The prophet and the heroes, the politicians
and prisoners
MacArthur, Curtin; war and the people
THE APPARITION
General MacArthur had arrived in Australia on 17 March 1942. He would sometimes express the thought that if the Japanese invaded Australia, it would be a strategic blunder on their part, but he still considered that they might take on Australia for symbolic reasons—to assert their superiority over the white race. In any case, Australian politicians and people believed the onslaught would come within eight weeks of the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin.
Douglas MacArthur, the general of an abandoned and defeated American army in the Philippines and a refugee from onslaught, was welcomed as an angel of victory, a manifestation. To get to Australia he had escaped by torpedo boat from the Philippine island of Corregidor. After flying south-east to Darwin with his young wife and little son and the remnants of his staff, he and his party caught a train southwards and arrived in Adelaide almost unexpectedly. It was more an indication of the psychological state of Australians and of the success of his own public-relations team that MacArthur was greeted as a messiah. Wise heads, however, knew that his arrival would at least bring American troops and arms to Australia. MacArthur declared to welcoming members of Parliament in Canberra’s parliamentary dining room on 26 March that his presence was ‘tangible evidence’ of the ‘indescribable consanguinity of race’ between the two countries, invoking an alliance of whiteness, even though some black troops were slated to come to Australia. He declared to great applause and to the great comfort of the Australian people that ‘all the resources of the almighty power of my country and all the blood of my countrymen’ were pledged to saving Australia and driving the Japanese back across the Pacific.
In 1932, as United States Army Chief of Staff, MacArthur had taken personal command of the infantry, cavalry and tanks when troops dispersed thousands of his fellow World War I veterans who were marching on Washington seeking the payment of a World War I bonus. Despite this—and Curtin had to know of it—he and Curtin became friends. As already mentioned, Curtin found friendship across political lines sometimes less fraught than that between political allies.
Again, as soon as MacArthur landed, his publicity machine went into operation on a scale at that time abnormal in Australia. According to the general, he had been pursued closely by Japanese fighter planes and narrowly escaped Japanese bombers at Batchelor airfield in the Northern Territory (in fact there is no record of this occurring). The Australians found such fables easy to accept because they wanted to believe that someone mythic had come to save them. MacArthur from then on controlled the news the outer world, including the United States, saw. Press releases in matters considered vital in the defence of Australia would never be phrased in terms that praised Australians. The exaltation of MacArthur himself was first priority, and the matter was attended to with PR dazzle by General Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff in ‘the Bataan Gang’, MacArthur’s party from the fallen Philippines. Napoleon had to create his reputation by his own mouth; MacArthur was the first general to travel with his own press office.
MacArthur was a conservative who did not get on with his own president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in turn believed that MacArthur would consider it appropriate in the right circumstances to overthrow the United States government and become a Caesar. Yet Curtin liked him more than he did General Blamey. As his assistant spokesman on war policy, Curtin nominated not Blamey but defence secretary Frederick Shedden. From the time MacArthur arrived, Curtin and the public servant Shedden treated him as the redeemer and showed no doubt about his talent. Shedden even applauded MacArthur for his brilliant defence of the Philippines—a little ridiculous, but slightly more credible than any praise for Percival’s performance in Singapore. But it was important that MacArthur keep the Australians such as Shedden innocent of the truth that his campaign in the Philippines had been deplorable.
An anonymous Digger wrote of the tendency to depict MacArthur as the supposed saviour:
For should we fail to get the mail, if prisoners won’t talk,
If radios are indisposed and carrier pigeons walk,
We have no fear, because we hear tomorrow’s news today
And see our operations plan in Doug’s Communiqué.
Blamey was commander of Allied Land Forces in the South West Pacific area, but he retained wide responsibility for the Australian forces. He deployed the 1st Army, made up chiefly of militia conscripts, in April 1942 to defend the east coast of Australia. The 2nd Army was based initially in Melbourne. One division, the 4th, was sent to Western Australia, where the 3rd Corps was to be formed. US anti-aircraft and engineering troops were also sent to Darwin, and a squadron of heavy bombers to Perth.
MacArthur was horrified to find on his arrival in Australia that Washington had so failed him that there were fewer than 26,000 American servicemen in the country, mostly air force personnel and rear-echelon men, and not a single infantryman. There were 104,000 members of the AIF, and nearly twice as many militia. They did not provide as much comfort to MacArthur as they did to Curtin. Curtin wanted to save Australia. MacArthur wanted to reconquer the Philippines, and he had other ambitions too, political ones. To get as many American troops as possible, he would badmouth the quality of the Australians, doing so with such consistency that the Australians acquired a second general to hate.
As early as 25 April 1942, Australian intelligence in Melbourne had predicted a Japanese task force would sail across the Coral Sea towards Port Moresby both to win its own naval battle against the Americans and to shepherd eleven transports and naval vessels across the ocean and enable them to seize Port Moresby. The Japanese descended from the direction of the Solomons and Rabaul and were intercepted from the south and east by three Allied task forces, one of them partly made up of the Australian cruisers Hobart and Australia, which made a screen protecting Port Moresby. Australia was attacked by torpedo bombers from Rabaul but avoided damage by a weaving movement.
The battle was fought on seas east of Cape York. Reading the maps in the newspapers, Australians would be amazed at how close to home the Japanese fleet were. The Japanese withdrew after four days of aerial attack, shocked that their aircraft carrier Shoho was sunk so quickly, although that loss was of very little significance compared to the damage done to the aircraft carriers Lexington and Yorktown. However, the Japanese troop transports also withdrew to Rabaul, carrying with them the five thousand men of the invasion force. It was the first Japanese setback. The author remembers being told by his relieved mother about this phenomenal battle and the extent to which it made us all safer. Indeed, in Australia, the Coral Sea was looked upon as a thorough victory, even though the Americans now had only two undamaged aircraft carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise. But it would prove to be the case that no Japanese naval force again attempted to cross the Coral Sea and take Port Moresby.
Until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May 1942, the Australian army was on the defensive. The Australian official historian noted that so hesitant had Blamey and MacArthur been to send reinforcements to New Guinea where they might be gobbled up that on 10 May, the day the Japanese planned to land around Port Moresby, the defending garrison was not materially stronger than the one General Sturdee had established early in January. This was an arrangement that would very nearly lead to the loss of the entirety of New Guinea, including Port Moresby.
After the Battle of the Coral Sea, Blamey reinforced Port Moresby with a militia brigade instead of an AIF brigade. He sent a militia brigade to Milne Bay, too. There was an expectation that the Japanese, thwarted in the Coral Sea, would now attack Port Moresby overland. Only militia units held that port; the 7th Division AIF was kept for training for overseas operations to occur later. General Rowell later said that the decision not to send the AIF made his ‘headquarters weep at the time’, and veteran war correspondent Gavin Long wrote in his diary that ‘the decision to keep the best troops till last was criminal’.
On Friday, 29 May, five large Japanese submarines lay 56 kilometres off the New South Wales coast. At least one of these had a hatch large enough to contain a reconnaissance plane, which flew over Sydney at 3 a.m. on Saturday and confirmed that the harbour was full of warships, including the heavy cruiser USS Chicago, veteran of the Battle of the Coral Sea. The flotilla moved now to within eleven kilometres of Sydney Harbour. At 4.30 p.m., after appropriate ceremonies to honour the men willing to undertake such a hopeless task, three midget submarines set out to penetrate the harbour. The first midget entangled itself in the huge anti-submarine net laid across the north-facing entry to Sydney Harbour, and before HMAS Yarroma, a patrol boat, could attack it, its crew of two men destroyed their craft and themselves with demolition charges. Towards 10 p.m., the second submarine penetrated the net and sailed up harbour. The alarms had sounded all over the city and people were advised to take shelter, if necessary under tables with mattresses laid on them. The portents were uncertain. Some American machine-gun emplacements near Garden Island had begun firing up harbour. Two hundred metres offshore, the second submarine was sighted by the Chicago crew, who opened fire. It released two torpedoes. Had the Chicago been hit, the myth of Japanese omnipotence would have been restored, and its capacity to strike at will would have been confirmed in a manner that would certainly have demoralised the Allies. The first torpedo ran aground at Garden Island, however, and the other ran under a Dutch submarine, K9, and hit the harbour bed beneath the depot ship HMAS Kuttabul, a converted ferry boat, killing nineteen Australian naval ratings and two from the Royal Navy. This second Japanese submarine was able to escape the harbour and its fate became a matter of speculation.
The third submarine was sighted by HMAS Yandra at the harbour entrance and depth-charged, but after withdrawing, it returned and was attacked by a number of vessels. Both members of its crew committed suicide. The two submarines were recovered and displayed, reasonably enough, as captured marine beasts of prey. The weekend that had begun with such omens of threat had now been dealt with and the threat neutralised.
PARER AGAIN
The north coast of New Guinea, on which the Japanese now intended to concentrate a considerable force, was sparsely populated by Europeans. One Australian who witnessed and then fled the Japanese landings there was Ashley Chapman, an oil depot manager on Huon Peninsula, over which the Australians and Japanese would later engage in ferocious battle. After a cross-country trek he led a party of other civilians safely to Port Moresby and then by ship to Sydney. Chapman, who had migrated to Australia from London in his teens, had gone to New Guinea to work for Burns Philp, the Pacific trading and shipping company that had general agents, massive plantations and commercial interests in New Guinea. Living conditions on the Huon Gulf on the north shore of New Guinea were primitive, and Chapman worked at the Burns Philp store at Salamaua, which was also an agency for Shell fuel. He lived with his wife Sadie, whom he had married in 1938, in a little residential area known as Kila.
The nearby district on the Huon Gulf had a community of about forty whites, mostly Australians and English in their early twenties. Gold had been discovered in the interior a few years earlier and so a village named Morobe had become an administrative centre. In Morobe throughout the 1930s a district officer named Taylor administered about half a dozen patrol officers and their staff based there. These patrol officers gradually penetrated the interior and made contact with the natives and set up what Taylor called ‘civilised administration’. One of the benefits of Australian occupation for local people, said Chapman, was that no one could buy native land. It could only be leased. Besides that, natives could not be employed without an official contract for more than two years at a time and without the administration’s permission. The contract, however, may not have favoured the native as much as it did the administration.
Salamaua had about four kilometres of road, all unpaved. There was a Burns Philp supply ship from Australia every three weeks and a petroleum supply ship from Balikpapan in Borneo. Business activity continued at Salamaua after Singapore fell, and aircraft still came and went. Chapman got used to RAAF Hudsons and Wirraways on the nearby strip, and a machine-gun detachment of Australian soldiers was billeted there. Most of the locals joined the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles.
Salamaua was first raided by air on 9 January 1942; the sudden arrival of aircraft found Chapman surrounded by great stacks of high-octane aviation fuel barrels: ‘One incendiary bullet and we would have evaporated in the explosion.’ But the Japanese wanted to preserve the fuel stock for their own use, and after damaging some buildings in the town of Salamaua, as well as demolishing Chapman’s own house, the planes turned away to bomb Lae. A civilian pilot, New Guinea aviation pioneer Kevin Parer, cousin to Damien the cinematographer, was just landing his Dragon Rapide when he was attacked from above by Japanese aircraft and killed. Bomb holes made the runway unusable, and hangars and repair shops were destroyed along with some fourteen civil aircraft.
The New Guinea Volunteer Rifles were now inducted for full-time duty, and fit men under forty were conscripted. The women, unfit men and those over forty were to be evacuated by sea in the Neptuna, soon to be attacked in the bombing of Darwin. Chapman was the last civilian to leave Salamaua on 25 January 1942, the day after the RAAF pulled out. He escaped the Japanese with his small party of men on mountain trails just wide enough to take one person at a time. It took three and a half days to make the 80 kilometres to Wau.
In about mid-February, a party assembled at Wau to walk to Port Moresby. They would have all the problems the infantry later faced. Six weeks after leaving Salamaua, seeing Japanese bombers fly above them on their way to Port Moresby, they took to canoes and reached the south coast, the Papuan side, in the swamplands at the bottom of the mountains. They made outriggers and were sailing for Port Moresby when they were strafed by Japanese aircraft. All survived, and they were picked up by a coastal boat requisitioned by the Australian army, and taken to Port Moresby.
In support of their operations in the Solomons, the Japanese army and navy occupied Lae and Salamaua the week MacArthur arrived in Australia. The Japanese had not landed in sufficient strength to pose a threat to Port Moresby, however, and the likelihood of their marching overland to Port Moresby seemed preposterous. The peaks of the Owen Stanley Range, dividing the south coast of New Guinea from the north coast, rose to heights above 4000 metres. But if their troops on the north coast of New Guinea were reinforced, the Japanese might then consider it. The other places where Japanese could land to build up their forces were to the east, on the beaches at Buna or Gona. These names, with those of Lae and Salamaua, would come to be lodged in the memory of people who lived through those days, for they would all become venues of sacrifice.
The Japanese considered that their troops on the north coast might one day be sent with reinforcements over the mountains to attempt to occupy Port Moresby. By June 1942, after the Battle of the Coral Sea had balked its capture by the Japanese navy, this possibility became more likely. Damien Parer, filled with more urgency than the Australian command, found his way from Townsville to a Port Moresby weakly garrisoned by semi-trained and often unruly militia battalions. Towards the end of 1941 he had tried to accompany a British military convoy to Tehran and so cross into Russia and film the Eastern Front. But he did not achieve it before the war with Japan began, and so returned to Australia with some of the 7th Division on the troopship Sophocles, arriving back in Melbourne in March 1942.
Once in Port Moresby, Parer established a camera position on a hill above the port. When Japanese bombers destroyed the new supply ship Macdhui, Parer was on this height only two hundred metres away, taking spectacular footage of a full-scale bomber attack on a port, film he would incorporate in his 1942 film Moresby Under the Blitz.
Osmar White, a journalist for the Melbourne newspaper publishers Herald and Weekly Times and a spirited young man like Parer, wanted to accompany native bearers as they crossed the mountains to Wau to deliver supplies to a malaria-racked force of four hundred Australians, Kanga Force. Kanga’s duties were to keep watch on the four thousand Japanese who had already landed, and to make guerrilla attacks on them. White’s proposed journey would involve a round trip of more than a thousand kilometres, mostly on foot, regarding which trip White found it impossible to get accurate information from the army in Moresby. Nonetheless, Parer wanted to go with him, and to observe the Japanese who were massing on the north coast and who would try to cross the intervening mountains.
Parer and White somehow managed it by travelling along the coast in a launch and then setting off inland. They started overland from a position called Bulldog, along with ninety-three natives who were transporting more than a ton of ammunition, mail and supplies. Parer worked as unofficial medical officer to the group, nursing a bearer dying from pneumonia. He also amputated an infected toe. As the trail grew steeper, six more carriers were sent back suffering from pneumonia or exhaustion. ‘These native carriers,’ he wrote, ‘with their heavy loads and extremely difficult walking conditions, would cause any of us to blush with shame when their war effort is compared to our own.’ He noted that there were nine cases of pneumonia and that one carrier died of a ruptured spleen on the track. Mould and moisture began to affect Parer’s cameras.
The group at last ran into Kanga Force, who had recently, in a party of nineteen under Captain Norm Winning, attacked Japanese-held Salamaua at 3 a.m. one morning. Parer filmed the bearers and a line of wounded members of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles trying to make their way back over the Owen Stanleys to safety. They had not had a delivery of anything by plane for two months, they said. Amongst their problems were badly infected tick bites. White and Parer found a manned telephone post that connected to the Commandos’ headquarters in Wau, and when they got there were asked if they had any tobacco, sugar or mail.
Not satisfied with filming the base, Parer went forward to the advance scouts of Kanga Force. Some of the raids he filmed accompanying Kanga Force produced footage that has been used in nearly every documentary on the Pacific War ever since. He observed that Allied planes bombed not only Lae and Salamaua but also as-yet-unoccupied Gona, which signified, he thought, an expectation of a Japanese landing there. For nine days, Parer lived with three Kanga Force scouts manning the Salamaua lookout, a tall tree high on the hillside from which the port township and aerodrome could be observed. He was not entirely welcome as far as they were concerned, and they had sent out their New Guinean assistants, treading on twigs and leaves, to erase every boot mark he’d left getting there.
