cigarettes and what stew he could make—‘learnt during the day that the Adjutant’s brother, Corporal Buckler, is our first fatal casualty. I served this lad with tea last night. It is terrible.’ Corporal H.A. Buckler had been killed when moving across an olive grove to attack a machine gun. Moore put himself in peril too—he would drive his truck down the road to Jezzine, which lay halfway to Beirut along the coast, a stretch known as the ‘mad mile’ because Vichy artillery had it zeroed in.
The troops on the coast were very impressed at last, after an advance that tested them greatly, to see the beautiful port of Sidon, and to discover that it had been abandoned by the French. But the Vichy troops had taken up position elsewhere. A platoon of the 14th Battalion attacked Hill 1248 north of Sidon, climbed 670 metres to the top of a spur, and sheltered behind boulders as machine guns fired down on them and grenades fell amongst them. ‘Shit, they’re bloody real,’ Private Harry Saunders cried. The platoon was driven off after a third of them had been killed or wounded. The battle around Jezzine would last for a week.
Far inland, the thrust from the desert right-wing was only 40 kilometres from Damascus, but in the middle, where the map is labelled with geographic names which include the sinister ‘Jebel’ (rock or mountain), the advance had hardly made much progress at all. Great boulders prevented trucks from leaving the road and the sharp-stoned plains cut up infantry boots. The planned route was through the Bekaa Valley and into a landscape of defiles and outcrops and watercourses designed for defence. There the Australians would face Moroccan and Tunisian Vichy battalions and two Foreign Legion regiments. Senegalese battalions and one Foreign Legion regiment lay in reserve.
It is hard to assess how ambivalent the French and North African troops felt about Vichy France. Certainly the North African troops had little choice but to be there, and it is quite possible that many of the French were chiefly fighting from loyalty to commanders and for their honour rather than because of adherence to the Fascist propositions of Pétain and Hitler.
Lavarack had impressed on Blamey the difficulties of the thrust through the Bekaa Valley. On the far right the Free French and the Indians were closing in on Damascus, but the column in the middle, said Lavarack, including the Australian 25th Brigade, but others as well, needed all the help that could be rendered. Blamey was so filled with urgency that he drove that night to the British headquarters in Jerusalem and insisted that General Wilson be woken up to listen to his and Lavarack’s fears that the inland thrust might cave in to the French.
‘All right,’ Wilson said to Blamey, ‘I’ll get hold of Lavarack and Rowell in the morning.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Blamey. ‘Tonight. Men are dying in Syria.’
Within a few hours, Lavarack, with his orders revised, was authorised to send a British brigade and three Australian battalions from the coast to help the British, Indian and Free French forces inland, on the Central Bekaa thrust to Damascus. After Lavarack was able to release his new reserve troops, the central column had successes, and later in the month the Free French and Indian forces helped by emerging from Damascus and recapturing villages on Lavarack’s line of march. The 3rd Australian Battalion, meanwhile, came up to Syria from Palestine by rail in cattle trucks through the ferocious heat of the Jordan Valley, where the temperature at the town of Samarkh was later claimed to have been 54 degrees Celsius. Their journey was complicated by a collision between an engine and some of the trucks. After that seventeen-hour train journey, the troops travelled all night to the front in commandeered civilian buses and in trucks.
For the Australians beating their way to Damascus through the mountains, medical supplies at the village of Mezze, where the wounded were treated, gave out. The Australians were given the job of capturing a number of forts north of Mezze and west of Damascus. Fort Goybet proved testing and very dangerous to take, having steep approaches. A misunderstanding between Australian and Indian troops led to the deaths of two Australians from friendly machine-gun fire. This same fire awakened the Vichy French troops in Fort Weygand who in turn opened fire, and a number of Australians were captured. The Australians of the 3rd Battalion who got to the top had not eaten a hot meal since they had boarded their train in Palestine three nights before. By the time Fort Goybet had been taken, there was a plan to attack southwards along the ridge and rescue the Australian prisoners there. But a quartermaster sergeant named Carlisle Smith had already led a party of three armed men from a kitchen truck below the heights, captured Weygand and released the Australians. Nearby Fort Vallier was empty, littered with clothing and bloodied bandages.
Further hills had to be attacked, and there were intimate Australian-to-French contests. The exchange at the Jebel Mazar summit between a French officer and the Australian lieutenant-colonel A.C. Murchison was indicative of the strangeness of this campaign, and of a certain emotional reluctance on both sides.
‘There are no Germans here,’ the French officer called to Murchison.
Murchison said he knew that. ‘What of it?’
‘Then why are you fighting?’
‘Because I’ve been told to,’ said Murchison. It was only after a pause that he said, ‘Because you are collaborating with the Huns.’
On the height of Jebel Maza, a regiment of Moroccan Spahis began to surround Murchison and managed to take seven Australian prisoners.
There were continued attacks by Vichy aircraft, and nine Tomahawks of the Number 3 Australian Squadron shot down six French bombers and two German-manned Junkers bombers.
The Battle of Damour, between 5 and 12 July 1941, was the final operation. Wadi Damour, the valley of the Damour River, needed to be forded if Beirut was to fall. Major-General Tubby Allen outflanked Damour, attacked it from its north-eastern side, and encircled many French units as well as cutting the road to Beirut. By now British forces were descending from the direction of Iraq and, later in the month, neared Damascus and Homs and General Dentz sought an armistice. At Acre on the night of 12 July, Dentz, the Vichy French commander, came to terms with the Allies, and a ceasefire came into effect, one of the conditions of the armistice being that all Allied prisoners should be set free. The Allies were permitted to lobby the Vichy French military through pamphlets, loudspeakers and broadcasts to join the forces arrayed against Fascism. Lavarack was ‘most charming in his attitude’ towards Dentz, perhaps as part of that process. In September, Dentz and his senior officers were allowed to leave for France, another of the armistice conditions.