Parer took the time to film this characteristic procedure. He filmed the arrival and departure of enemy fighters and seaplanes, and a burning Japanese troopship drifting onto a reef. The Japanese he filmed were digging in and camouflaging their weapon pits. ‘No good tripod rest possible,’ he wrote of his work, ‘and tree with slight sway—these shots may be spoiled. Also visibility on most days was bad and it rained a hell of a lot.’
He returned ultimately with film of superb quality. But he could only find that out once he had marched over the mountains again to Moresby. By now White was stricken by fever. When the two of them left Wau on a July morning in 1942, Parer was about to begin a year of unrivalled camera work.
MANPOWER, PRISONER POWER
The Manpower Directorate was established during the invasion crisis of early 1942 and operated as a powerful section of the Department of Labour and National Service. Women, including some mothers of young children, were conscripted into national service in the form of compulsory and directed labour. Anglo–Australian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were being conscripted into the Australian military forces and there was a desperate lack of farm labour.
At the very time that the vast majority of Italians from the sugar belt in north-east Queensland were being interned, ironically now in greater numbers than had been the case at the outbreak of the European war, public policy redirections allowed those who were not Nazis, Fascists or of Japanese origin to be considered for work release under stringent restrictions and curfews. In early 1942, the Civil Alien Corps was established as a section of the Allied Works Council. Under this arrangement, Italians from strategically sensitive areas like the mining districts of Kalgoorlie and the sugar belt of Queensland were not permitted to return to work in those regions, but were allocated work elsewhere.
Aborigines from the reserves in Queensland who had been redeployed with soldiers from their normal jobs to harvest the crops the Italians no longer worked on were now either interned or released into Civil Alien Corps camps elsewhere in Australia. There had been some doubts about the loyalty of the Aborigines of Cape Bedford Mission in Cape York where George Schwarz was the pastor for nearly six decades. On 17 May 1942, trucks manned by police and army arrived to intern Schwarz and his wife and to take the more than 250 Guugu Yimidhirr Aborigines away. The elderly were sent to Palm Island, the others to a settlement near Rockhampton where they suffered sixty deaths in a year because of the cold winters. Thus, under wartime emergency regulations, Aborigines could be treated as enemy aliens in their own country.
In 1943, however, fifty Aboriginal women from the Cherbourg settlement in Queensland would dig the greater part of the Lockyer Valley potato crop. Other Aborigines in Cape York joined the Civil Construction Corps, building makeshift aerodromes in the area. In Victoria, meanwhile, five hundred released Italian internees formerly from Queensland were despatched to the saltworks at Underwood and Laverton in Victoria, as well as to the forestry camp at Werrimull. Three hundred and fifty civilian Italian internees were deployed on the Port Augusta–Kalgoorlie link of the Trans-Australian Railway to replace a group of dissatisfied Italian POWs.
Suggestions were made to deploy the seven hundred Indonesian political prisoners to harvest the Mackay cane crop in Queensland. They were considered reliable workers but suspected of being willing to collaborate with the Japanese as a means of ridding themselves permanently of the Dutch colonial regime.
Working parallel to these forced labour forces was the Australian Women’s Land Army. The women who enlisted in this force were often as young as sixteen, anxious to serve and acquire a uniform and a measure of freedom, and totally unaccustomed to hard manual labour. In an emergency some of them were sent to cut cane in Sarina, Queensland. But the Land Army’s members were considered somehow inferior to those of the women’s army, navy and airforce, and only some two thousand women joined for a year’s service, and over one thousand more as auxiliaries, who could be called on at harvest time to work for a month.
By 1942, there were 18,500 Italian POWs in various camps in Australia, locked up in locations from Thompson Point in Queensland to Cowra and Hay in New South Wales, Tatura and Murchison in Victoria, and Northam in Western Australia. In 1943, Australia agreed to accommodate an extra ten thousand Italian POWs from Egypt and Abyssinia who had initially been imprisoned in India. Through regional offices named Control Centres, the government had begun to distribute as labourers Italian prisoners who were obviously not camicie neri (Blackshirts) or dedicated Fascists. The Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, noted in May 1943 that with the progress of the Allied advance in Italy ‘there is a marked tendency amongst Fascists to abandon political faith’. In fact, as the Italians were a conscript army, there was a great range of opinion amongst them, from Communists and anarchists to social democrats and beyond.
The camps tried to become farms in their own right. Pig, poultry and dairying enterprises were carried out by Italian labour at the Hay camp, where three thousand POWs were housed. By mid-year, nine hundred Japanese and two thousand Italian POWs were engaged in charcoal-burning, brick-making, wood-cutting, trench and irrigation canal-building, tailoring, boot repairs, sail-making, blacksmithing, market-gardening, and road and pavement works.
Italian POWs were permitted to work within fifty kilometres of a Prisoner of War Control Centre. They were to be provided with spartan but not unhealthy accommodation by the employer outside the house—in sheds or shearers’ quarters—and were allowed to leave only on Sundays from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., provided they wore their detested burgundy POW clothing.
In the Stanthorpe district of south-east Queensland, Mrs Barranger, the wife of a returned soldier, and Mrs Haslett, ‘a soldier’s widow with two sons in AIF’, were recommended for the immediate placement of an Italian on their farm in August 1943. On the Atherton Tablelands in early 1945, Rita Costas’ family, despite being Italian themselves, were allocated POWs—but only by the day. After all, Rita’s brother was a member of the 2nd AIF and was engaged in service in New Guinea. ‘We had to supply lunch for them, that was all. They would come out [to the farm] after breakfast and there would be an army vehicle to come and pick them up’ in the afternoons.
The returned soldiers’ organisations were totally opposed to the employment of Italian POWs, particularly in the Atherton Tablelands area. Smith’s Weekly maintained a hate campaign through the entire war. On 6 July 1940, it had proclaimed ‘Make No Mistake about the Dago Menace’, and it would keep up the cry, though at diminishing volume, for the rest of the war.
Italian POWs who were returned by their employers for misdemeanours—which sometimes involved political fights between prisoners—received detention, but were sometimes then reassigned. The authorities knew that sometimes the farmer was to blame.
Marjory Pierpoint’s fiancé, Ron Colvin, owned a sheep and cattle station, Ballandean, twenty-five kilometres from Stanthorpe. In 1944 he decided to grow tomatoes and carrots for the lucrative Brisbane market. According to Marjory’s memory, he got a phone call asking, ‘Do you still want those prisoners?’ He said yes, and the local Control Centre told him, ‘We’ve got some here but we have to warn you, they’re all back because they bashed their bosses.’ Because Colvin knew that there were as many bad bosses as there were bad workmen, he said to send them out. Despite their reputation, the four Italians who arrived proved excellent workers.
‘They also made an impression in the local area. We were taking Vincenzo to the dentist and he called out, “Mr Colvin, Mr Colvin, slow.”’ So Ron slowed down and Vincenzo ran off into a field to see someone. ‘We were reported for letting him fraternise.’ Vincenzo was sociable: ‘He’d met a girl on a previous farm.’ Australians believed that ‘no decent Australian girl would look twice at a Dago prisoner’. The problem was that they envisaged the Italian POW as swarthy, dark and lacking in graces. The young men who showed up sometimes more approximated Michelangelo’s David.
Like many indulgent or satisfied bosses, at great expense Colvin obtained some parmesan cheese at £7 per pound for his POWs when he realised they hated mutton and potatoes. Another POW, Sergeant A. Bisile, had been sent to a farm in Leongatha in Victoria; on 28 September 1943 he wrote, ‘I am with a family of four; a boy of about twenty and a girl about twenty-two years of age. I’m being treated just like in my own home. I have a room for myself with all the comforts. I use their bathroom and basin. In other words, I am considered the third child of the family.’
Sometimes the knowledge that they were safe and well fed added to prisoners’ depression and feelings of guilt about their families in Italy. And they would not see them again for some years. Though in 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies and joined them in fighting the Axis, many Italian POWs were not returned home till 1947, in all cases because of the shortage of shipping.
WOMEN POWER
Women had been used during World War II in other ways than as industrial labour. In an attempt to free men for more essentially military roles, for the first time in history women were recruited into the services to fulfil support roles, separate from those of nursing. The aviator Nancy Bird Walton was the New South Wales head of the Women’s Air Training Corp, which was founded in 1939 and headed nationally by Mary Bell. Bell, wife of an air force pilot, had herself trained as a pilot in 1927. In March 1941, government, urged by many young female volunteers, authorised the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF), the first women’s service to be formed and the largest, with 27,000 women, though that figure included a minority of nurses, who were its only members eligible for service overseas. Figures of admiration amongst the populace generally, WAAAFs served in radar and signals, in operations rooms and messes and offices, drove vehicles and worked on ordinance. Mary Bell was the auxiliary’s head, but was passed over for the administrative expertise of Clare Stevenson, an executive from the Berlei company in Melbourne.
By April 1941, there was a shortage of telegraphists in the navy, and the government authorised the recruitment of women into a Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (ANS). The Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) was founded in August. The women recruits worked as signallers, coders, wireless operators, cypher clerks, couriers, cooks and drivers. This latter corps of young women was led by a woman with the rank of colonel, Sybil Howie Irving, and was, amongst other things, employed on searchlight detachments on coastal cliff sides and in cities, and as artillery spotters for the Japanese invasion that seemed imminent soon after the start of the Pacific War. Notably, all these services were in place before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Malaya, and would grow in importance once that attack had occurred.
Over 36,000 women enlisted in the three women’s services. Thousands more worked in volunteer roles in Nancy Bird Walton’s organisation and the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corp. Around 3500 army nurses were also recruited, although for purely medical rather than for manpower reasons, and it was amongst the nurses that the casualties would occur during the advance of Japan.
At a quasi-official and organised level there was also a Land Army recruited to work on harvests. The recruits were generally young urban women, some as young as sixteen, although the women who joined were meant to be between eighteen and fifty years. Nearly three thousand permanent members served in the Land Army, and over a thousand casuals, and they worked forty-eight hours a week for a mere thirty shillings. In January 1943, Cabinet decided that these women would be given an official status of a fourth service, but the intention was never enacted. So the women of the Land Army had a struggle to be recognised as contributors to the war. As well as that, they faced many crusty old farmers who disapproved of flighty young women doing farm work and living together in informal barracks far from home. The women suffered not only from toilsome and tedious work, but were endangered by unprotected use of agricultural chemicals. Judy Finley, who had worked for a Sydney frock factory, would remember travelling with other Land Army girls sixteen hours by train to be met at Leeton railway station by the manager of the cannery and its matron. The first task of the young women was to make their own mattresses out of white palliasses and straw. So began months of unglamorous labour, harvesting the peas and carrots considered essential to victory.
THE IMPRISONED
On 18 April 1942, Captain Adrian Curlewis, as an example of decent or benignly neglectful treatment from the Japanese, was given a lift into town by Okasaki, commandant of the POW camp at Changi in Singapore, who asked him what he had done before the war. Curlewis discovered that Okasaki had known Tatsuo Kawai, the Japanese legate in Sydney with whom he, Curlewis, had done some committee work before the war as a member of the Japan–Australia Society. ‘Every dealing I’ve had with Japanese for four months has been [marked by] extreme courtesy. What is behind it I cannot make out, but the moment a Japanese knows you are Aussie then you are better off. They hate England.’
But Private Charles Watson, also in Changi, noticed that the Japanese had been driving groups of Chinese to the edge of the sea and machine-gunning them, ‘mostly lads rounded up as Communist suspects’. One young wounded Chinese man was rescued—‘he spoke English and we have a few Australian–Chinese in our ranks, so it was decided he would be smuggled back to camp, carrying a tin of water, and put into hospital until his slight wounds heal.’ The Japanese themselves rarely visited the hospital, for fear of contagion.
By May, Curlewis noticed betting on what was the destination of a rumoured party that was being sent away from Changi. There were rumours that three thousand were going and the hopes were that it was a prisoner exchange and that they were going to Australia; in the betting, Australia was at short odds. The reality would be far more grievous. By now Curlewis realised how deficient the diet was, and that he and others were already in declining health. ‘Blood pressure 90/70,’ he wrote. ‘Lack of proteins.’ He had been passed the job by a superior officer of rewriting the 8th Division’s war diary. ‘I fear me some hard words will appear when the whole story is written.’ Curlewis had also been told by his commanding officer on 19 February that he would be the Assistant Director of Education for the fourteen thousand men in and around Changi. He was to be Dean of the Faculty of Law, and indeed he gave lectures on contracts, criminal law, evidence and torts for forty-four law students and 120 interested others. Work parties were often sent out, however, and so classes were interrupted. Some of them worked on wharves and collected scrap iron and furniture for shipment to Japan, while others filled in bomb craters.
By contrast with the relatively comfortable conditions described by Curlewis, Private Edgar Wilkie, in the harsher prison in Kuala Lumpur, was already recording deaths from disease. Malnutrition weakened men as fever’s opportunistic ally. ‘Lunch of rice and pork, just enough to aggravate my hunger.’ The description of the Pudu prison in Kuala Lumpur in Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, a prison for men taken behind Japanese lines as he had been, is of a circle of hell where dysentery patients were heaped without medicine in a small room designated as a hospital, and where the dying began earlier than it did in Changi.
Brigadier Arthur Blackburn, VC, was the senior officer in the POW camp in Batavia, the future Jakarta, in Java. In that camp there were 2600 POWs, of whom two thousand were Australians. The survivors from HMAS Perth and USS Houston, sunk during the night of 28 February–1 March in an engagement known as the Battle of Sunda Strait, were amongst them too. When Blackburn requested clothing, boots, a canteen, pay, freedom to send letters and to receive books, he was told that the Japanese did not recognise these things since they did not recognise the Geneva Convention. However, his requests would be considered.
On the eve of Anzac Day 1942 in Batavia, the meal was rice and vegetable soup. A slice of white bread was issued every fourth day. The meat ration was so small that it was best used to strengthen the soup. The men from the Perth and the Houston had no razors, toothbrushes or soap and the request to purchase such requirements was fobbed off. Requests for more meat were refused outright. A certain amount of rations had been brought into the camp by the prisoners, which enabled an issue once a week for twelve weeks of two sausages per man and a weekly issue of dried potatoes. Malnutrition seemed an established fact.
Ultimately, when the information became available, the Australian government kept good statistics on the fates of their men who became prisoners of war, and calculated that of over seven thousand men captured by the European Axis powers, just 242 died, while over seven thousand of more than 21,000 POW in Japanese camps perished—nearly one in three.
In 1942, though, information was scarce. For many families, to the fear of invasion was added anxiety about the thousands captured in Singapore, Java, Ambon, Rabaul and elsewhere. Little information was coming through about them from the Japanese, who had not signed the Geneva Convention on POWs. The Convention bound its signatories to see that the relatives of captives be quickly informed by way of the Red Cross.
The wives and mothers of POWs wrote to Curtin in the belief he was the sort of man who would take a personal interest in their anguish. The letters are poignant. Mrs Wallace of Glenbrook in New South Wales wrote to explain that one of her four soldier boys was now a prisoner of war: ‘I am alone, and greatly worried about my son in Japanese hands, who is a good boy.’ Mrs Grace Harrison of South Melbourne: ‘My son is missing in Malaya and I am a very sad mother . . . please forgive me taking the liberty and may Our Lady of Good Counsel help you in a task that is very great.’ Mrs Elsie Salter of Epping in Sydney even wrote to Elsie Curtin, asking her if she could use her good offices with her husband to find out what had happened to Mrs Salter’s husband: ‘I have a baby daughter who was born two months after the fall of Singapore.’ The prisoner of war did not know their child’s name. Could Elsie ask John Curtin to get that name to her husband?
In April 1942, Curtin wondered whether he should exercise ‘reciprocity’ in withdrawing privileges from the Japanese prisoners and internees Australia held until the lists of names arrived from the Japanese military by way of the Red Cross. The British wisely reminded him by way of Stanley Melbourne Bruce that there was a disproportion between the small number of Japanese prisoners of war the Allies held and the great number of British, Australian and Indian prisoners the Japanese had taken. In September 1942, the equally frustrated British wrote to ask whether Curtin had received any information. Up to that time only eight Australian names had been provided by the Japanese, and three of those were of dead soldiers.