Major-General Speers, head of the British military mission to General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, complained to Blamey of Australian miscreancy. ‘The Australians are already greatly feared by the natives. Their behaviour, with the exception of some specialised units which are well disciplined, would be a disgrace to any army. They are alleged to have stolen Vichy officers’ wedding rings and have deprived prisoners of their water bottles. At Mezze aerodrome . . . they stole and smashed vital parts of the Air France wireless installation.’
Blamey appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Rogers to investigate the complaints. Rogers’ report said that ‘there was no basis for the accusations’ and that the charges were ‘a gross exaggeration, most unfair and extremely defamatory. None but British troops had been billeted in or near Mezze aerodrome’. Whatever the value of Rogers’ conclusion, and though it was an internal investigation, it need not be written off as totally invalid, and the accusations indicated the uneasy relationship between the British and the Australians.
By then Australia had taken nearly sixteen thousand casualties in Syria, more than four hundred of them killed.
Earlier in the campaign, Lieutenant Roden Cutler had won a Victoria Cross in fighting at Merdjayoun in the centre column. In company with a lance corporal named V.G. Pratt, a farmhand from Queensland, Cutler was opposing an attempted advance of tanks and Vichy infantrymen. Fire from a tank turret killed Pratt, and a Captain Clark of Strathfield. Cutler fired an anti-tank rifle whose projectiles bounced off the turrets. He was able to hit the tracks, however, and infantry were driven off.
Merdjayoun fell to the Australians on 12 June. The Vichy French counterattacked the 25th Brigade and took back the town but the Australians took it conclusively on 18 June. Damascus fell to the Free French, Australian, British and Indians on 21 June. The day after, on 22 June, the German army advanced into Russia. It was obvious now that that was where their minds had been, and that they probably had no intention at all of occupying Syria.
The German invasion of Russia caused a shift of perception and behaviour in Australia. Margaret Holmes, a Sydney pacifist, declared, ‘I can remember that overnight these Commo friends of mine, they changed—from saying that it was a phoney war and we shouldn’t take part in it, to saying, oh no, it’s really “workers and all unite”.’ The Communist Laurie Aarons noticed that Frank Packer’s Sunday Telegraphbegan to call the Russians ‘our gallant allies’. Joyce Batterham, a Communist Party member who worked in Newcastle, received a letter from a friend who had joined the forces now that Russia was under attack and who was stationed in Darwin. When in the open-air cinema ‘God Save the King’ was played, many of the troops called out for Stalin: ‘We want Uncle Joe, we want Uncle Joe’.
CYRENAICA RATS
The troops shipped back from Greece and Crete were sorely needed in North Africa, where a crisis had struck. On 8 March 1941, as the Australian veterans of the 6th Division were on their way to Greece, the assault of the German general Rommel and his Afrika Korps burst from the borderlands of Tunisia and, driving east along the Libyan desert coast, and in a little over three weeks, overwhelmed and outflanked the Allied forces garrisoned and dug in around the coastal towns—Benghazi, Cyrene, Tobruk, Derna, all captured in such style from the Italians in past months. Rommel was advancing against the ‘minimum possible force’ that the British commander Wavell mistakenly thought he had needed to hold the line in the desert, given all the forces committed elsewhere. The soldiers Wavell retained in Africa when Rommel surprised him included the 9th Australian Division troops, fresh to the desert and led by a vigorous and stubborn citizen-general named Leslie Morshead. It was thought that the British, Indians, South Africans and raw Australians could hold the line, and a Rommel attack had not been expected so early. Wavell’s minimum possible force now proved cruelly inadequate.
On 4 April the first action in which the 9th Division’s troops were involved occurred, when its 19th Battalion (ideally a thousand men, in reality some hundreds less) had to fight off three thousand Germans seeking to surround them near the coast during what twenty-two-year-old Les Watkins, along with others, called ‘the Benghazi Handicap’.
Morshead’s men defending Benghazi lacked equipment to a degree close to scandalous. They were not equipped with anti-tank guns, transport, artillery ammunition or signals gear. There was a shortage of field ambulances as well. The Australians were forced to improvise with enemy equipment, and as the 23rd Battalion diary says, ‘There has never been a phone issued to the battalion, yet we have over twenty miles of wire and sixteen phones (all Italian) working.’ The 17th Battalion diary confessed that they were ‘alarmingly under-equipped’ but that they ‘fossicked’ amongst the debris left behind earlier by retreating Italians and found three motorbikes and several Breda and Fiat guns.
One of Morshead’s brigades was in reserve at Tobruk. The British general Neame, an incompetent fellow who to the delight of many would soon be captured by the Germans, wanted to take another of Morshead’s brigades, but the forthright Morshead refused him in a way Neame thought unmilitary, appealing over his head to Wavell, the commander in chief, and to Blamey. It was just as well Morshead objected, because the British 2nd Armoured Division, bravely using captured Italian tanks, disintegrated under Rommel’s initial attack. Morshead and his staff, despite the regular bombing attacks, were able to transport his men from one rearguard or blocking position to another. He had requested and been granted permission to move out all Italian civilians and Arabs from the region he was to defend, and his troops undertook the work enthusiastically and not without some of the attitudes engendered by White Australia. But Morshead did not want to waste his men on policing these groups and preventing them from cutting or stealing signal lines, for which they had an appetite. The Arabs of the Libyan region Morshead was trying to clear were members of the Senussi sect and largely friendly; their enthusiasm for telephone equipment was more enthusiastic than malicious, but could prove disastrous.
Before Rommel captured him, Neame had been critical of the Australian troops’ own looting and ‘disorderly behaviour’ in the towns along the coast—complaints that were a predictable British refrain by now. ‘The Commander in Chief was accosted in the street by a drunken Australian soldier while visiting me here,’ wrote Neame in protest. ‘Without in any way condoning any offences,’ commented Morshead in response, ‘I fear it is the same old story of giving a dog a bad name.’ Morshead called Neame’s bluff by telling him that he was forwarding the insulting letter to Blamey and might forward it also to the Australian government.
The untrained Australian infantry, supported by limited British artillery and by 6 Squadron RAAF, who could not safely use their decrepit airfield at the nearby airstrip of Agadabia, were nonetheless able to fight an appropriate rearguard action. One Australian battalion, the 13th, with British help, held up the Germans at Er Regima in an intimate, gory little skirmish—‘little’ unless one speaks of the dead, for whom it was cosmic. The Afrika Korps itself was beginning to find the going hard as it came eastwards—it often lacked fuel and supplies and the men suffered from exhaustion. Also Rommel decided to advance on three fronts, so that when his leading elements ran into the 9th Division there was not as much weight in their thrust. But if he took Tobruk, his men could be resupplied from that port, and even from the British fuel and other dumps located there, and so be renewed in effort and morale.
Tobruk with its defences and dumps lay in the path of Morshead’s retreat. He had inspected its defences earlier in the year, so when the retreat arrived there, he decided that the port could be held. His 24th Brigade was already there, bringing up his division to something like full strength. Wavell visited Tobruk; Morshead, with his chief intelligence officer, met him at the El Adem airstrip. ‘They [Morshead and his officers] looked and smelt of the desert, of defeat and of retreat,’ wrote one British observer, John Connell. But Wavell’s affirmation that Tobruk must be held, said this observer, seemed to stiffen them. Connell’s tale may be unreliable—in pictures of the meeting, Morshead and his intelligence officer look robust and confident.
The Australians and the British support troops in Tobruk would be helped by the desert soaks and sand morasses to the south, which could limit the thrust of the attack just as it limited the Allied supply lines. In British minds, and possibly in the minds of the novice Australians, the malign legend had taken root that Rommel could not be stopped. Just the same, the 24th Australian Battalion took up positions on the scree of the escarpment running south and west of Tobruk, with the port behind them. And when on Morshead’s orders the 48th Battalion fell in on the ridge beside them, the Australian determination increased that they would not be moved except by retreat orders. Even to the individual soldiers, this struck them as a holdable position.
Far to their rear, people with an investment in the outcome—Egyptian elites, Greeks, French and British in Alexandria and Cairo—felt something very like panic. Slessor was most concerned for his wife Noela, with him in Cairo. He wrote, ‘It seems that our forces have fallen back again from the Fuka area to positions around El Alamein [an Egyptian village and train station only 100 kilometres from Alexandria], where they are making a desperate stand. The Australians [are] said to be ready at posts on the Alexandria defence perimeter and between Cairo and Alexandria on the desert road.’ The general feeling was that Alexandria was as good as doomed, and if it went, so would Cairo and the Suez Canal, and God knew what degree of penetration eastwards. Slessor had already seen hundreds of lorries packed with Australian soldiers (ones other than those already surrounded in Tobruk) streaming through Cairo, heading desertward to take new positions on the threatened flank. They yelled cooees to the bemused Egyptians who watched them roll through town. Slessor noted that Ray Moseley and Geoffrey Hoare, journalists for the London Times, were trying to buy a car to escape. Arrangements were made for getting the correspondents away if it were necessary (thirty seats were to be reserved for them on one of the last special trains to leave Cairo for Palestine), and all those who could find private transport were told to use it.
The battle offshore was lethal, involving German U-boats attacking supply ships and naval vessels running supplies into Tobruk under protection of British and Australian aircraft or attack from German ones. Slessor would write perhaps his finest poem, ‘Beach Burial’, about the corpses of young sailors, both enemy and ally, washed onto the North African beaches. As he wrote, ‘The sand joins them together, enlisted on the other front.’ The Allies’ struggle to prevent supplies getting through to Rommel’s men, and that of the Axis to stop supplies reaching the British in Malta and North Africa, was brutal.
During the Allied retreat, Morshead understood, first, that Tobruk, and Tripoli, far to the west, were the only viable ports to support Rommel, so that if the German general could take Tobruk his supply route would be simplified and shortened. Morshead understood further that the loss of Cairo and the Suez Canal would be catastrophic both for Australia’s trade with Britain and for the Allied hold on the Mediterranean. He must do whatever could be done to slow the advance of the Nazi regime eastwards into an unlimited eastern version of the Reich beyond the Canal and as far as the oilfields of Iraq and into Persia.