As early as mid-March 1942, the Australian government felt it must send out telegrams that notified families only that the son, daughter or husband was missing. Gordon Bennett, the general who had fled Singapore, told the press that ‘evidence so far is that Australians in Japanese hands have been treated quite well, and there does not seem to be any need for undue worry by relatives’. This was a true assessment for the moment—the period while the Japanese worked out what to do with the masses of prisoners they had taken. Bennett’s statement must have comforted the families of the lost.
Meanwhile the British and the Australians were planning food supplies to be sent to help the Japanese feed the prisoners. Civilian prisoners were to be considered as well as the POWs. Governments would never be certain how many Allied civilians were interned by the Japanese, since exact records would never be received or found. There may have been as many as 130,000 of them, mainly Dutch, British, Australian and American. They were missionaries, nurses, doctors, administrators, teachers and traders. Australian nurses in Rabaul were imprisoned with others at a Catholic mission where some of the nuns and clerics were Australian. In April these prisoners were each allowed to write one letter home, and many of the letters reached their destinations. Thereafter there was no more communication, neither with the Australian government nor with the prisoners’ families. Within six months of capture, with their families still believing that they were prisoners in Rabaul, the nurses were sent off to Japan in an unmarked merchant ship.
These six army and seven civilian nurses, together with a plantation owner’s wife, four Methodist women missionaries and an American woman named Etta Jones, who had been captured in the Alaskan Aleutians, witnessed the massacre of orderlies and the wounded, and had had to appeal to a German bishop in Rabaul to save them from night-time molestation by guards. They survived the appalling journey to Japan, where they were first imprisoned in the boarded-up Yokahama Yacht Club sewing bags to be carried by Japanese soldiers. Despite hunger and a nearby cemetery where Japanese dead putrefied in ill-dug graves, and the ferocious winter of 1943–44, the coldest in decades, the nurses and their companions would survive.
Not so later voyagers. The two Australian priests at the mission would be sent off later, with the Australian garrison, the men of the 22nd Battalion, on board the 7000-ton prison ship Montevideo Maru, ultimately torpedoed on 1 July 1942 by an American submarine and aboard which prisoners locked below suffered unutterable torments as the ship sank.
The captured young surgeon, Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, former rugby international, would mention in his diary that by Anzac Day 1942 there was a Japanese edict against buying goods outside Changi. Food was scant, but not as scant as it would become later. And morale was helped by the poignant rumours du jour: that Sweden had joined the Allies, and that Timor had been captured by the Australians and Americans. For now there was still a structure to events—the day before, Captain Lancaster had given a lecture on ‘The Tank in Modern War’, and Major Morris on Morse code.
BRING THEM HOME
In February 1942, as Curtin’s symptoms improved in St Vincent’s Hospital, he was still plagued by concern for the two Australian divisions, and not only for their safety, but also for the question of which theatre of war Churchill and Roosevelt would try to bluster him into sending them to. On the night of 20 February, after leaving hospital that morning, he sent a cable to Churchill—‘the biggest and most important decision I have had to make since Japan entered the war’, he later told Cabinet—further demanding an even more urgent return to Australia of the two divisions for fear of their being consumed in lost causes such as the fighting in Burma or in Java. His cable was not responded to. In fact, Earle Page told Churchill that he would try to change Curtin’s mind.
Churchill cabled Roosevelt on 5 March that it was ‘not easy to assign limits to the Japanese aggression. All can be retrieved in 1943 and 1944, but meanwhile there are very hard forfeits to pay’. The question was, was Australia to be one of those forfeits? The discussion on the Australian divisions thus rolled on and on.
So the 6th and 7th divisions were scattered across the Indian Ocean in poorly protected convoys between Suez and Fremantle while the 9th remained in Palestine, and the 8th was in prison in Malaya and Singapore. The Armoured Division of the AIF was training with their less than a dozen tanks, and despite Washington accepting the strategic responsibility for Australia’s defence, the first US division had still not arrived.
Page’s arguments on Churchill’s behalf were not as slavish to the British agenda as they first appeared to be. He certainly did not consider himself Churchill’s errand boy. The good surgeon of Grafton and Australian Minister in London, Page had been sent to the United Kingdom by Menzies, on the usual grounds of keeping rivals or enemies offshore. On coming to power, Curtin had not sacked him. Nor had Curtin dispensed with former prime minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner who would ultimately be given an uninfluential place on the British War Cabinet. Bruce himself did not like the high-handedness with which the British government made unilateral decisions. Though despite the emergency of 1942 the Australian government continued to send young flyers to be trained in Canada for Bomber Command operations from Britain, both Page and Bruce felt they must apologise for the Curtin government’s demands. Bruce argued that Anglo–American assistance would be increased by Australia adopting a compliant attitude since there was ‘a vast difference between the help given because of necessity and that afforded out of gratitude and good feeling’. And yet there was little gratitude and good feeling from London’s direction towards Australia. All this was unfortunate, but again it must be noted that Bruce and Page too lived in Britain, and had survived the seventy-one catastrophic air raids on London between late 1940 and mid-1941; they were also aware of the scale of British defeats thus far, and of the perilous year to come when in the northern spring Hitler would unleash a further assault on Russia. These matters weighed hugely on those in Westminster. South-west priorities weighed hugely on Curtin.
It was not as if Page was immune from the stress Curtin himself felt. This was partly from the task of mediating between an acerbic and aggrieved Churchill and a determined Curtin, and straining from within the European milieu to see where Australia’s interests outweighed those of Empire. He would write to Curtin in April, ‘I went through since January the worst period of acute mental distress of my whole life.’ A severe attack of pneumonia would so undermine his health that he would return to Australia in June.
In any case, in early 1942, Churchill convinced Page that if Burma was lost, China might pull out of the war against the Japanese for lack of supplies. If the two Australian divisions were used to strengthen Burma, it would not only help save India to the west and China to the east, but also show the Americans that Australia was willing to do its part, and so cause America and Britain to do their part for Australia in turn.
On the night of Saturday, 21 February, Curtin slept soundly, but woke up to be presented with cables from Churchill and Roosevelt arguing that the Australians must go to Burma. Indeed, Churchill persisted with the idea of sending the Australians to Rangoon, the capital, even though the Japanese were only 64 kilometres from the city, and the port facilities needed to unload the two Australian divisions had been blown to scrap iron by the Japanese air force, and all wharf labourers had fled.
Curtin lacked training in military strategy but was willing to be advised by his own chiefs of staff, all of whom said, ‘Bring the boys home!’ This advice echoed his instincts. General Vernon Sturdee, Chief of General Staff, who had never believed in the Singapore solution in the first place, said he would resign if the government ignored this advice. Curtin left the Lodge at night, often on his own, and wandered the hills, worried about the convoys of men on their way home. The first Australian formations to leave the Middle East at this time had begun to do so on 30 January, and the last was loaded on 12 March. They were not what experts call ‘technically stowed’—men and equipment became separated from each other during the voyage, and so it became strongly believed by the Australians that men and equipment could only be reassembled in Australia, not on some desperate last-stand front in Asia. By the middle of February, 17,800 men of the 6th and 7th divisions were in the port of Bombay and were re-embarked into smaller ships to avoid sending larger, vulnerable liners into the danger zone.
Lieutenant-General Sir John Lavarack, Commander of the 1st Australian Corps, had rushed from the Middle East to Java and was waiting for the troops to arrive there, but Allied forces in Sumatra were subjected to the same total dominance of the air and mobility on the ground of the Japanese forces and a Java landing was imminent.
The 3400 Australian veterans of the 7th Division that had landed on Java by 19 February faced capture. The Australian government became aware of this potential entrapment only in late February or early March, and it made Curtin more insistent that all the AIF should be returned to Australia and the men in Java evacuated if possible, even if it was already too late. General Archie Wavell’s deputy, General Henry Pownall, blasted the Australians for their ‘damnable attitude’ in demanding a withdrawal of their recently landed troops from the Netherlands East Indies. He wrote that they had been ‘shown up in their true colours. Not so much the troops and commanders themselves . . . as their government, actuated presumably by a mixture of public opinion in Australia and common funk. Winston had little enough use for them before, especially after they demanded to be relieved at Tobruk, to everyone’s great inconvenience. He’ll be madder still now.’ Pownall described Australians as ‘the most egotistical, conceited people imaginable . . . so damn well pleased with themselves all the time and so highly critical of everyone else’.
Already, as things got worse in February, Lavarack had doubted that in their ‘unstowed’ condition the further Australians would be able to maintain their lines in Sumatra and Java and feared that they would suffer unaffordable casualties as well. There was a small benefit from the coming Java disaster. When it came, the Japanese landed on both the east and west coasts of Java. A force of some units of the 7th Division men, Blackforce, landed on 19 February and led by Brigadier Arthur Blackburn, a lawyer and Victoria Cross winner from World War I, defended the Tjianten River crossings in Java, near Batavia (Djakata), the capital. When the Dutch on their flanks capitulated as a result of the Dutch signing a surrender in Bandung in West Java on 12 March, the senior British, Australian and American officers were forced to sign a formal surrender. (A number of Dutch flyers escaped and formed ultimately four Dutch squadrons in the RAAF, the first being called 18 (NEI) Squadron.) Blackburn’s three thousand Australians became prisoners of war. Many RAF and RAAF men had gathered at the unhealthy port of Tjilatjap (Cilacap) on the south coast of Java for evacuation, but Japanese bombers sank all the ships in the harbour, and a plan to evacuate Australians by flying boat fell through. On 7 March 1942, RAF Wing Commander J.R. Jeudwine took a ship’s lifeboat with a maximum capacity of twelve, and in piled RAF and RAAF men more than twice that number. They hoped they would reach Australia in sixteen days, but it took them forty-four. There was just enough continuing supply of rainwater to keep everyone alive. For morale’s sake games were played and debates held. On 18 April their lifeboat landed on Fraser Island off north-west Australia, where they were rescued by a flying boat.
Sixteen Australians were picked up from Merauke, on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, in a vessel coming from the Netherlands East Indies, and it sailed on to Currumbin in Queensland in four days. Other Australians pooled at Merauke were collected by a navy ship and brought to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait.
Churchill had assured Curtin when MacArthur arrived that this did not mean that Britain no longer felt any responsibility. ‘We shall do our utmost to divert British troops and British ships rounding the Cape, or already in the Indian Ocean, to your succour, albeit at the expense of India and the Middle East.’ Curtin had heard that tune before. It proposed what could be called the ‘indirect policy’—of Australia helping Britain out in North Africa and being rewarded in turn with immediate help should Singapore fall—and was a plan that had failed catastrophically. Amidst his fears, his struggles with morbidity of soul, manifold doubt and chronic ill health, Curtin was determined not to fall for it all again. When Roosevelt offered an untrained division of American troops to allow the Australians to go to Burma, Curtin sent a polite refusal. In the meantime, Churchill had already, on his own assumed authority, told the Australian convoy to veer towards Burma to defend ‘the only white man’s territory south of the equator’. In fact, Burma was north of the equator.
Evatt had drafted an urgent reply to Churchill but when it was time for the public servant Shedden to take it to Curtin for approval, Curtin had wandered off on one of his long walks around Canberra, during which he might visit men as diverse as drovers on Red Hill or the Reverend Hector Harrison. As hours passed, messages were put on the screens of Canberra theatres asking audiences had they seen him. He was in fact on a sanity-enhancing walk around Mount Ainslie, east of Canberra.
Curtin eventually returned to his office at Parliament House about midnight, and worked on the draft reply. It stated heatedly the conviction he had so firmly reached: to send the troops to Burma, he said, would be to repeat the follies of the Greek and Malaya debacles and bring the troops within range of sea and air attack by the Japanese. Churchill replied that the ships were actually steaming away from Australia and no longer had sufficient fuel to reach home without stopping at Ceylon. That reality would give the Australian government, said Churchill, another three or four days to reconsider its decision. But there would be no reconsideration. Curtin was outraged at Churchill for diverting the convoy in the first place.
It was at this stage that the commander of the Home Forces, General Iven Mackay, urged on the Australian government what would become known as the ‘Brisbane Line’—that the rest of Australia should be abandoned if necessary and the battle against the Japanese be waged by a concentration of Australian and other troops in the south-east corner of the continent. Just after the Great War, a committee was set up consisting of Generals Monash, Chauvel and Brudenell White to create a plan for the defence of Australia against future enemies—and it was Japan they had in mind. Since Australia had the longest coastline of any nation on earth and so many beaches, it seemed impossible to defend it all, particularly given the sparse population the further north one got. The three generals assumed that the invaders’ main objective would be ‘some compact vulnerable area, the resources of which are necessary to the economic life of Australia’. Thus Mackay, former headmaster of Cranbrook School in Sydney, had merely drawn on a plan devised years before. Hard-hitting Labor minister Eddie Ward would, however, in the 1943 elections, lash the plan as something dreamed up and condoned by Menzies, and made much of the turpitude of abandoning any part of Australia. Queenslanders would take generations to forgive the concept.
But even if all its forces reached home safely and were concentrated in this south-east sector, Australia had just five divisions in the Brisbane–Adelaide–Melbourne triangle, and their equipment was massively inferior to that of the Japanese, and their aircraft outmoded.
At a strategy meeting on 15 March 1942, at which the General Staffs of both the Japanese army and the Japanese navy were represented, an invasion of Australia had indeed been proposed. It was acknowledged it would require ten divisions or more. The army was nonetheless keener than the navy. Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, wrote: ‘With even Sydney and Brisbane in my hands, it would have been comparatively simple to subdue Australia . . . although the Japanese general staff felt my supply lines would have been too long, so would the Australian or British lines. We could have been safe there forever.’ Even Admiral Yamamoto, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, wanted to establish a substantial naval base on the east coast of Australia. He believed five divisions of troops stationed around the Sydney–Newcastle area would be sufficient.
But the Japanese naval staff thought their fleet would be too stretched in protecting the lines of communication with a Japanese army in south-east Australia. Instead, a scheme to take Port Moresby and isolate Australia and New Zealand by occupying Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia was adopted. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s priority became an invasion of Port Moresby and the subjugation of New Guinea. Port Moresby could serve as a base from which Japanese planes could intercept the land and sea routes between Australia and the United States. The Allies knew the Japanese plans beforehand since they could crack their codes. But having the forces make use of the knowledge . . . that was the limitation.
Yamamoto turned his attention to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean, where he would land seven thousand Japanese soldiers once the combined fleet had destroyed the US aircraft base there. It was in this phase that Yamamoto decided to use diversionary tactics, ranging from the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian island chain in Alaska down to a midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, and another on Madagascar.
Significantly, Curtin agreed now, as the Australian convoys turned their back on Burma and made for Ceylon, that two brigades of the 6th Division, whose ships were behind those of the 7th Division, could stay in Ceylon as a temporary garrison for four to six weeks. This was much better than their going to Burma—indeed, Rangoon would fall to the Japanese on 8 March. But Curtin’s implied conditions were that the 7th Division, the third brigade of the 6th Division and the remaining fifty thousand Australian troops in the Middle East should all be returned to Australia as soon as possible. The Ceylon concession was a relatively small tribute paid to relentless determination and insistence from Churchill and others, but it does not figure in the popular legend of Curtin. The 6th Division men in Ceylon would be as exposed as their brethren had been in Singapore and in Greece and Crete. They would be without adequate air or naval support, since the Japanese controlled the Indian Ocean too and kept the British Pacific fleet hovering timidly around the east coast of Africa. The two brigades would not in fact arrive back in Australia until August 1942.
In return for his gesture, Curtin felt he had a clear understanding with Churchill that the 9th Division would be promptly returned to Australia. Churchill would not honour that implied agreement, and the British government had control over the shipping necessary to take the 9th home. From a British point of view, the 9th Division was still needed in North Africa, and would indeed be crucial to the British success at El Alamein later in the year, the battle that ended German hopes of ever taking the Suez Canal.