Morshead had been a young schoolteacher when war broke out in 1914. He landed at Anzac Beach, Gallipoli, on 25 April 1915, and was wounded at Lone Pine. In this second war he had replaced Major-General Wynter when Wynter became ill. Amongst his troops in Tobruk he shared with Prime Minister Menzies the nickname ‘Ming the Merciless’, a name derived from the villain in Buck Rogers serials at the flicks. Living up to the name, Morshead banned within the besieged port the playing of two-up as a potential source of trouble in the garrison. Perhaps not quite understanding the Australian penchant for embracing negative epithets, William Joyce, the Irish Nazi who broadcast from Berlin under the nickname Lord Haw-Haw, gave the troops in the port their own nickname, ‘Rats of Tobruk’. Indeed, there would be a sort of rodent stubbornness in the way the men possessed the bunkers and half-ruined streets and shattered houses of the port, endured grit in their food and tea, and developed a close acquaintance with the walls of slit trenches and the earth, generally during near-ceaseless daytime attacks from the air.
The Tobruk area was a plateau surrounding a spacious east–west harbour. The Red Line—the defences built to protect it—ran in a semicircle across the desert from the coast thirteen kilometres east of the harbour to fourteen kilometres west of it. The defences were not continuous but consisted of many strongpoints protected by barbed wire and anti-tank ditches. Mines were laid down in the barren, stony ground beyond the perimeter. It could have been a Central Australian scene the 9th Division men and others faced to the south, but they had the Mediterranean at their backs, and it was a source of supply and an aid to hygiene. The Germans launched their first attack on Morshead’s perimeter on 13 April 1941—‘the Easter Battle’. The Afrika Korps and their Italian allies expected to surge over the Tobruk plateau and capture the port in quick order. But the two-thirds Australian defenders collaborated with the one-third British with a wholeheartedness the Afrika Korps had not before encountered. Morshead had already warned his brigade commanders, ‘There’ll be no Dunkirk here. If we should have to get out, we shall fight our way out.’ Chester Wilmot, transmitting from inside Tobruk and making it famous, was told by Morshead, ‘I determine we should make no man’s land our land.’ In the Red Line, the front line, everyone was employed in regular patrols. The nightly patrols allowed the Australians to find where the enemy was most thickly bivouacked so that the artillery could shell their camps. Morshead later said, ‘We set out to besiege the besiegers.’ At night the wounded were taken out of the port by ship, and new men and food and ammunition came in. A Royal Artillery anti-aircraft brigade protected the port from the Luftwaffe. The 1st Royal Northumberland Fusiliers worked the machine guns, and there were men from the 18th Indian Cavalry and the 3rd Armoured Brigade deployed as part of the garrison.
When the enemy sent in the infantry on Easter Sunday, they broke the perimeter in only a few places. There were exchanges of the greatest savagery, involving bayonets and grenades, as young German men were met by similarly young Australians, crazed with proprietorial rage and ready to eject them. The gods of battle dictated terms. Jack Edmondson, a corporal dying of wounds, found the strength to bayonet two Germans before collapsing. The next morning, 14 April, Rommel launched a tank attack with tactics used in the Blitzkrieg in France in 1940, methods that had not yet failed the German army. Les Watkins, one of the Rats, yelling, ‘Whop it up ’em, mate!’, admired the sangfroid, the gameness, with which the British-manned and inadequate Matilda tanks rattled forth between Australian weapons pits, foxholes and strongpoints to take on the Panzers. On Morshead’s orders, the German tanks were let through the perimeter, and it was the German infantry following the tanks on whom the soldiers on the perimeter turned their guns. The tanks were isolated and became targets for British anti-tank guns and for those impudent Matildas. At last, the enemy tanks retreated through the very gap they had made in the perimeter; as they exited, they were caught from both sides by mortars, cannon, Bren guns and rifles. In a communiqué to Roosevelt, Churchill said that this ‘is the first time they [the Afrika Korps] have tasted defeat’. Italians sent in that night against the Tobruk perimeter met fire sufficient to cause them to surrender; this so enraged their German allies that they fired on them.
Ships continued to bring in new men and took the mutilated and damaged out. At least sometimes they did: a transport that landed the 23rd Battalion one night was immediately attacked by Stuka dive bombers and blew up soon after the men landed. The town they moved through, a place of rubble now, smelled of dead bodies and excreta.
These new men were in place along the perimeter on 30 April to see Rommel’s tanks and infantry transported by trucks churning up the desert to the west. This was the start of the next attack, which would grow in intensity to be named the Battle of the Salient. Rommel’s spearhead fell on the 24th Battalion sector of the perimeter, concentrating his dive-bombing and artillery bombardments on those men. Morshead had laid down a new minefield in the path of what turned out to be Rommel’s planned penetration, but it would not stop a penetration three kilometres deep and five wide. The Panzer tanks worked with assault troops, capturing post after post, killing or taking prisoner the Australians who garrisoned them before attempting an armoured drive on the port. By nine that night, forty German tanks were inside the perimeter and most of the perimeter posts had fallen. More tanks and artillery rushed into the gap and so, widening it, did German and Italian troops. Flamethrowers were directed at posts held by the 26th Battalion. Communication between Morshead’s headquarters in the town and the posts on the Red Line had been lost from the start. It was impossible, therefore, to find out what posts still lay in Australian hands. Morshead moved supports up behind the 24th Battalion on the west side of the perimeter, though he did not yet know if the 24th had held on. In the afternoon, he ordered his 48th Battalion to counter-attack and recapture before dark the perimeter strongpoints now held by the Afrika Korps. These were stretched out over four kilometres. Spread thin over so many kilometres, many of the battalion were killed, as their colonel had predicted to Morshead they would be.