This was the time of Curtin’s nervous night rambles. But he did not always sleep at the Lodge. He used a pull-down iron bed in his office and on it barely got two hours’ sleep a night. The populace were partly aware of the strain on him, and were somehow comforted by the nervous energy he clearly expended. He was something like the national worrier, and took some of the burden off them. Gladys Joyce, working as his personal secretary from 1941 onwards, said that each day he would lie on the couch in his office, staring ‘up at the ceiling with his cigarette holder jutting out from between his teeth, smoking . . . and thinking through his problems’.
Joyce was acutely loyal, an old-fashioned girl who lived with her parents in the suburb of Forrest and cycled to work each day. But the Americans did not bamboozle her. When General MacArthur’s secretary called, she was asked to put Curtin on the phone, apparently to wait for MacArthur. ‘“No,” I said, “I shall put the Prime Minister on when you’re ready.” The American secretary said, “Well, shall we switch together?” I thought as Prime Minister of Australia he had the priority to not have to wait.’
Curtin was certainly busy enough not to be required to wait. A 1942 newspaper article described the prime minister’s ‘timetable for a busy day’:
Rises 8am. In office, 9am. The morning is filled with interviewing Ministers, service chiefs, departmental heads, foreign diplomats and trade union executives until 1.30pm Press conference.
Lunch from time this conference ends, usually 1.45, sometimes 2pm to 2.15pm. Back in the office 2.15pm to go through the same routine as the morning until 6.45pm Press conference to 7pm.
Dinner and current newspapers till 8pm.
Back in office or at Prime Minister’s Lodge dealing with cables and reports until, at the earliest—
Midnight, when he tries to get to bed, reading more newspapers and something diverting, mostly thrillers.
Curtin confessed to the clerk of the House of Representatives, Frank Green, who met him one night while he stood alone in the moonlit garden of the Lodge, that he wasn’t able to sleep ‘while our transports are out in the Indian Ocean with the Jap submarines looking for them’. Curtin was so distressed that he is said to have spent one night praying with his religious-minded secretary Fred McLaughlin. McLaughlin was a member of the Moral Rearmament Association, a movement to counter the literal rearmament of sinister world power by putting on spiritual armour through prayer and meditation, and he said that he spent ‘an awful lot of time during that war on my knees in my office’.
When film was taken of Curtin returning to his house—typically described as ‘modest’—in Cottesloe in Perth, carrying his own suitcase, troops who saw it in Darwin cheered. Many Australians felt he was living their sort of life, and was one with them.
AUSTERITY
Meanwhile, Australian citizens began to know true hardship when it was decided that everyone must carry an identity card and a ration book. The rationing of tea began on 20 March 1942, to be followed by rationing of clothing on 9 May, while sugar was not rationed until 31 August. Butter and meat followed. The neighbourhood butcher became a man of possible generous favours to families, especially those with sick members; or sometimes of extortion, but even so his hands were largely tied by the coupon system. Suddenly goods cost not only money but coupons as well. In June 1942, each Australian received a coupon book with 118 coupons. Every purchasable item had a coupon value—a man’s suit took thirty-eight coupons, a pair of socks four. If buying a particular piece of apparel for fashion (local dances) or necessity (school uniforms), a civilian needed enough coupons left in his or her book to cover it.
After receiving coupons from shoppers, shops passed them on to wholesalers, so that they could order more goods, and wholesalers passed them back to producers and the Rationing Commission. It was considered a great mercy when a storekeeper supplied some under-the-counter delicacy, say, for a sick child, without demanding coupons, since that meant he was sacrificing a fragment of his own purchasing power.
The production of beer and spirits was reduced by a third. Hoadley’s, the confectionery company, makers of the famous Violet Crumble bar, advised Australian children that they must await the availability of that confection until the war was won—their entire output was apparently needed for the troops on the front line. The author and many other children of the period imagined soldiers gorging themselves on Hoadley’s products as they rebuffed the Germans and Japanese.
Rationing was preceded by much panic buying and accompanied by the onset of the black market. Liquor became a fertile item of trade. Lucky young women had gin and nylons supplied by MacArthur’s arriving Americans, who could buy them cheaply at the PX stores set up in American bases. Otherwise liquor was sold by sly grog dealers, selling their goods from premises in laneways, often to men who had missed out on their evening intake because of the newly enacted six o’clock closing of pubs.
Petrol rationing had already begun in June 1940, and increasingly people got used to the sight of charcoal gas bladders in frameworks on top of cars, or charcoal gas producer tanks welded to the rear of vehicles. Refuelling with charcoal was even then considered a dirty enough business that those who did it wore masks. Research on the running of cars on charcoal gas had been done by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research as a possible petrol replacement if an enemy impeded oil supplies. The other initial purpose of rationing petrol in Australia was in part to free supplies for the war in the northern hemisphere. On the day in 1940 when rationing was to begin, there was a rush on supplies, and unsafe private stockpiling for personal use or black-market sale began. The Motor Trades Association claimed it knew of one man who had compiled a store of two hundred 44-gallon drums. Labor, then in opposition, and motor traders generally, opposed the necessity of the rationing and declared Australia could not win a war by strangling the means of transporting goods. But fewer tankers were arriving, and the Commonwealth Oil Board worked within the program of oil deliveries devised by the Empire Oil Board in London, whose priority was the European front.
Robert Menzies had received angry letters from motorists declaring they lacked the petrol to get to church or hospital, and some writers were angry that ‘Dagos’ got the same ration as everyone else. But in September 1941, rationing grew tougher still. The allocation for taxis was reduced from 100 to 22 gallons a week. This had a sometimes severe impact even in an era when most people used taxis only in the most dire or important circumstances. The author’s mother, whose husband had been sent overseas during her pregnancy, had organised with a local cab driver, the sole one in the suburb, to take her to hospital if she went into labour. When she called, however, the taxi had used up its petrol allowance and was not yet fitted with a charcoal gas device (installation of the unpopular gas producer bladders, one of whose defects was that they increased tyre wear, took some time). She had no neighbours with cars, and thus no option but to walk, in the early stages of labour, over a mile to hospital.
Petrol rationing would in fact last until 1950, and in the post-war period, Australian drivers received only 50 per cent of the British ration. Rationing had been one of the chief issues in Menzies’ near-loss of government in 1940, and would contribute to the discontent that brought down Ben Chifley’s Labor government in 1949. But in World War II, most people accepted it with grumbling but a fundamental good grace, eroded only a little by the black marketeers and the exorbitant prices they charged for luxuries.
The austerity drive also involved the standardisation of clothing, including the introduction of a ‘Victory’ suit for men, much mocked by commentators. In an age when suits were much worn—even to football matches—it was a suit made with a minimum of cloth. The jacket was shorter in the tail than usual, and if it was double-breasted it lacked the vest, then normally part of any suit. It was matched, in the case of women, by the unavailability of stockings and by ‘austerity dresses’. These used the minimum of cloth required for modesty and were made out of old, discarded clothes or even curtains, bedding or tablecloths. Young stockingless women put tan lotion on their legs and drew a seam down their calves to simulate the real thing. The sight of boys on the cusp of adolescence wearing too short and crotch-pinching pants was common.
The apparent zealotry of Minister Dedman’s department often attracted mockery. John Dedman, radical economist and former British army officer, Curtin’s Minister for War Organisation of Industry, was dubbed Minister for Austerity by the public. In accepting a report of his department on 29 April 1942, he took a tone that was certain to generate opposition from conservatives and business. It had, he said, a ‘specific duty of setting in motion a transfer of the nation’s resources into those uses in which they will go furthest towards victory’. Confectionery, pharmaceuticals, bicycles, cosmetics, radios, building materials, smallgoods and clothing of all kinds would come under his provisions. Under pressure of mass production, brands and trademarks might be affected through companies being compelled to contribute mass-produced goods for generic use, but the minister said, ‘I shall not hesitate to move in every case for the most effective rationalisation plan, irrespective of the interest of particular firms in product-markings of one kind or another.’ On 7 May he told Parliament, ‘The paramount consideration . . . must be the most effective use of the nation’s manpower in the production of the war.’
Dedman, a former professional soldier, was strangely sensitive and easily baited by the uncomplimentary nicknames hurled at him across the floor, but he had the courage to pursue agendas that other Cabinet members found too unpopular. He prohibited cosmetic manufacture to conserve scarce supplies of oils and chemicals. In South Australia in particular he wanted to bring a large number of women previously employed elsewhere, in stores and non-essential industries, into munitions factories.
THE PEOPLE AND POLICY, 1942
The growing public conviction of the rightness of returning the troops to Australia played in the Labor Party’s favour. The United Australia Party (UAP), according to Paul Hasluck, suffered from ‘ideological poverty’. The jovial and garrulous Queensland accountant Artie Fadden, who had left the Country Party for the UAP at the time of his brief prime ministership in 1941, had not appeared to be a credible alternative leader of an embattled Australia. The Labor Party and Curtin had by artfulness, political instinct and merit come to be identified with the war effort, and Hasluck would complain later that there was an assumption that the Labor Party had won the war and saved Australia. Don Rodgers, Curtin’s press secretary, was skilled at pushing the view of Curtin as saviour.
When in government the UAP had asked for single-minded support from Labor, and now many of the conservative opposition gave support to Curtin’s war measures even though Fadden thought they smacked of socialism. He complained that the government’s policy in limiting profits and increasing taxation on higher incomes had reduced the capacity of the ‘investing public’ to subscribe to loans. There were cries from the opposition, too, that the Labor Cabinet was pandering to the trade unions by regulating the coalfields and the waterfront less than other sections of the community.
Eddie Ward, Labor warrior from Paddington in Sydney, said that by having raised the possibility of the socialisation of banks and industry, and the repudiation of interest on war loans, Fadden had shaken the confidence of investors. Ward had been merciless on Menzies, describing him as ‘this posturing individual with the scowl of Mussolini, the bombast of Hitler and the physical proportions of Goering’. But he was willing to extend the same level of compliment to his own side as well, and even to Curtin. Ward and another inheritor of Irish Labor-style militancy, Arthur ‘Cocky’ Calwell from Melbourne, were called the ‘terrible twins’ and believed that the war should be financed by taxation and by loans Australia would not need to repay until the end of the war. As a youth, Ward had lost employment in the Eveleigh Railway Works in Sydney for his involvement in the railway strike of 1917. He boxed professionally at Rushcutters Bay stadium to bulk out his small returns from work and, after visiting his fiancée in Parramatta, would walk home the 25 kilometres to Surry Hills for lack of a train fare. He had been and would remain, in this war, an anti-conscriptionist.
Curtin left it above all to his Treasurer, Ben Chifley, to assure Australians that the social justice program would be maintained during wartime. Invalid and old-age pensions were raised and these benefits were extended to at least some Aborigines. A Maternity Allowance Bill was passed and similarly extended to Aborigines, and a Child Endowment Bill and a Widows’ Pension Bill were passed. The government linked the rise in the pension rate to the rise in the cost of living as war demand drove up prices. The Aboriginal entitlement to these benefits was limited to ‘Aboriginal natives of Australia who are living under civilised conditions and whose character and intelligence qualify them to receive pensions’. Payment of the benefit could be made either to the pensioner or to ‘a suitable authority or person for the benefit of pensioners’. This created the risk of corrupt withholding of money in the many cases in which Aborigines were wards of the state and were not entitled to receive money directly.
Nonetheless, in the minds of Curtin and Chifley, to lower social-benefit standards during the war was to lose what Australia was. The only Australia worth fighting for was a just one. In fact, these social service measures, unlike Dedman’s emergency plans, received support from both sides of Parliament, and some had been foreshadowed in Menzies’ last budget. While the Minister for Social Services, the former bootmaker Ted ‘Jack’ Holloway, said, ‘So far as lies in our power, we shall at least prevent a lowering of social standards during the war, and we have every intention of improving them from time to time,’ the shadow minister, Sir Frederick Stewart, one of the founders of Australian National Airways with Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, declared, ‘I believe we are more likely to succeed in this conflict if we are able to maintain the morale of the people by giving at least an instalment of this new social order.’
One wonders how much deal-making went on at Canberra’s Hotel Kurrajong, where so many parliamentarians stayed and where Chifley’s secretary and lover, Phyllis Donnelly, a tall, thin, brown-haired diabetic woman whom some found difficult, also stayed, sharing the breakfast table with Chifley. Unlike the frailties of politicians in later eras, no one pointed a finger at this alliance. Maybe, too, some internal Labor Party issues between Chifley and the turbulent Victorian Arthur Calwell were smoothed away on their stroll to Mass at St Christopher’s each Sunday.
In 1941, Fadden had tried to persuade the states to surrender temporarily their power to impose income tax. The premiers had rejected the proposal. Now Chifley forced the issue. In April 1942, the Commonwealth insisted to all the premiers that there should be one income-taxing authority in Australia. In May, Chifley introduced four income-tax measures into the Commonwealth Parliament, the effect of which would be that for the duration of the war and for the financial year in which the war came to an end, the Commonwealth should be the sole authority to tax income. Chifley said that the Commonwealth had the task of mobilising the complete resources of the nation, and its financial obligations had increased beyond anything imagined. The states would be reimbursed for their lost revenue. He declared in Parliament: ‘Nothing short of complete control by the Commonwealth during the war will meet the huge demands that have to be faced . . . the rights of the sovereign people are paramount to the sovereign rights of the States.’
The reality Curtin and Chifley did not emphasise was that once the states dismantled the structure for collecting income tax, and gave the public servants who had previously collected and processed taxes other jobs, it would be hard for them ever to take over collection of taxes again. One conservative politician complained of Chifley’s tax coup, ‘Canberra . . . has swept aside every consideration except its own more and more intense desire to destroy the Federal system.’ Indeed, there was not much doubt that Chifley saw this centralism as an objective desirable whether in peace or in war. Chifley’s subtle argument was that the government did not seek to take away from the states their power to impose taxes upon incomes, but ‘we say to the states: “If you impose income tax you will receive no compensation from us. On the other hand, if you vacate the income tax field, we shall give you the money that you would otherwise have raised for yourselves.” I ask the States to accept that arrangement.’ It was, in fact, the querulous young Melbourne Labor member Calwell who said he hoped the states would challenge the legislation in the High Court, for he predicted that having lost their right to impose income tax, they would become ‘mendicants existing upon the bounty of the Commonwealth . . . and for practical purposes will cease to exist as States’.
Sections 106 and 107 of the Constitution, the temporarily routed Menzies pointed out, indicated that not even the use of the defence power of the Commonwealth could operate ‘by destroying the States as polities’. But even many on his side of the plain little Parliament in Canberra did not agree with him on the issue. ‘We are not destroying the States,’ declared one UAP member loudly in reply to Menzies, and another cried, ‘We are just putting a bomb under them.’
Many opposition members voted with the government, while Curtin’s friend and old mentor, the noble Maurice Blackburn, crossed the floor to vote against the legislation. In the Senate, four of the opposition voted with the government. Four states—South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia—decided to make a High Court challenge to the ‘Federal grab’. Billy McKell, the Labor premier of New South Wales, wanted to join them in their cause but was overruled at the annual Labor State Conference in June when a massive majority decided to support the Commonwealth’s intentions. Even the old Labor warrior Forgan ‘Bill’ Smith, Queensland premier, declared in his robust Scots-Presbyterian manner that his motivation for going ahead with the High Court challenge was that ‘my breeding and training are such that I will not be a vassal to anyone’.
The High Court action began on 22 June and the judgment was delivered on 23 July. The four Commonwealth Acts were upheld. As historian David Day says, ‘A major change in constitutional relationships and in the political structure of Australia had been made without any formal amendment of the Constitution.’ But when later in 1942 Evatt introduced the Constitutional Alteration (War Aims and Reconstruction) Bill, which prefigured the post-war structure of Australia, Hasluck feared it would create lasting socialist or centrifying tendencies in Australia, and as we will see the measure would ultimately be defeated in a 1944 referendum.
FOREIGN PARTS
In 1939, at war’s outbreak, Eddie Ward, the ‘Firebrand of East Sydney’—frightened of Menzies’ tendency to favour conscription—was arguing that just as some citizens had the liberty to volunteer to fight beyond our shores, people ‘should never surrender the right to decide whether or not they should go overseas to render military service’. The militia could be conscripted to fight in Australian territory, but beyond that defensive duty, no one should be compelled. Though he uttered these opinions in 1939 in opposition, he would maintain them after the ALP gained power and the Japanese entered the war. Menzies, in any case, declared himself to have no interest in introducing conscription.