The next morning there was fog from the sea, and its effects would be added to by dust storms. But though the hole in the defenders’ line would never be repaired, the defences around the port held. Three months later, Morshead would try again to take back the perimeter. A battalion attacked at each end of the German salient to capture perimeter posts. This, too, failed, and the siege went on. It is hard to know if the young men defending the port understood that they had crucially delayed great German plans for conquests far to the east. They would no doubt have sworn at anyone who tried to tell them.
The British general Claude Auchinleck, now in charge in the Middle East, ordered that the 18th Australian Brigade be relieved and taken out of the port by sea in August. This withdrawal was due to Morshead’s telling Blamey in July that the garrison’s capacity to resist a sustained assault was diminishing. The men’s health was poor. Blamey took up the cause of the relief of the Australians by other troops, and the Australian government demanded it too. Churchill thought Blamey was being troublesome for Australian political reasons, to try to bolster Menzies’ diminishing reputation with voters. In any case, most of the remaining Australians were taken out in September and October, to be replaced by, amongst other units, a Polish brigade. The 13th Battalion AIF stayed until it fought its way out of the siege in December. By then there had been three thousand Australian dead and wounded, and just under a thousand taken prisoner.
The navies of Britain and Australia had kept the garrison supplied throughout—the soldiers called the supply ships the ‘Tobruk ferry’. On 27 November, escorting a slow convoy from Alexandria, HMAS Parramatta was shepherding one of the fuel ships on the approaches to Tobruk, and travelling at only three knots. Her sailors had spent the day before protecting the ship and her convoy from a number of attacks from dive bombers. Such an exhausting day as that was standard for the crews while on convoy duty to Tobruk. Parramatta was torpedoed in the magazine by a U-boat, exploded and sank fast, with the loss of all her officers, and 138 men as well.
Back in Mount Gambier, a schoolboy named Charles Janeway remembered the minister’s visit to a neighbour’s house. The neighbour, Mr Clarke, called to the hesitant parson, ‘Come on, I can take it.’ A telegram was delivered later. All telegrams, good and bad news, had to be signed for. Mr Clarke signed his, as thousands of other parents would manage to in the next four years.
General Auchinleck said that Morshead’s aggressive defence of Tobruk was responsible for ‘freedom from embarrassment’ of the weak force stationed on the Egyptian frontier. It kept ‘the enemy constantly in a high state of tension’. Cairo, Alexandria and the Canal were held by brave counter-attacks, in part by troops rescued from the ports of Greece and Crete. Tobruk was Rommel’s first failure, the viper at his flank.
CURTIN RISING
The brilliant young jurist and Labor member Herbert Vere Evatt understood that Hitler’s assault on Russia in June 1941 would have a worldwide impact and an impact for Australia. It drew Russian divisions facing Japan away from the far-eastern borders, and so gave the Japanese army a windfall of divisions and aircraft for a potential thrust into the Pacific.
While most politicians who fancied themselves as lawyers went from politics to the High Court, Evatt had already been on the High Court; appointed at the age of thirty-six, he was the youngest High Court judge yet. He had been on the bench for the case which upheld Scullin’s Commonwealth government’s claim against Lang’s New South Wales government after the Federal government had paid New South Wales’ interest bills, but had himself dissented from the decision. He was East Maitland–born, son of an English publican, but—like many a brilliant boy—never fully a child. His attitudes were formed in part by the Maitland Irishmen and unionists who favoured his father’s pub. Though a gifted all-round sportsman, he was rejected for military service in World War I because of astigmatism, and his thick glasses would become famous through press photographs. Once he was admitted to the bar, Evatt’s work was often what people would now call human rights law—for example, representing trade unionists such as Tom Walsh, threatened with deportation from Australia in 1925. As a High Court judge he was often a dissenting voice. In 1935, he successfully upheld, however, the right of the visiting Czech radical and anti-Fascist Egon Kisch to tour Australia. (Kisch had been reduced to hurling himself off the ship about to deport him, and broke his leg when he landed on the pier.) Evatt also had time to publish three works of history, including one on the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Injustice within the Law, and another on the legality of the Rum Rebellion on 1808. He also wrote a biography of William Holman, a New South Wales premier and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century compadre of the ‘fiery particle’, Billy Hughes. As a jurist Evatt was smart, contentious and, some said, glib. He was passionate about rugby league and cricket, and a friend of artists and of the writers Kylie Tennant and Eleanor Dark.
In 1940, Evatt stood for the federal seat of Barton in New South Wales, won it and retired from the High Court. He chafed in opposition and longed for office, and was impatient with his leader John Curtin in a parliament where a vulnerable Menzies had ruled with the help of two independents. When Curtin came to office in 1941, Evatt was appointed Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs.
In 1920, Evatt married Mary Alice Sheffer, the American-born daughter of a chemist, a woman who had grown up in the Tory purlieus of the Sydney suburb of Mosman. Their relationship was sometimes turbulent. Sheffer was an artist who studied modernist painting in Sydney and then attended the George Bell School in Melbourne. She studied in Paris in 1938, and in New York she and Evatt met a number of modernist painters. Because the Evatts were prosperous, they bought paintings and drawings from Russell Drysdale and a young working-class Melbourne painter named Sid Nolan. The works Sheffer bought at an exhibition of French and British contemporary art on the eve of World War II included those of Modigliani, the French Cubist Léger, and Vlaminck.
Now Evatt stated his convictions about Australia’s danger most vocally at meetings of the Advisory War Council, of which he became a member in 1941. Evatt considered the gentlemanly Curtin too conciliatory in his manner towards the United Australia Party (UAP). But there is no doubt that Curtin understood the peril of the moment as well as Evatt did. At the Advisory War Council meeting on 12 June, Curtin urged that Australia put its own defence first, the way Britain had. He did not necessarily want Australian forces withdrawn from the Middle East yet, but he complained that Britain had not given the Middle East priority in aircraft and equipment, and thus made the British and Australian forces there all the more vulnerable.