Still in opposition in 1941, Curtin declared that there were too many volunteers in the militia being turned away for there to be a need of compulsory service. But he took the chance to criticise the pay of soldiers—five shillings a day for the soldier, three shillings a day for his wife, with a shilling a day for each child. The three shillings a day, he said, would be sufficient merely to pay the weekly rent.
Only towards the end of 1942 did Curtin reach the decision that the Defence Act should be amended to enable the militia to serve outside Australian territories. In effect, this would combine the militia and the AIF into one Australian armed force. He was under pressure from the Americans, who considered that if conscription was fair enough for them, it should operate in the case of the Australians too.
Curtin came sincerely to believe though that the problem of Australian defence was a strategic one, and if an area—a set of islands—was vital to Australian strategy, that was one to which the Australians should be able to bring full force to bear. In Parliament in early 1943, Curtin would reiterate his chief arguments, including the one that said, ‘The defence of Australia is not confined to its territorial limits.’ But the American issue was strong too: ‘Because of the debt of gratitude owed to the US, Australia should be able to say that Australian resources would go on with them and maintain supplies and bases to them from islands close to Australia which, if not held, could be bases for the enemy to attack the US forces.’
In his broadcast to the American people in March 1942, Curtin had brushed aside the difference between the militia and the AIF with his claim that Australia had a complete call-up. While he might have liked to merge the two forces, he realised the issue was weighed down with the emotional baggage of Labor Party anti-conscription for overseas service in 1916–17. But he sprang the matter on the unsuspecting delegates of the party conference held in Melbourne on 16 November 1942.
‘The enemies of Labor are jubilant,’ wrote the aggrieved Labor Call on 3 December 1942. ‘They have always wanted conscription for military service beyond Australia and its adjacent territories, and now, at long last, they think their dream is coming true. Labor’s Prime Minister has proposed that the Defence Act be amended to permit the militia forces to be used anywhere in the Southwest Pacific, and Labor’s enemies believe the proposal will be agreed to by a Special Federal Labor Conference to be held on January 4th next.’
Maurice Blackburn, Curtin’s mentor when he first came into the House, and who had been expelled from the Labor Party in 1941 by the anti-Communist Victorian branch because of his stand on Spain and sympathy for Russia, produced, in January 1943, his tract entitled Against Conscription, 40 Questions Answered. Some of them were answered thus: ‘Mr Hughes asked Power to compel Australians to fight anywhere, while Mr Curtin wishes to be able to send men to fight anywhere the Government chooses in the South West Pacific. Question: What is the South West Pacific area? Answer: No official definition has been published . . . Question: What do you say about America? She is helping us. Are not you anti-conscriptionists ungrateful to her? Answer: No question of gratitude arises. We value America’s friendship, but friendship did not bring Americans to Australia. Without the surprise of Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Philippines, we might never have seen the Americans.’
Back in late October 1942, Curtin was still mulling it all over. He and Elsie went back to Western Australia to attend the wedding of their daughter, who was marrying a dentist from Cottesloe. Curtin then returned for the November Federal Labor Conference, but as he travelled back eastwards by train across the Nullarbor, he began to suffer acutely from neuritis. It is not the first time we could ask how many of Curtin’s illnesses were caused by inner tension and even by dread. He had to have hospital treatment in Adelaide but was fit enough to speak at the civic reception hosted by Tom Playford, conservative premier of South Australia, as if forewarning his followers that: ‘no Labor government had ever been as bad as its opponents had suggested, nor as good as its admirers had hoped. That went for governments of all parties.’
Although advised against travelling, Curtin joined the night train to Melbourne so he could address the Armistice Day commemoration. On the way, several servicemen and servicewomen forced their way enthusiastically into his reserved compartment and refused to leave; as a result he arrived in Melbourne without having had any sleep and needed to go again to doctors. Meanwhile, he had forewarned Chifley and his old friend Scullin of what was to happen, for he trusted them and knew they agreed with him.
At that November conference, Arthur Calwell tried to prevent Curtin being heard. Eddie Ward and Don Cameron attacked Curtin as expected. Ward denounced him for ‘putting young men into the slaughterhouse, although thirty years ago you wouldn’t go into it yourself ’. In return, Curtin produced an interesting variation on his argument: ‘A man could be sent to Darwin, where he would be bombed, but not to Timor [which then belonged to the Dutch and the Portuguese, though occupied by the Japanese] to save Darwin from being bombed. The militia could be forced to fight in Papua but could not pursue the Japanese across the border into Dutch New Guinea.’
Though at one stage Curtin could be seen to weep, he was immovable. His tears were possibly for the lost idealism of 1916–17, and for the friends he would now offend by what he proposed, as well as being caused by stress. But there was a serious difference between the present idea and Hughes’ ambitions in World War I. Under Curtin’s proposal, the region to which conscripts could be sent was in the Pacific and did not go north of the equator.
A hostile Calwell moved that the matter be referred to state executives and be brought back to a special federal conference in January 1943. Curtin received warmer Christmas wishes from Menzies for the ‘many personal courtesies’ than he did from his own side. He was on his own that Christmas of 1942, Mrs Curtin and daughter Elsie in Perth, son Jack in Adelaide.
The special Labor conference for 1943 approved the change to overseas service, by twenty-four votes to twelve. The AIF and militia were at one in where they might be committed.
SECOND- AND THIRD-PHASE PERIL
Although Allied success in the Coral Sea delayed Japanese plans, a victory for the Japanese at Midway Island in the mid-Pacific would have meant complete domination of the Pacific Ocean and weakened Australia and New Zealand’s tenuous link with the United States geographically. At least one historian argues that Japanese victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea might have seen Australian cities heavily bombed and might even have seen Australia invaded. Victory at Midway, in waters off an atoll of that name just north of the equator, would have made both of these a certainty.
The battle began on 4 June 1942, almost exactly a month after the Battle of the Coral Sea. US fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commanding from Hawaii, knew he could not fight the Japanese head-on, but he had accurate intelligence and other advantages—as it turned out, luck and the complicated deployment of the Japanese fleet were two of them. The Australians did not take part, but they had the excuse that their Pacific navy was fully preoccupied further south. The Australian official historian of the Royal Australian Navy would later find himself going to some lengths to explain why a British battleship could not be transferred from the Indian Ocean to help Nimitz out. It was true that some Royal Navy ships had been damaged in a submarine attack on Madagascar that was staged almost simultaneously with that on Sydney a few days past.
Midway was a battle in the pattern of, but on an even larger scale than, the Coral Sea, with fighting for Midway, where an American Marine garrison was located, one of its aspects. Four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and the number of young Japanese men consumed for the sake of their admiral’s ambitions was nearly ten times that of American casualties.
The Battle of Midway was also a problem for General MacArthur. It wasn’t his victory. He had been in Australia less than three months and had yet to strike a significant blow at the enemy. In this period, although his communiqués were full of tales of contact with the Japanese, few soldiers were in contact with them other than the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and the two independent companies that made up Kanga Force. As a first step in getting engaged with the Japanese, he moved his headquarters from Brisbane and, to give himself an edge, without reference to Washington changed his own title to Commander in Chief, South West Pacific Area. By now he felt that he was able to inform Prime Minister Curtin, at a conference on 11 June, that the threat to Australia was over. Yet if Port Moresby were captured by the Japanese, there would be a third and climactic round of peril. Still, the publicity emphasis remained on MacArthur as the man about to save Australia, and he would manage to seize that mantle from the admirals Nimitz and Spruance (the latter had commanded the fleet at sea off Midway).
In his biography, MacArthur declares that he had now decided to abandon the plan to hold the Brisbane Line and to move his troops a thousand miles (1600 kilometres) forward into eastern Papua and ‘to stop the Japanese on the rough mountains of the Owen Stanley Ranges of New Guinea’. Curtin and his advisors had decided that Port Moresby should be built up strongly, and as early as 1 May, General Blamey received a note from MacArthur asking whether there might not be a chance for his troops to raid Lae and Salamaua from Port Moresby. The request showed an utter lack of knowledge of the realities of the terrain, even though MacArthur was supposedly a great exponent of taking terrain into account. In this case, he and his staff had seen the map as a two-dimensional one and failed to take into account its human contours.
General Basil Morris had been a permanent soldier since 1910 and was described by General Vasey as ‘no brains, but very honest and stout-hearted’. In Port Moresby he began to assemble Maroubra Force, organised around the 39th Militia Battalion, which had a few AIF reinforcements, including officers. With some reluctance and at Blamey’s orders, he sent the 39th Militia Battalion up over the exhausting, rain-slicked and overgrown mountains to garrison Kokoda, a small village which had an airstrip and was situated on the far side of the Owen Stanley Ranges but on the lower northern slopes. A walking track and a road connected it to Buna 60 kilometres away on the coast. Morris had had a lot of trouble supplying Kanga Force outside Salamaua. He prophetically believed that the main Japanese invasion force would land at Buna, but also believed that no matter how many men it had, and how much equipment, on the way across the mountains the force would suffer such attrition and be so affected by disease that it could not reach Moresby. It would also need to move without heavy artillery, since these could not possibly be manhandled over the mountains. He saw that in being ordered to send troops forward to Kokoda he was creating for himself the very problems he foresaw for the Japanese. No wheeled vehicle could go more than a few kilometres towards Kokoda, and though it had an airstrip, there were not sufficient aircraft to supply it by air, even if the weather and the mountains were not such a challenge that pilots would need consummate skill to socket their aircraft safely onto the cramped airstrip surrounded by peaks. So native New Guinean carriers, each man carrying no more than twenty kilograms, would be the main method used to provide for whatever troops were committed in an attempt to defend Kokoda.
On 2 July, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff upped the situation when, perhaps operating off the same map as MacArthur, they ordered him to take steps to seize and occupy those parts of New Guinea not already held by the Allies.
MacArthur’s first plan was to attack New Britain and New Ireland, the long narrow islands off the north coast of New Guinea. The jewel of New Britain was Rabaul. He asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with a division of marines and two aircraft carriers. The navy said they would not commit their aircraft carriers without adequate land-based aircraft cover.
Two divisions of American infantry had by now arrived in Australia, the 32nd and the 41st. After Midway, MacArthur ordered them both from the southern states up to Queensland. The 32nd went to a camp west of Brisbane and the 41st to train between Rockhampton and Yeppoon. He issued an outline plan for the creation of airfields and other installations at Buna on the north coast of New Guinea to provide support for the planned recapture of Rabaul and New Britain. Australian infantry and American engineers were to cross the Kokoda Trail from Port Moresby to the north New Guinea coast before the Japanese grabbed it, and to ‘seize an area suitable for the operation of all types of aircraft and secure a disembarkation point pending the arrival of sea parties’. He also ordered airfields constructed at Milne Bay at New Guinea’s eastern extremity. By mid-July 1942, an Australian fighter squadron equipped with American Kittyhawks was operating from the Gili Gili airstrip at the extreme end of Milne Bay, and a brigade of Australians was sent to defend the area.
Before that could happen, a Japanese float plane machine-gunned the mission at Buna, and a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer escorting two troop transports appeared off the beach at Gona, fifteen kilometres to the west, on 21 July 1942. General Horii from Rabaul had gazumped the Allied plans, and the amphibious assault on the Buna–Gona coastline continued. It became apparent the Japanese did intend to march along the precipitous track to Port Moresby. The only Allied troops north of the ranges were the men of Kanga Force, and the 39th Battalion at Kokoda. Most of these militiamen, the choco soldiers, were boys of eighteen years of age. They were exhausted from their trek over the ranges, they were ill-supplied and hungry, and going down with malaria. By the end of August their commander would be an AIF man, Brigadier Arnold Potts.
Ninety-six kilometres north-east of them, more Japanese infantry and engineers were storming ashore, where they ran into small Australian squads, the priest and nuns from the mission, and a plantation manager and his staff. Many of the latter, including six women, were captured by New Guineans and handed over to the Japanese, who beheaded nearly all of them.
Two young Anglican nuns, May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, were attached to the mission and had refused to leave for Port Moresby or Australia when everyone else had earlier in the year. The Japanese opened fire at Buna and then Gona. One of the women cried, ‘Scrummy! A real naval battle.’ The Anglican priest James Benson gathered the women and some of his servants, some blankets, mosquito nets, and tins of food, and got out just ahead of the troops. The Japanese advanced so quickly that he and the others found their route of escape to inland Popondetta cut off. They moved into the jungle to make their way by means of Father Benson’s compass.
One can ask why no Allied army waited on the shore and why no navy opposed this landing. A few Allied planes inexpertly attacked the fleet, and the transport ship Ayatozan Maru ran aground. Pilot Officer Warren Cowan of 32 Squadron RAAF attacked the enemy ships leaving Buna in his old Hudson bomber. Nine Zeros pounced on him, one of them piloted by an ace, Saburo Sakai, and shot him down. He crashed into the jungle and was killed.
So General Horii came ashore in the Buna–Gona area with more than thirteen thousand men, well trained, many of them veterans of China and Malaya. The Kokoda campaign began on the afternoon of 21 July 1942 when James Benson looked out over his garden to see a Japanese transport ship flanked by warships approaching the beach at Gona. The Orokaiva and Binandere people had already disappeared into the bush, cognisant of what was about to happen. Horii landed his white horse, which he intended to ride over the mountains. The outnumbered 39th Battalion were ordered by Morris to fall back from Kokoda before they became trapped there.
This gave MacArthur welcome grounds to condemn the Australians. As members of the 7th Division AIF commanded by General Tubby Allen began to arrive on 11 August, New Guinea became a corps command under Lieutenant-General Sydney Rowell, who took over from Morris. Rowell had served on Blamey’s staff, but was not an admirer of his and had already made that clear in the Middle East. But it was MacArthur’s orders that astounded him. Rowell was told by MacArthur’s headquarters to reconnoitre the Kokoda Trail for a summit pass that might be readily blocked by demolition. MacArthur’s people asked if The Gap at the peak of the Owen Stanleys could be defended by a small group of men like the Greeks at Thermopylae. The Gap was a twelve-kilometre-wide dip in the mountains; because it was less vegetated, it was one of the places where more open military operations could take place and small parties of Allied forces overrun. Rowell replied, ‘The amount of explosive which could be carried by native porters for the ten days’ trip . . . would hardly increase the present difficulties of the track [for the Japanese]. Some parts of the track have to be negotiated on hands and knees and the use of tonnes of explosives would not increase these difficulties.’ Then, he said, ‘I sent [the order] back asking whether it was this week’s funny story.’ Nor had MacArthur seemingly heard of the fate of the Australians defending the real Thermopylae area in Greece in 1941.
Often a planeload of officers from general headquarters would arrive at a New Guinea airfield and spend the day sightseeing around Port Moresby before returning to Brisbane, their journey designed to qualify them for a campaign medal. The Australians were correct in assuming that medals came easily for some Americans. MacArthur had already awarded the Silver Star to Lieutenant Commander Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), future US president, for gallantry in action in the vicinity of Port Moresby and Salamaua on 9 June 1942. Johnson had flown on a ‘hazardous aerial combat mission’ from Townsville and his plane had been intercepted by eight hostile fighters. ‘The plane was forced to turn back alone, providing a good target to enemy fighters.’ There have been claims that Johnson’s plane never reached the target and never came under fire. Robert Dallek, an LBJ biographer, said the medal was given to Johnson because of ‘his growing power as a young Congressman in Washington and to ensure that he would lobby the President for greater resources for the Southwest Pacific theatre’. In any case, Johnson flew just the one mission and then returned to Washington.
Rowell made ready to defend Milne Bay and Gili Gili airstrip. Soon an AIF brigade arrived and Major-General Cyril Clowes took command of Milne Force, now more than six thousand strong. His headquarters was on relatively open ground in the north-west of the bay near Gili Gili. Milne Bay was a terrible place for malaria, a swampy environment below steep mountains. The Australians were equipped with shorts and often wore singlets, and with their exposed legs and arms they became victims of malaria in considerable numbers. Throughout 1942, malaria and other tropical diseases caused three times as many casualties in the New Guinea forces as the enemy did.
On 25 August 1942, the enemy arrived at Milne Bay—four Japanese transports escorted by cruisers and destroyers. They landed the first contingent of 2400 troops at Ahoima on the north shore of Milne Bay, less than ten kilometres from Gili Gili. Twenty-seven Japanese tanks came ashore as well. Over the next few days the supply barges of the Japanese force would be strafed and sunk by Australian Kittyhawks. Unable to move by barge, the Japanese took to the muddy road towards Gili Gili, an airstrip that would increase the range of their air force.
As they advanced, they were attacked by Australians, who sank to the ankles and sometimes to the knees in the claggy mud, and who had waited for them at an intermediate point named KB Mission. MacArthur’s headquarters was not aware of any of this and placed pressure on Blamey, who in turn signalled a complaint to Rowell about Clowes’ lack of movement. Rowell passionately defended Clowes. The Japanese could not be immediately hurled back into the sea because Clowes had to keep troops on the south shore as well, in case of a Japanese landing there.
On the night of 28 August, the Japanese attacked the Australian lines. Behind the tanks, the infantry began to sing melodically and solemnly, and then charged. The tanks floodlit each other’s flanks to protect themselves from attacks by Australians running up with sticky bombs—anti-tank grenades packed with nitroglycerine—to attach to the sides. Damaged by damp, these either failed to explode or fell off. The tanks’ lights also enabled them to see, encircle and destroy groups of Australian soldiers. Here one knot of grappling bodies spilled into the sea, so narrow was the coastal plain. The Japanese forced the Australians back beyond the Gama River where militia units held the line.
Clowes’ laconic press reports were not popular with GHQ, not being written in what General Vasey affectionately called ‘Americanese’. Three days after the landing, MacArthur had just about made up his mind about the quality of the Australian troops and alerted Roosevelt to his doubts.
By now the Japanese were close to Gili Gili airstrip. Group Captain William Garing, in charge of the RAAF, was concerned for the overnight security of his aircraft and had them and all spare pilots flown out to spend the night at Port Moresby before returning to rejoin the battle the next day. The American staff had heard, wrongly, that Major-General Clowes had flown out too. Colonel Fred Chilton—the same Chilton who had led a remarkable escape from Greece, and now a member of Clowes’ staff—said in frustration, ‘How they thought they could fight the battle from Australia, I don’t know.’
The 9th Battalion of the 7th Division fought its way into the Japanese base area at Milne Bay on the night of 6 September. That same night a small Allied merchant ship managed to sneak in from Port Moresby carrying ammunition and stores. As it unloaded alongside the wharf, a Japanese cruiser entered the bay and sank her with gunfire and heavily shelled the area around the airstrip. All the more, Clowes had no choice but to maintain an uncommitted reserve to deal with any new position the Japanese might take because ‘they completely dominated the bay’.
Australian pilots strafed Japanese positions on the north shore as the infantry forced the Japanese back over their occupied ground towards KB Mission. There was a Japanese counter-attack and prodigious slaughter—ninety-two Japanese killed and hundreds wounded in a few minutes. Clowes received a peremptory message from MacArthur’s headquarters saying that the port would be attacked by new forces emerging from the west and north-west. So he halted his eastern offensive and all night the Australians waited for these attacks from the west and north-west to present themselves. Patrols found nothing of them. At dawn, Clowes swung his troops back from this useless exercise.
The advancing men found the bodies of natives with atrocious injuries. An Australian captain discovered the body of a native boy bound with wire, a bayonet up his anus and half his head burned off by a flamethrower. A native woman lay bound with her left breast cut off. Two Australian militia soldiers had been used for bayonet practice, one of them tied to a tree. The Australians responded to these sights with rage—a Japanese sniper’s body was later found to have five hundred bullets in it. The 18th Brigade recaptured KB Mission. One sergeant told his men to stick each Japanese corpse with a bayonet; when one soldier refused, he was told, ‘It’s all for our safety.’
In the jungle the Australians found the burned-out Kittyhawk of Squadron Leader Peter Turnbull, who had flown dozens of air raids against Japanese positions. By now the Japanese tanks were bogged and Australian fighter aircraft had forced the Japanese to move entirely at night. Kittyhawk pilots even killed snipers waiting in trees.
A Japanese convoy sailed into Milne Bay on the night of 6 September to evacuate the troops, and some fourteen hundred of them escaped. The Japanese bombed and sank the Anshun, an Allied supply ship, but spared the hospital ship Manunda, veteran of war in the Mediterranean and of the bombing of Darwin, after they had examined it by searchlight. Clowes had suffered 161 dead. Amongst them were an American engineer and two other American soldiers. Though it was the first Japanese amphibious landing repulsed, MacArthur churlishly wrote, ‘The enemy’s defeat at Milne Bay must not be accepted as a measure of the relative fighting capacity of the troops involved.’ But though the ground troops were so poor in his estimation, the report of his own military wisdom his press office prepared was glowing. ‘The decisive factor was the complete surprise obtained . . . by our preliminary concentration of superior forces.’
VIA DOLOROSA
The poorly equipped Australians retreated from Kokoda, with the Japanese both charging frontally and outflanking in the same manner as in Malaya. The confidence of the enemy, their screened closeness to the Australians, their taunts and cries and howls and sudden apparitions must have appalled the young Australians, whose desperate withdrawal nonetheless managed coherence. Don Barnes, an Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit member and first-aid man, had a small roll of plaster and a pair of nail scissors to treat the wounded who arrived in Deniki escaping from Kokoda.
General Tubby Allen, commander of the 7th Division AIF, arrived in Port Moresby in August. The 7th Division troops were suntanned, muscular, and justified in believing themselves an elite. But journalist Osmar White, seeing the battalions of the 21st Brigade set out on 15 August under General Arnold Potts, advancing through Owers’ Corner where the track proper began, worried about their lack of jungle greens, the way their webbing would stand out in the jungle, and the impact of the malarial mosquito on their bare limbs. The altitude of the track at its highest point is 2590 metres. On the track up to Imita Ridge, Australian engineers had cut two thousand steps—the notorious Golden Stairs—on a track barely a metre wide. All this lay ahead of the 21st Brigade.
Commander Potts was an amiable but very competent man who had worked with Rowell in Syria. Because of a wound suffered at the Battle of Mouquet Farm, near Pozières in France, he had been classified as 20 per cent disabled after World War I, but was fit enough to run his own sheep station near Kojonup, east of Bunbury. He told his men they were to cross the Owen Stanley Ranges, take over command as well of the depleted 39th and 53rd battalions at Isurava, recapture Kokoda and drive the Japanese into the sea.
The packs of the men as they took off weighed about twenty kilograms, and held some of the Allies’ leftover supply of quinine, the sources of which in Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, had been captured by the Japanese, and which would eventually run out and be replaced by the skin-yellowing anti-malarial Atabrine. As well as that the rifle and rounds brought the loads carried up to twenty-five kilograms. The Bren and Tommy guns were carried by the stronger men. Wirelesses, field telephones, three-inch mortars and medical gear were toted by support troops or native bearers. The 7th Division troops were quickly felled by the rigours of the track. Captain Phil Rhoden said, ‘You slept in the open, you slept when you fell.’ The difficulty these crack troops suffered made the performance of the militia all the more remarkable.
Potts found Myola, meant to be the horn of plenty from earlier air drops, barely supplied. He found eighty blankets, six thousand rations—about four days’ worth—and a small amount of ammunition. The latter paucity was because of a Japanese raid on Moresby during which (through a junior officer’s failure to obey Rowell’s orders to put them under cover or camouflage and disperse them) twenty-eight transports at Seven Mile airfield had been destroyed on the ground by enemy bombers, along with bomb-laden US Flying Fortresses. The transports were destroyed by the exploding bombs of the Fortresses as much as by the attack from above.
This meant that Rowell could not go forward and relieve the 39th at Isurava above Kokoda. Fortuitously, as Potts’ brigade neared the front, the Japanese pressure on the boy soldiers of the militia itself slackened to wait for supplies to arrive from the coast. General Horii was running into the problems Tubby Allen, General Morris and others had predicted. Horii’s supply chain was longer—from Rabaul to the north coast of New Guinea, and from there to Kokoda. His troops carried for the journey nine kilograms of rice to last fifteen days and no tinned meat. This appalling undersupply of food was probably an indication of his limits but could not have been better designed to enhance desperate attack and savagery.
At the village of Efogi near Myola, the men of the 7th Division met the 39th Battalion’s wounded militia coming back down the track. A man who had been shot through the skull had walked 180 kilometres in sixteen days to get as far as this. The wounded seemed indifferent to the hard march still ahead and delighted at the home leave they would get at the end of their hospitalisation. One of the problems of this mountain village was the cold. The 14th Battalion were shivering in their wet clothes and short pants. The men lit fires and sang as squalls of cold rain swept over the area. Former Wallaby Stan Bisset, serving in New Guinea with his older brother Harry or ‘Butch’, entertained the troops with rugby songs as well as standards such as ‘The Mountains of Mourne’. Victorian Bisset had been a member of the Wallaby team which included the ultimately famous young physician Weary Dunlop, and which had docked at Southampton the day the war began to play no games but fill sandbags instead.
Rowell and Tubby Allen began to organise the air drop for Potts’ men—unparachuted loads of rations, ammunition and medical supplies that were pushed out of the rear doors of Dakota transports. At last some green (though not mottled) clothes were dropped to the khakied AIF. Broadcaster Chester Wilmot was on the trail with White and Parer. The latter had reached Moresby behind White and now began crossing the mountains again to film the reinforcement and—as it would turn out—retreat. Parer filmed the air raid that damaged the entire fleet of transports allocated to the Myola air drop. The following day he, Wilmot and White were given permission to advance up the Kokoda Trail to wherever the 21st Brigade headquarters was. They were to carry five days’ rations and were not permitted to use native carriers.
Wilmot had been in North Africa with Blamey and disliked him, and now declared, ‘It is strange that six months after the return . . . of General Blamey [to Australia] there should be no green uniforms.’
The problems at Myola also involved the disappearance of some of the bearers, who had walked away from what they considered inadequate wages, as well as the fear of encounters with the Japanese and the crippling labour. Meanwhile, further down the track at the village of Kokoda, General Horii’s troops were now beginning to take up their positions again in great numbers. Horii’s patrols told him that only the remnants of one battalion, the 39th, were defending Isurava.
On his way to relieve the 39th and confront Horii, Potts continued along the track towards the crossing that would later be named for Captain Sam Templeton of the 39th Battalion, ‘Uncle Sam’ to his men, soon to die on the track’. Here his men descended into the Eora Creek gorge, down which water cascaded, by an embankment where a field hospital stood. As the 7th Division troops approached Isurava they met files of wounded militiamen retreating, ‘walking skeletons . . . their eyes . . . bright with fever’. On the banks of Eora Creek scores of wounded men stood about, said White, ‘slimed from head to foot’. Captain Geoffrey Vernon, a fifty-nine-year-old doctor and a New Guinea resident, was here, unfazed, though he soon ran out of morphine. Vernon had charge of the carriers as well. A cheerful army cook with a septic leg worked dishing out stew to the men who collapsed around the cookhouse.
At Isurava on the day before the 2/14th Battalion of the 7th Division arrived, a young sergeant, Bill Guest, a member of the 39th Battalion since the age of seventeen, found out by telephone that the 14th were arriving the next day and were at Templeton’s Crossing. Guest, who like everyone of the 39th had been expecting to be overrun, whose clothes were foul and rotting and whose boots were held on by vines, was immensely fortified by the news. Guest saw his first 14th Battalion man as he went down to fill water bottles below the Isurava escarpment. He was astonished to see this creature, this forward scout from a different, more robust and less deprived world.
Horii became aware on Friday, 28 August, that the 39th had been reinforced, and the news dispirited him. By then the 39th Battalion had been holding Isurava for ten days under persistent Japanese attacks. The 53rd Militia Battalion’s disgruntled and demoralised troops, who were untrained and had been used until now mainly as labour along the track, had arrived at Isurava a few days before Potts’ men but had not caused the same degree of elation as the coming of the AIF men did.
When the first AIF platoons moved up to Isurava that evening, they presented themselves in the dugouts as if they belonged there. ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ one of the 39th men asked of these unlikely figures. This was the first time the twin armies met together at war. ‘I could have cried when I saw them, they looked terrible,’ wrote Phil Rhoden of his first meeting with the 39th. ‘The divisions faded at once . . . We were Australians fighting for Australia. The mood was electric.’
Isurava was an excellent defensive position, Potts thought, a high spur that forced those who would outflank the Australians to climb mountainsides to east and west and at massive effort. Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Honner, another Western Australian and veteran of the Middle East and Greece, and who had been commanding the 39th, said that they were in a situation to allow ‘the jungle itself to do the killing’. Here about six thousand Japanese troops confronted some eighteen hundred Australians, of whom six hundred were the militia of the 39th and the 53rd and twelve hundred were newly arrived and morale-enhancing AIF. There were more on their way too. But during the Isurava fight, from 28 to 30 August, there were perhaps three or four Japanese to every Australian.
Having now seen the condition of the 39th, Potts decided to let the battalion rest a while and to send in a fresh AIF battalion, the 14th, and to commit the militia’s 53rd along a fork in the track towards Abuari, the village high up on the eastern ridge. If he did not secure this height and the Japanese did, he could be fired on from above. The 53rd had had a week’s rest since crossing the Owen Stanleys. It was impossible to send in men—even the other AIF units—who had just survived the track, since a period of recuperation was essential.
Horii, still on his white horse, surveyed the battlefield and distributed sketches of the Australian position to his men. The next morning a detachment of the 53rd Battalion set off in the direction of Abuari on the eastern flank as they’d been ordered to. A forward patrol led by Lieutenant Alan Isaachsen, a South Australian bank employee, reached the village of Kaile; though attacked by two Japanese platoons by night, he held his position. Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Ward, the 53rd’s brave but inexperienced commander, could not get through to Isaachsen’s men because a Japanese soldier had captured the Australian signalmen and smashed their radio set with his sword. Ward was ordered to recapture the lost ground at first light.
A mountain gun dragged this far by Horii’s gunners fired into Isurava village as the Japanese infantry advanced through high grass. Two militia platoons a few hundred metres forward of Isurava were cut off. The Japanese jumped into their foxholes, and the horrifying intimacy of hand-to-hand combat began. The Japanese captured further high ground to the east and were deploying men along the ridges. It was, for four days, an inhuman affair, with the Australians positionally sound but undermanned. The attempt to advance on the right again was catastrophic for the 53rd; Ward and his entire headquarters staff were wiped out in an ambush. Potts ordered the 53rd back to Port Moresby and brought up the newly arrived 16th Battalion to recapture the eastern flank. The fittest of the 53rd were assigned to labour details at Myola and the rest ended up back in Moresby, through no fault of their own—‘untrained, deeply stigmatised young men’, as one historian puts it.
All the first day, the 39th held amidst mortar and machine-gun fire and mountain-gun shells. All day, waves of Japanese tore down narrow ridges to the west and attacked the Australian perimeter. The casualties were prodigious. All night, Japanese patrols tried to enter the Australian lines. Preliminary to these sorties would be cries from the blackness—‘You die tonight!’ The 39th were all but overrun. By the time a fresh batch of AIF troops arrived, only two hundred and fifty of their seven hundred men were left in the battle. It had been fighting with ‘fist and boot and rifle butt, the steel of crashing helmets and of struggling fingers’, as Honner described it.
Australians who were captured, such as Arthur Davis, were tortured. Davis’s body was dumped some hours later in a clearing to draw the Australian troops into the open. Potts himself declared, ‘We had to sit in the jungle listening to the screams of comrades tortured by Japanese in an attempt to provoke an attack.’ But Potts could not attack: he believed his line at Isurava was about to collapse. Across the valley, General Horii was shocked by the level of resistance and by his own casualties. His five-day march to Port Moresby was already three days late. At sunset on 29 August he ordered an attack by fresh units which was to last all night and continue into the next day. Japanese survivors would remember 30 August as the peak of the Kokoda campaign, with murderous point-blank hand-grenade exchanges. One Japanese who was wounded that day found that there was no morphine in the Japanese field hospital in Kokoda. It was a symbol of the shortages the Japanese faced.