In part for fear of loss of identity and of an ability to represent their constituency—working people—Labor had been unwilling in mid-1941 to share power and form a combined government with the UAP, as both sides of the British Parliament had. Partially this was because Menzies’ hold on power was so slim and his view of the crisis so much at odds with Curtin’s. Curtin told Menzies he was content to let Menzies’ government make policy and refer it to the Advisory War Council for comment.
A combined Labor–conservative government would have permitted Menzies, while retaining leadership, to return to London to continue in his desired role as statesman of the Empire, and allowed him to find a place on the British War Cabinet as well. Many attacked Curtin, even some in his own party, for not joining a national government, while others like Evatt attacked him for being too amenable with Menzies and Menzies’ amiable deputy Artie Fadden. But Curtin’s relationship with Fadden was very close, and Fadden knew about Curtin’s tendency to go on the occasional bender. Fadden, leader of the Country Party, was of Irish parentage too, and his father, as Curtin’s had been earlier in life, was a policeman, another coincidence of background.
It is not to demean the two lawyers, Evatt and Menzies, or to question the genuineness of their highly contested visions, if we say that they had strong self-regard and a conviction of their ability—and even of their destiny—to lead. Curtin was a complex being by contrast. He was certainly a politician and knew the value of a vote, and how to work the press through his skilled pressman Don Rodgers, a vigorous man in his mid-thirties who cut his teeth on such hard-nosed Hunter Valley journals as the Miners’ Advocate and the Newcastle Sun. But Curtin possessed immense self-doubt as well. Though his political beliefs were strong, he made many apolitical friends and often trusted them better than he did his colleagues. He would say his best friend during World War II was Fred Southwell, brother of Curtin’s mistress Belle Southwell, housekeeper of the Kurrajong Hotel. Whenever Curtin, a reformed alcoholic, lapsed, and went on a bender in Sydney or elsewhere, he depended on opposition members, not one of his own fraught party, to look after him. Lloyd Ross, expelled from the Communist Party because of his negative reaction to the 1939 German–Russian pact, and for much of the war a government PR man, would tell the story of a Country Party man once ushering a ruinously drunk Curtin onto a train from Sydney to Canberra, and into a compartment where the shades were pulled down so that no one could see in from the corridor. Belle Southwell always arranged that when Curtin had a get-together with her brothers, only soft drinks were served. Years before, Curtin had managed to get so drunk while staying with his wife Elsie in a Melbourne temperance hotel that it took some days before he was fit to travel to Canberra, and even then he tried to retain a whisky bottle in his pocket. Elsie extracted the bottle and hurled it out of the train window.
To what extent was Curtin’s occasional lapse due to how difficult he found it to take adverse news? He was accused of insensitivity when in late 1940 he failed to visit his old mentor, Fred Anstey, who was dying in Brunswick and who disapproved of the way Curtin’s amiability undermined strict socialist principles. But Curtin got to the door and could not go further, not from fear but from grief at the withering of friendship and the loss of a political parent. One biographer, David Day, argues that these days Curtin might have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, for he could be immobilised with depression which, if given the chance, he would medicate with liquor. Anstey had been a Scullin minister, and Curtin, a backbencher, blamed Ted Theodore for keeping him out of a portfolio in Scullin’s government because, unlike Theodore and orthodox Labor, he opposed the Premiers’ Plan. Defeated that year, he drank in a hotel in Cottesloe where he was having an affair with the housekeeper, though the publican said all he ever heard them do was talk politics.
Even then, as he had from youth, Curtin took things hard, and hardest of all the misfortune and peril of others, and these days, of Australia. And he was a peacemaker: he brought the seven Lang Labor rebels, led by Jack Beasley—known as ‘Stabber Jack’ after he crossed the floor to bring Scullin down—back into Labor. Through his membership of the Advisory War Council he worked on improved social welfare payments and better pay for troops, but in a savage 1940 Caucus meeting he was accused of backing down, blamed for his sociability with Menzies and lack of bite, to the extent that he offered his resignation as party leader. It was not accepted.
Curtin recovered from the damage to him, physical and spiritual, over the Christmas of 1940. In the New Year of 1941, Menzies was gone to Britain, and Curtin could do business congenially with acting Prime Minister Fadden. He had pledged himself to honour Menzies’ narrow mandate and continued to do so. The Australian people, he said, had differing politics, but they wanted the ‘complete cooperation of those who are charged with the responsibility to ensure the safety of our country’. Such talk enraged his followers, and some asked what Menzies was doing for the country’s safety anyhow.
Curtin was fully aware that Menzies was not only unpopular but had failed to provide an imperilled Australia with any form of sophisticated defence should the Japanese attack and thus had caused the electorate anxiety about the primitive state of Australian defences. Faced with the prospect of power, Curtin took advice from Scullin, the elder statesman, and from his at first sight unlikely friend, the Scots replacement for Sir Isaac Isaacs, Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, whose curriculum vitae included Eton, Winchester, a good regiment, Tory parliamentarian, et cetera. After initial apprehension about a Labor government, Gowrie warmed to, and was warmed to by, Curtin. In an informal Canberra, Curtin, especially after he became prime minister, would stroll across from the Lodge to Government House and, as Gowrie wrote, ‘spend quiet afternoons and evenings with my wife and myself ’. Gowrie liked Curtin for his perseverance and patience and lack of personal ambition: ‘The most selfless man I have ever met,’ he declared of Curtin.
It cannot be denied there was true friendship there, but it would be unrealistic to think Curtin did not pass on his sense of Australian priorities, knowing Gowrie would include his views in reports to London. These would not be greatly influential but would be a further voice to buttress Curtin’s plans.
Curtin’s health was fragile, and he suffered pneumonia at the time military disasters occurred in Greece and North Africa. In the three weeks Curtin was in hospital in Melbourne, Crete fell, and Labor blamed Menzies—who had been in London the better part of six months—for the debacle. Events were indeed turning on Menzies that June. He imposed a ban on the Communist Party, and yet a few days later Hitler invaded Russia and the Australian Communists became Australian patriots, no longer devoted to thwarting the war effort. Richard Casey would later describe Menzies at this time as the ‘worst man at getting anything done that I’ve ever met’. Besides his pre-war sympathy for Nazi Germany and for appeasement along the lines pursued by former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, there was his export of pig iron (that is, iron with a high carbon content) to Japan against the unions’ protests. All this told against him in public opinion. So did his anxiety to return to London in August 1941 when he had achieved so little on his first trip.
Menzies’ Cabinet was, in fact, perversely grateful for his proposal to return to England, because it, like Curtin, preferred Fadden’s company and style. But in a House where his support was so narrow, Menzies needed Labor’s agreement to his absence. Curtin, while aware of the threatening times, was willing to let Menzies depart; however, many of his party were not, and when the Advisory War Council met on 14 August, it was obvious that Menzies would not get the Labor Party’s approval for his absence. It was Frank Forde, a Labor teetotaller from Queensland (in a culture where many deals were sealed at the bar), who, with the young jurist Evatt, argued that the right place for an Australian prime minister in wartime was in Australia. Curtin suggested as a compromise that Menzies be permitted to go to London only for as long as it took him to arrange the dominion representation lacking in the British War Cabinet. But the others spoke of the barrenness of his last visit and of the debacle in Greece and Crete, and ultimately went along with Menzies’ narrow majority. Curtin might have struck now and tried to attract a frustrated UAP man, Arthur Coles, and the independent Alex Wilson to cross the floor. He wanted to avoid becoming prime minister on terms that would rile the UAP–Country Party majority in the Senate. This made a forceful minority of the hardheads in his party wonder if Curtin had the political will for leadership. But Curtin felt he must wait until they obviously came across to his side for the national interest and without blandishments.
Menzies had recently told the Sydney Morning Herald that he would go to any lengths to keep the conduct of the war out of Labor hands. But in secrecy he offered Curtin the prime ministership in a national government if Curtin would select him to represent Australia on the War Cabinet in London. The Labor Caucus met to consider Menzies’ astounding offer, and rejected it. Labor wanted to govern in its own right. If it joined a national government made up of all parties it would forgo its right to offer, as Curtin said, ‘honest patriotic criticism without which a successful war effort is impossible’. To prevent rejection in the polls and still hold to his London ambition, Menzies resigned as prime minister on 28 August in favour of the Country Party’s ‘Affable Artie’ Fadden. Arthur Coles now thought it time to leave the UAP and reverted to being an independent, though still supporting Fadden. Some of the Labor Party wanted to challenge right then for government, but the majority took Curtin’s view and were against it. They wanted moral legitimacy, and felt it was close.
On 2 September 1941, two years since the beginning of the war, Curtin told the Australian people, ‘We will govern when we are given a mandate by the people to do so.’ The Fadden government lasted for just forty days with the support of the two independent MPs, Coles and Wilson, whose sympathies were increasingly with Curtin. Evatt had been cultivating the support of the Wimmera wheat-grower Wilson, and had even visited the Wimmera electorate to tell the drought-affected farmers that Labor would offer drought relief if it came to power. When Fadden presented his budget to Parliament at the end of September, Labor decided to test the government support by opposing it, on the basis that the burden was not shared amongst the community. In protest, Curtin moved to amend the budget, symbolically, by one pound, knowing that this gesture would test his friend Fadden’s support. Friendship in politics, only went so far.
In early October, Curtin came to Fadden’s office in Parliament House and they held a conversation that possesses all the quaintness of their friendship and the intimacy of Canberra as a bush town and a federal capital. Curtin is said to have asked, ‘Well, boy, have you got the numbers? I hope you have, but I don’t think you have.’ Fadden answered, ‘No, John, I haven’t got them. I have heard that Wilson spent the weekend at Evatt’s home and I can’t rely on Coles.’
‘Well, there it is,’ said Curtin sympathetically. ‘Politics is a funny game.’
Late that afternoon the budget was voted down and Parliament adjourned. Fadden went to Lord Gowrie to resign, and soon after Curtin arrived by summons. ‘You’ll be prime minister against your will,’ one of his critics inside the party had said. But there was no reluctance in the telegram Curtin had already sent to his wife Elsie on 3 October, the day before her birthday: ‘This is your birthday gift. Coles and Wilson are providing it, they have announced their intention of voting for our amendment and the Government will be defeated. Love, John.’
Elsie Curtin chose not to live with him at the Lodge. It was a decision arrived at mutually, since Elsie had their daughter, also Elsie, and her own mother to look after in Cottesloe. At that time the Curtins’ son John was stationed at a nearby RAAF camp. The pattern was that Elsie senior would come to Canberra twice a year and stay at the Lodge for two or so months. Many assume she was a political nullity, but in fact she was strongly versed in Labor doctrine, and yet afflicted by acute shyness and a sense of unfitness for the bigger world. ‘It was strange for me to have such a big place to run,’ she unaffectedly later said, ‘and well-meaning people confused me by telling me what I should wear.’ Pattie Menzies, Robert’s wife, daughter of a federal senator, had made a much more polished job of living at the Lodge, and in British society.