Australians were amazed by the numbers of the enemy killed. Corporal ‘Teddy’ Bear, a plain die-cast operator from Moonee Ponds in Melbourne, killed fifteen Japanese, men driven forward by desperate officers, themselves responding to Horii’s orders and the growing urgency of their supply shortage. Lieutenant Butch Bisset’s platoon from the 7th Division fought off fourteen Japanese charges. The frontal assaults right up the middle to the lines on the heights of Isurava were demented. But there was frenzy and fury on all sides. Bruce Kingsbury, a twenty-four-year-old Melburnian who had survived Syria and Egypt, was killed by a sniper while rushing forward firing his Bren gun against machine-gun fire.
Butch Bisset received stomach wounds and died at 4 a.m. in his brother Stan’s arms. ‘I held him in my arms for four hours,’ said Stan. ‘We just talked about our parents, and growing up.’ It was unlikely that most died with such blessed composure.
In the late afternoon of 30 August it started to rain. The Australian survivors withdrew, knowing dispiritedly that capturing Kokoda itself, up ahead beyond Isurava, was impossible. Potts was reduced to ordering a hundred remaining troops of the 53rd to cover the retreat. But as an indication of what men bound by a common, unutterable and tribal experience can do, thirty men from the 39th, waiting at Eora Creek to be returned to Port Moresby, rose, all but three, and stumbled back into battle. Lieutenant Stewart Johnston, a twenty-four-year-old, led this party past 53rd survivors resting on the track and too uncertain or uninterested in going any further forward.
On 30 August Potts had at dawn sent three companies in to attack on the right flank, sensing that the Japanese could not sustain a toll of sixteen hundred casualties as they had the day before. Meanwhile Horii found out that the Australians had vacated their old positions at Isurava and ordered his troops to charge them in their new positions dug in further back. They attacked that morning with enthusiasm and an onerous sequence of orders from above. The Australian perimeter held, but the Japanese started to sidestep it by taking the high ground to the west. Potts made his headquarters at a place named Alola, high on the track. He became aware that the enemy had virtually flanked the battalion and that the pathway to Alola was almost cut. He ordered a breakout. Colonel Key and about five of his staff, including the adjutant, were killed on the retreat.
The Japanese eventually threatened brigade headquarters at Alola, and knowing that Alola was difficult to defend, Potts ordered his headquarters pulled back to another small clearing—as clearings were in New Guinea—named Eora. News of such withdrawals was neither understood nor much treasured as wise tactics at MacArthur’s HQ.
As his men fell back down the track to the creek at the Eora position, Potts himself felt his control over events was restricted most of the time to the limits of his vision, in this case feet rather than miles. Units that had been lost behind enemy lines retreated fighting in ways that could not be witnessed, assessed or eventually recorded.
Horii was by now a week late in his scheduled arrival at Port Moresby. It was a week that would prevent any Japanese ambition to capture Moresby and—from there—continue to bombard the Australian mainland and Allied positions there. The boy-soldiers had lost Horii an essential ration of time.
Many Australians wounded at Eora Creek behind Kokoda were operated on by torchlight under a canvas awning. The surgical tables were canvas stretchers soaked in disinfectant. Major Henry ‘Blue’ Steward and Captain Rupert Magarey performed amputations in this way, but when the Japanese appeared above the field ambulance, the doctors were ordered to stop operating and to pack up urgently; they were to tarry to stem blood loss in cases only where it was absolutely necessary. Steward had the terrible job of deciding who would be carried and who could walk. The walking wounded hobbled along Eora Creek and towards Templeton’s Crossing. Their bandages became blood-soaked. Three of the abdominal and thoracic wound cases of the kind called ‘sucking’ because they sucked air into the chest cavity, could not be moved. The medics could merely nurse these doomed youths, who lay whispering for their families before dying. Magarey calculated they had half an hour to live. Later a medical patrol returned and found one of these alive, who pleaded with them not to leave him. He was carried out by native bearers and lasted some days before expiring.
One private, John Blythe, was shot in the chest, the chin, the back, the right hand and leg. He was carried away from Eora. The journey took twelve days and he was half his normal weight when they got him back to Moresby. His arm was amputated but he lived. Russ Fairbairn, shot in the stomach, was able to claw his way back to Moresby by a seemingly impossible exercise of will. Osmar White saw a man whose leg had been blown off and who had ligatured the stump, applied two shell dressings and wrapped the remainder of the leg in an old copra sack. He refused White’s offer of bearers. Many other wounded men, told frankly by Captain Magarey that there were no bearers, crawled their way up the mountain behind Eora Creek. Major Steward himself managed to gather a group of retreating men to carry some of the last stretcher cases out.
Medical supplies were still scarce. No salt tablets had been issued and so men were exhausted from salt loss by sweating, as much as by disease and wounds. Penicillin, which would transform the medical scene, was a year in the future. There was a supply of morphine coming over the mountains from Moresby and Steward saved it for those in the most extreme pain. He made splints out of bayonet scabbards or branches from trees. Some sulfonamide (antibacterial) tablets for oral use began to arrive by porter, and sulfa powder for open wounds. Mental collapse of the kind that had occurred in trench warfare was less common. As in World War I, though, Australian doctors were accused of diagnosing men with diseases they did not have. This applied particularly to dysentery, of which Steward declared, ‘I say they have got dysentery, but if you expect me to look up every arse to make sure, you’re making a big mistake.’ The latrines were too shallow and helped spread the disease.
Involved now in the retreat, Damien Parer knew from experience that even thousands of native bearers could not adequately supply the small Australian force. The newsmen stopped at a native compound to enlist three rejected native bearers to carry Parer’s camera equipment and so reached Uberi. Parer’s 150-pound (70-kilogram) camera load was split up between the three men. As they advanced they began to pass wounded young militiamen, the first two they met injured in the foot and the left eye.
White certainly got a sense of the battle. Having crossed the mountains with Parer and now retreating with him, he was called on by a travelling line of wounded to switch on a torch so that they could see the track. One of the men had been shot twice in the chest; while the others moved on towards an impossibly distant Moresby, this young man sat down saying, ‘I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll wait till daylight.’ White wept as the boy fell asleep on a bank of arsenic weed. When the wounded men reached Myola, new stretchers were built and wounds were dressed, but White knew there was no chance of air evacuation because of the destruction by bombing of the transport planes in Moresby. So Captain Magarey herded the wounded on towards Efogi, with tiers of mountains between that and Owers’ Corner, where the road turned right into Moresby. Magarey found the strength of soul of those walking with leg wounds astounding.
Out of Parer’s footage of the withdrawal came again some of the classic shots of the campaign. Having to flee the village of Eora, he left his personal gear and took only his cameras and equipment. Retreating along the trail he had to throw away the heavy leather case and spare parts of his movie camera, then the tripod, then his still camera, but he kept filming with his movie camera and carrying his rolls of film.
To Parer’s single-minded regret, many rearguard actions and withdrawals were conducted at night when his camera was useless. Even by day he didn’t know if the dimness of the jungle tracks would enable him to film or if rain and mould would get into his cameras. He shot in faith. At Myola his film ran out. However, the last plane in before Myola itself was overrun dropped, amongst other things, about 450 metres of film for him. And so he continued on, as fevered and exhausted as the young men around him, to Ioribaiwa Ridge, where the Australians stood and retreated no further.
Later that year, in the first week of October, Parer turned up in Townsville as what a friend, Alan Anderson, declared ‘a living wreck’. He apologised that he wasn’t able to get his gear up the stairs. In a few days’ time he went to Sydney where Ken Hall and Cinesound wanted to film him introducing his Kokoda film. The film, Kokoda Front Line!, would receive an Academy Award for the Best Documentary Film of its year. The Academy was more ready to acknowledge the Australian contribution than MacArthur was, but Parer himself wasn’t satisfied with Kokoda Front Line!. The encounters had been hard to film and before that the quick raids and getaways of Kanga Force did not allow him quite the latitude that the desert had.
Myola was eventually overrun. More accurately, Potts told Allen in Port Moresby, he was withdrawing in good order while he could. By then the 2/14th that had left Port Moresby less than a month before with about 550 fighting men had been reduced to less than one hundred. Close behind them came the 2/16th, holding the track with only 250 men. Everyone was grey-faced. At that alpine height, Alan Avery of the 7th Division and others bayoneted all the tins of food in the hope that bacteria would affect them and the Japanese would eat (or at least be deprived of) them. Forty thousand rounds of ammunition were destroyed and Bren guns that there were no soldiers to carry were bent at the barrel. The three battalions moved into defensive positions behind Efogi around a Seventh Day Adventist mission hut perched on the spur of the ridge, and the 39th were at last due to be taken back to Moresby to the rear. There were 185 of them left and they lined up to pass over their automatic weapons, rations, signal stores and medical supplies.
At length a strong defensive line was set up on Imita Ridge. General Horii was able to use two full regiments alternatively to attack the Australians and push them back. By 12 September it was estimated he still had five thousand fit men under his command, including artillerymen who brought with them mountain guns that could be broken down into five two-men loads. Sickness and casualties cut their number down to two guns by the time Horii reached Ioribaiwa Ridge facing the Australians on Imita.
By now the Japanese had reached a position where they could hear the aircraft at Port Moresby and see the port’s searchlights flashing in the sky. They were a few days’ march away from the port they wanted. Their resources were at an end but they might succeed by desperate, literal hunger and raw desire. The Australians were on the last ridge, Imita, confident in the terrain but aware they could not retreat further. This was where Port Moresby would be won or lost. Fortunately, Imita Ridge was a natural rampart, and its cliffs rose steeply above the track. An entrenched Australian force could hold it, Potts was sure. The trouble was that the composite battalion made up of survivors waited for the Japanese attack in a state of suffering from sundry mosquito- and tick-borne fevers, and mentally afflicted by extreme stress and the weight of horrors undergone.
Of 546 men of the 2/14th Battalion who had come over the ridge four weeks earlier, there were only three officers and eighty-five other ranks left. But to answer the Japanese mountain guns the Australians had themselves moved two large guns to the top of the ridge. And by 21 September, there were newly arrived Australians on Imita Ridge. What the Australians did not know was that Horii had already received orders from his superiors to withdraw to Gona and Buna, where he could be reinforced, supplied, and given the means to make his positions secure. The fact that the Japanese had been able to get two regiments in front of Imita Ridge was chiefly because of the supply problems of the Australians. If the Japanese happened to reach the outskirts of Port Moresby they would face the 26th Brigade of veteran Australians, the 16th Brigade which was on its way, two squadrons of light tanks, three field regiments of artillery and a mountain battery. As well as that, the first brigade of American-trained troops was about to arrive. The force the Japanese were facing would redouble within a few days. The army available to defend Port Moresby was almost twice that commanded by General Morshead when he held Tobruk for eight months against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
The Japanese retreat began, and the Australians were now the pursuers. They made contact with the Japanese at Templeton’s Crossing. There were two days of Japanese defence before a flanking unit of Australians found the Japanese arms pits and muddy trenches empty. Along Eora Creek there were further rearguard actions by the Japanese, while from out of the jungle there still emerged stark-eyed Australians who had stayed at large all that time the Japanese owned the track.
What of the bearers, the ‘fuzzy-wuzzy angels’ so endearing, via Parer’s newsreel and press photographs, to Australians? There seemed to be elements of coercion and elements of choice to their work, and there is little awareness that the Japanese also used native bearers, recruited from the north sectors of New Guinea. One of our fuzzy-wuzzy angels was Havala Laula, who lived in the village of Kagi along the Kokoda Trail in the high central province of Papua. Aged about fourteen, he carried his first wounded Australian back over the mountains as part of a team of eight. When wounded soldiers died, they would lower them to the ground and bury them on their stretchers. The bearers he worked with were reverent Seventh Day Adventists, and they gave each who died an appropriate burial. Nor were they beyond using bush remedies on the wounded, wrapping leaves around some wounds. ‘That made them feel better,’ Havala remembers.
When the Japanese reached his village on their advance towards Moresby, they destroyed it, ruining the gardens and killing the livestock. Since the Australian troops formerly there had treated the people well, the loyalty of these colonised people went not to the self-proclaimed liberators, but to the representatives of Australian control. One must remember too that the conditions on the track left little room for men to think of ethnic or political difference. All were brothers in misery, fear and inhuman endeavour.
YOUNG BLOOD, OLD POLITICS
No sooner had the Japanese stalled on Imita Ridge than Curtin was called by a feverishly discontented MacArthur urging that Blamey be sent to New Guinea to ‘energise the situation’. He wanted Rowell more motivated or sacked. Lieutenant General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, Chief of Staff of the US Army Air Corps, had visited Australia and reached the conclusion that the Japanese were better fighting men than the Germans, that they could take New Guinea at will, and that the newly arrived, fatherly-looking American Lieutenant General Robert L. Eichelberger ‘will put some pep into the Aussies’. As yet no American infantryman had fired a shot in New Guinea but Arnold believed that ‘the Massachusetts soldiers know more about the New Guinea jungle in two days than the Australians in two years’. Eichelberger, a man of less egregious narcissism than MacArthur, was wise enough to sense a certain resistance to the Americans in the Australian staff officers too: ‘The Australians didn’t think they needed much help from anyone. Many of the commanders I met had already been in combat in North Africa and, though they were usually too polite to say so, considered the Americans to be, at best, inexperienced theorists.’
All this discontent also showed that MacArthur, ravenous for victory, believed the Australians had stalled rather than that they were about to rebound. There was a chance Washington would sack him if he continued to promise much and deliver nothing (except perhaps Milne Bay). He was determined at the same time that his operations would be controlled by task-force commanders rather than by Blamey as Commander, Allied Land Forces. MacArthur said that Blamey couldn’t cover the two jobs, and asked General George C. Marshall, Chief of the General Staff in Washington to send General Walter Krueger from America ‘to give the US Army the next ranking officer below General Blamey’. Soon after Krueger’s arrival, MacArthur formed Alamo Force to conduct the operations of Krueger’s 6th US Army. His problem was that there were not enough troops to form an army in Australia, an army normally being made up of a number of corps and a corps of a number of divisions. But bringing in Krueger was a ploy to prevent Blamey from commanding American troops.
In any case, Blamey set out at MacArthur’s orders to examine the situation in New Guinea. General Frank Berryman, on Lavarack’s 1st Army staff, said that Blamey was now fighting for his own military career. Either he was to take decisive action or MacArthur would lobby Curtin to have him dismissed, and there was every chance Curtin would agree. Blamey was aware of his unpopularity and the yearning of generals Robertson, Lavarack and even the Malaya escapee Bennett for his position. On the other hand, when Blamey’s performance had earlier been raised at the Prime Minister’s War Conference in Canberra on 11 July 1942, Shedden’s notes recorded that MacArthur said he considered Blamey ‘to be the best of all the Australian generals’. Though elsewhere MacArthur recorded that Blamey possessed a ‘sensual, slothful and doubtful character’, Curtin told the press, ‘The Government was seeking a military leader, not a Sunday school teacher.’
But when the Advisory War Council met on 17 September 1942 to examine the deteriorating situation in New Guinea, it was obvious to Blamey that some members were blaming him for the lack of success until now. One of his options was to sack General Rowell, overall director and careful planner of the campaign. The spiky and righteous-minded Rowell must have been not entirely hard for Blamey to contemplate sacking. He was one of those officers who, in Palestine a year and a half earlier, had lectured Blamey on being too obese and unfit to campaign.
When Rowell had first arrived in New Guinea in July 1942, he had visited Owers’ Corner, the beginning of the track proper, and at once saw how hard it was going to be to supply the troops. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he told Osmar White, ‘I’m willing to pull back and let the enemy have the rough stuff if he wants it. I’m willing to present the Jap with the supply headache I’ve got.’ At the same time he knew this option was politically risky, and went on, ‘But there are those who think otherwise. We need a victory in the Pacific and a lot of poor bastards have got to get killed to provide it.’
Before his own visit in September 1942, Blamey had written ahead to Rowell saying that he hoped Rowell would not think that Blamey’s imminent arrival in Port Moresby meant any lack of confidence in him personally. It arose from the inexperience of politicians, said Blamey. On the evening of 23 September, Rowell and Blamey had a discussion about their respective roles that was ‘at times acrimonious’. Rowell had no wish to become merely Blamey’s Chief of Staff, and submitted that Blamey should establish an army headquarters in Moresby to control all New Guinea operations, including Milne Bay and elsewhere, leaving Rowell to concentrate on the operations in the Owen Stanley Ranges. But Blamey had no intention of staying in New Guinea indefinitely. They also argued about bringing Lavarack and his 1st Army forward to New Guinea. Rowell said perceptively that if an Australian army headquarters wasn’t set up in New Guinea, then an American headquarters would be.
Acting on a suggestion from MacArthur, and without telling Rowell, on the morning of 25 September, Blamey flew to Milne Bay and ordered General Clowes to send a force by air to Wanigela in the north-east of Milne Bay. Rowell was angry that Blamey had given orders that should have come from him. ‘I fairly rose,’ Rowell wrote to Clowes later. ‘I then got off my chest what I’ve been storing up since April 1941.’ It must have been a scene, this after-dinner exchange!
That night, Blamey wrote to MacArthur and told him the defensive phase in New Guinea was finished. There was now a plan to advance on three axes. The first was along the Kokoda Trail via Ioribaiwa to Kokoda. The second route, to be taken by the American 32nd Division, was to be further east along the track through Juare, and the third was a sea-and-land route from the direction of Milne Bay. The 32nd Division would be the first full United States army division (as distinct from the Marines fighting on Guadalcanal to the east of New Guinea under ultimate control of the navy) to be committed to combat with the Japanese, and it would have successes in the Philippines later in the war. But here it was rushed into combat only partly trained and with little experience of jungles.
General George Vasey, who had endured the finance-starved inter-war years as Rowell’s brother officer, and more recently experienced North Africa and the Greek campaign with him, had arrived in New Guinea with members of his 6th Division. Vasey knew Blamey certainly had something to gain by getting rid of Rowell, but Rowell made it easy for him by his attitude. ‘We’ve had three first class brawls,’ Rowell further informed Clowes. ‘I would never have believed a senior officer would have taken what I said to him.’
If Blamey had arrived five days later, it would have become obvious that the Japanese retreat had begun and there would have been less pressure on him. However, three days after Blamey arrived, Rowell was stripped of his command. Edmund ‘Ned’ Herring, another regular soldier between the wars but one who was able to relate well to other people and was also a friend of Blamey’s, took over the command. His successes in New Guinea would be considerable. But Major-General Richard Dewing, the British army representative in Australia, wrote that MacArthur was ‘working steadily to exclude the Australians from any effective hand in the control of land or air operations or credit in them, except as a minor element in a US show’.
Both Curtin and Menzies felt sympathy for Rowell, and particularly when the Australian advance back over the mountains to Kokoda became so successful. They organised a post for him as a liaison general in the Middle East, but he found it a dispiriting, make-work job.
YOUR DOCTOR, MY DOCTOR
When one mentions the term ‘prisoner of war’ in an Australian World War II context, there is a tendency to think of prisoners of the Japanese, and the name ‘Changi’—the large barracks that became the chief prison of Singapore—dominates the imagination.
It seems, however, that if one was a prisoner of the Japanese empire, Changi was the best of many bad places to be, although that is perhaps not saying a great deal, given that the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. But Australians at Changi were well organised in terms of their own administration, and lived to an extent under a normal military hierarchy. Captain Victor Brand stated, ‘They talk about the “infamous Changi hospital”; well, that’s nonsense. Changi was a very pleasant spot. The only trouble of course was the lack of food. But compared to other places it was a tremendous place.’ This is a common theme in the journals and memories of men who survived the building of the Burma Railway in Thailand. Captain Colin Juttner, on returning to Changi, declared that the men still there ‘just piled this good food into us . . . they looked so marvellous themselves . . . it was like coming home’.
Private Stan Arneil, who returned to Changi from the hellish railway in December 1943, had been stuck in one of the F Force camps on a section of the railway. F Force was a group of seven thousand men who suffered the greatest death rate—44 per cent—of all the alphabetically labelled ‘forces’ of prisoners and coolies the Japanese used to work on the project. On 8 April 1943, the Japanese had announced that, commencing on about 16 April, seven thousand medically fit British and Australian prisoners were to move from Singapore by rail. This group was dubbed F Force. Early rumours of this move had created excitement and a sense of possibilities, all of which was soon to be tragically negated. They were not informed of the purpose of the move, but Captain Adrian Curlewis heard that the force was to be distributed over seven camps, each accommodating a thousand men. The prisoners were informed that the force was not to be employed as a working party, and so the inclusion of a high percentage of the unfits was not discouraged—in fact, the Japanese authorities suggested many men would have a better chance of recovery from ill-health in new and pleasant surroundings. All those going were vaccinated and inoculated against cholera and plague, though it was only the first injection in each case, without follow-ups. A band could accompany each thousand men, and gramophones would be issued after arrival. The men were entrained in unutterably hot steel rice trucks into which twenty-seven or -eight men were crowded so that only a few could lie down at any time and practically none could even sit in comfort. There was, if they were lucky, one meal a day. There was no provision for sanitation. One Australian train was without water from midday of one day until nightfall on the next. The force detrained across the Malayan border in Ban Pong, Thailand.
The camp, when they arrived, consisted of four atap-thatched huts built on low-lying ground in a constricted area. From there, Curlewis’s group was to walk 290 kilometres to a place called Nieke on the River Kwai, near the Burmese border. They set out at 10.30 p.m., stocked up on food purchased from the Thais. By three in the morning their gear and their boots were beginning to fall apart. At one of their stops on this via dolorosa there were no latrines and ‘the ground was fouled in all directions, flies abounded, and the stench was particularly offensive’.
One day was spent in having cholera and malaria tests and smallpox vaccinations from Japanese doctors. Further into the march, troops were warned of the dangers of Thai bandits attacking men straggling behind. Warnings were also issued about tigers. According to Curlewis, these twin threats had an impact on the guards as well, who placed themselves in the middle of the column of prisoners. Eventually they entered continuous jungle. Men began to wonder about the distance still to be covered, but they could find out nothing from the guards. They reached Barangali, which would in the end be seen as the halfway mark. By now every fit man was carrying a sick man’s bundle as well as his own, and a suggestion from an officer that the sick be left in the camp there led to his being beaten and his hand broken.
It is impossible to describe the profound misery of the camps along the railway, and as much as can be described has been by the men who endured it. At the camp in Takanun in Thailand, Curlewis felt that more Allied officers should have declared themselves fit for work than the six out of thirty who did. But he found the work of digging latrines too gruelling for a forty-two year old. By the time his group were moved on to further wretchedness at Tamarumpat in June, he had suffered malaria and recurrent diarrhoea and mild beri-beri. Tropical ulcers, dengue fever, dysentery were already pervasive amongst his men and colleagues. Malnutrition made it easy for opportunistic diseases to strike, including cholera. On 19 May, the daily ration at Takanun had been three-and-a-half ounces of dry rice and one-third of a cup of onion water three times a day. On other days the rice was served with bamboo shoots. ‘Cholera in next camp until control,’ he would write before the move, ‘but five deaths.’ Yet up and down the line, cholera visited again and again and compounded the level of fatality. Suddenly, before the end of May, Curlewis was reporting forty-nine deaths from cholera. Skeletal sick were driven out to work on the rail bed.
Sometimes there was a windfall, like the arrival of pay for their labour, and rations might be supplemented with condensed milk and other small comforts. But never enough to delay an aching attrition of the human system that would come during the following months.
On 11 December 1943, there were seventeen hundred prisoners left in Stan Arneil’s camp on the Burma railroad, and the deaths were unsustainable, seventeen having died in the past day. Suddenly they were all moved out, their work on the railroad finished; they were put in boxcars and railed south and were, as Arneil wrote, ‘at the end of our physical resources when we arrived at Changi’. And there he found that the food was, unexpectedly, sufficient to halt the illness and weakness that had plagued him and his fellows. ‘Ah Changi!’ he later declared. ‘You were heaven to us then.’ He was able to shower and rid himself of lice. ‘The food here is delicious but there is not enough of it for us although the quality is first rate. We even have fried shark which is very good. The menu for Xmas Day is colossal.’
The Burma Railway, not Changi, was the great killer of F Force. The rates of death were so great, Arneil remembered, that there was not time or sufficient men strong enough to dig graves, and so the dead were cremated on bamboo fires, and a handful of their ashes placed in bamboo containers.
Of the nearly eight thousand Australian prisoners of war who died in Japanese camps, Changi had the lowest death rate. The Burma Railway had more in common with other appalling camps in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Manchuria, Formosa, Ambon and Hainan, and camps on the Japanese mainland. Borneo and Ambon were proportionately the most lethal camps, although the level of general suffering, physical and mental, amongst prisoners military and civilian was such as to make the numerical comparisons close to odious.
Weary Dunlop, the boxing star who, although a Victorian, played rugby for Australia in 1932 and 1934, became the best known of the medical heroes of the Burma Railway and the most renowned amongst the 106 Australian military doctors who worked in Japanese captivity. He deserved renown. He stood up to his captors, protected the desperately weak, and was well liked and heartily praised by his colleagues. By the time of his capture he had served in Jerusalem, Gaza, Alexandria, in the Greek and Crete campaigns, and as senior surgeon at Tobruk. Returned to the home front, he was captured in Java at Number 1 Allied General Hospital at Bandung, in early March 1942. On 20 January 1943, he left Singapore for Thailand in charge of ‘Dunlop Force’ to work on the railway. Many attributed the relatively lower death rate amongst Australians in the camps at Konyu River, Hintok Mountain and Hellfire Pass to his impact as a leader, surgeon and physician.
He was by no means the only Australian surgeon to behave impeccably. As one historian says, ‘Many prisoners in other places had their version of Weary Dunlop.’ Captain John Akeroyd cared for prisoners in Ichioka, in Osaka, Japan. This officer was, according to one prisoner, ‘repeatedly beaten and knocked about because of the strong stand he took regarding sick and ailing men . . . a great deal of credit goes to him for the few deaths recorded in this particular camp’. With no anaesthetic, he depended on his orderlies to hold patients down for necessary surgery. A number of Japanese officers and guards, including a man named Nosu, the so-called ‘Mad Butcher of Ichioka’, abused him for his direct protests about the health of the men and the plundering of Red Cross parcels by guards. By the end of the war he had tuberculosis, but recovered to lead a robust post-war life.
Dr Kevin Fagan, saviour of an ultimately famous British sapper named Ronald Searle (a cartoonist who, amongst all else, would create the St Trinian’s cartoon series), was able to return to Australia when liberated and resume specialist surgical practice in Macquarie Street, Sydney. A former POW named Bob Goodwin recalls, ‘I was a personal recipient of his compassionate care. His surgical skill halted the progress of the ulcer, and I have always felt I owed my survival to him.’ On that basis he nominated Fagan for the award of the Australian Medical Association gold medal.
In his time in Thailand with H Force, Fagan’s efforts were spent on preventing a severe epidemic of cholera, rampant dysentery, and tropical ulcers. Kanu Number 2, Fagan’s post, was a camp in which terrible casualties occurred. The party of 3500 troops with whom Fagan had first moved from Changi to Thailand travelled by freight car to Ban Pong, then marched 150 kilometres into the jungle, and was immediately put to work for twelve to fifteen hours a day, making a cutting in solid rock. Their rations were deficient in protein, fats and vitamins, particularly thiamine, B1 complex. Fagan wrote that: ‘Very soon our men were reduced to the status of a malarial, dysenteric, underfed and overworked slave gang. An epidemic of cholera killed 25 per cent of the camp strength in six weeks. With this classical background an epidemic of acute phagedenic ulcers appeared six weeks after our arrival.’ The spread of the lesion, he said, ‘was accompanied by intense pain and moderate toxaemia’, that is, blood poisoning. His description of a man suffering from these ulcers is hard to forget. The victim retained a thin strip of intact skin down the calf or outer side of the leg, ‘the rest of the leg being . . . a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus; sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses.’ He would treat these cases by cutting out the massive ulcers. Sometimes chronic diarrhoea caused infection of the ulcers, and amputation was the only possible treatment. There were no adequate drugs after the operation, but ‘amputation enabled many of these unfortunate men to die in greater comfort and dignity’. Fagan’s operating theatre was at first open-air, later under a tent fly, and later still, in the plains of Kamburi, ‘a luxurious affair of palm leaf with a mud floor’. Sterilisation of instruments was done in a four-gallon ‘dixie’ on an open fire.
Towards the end of his ordeal on the Burma Railway, Fagan was ordered by the Japanese to detail one hundred men to remain and continue working, while the remainder were to be shipped south, probably back to Singapore. He would later say that it was the worst thing he had ever been ordered to do, and he knew the men he chose to stay must have hated him. But he remained with them himself, and they were sent by rail to a place named Konkoita, a hundred kilometres away.
By the time H Force was evacuated back to Singapore, Fagan was in a state of physical exhaustion and was mortally ill with cerebral malaria. One survivor of Kanu and Konkoita, Lieutenant Don Lee, said that during Major Fagan’s illness, half-hourly bulletins were issued on his condition, such was the interest his fellow prisoners had in him. He survived.
At the end of the war, Fagan would declare, against the normal suspicion to the contrary, ‘that the returned prisoner of war is in most cases not only a normal man except for some temporary physical disability, but one who has had intellectual and emotional experiences which give him a decided advantage over his fellows. He has learned to appreciate the minor pleasures of life. He knows the essentials of existence. He has a high threshold for the pinpricks of ordinary life. He knows man for what he is—his courage, his cowardice, his limitless generosity, his gross selfishness, his nobility and his utter meanness.’
Ten Australian doctors died in captivity. One of them was Captain John Oakeshott, another medical officer on whom men depended not only for medical care but also for indefinable comfort. Tragically, Oakeshott was killed after the end of the war, along with another doctor, Captain Dominic Picone, under the supervision of a Sergeant-Major Beppu Yoichi, a man who, like his superiors who authorised the killing, criminally knew the war was already over. These two physicians were victims of the Sandakan death marches—the deadly march of prisoners away from the coast of Borneo into the interior. A number of men at inland Ranau, who had survived the march all the way from Sandakan, were similarly executed in another jungle clearing.
After the sinking of HMAS Perth by a submarine in early 1942, Lieutenant Samuel Stening became the only naval medical officer in Japanese captivity. In one camp, Oeyama in Japan, he was the sole medical officer; in a second he was brutalised by the guards; and in a third he concluded that the sulfa drugs handed out by the Japanese authorities were causing kidney failure in prisoner patients because of their weakened and malnourished condition. Like Dunlop, Akeroyd and Fagan, he would survive the war, and one can wonder whether the dependence of other people upon these surgeons gave the doctor himself a sense of the necessity to get through the purgatory; indeed, a reason to live. After the war, Stening would become a paediatrician.
One of the reasons for Dunlop’s deserved repute is that after the war he was one of the first to recognise that the Repatriation Commission had made medical and psychological assessments of POWs too soon after liberation. He spearheaded campaigns to allow them to be assessed for their ongoing health problems, and brought attention to the continuing suffering of ex-prisoners of war.
The captives of these Japanese camps were put in an inhuman situation, and thus the question arises as to whether Australians and others, impelled by a young man’s natural impulse to survival, sometimes betrayed each other. If so, the burden—as it did for Holocaust survivors—remained for life. Those who made the conditions barbarous were the ones to blame. But, as one Holocaust survivor says, ‘This is the greatest injustice: that those who tried to kill us made us feel guilty.’
When it comes to Australian POWs, it is a question which, out of tribute to the extremity of what they went through, we almost dare not ask. We Australians have much less problem criticising British or Dutch prisoners—indeed, as an historian says, ‘it’s open season on British or Dutch prisoners’. But a recurrent statement amongst former prisoners is that captivity ‘brought out the best and worst in every man’. One ex-prisoner stated that the men in his camp were little better than criminals, and ‘mateship’ was a myth. In captivity, he said, everyone was out for themselves. But subsequently he said how close everyone was, and that the Australians looked after each other.
It is all beyond commentators and laymen to know.