The press, including the Melbourne Age, applauded Curtin’s accession, saying that Labor had shown it would be able to prosecute the war vigorously. At this crucial time, Curtin appointed Frank Forde as Minister for Defence and deputy leader. Forde, like Curtin, was the son of Irish immigrants, Forde’s father having been a railway ganger at Mitchell in Queensland. Forde himself was a champion of the sugar and cotton industries and of protective tariffs, and had served in Scullin’s government as Minister for Trade and Customs. The vigorously self-educated former engine driver, Ben Chifley from Bathurst became Treasurer. And Herbert Vere Evatt, as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, could now set out to address the crisis he knew was calling to him and to Australia.
On taking office, Curtin sent a telegram to Churchill assuring him that Labor would ‘co-operate fully’ in bringing victory to the Empire and its Allies. Despite this, he insisted that the remainder of the 9th Division be relieved from the besieged town of Tobruk, for fear they would be overrun. Churchill complied reluctantly.
Domestically, Curtin introduced a production executive under the control of John Dedman, a former Indian Army officer and Victorian dairy farmer who was Minister for War Organisation of Industry. There had been a similar organisation under Menzies’ government, but it was now, as Curtin said, ‘a real department’. Dedman was Scots-born and a survivor of Gallipoli, Egypt and France. His Presbyterian energy worked well with Curtin’s compulsive Irish vision of Australia as a place which, if obliterated, would deprive the earth of its last best chance. In this way he echoed Deakin’s convictions about Australia’s social uniqueness.
The idea that Curtin transformed the focus of Australia immediately from Europe to the Pacific is one that was stated and applauded in many families, including my own. But in fact during the eight weeks Curtin was given before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaya and Hong Kong, many commitments to the Northern European theatre remained as they had been before. There was one great difference, though—while Menzies cold-shouldered the Americans for fear that British interests in the Pacific would be diminished, Curtin gave permission for American aircraft to land in Australia as long as the war lasted—this permission having been granted seven weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. He also agreed that the United States could establish an air route between Hawaii and the Philippines, using bases in Australia and New Guinea, and though Britain was informed of these new arrangements, it was not consulted on them. Curtin still part-believed, however, the unlikely British promise that it would abandon the Mediterranean to hold Singapore. He did not yet fully see it as Churchill’s desperate and even deceitful means of keeping the Australian divisions in the Middle East.
Blamey came back home to speak to Curtin in October 1941, but the general’s military focus was, understandably enough, on the Middle East, and indeed he wanted the 8th Division, then in part in Singapore, to be sent to the Middle East. But the request was unrealistic. By now it seemed that war with Japan was inevitable—all intelligence indicated it. Japan’s first ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai, had arrived early in the year; though he believed in Japanese expansion north of the equator, Kawai liked Curtin, and tried to organise a deal by which in return for iron ore, Australia’s safety would be guaranteed. Kawai told his government that, ‘Deeply thinking about the Japanese–Australian relations, [Curtin] is open-minded enough to listen without prejudice to arguments in favour of friendship between the two countries. He is a man of considerable calibre.’ Kawai had visited Perth and even dined at the Curtins’ home. Visiting the Lodge, he had given Elsie a signed copy of his 1938 book, The Goal of Japanese Expansion. Now, at the end of October 1941, he told Prime Minister Curtin in a private meeting that war was nearly unavoidable.
Curtin did not yet, despite the rumours of war, initiate plans to withdraw the Australians from North Africa and bring them home. He was comforted to know that a great force of American B17 heavy bombers was being assembled in the Philippines (though most of them would be destroyed on the ground in Japanese bombing attacks during the second day of the Pacific War). Closer to home, in mid November 1941 the light cruiser Sydney had sighted the German ship Kormoran, a raider designed for sinking merchant shipping, south of Carnarvon off the coast of Western Australia, and had set out to chase her. The Kormoran hoisted signals which were deliberately obscured from the Sydney by Kormoran’s smoke stack, and pretended to be a Dutch freighter, all with the purpose to lure the Sydney within range of its gun. Sydney, travelling abeam of the raider, had a well-trained crew and had sunk the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni off Cape Spada in Crete the year before. Now it asked Kormoran to show its secret Allied sign; since the German commander, Theodor Detmers, could not do so, he had no choice but to hoist the German flag, uncover his guns, open fire and send off torpedoes. Sydney’s answer to this fire was at first inaccurate, but then a shell hit the Kormoran in the funnel and destroyed the engine room and electrical installations. One of the raider’s torpedoes nonetheless hit the Sydney by her forward turrets. Within five minutes both ships were doomed. Sydney fired four torpedoes, which all missed, and as she struggled away, was further hit by Kormoran’s guns. Detmers ordered the Kormoran abandoned, because the mines lying in its hold could explode. The crew abandoned ship after setting charges.
The Germans saw the glare of the receding Sydney, and were the last to see anything of her, for of her crew of 645, none survived. Receiving this news, Curtin said, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to make the announcement . . . so I went to Government House and talked to the Governor-General.’ Sydney’s departure from the port it was named for had been delayed by industrial trouble, and Curtin felt that had he moved against the strikers, it could have left port on time and thus avoided Kormoran.