CHAPTER 7

In the balance
Military success, political dreams

THE GREAT DESERT BATTLE

Many Australian troops, the twenty thousand or more men of the 9th Division, were still in the Middle East, on garrison duty in Syria since the campaign against the Vichy French had ended. There was considerable boredom as fortifications were dug and drills were held, as well as concern about the Pacific War and, amongst married and engaged men, that their women were subject to new levels of temptation. One soldier wrote, ‘Some of those bed warming, noble-hearted chaps still at home are carrying on for us . . . hardly any of the original convoy had been safe from this happening.’

When Les Watkins, an Australian soldier still in Syria, heard on 24 June 1942 that Tobruk, where he had lived and fought for nine months, cheering the Matilda tanks on, was now in German hands as a result of yet another Rommel offensive, he found it hard to digest. And Japan’s entry into the war had given him and others a sense of being forgotten and in limbo. In January 1942, when the 9th Division was garrisoned in the Syrian town of Latakia on the coast north-west of Damascus, leave was granted and two brothels set aside for specific use by the Australians, Lunar Bar and Maison d’Orée. In Damascus, Australian troops enhanced their reputation as wreckers of bars, particularly if bars restricted the service of spirits to officers. There was a sinister side to this, involving in some cases men on leave taking to town a respirator and steel helmet out of which they could construct a swinging bludgeon.

A Digger of Italian background, Frank Perversi, who could speak French, was grateful to be connected with a girl by a local man. The girl had seen Frank in passing and was impressed with him. Together they went to a storeroom, locked the door and lay on a large palliasse. ‘Undressed, her light milk coffee body was graceful and quite beautifully proportioned . . . we united as gently and lovingly as if we had known each other for years . . . this is better than cricket.’

Over the Mediterranean, there were Australians still stranded on Crete who had evaded capture by the Germans but who understood that if they became associated in any way with any girl or any family there, the Cretans concerned would pay a frightful price. At a village where forty Australians were hiding, four hundred German infantry turned up, laid waste to the village, killed thirty Cretans and took sixty prisoners. Yet men who had escaped from prison compounds were hidden by Greek families despite the peril involved. An Australian was one day captured in a hill village, and Reg Saunders, an Aboriginal soldier from the western district of Victoria, an infantryman on the run, watched the affair from a crag above the town. He was amazed to see the Greeks spitting on the German soldiers even though they knew they would be punished for it. After months at large, Saunders spent Christmas Day 1941 in a cave in the White Mountains; his dinner was black olives soaked in oil with a chunk of dry bread. A Greek secret agent ultimately brought Saunders, and his friends George Burgess and Dodger Vincent, down to a beach, where they found seventy-five other escapees waiting. A fishing trawler called Hedgehog picked them up on 7 May 1942 to take them away to Egypt and a set of altered military priorities. Saunders’ brother Harry and his 14th Battalion had returned to Australia four months earlier with the 7th Division. In August 1942, three months after his escape from Crete, Reg too was returned home.

Expecting to be sent home and then to the jungle, the 9th Division was moved out of the camp in Palestine where they had been retraining. Instead, as was the result of the crisis of June 1942 when Tobruk was captured and 35,000 Allies taken prisoner along the road from Libya to the Egyptian border, the Australians were rushed south to defend Alexandria. Supervising his men digging in outside the city, Major Chas Daintree wrote, ‘After all, even we believed we’d seen the last of the desert, yet here we were once again.’ In the first week of July the Australians were trucked out to stop the Germans at a small railway village named El Alamein roughly halfway between the Nile Delta and the Libyan border. Here Rommel was halted by British, Indian, South African and New Zealand troops. He was disappointed to be held up here, in a narrow front between El Alamein on the coast and the unnegotiable sand trap to the south known as the Qattara Depression. The British commander, General Auchinleck, called it ‘the El Alamein Box’.

As soon as the Australians had jumped down from their trucks, General Leslie Morshead, commander of the 9th Australian Division, was arguing with the British almost as vigorously as he had before and during his defence of Tobruk. The British staff had devised a plan that infantry divisions be split up into tactical battle groups and the rest sent to the rear as a reserve. This would fragment his division, but Morshead had other reasons to dislike his corps commander, Major-General William Ramsden. For a start, Morshead had superior rank to him, having become a lieutenant-general, but the British High Command had shown its normal reluctance to promote citizen soldiers from the dominions over full-time British soldiers. To them, Morshead seemed a nuisance, complaining not only about other generals but about the quality of British armour and artillery as well. He forced them to give way on the tactical battle groups idea. Thus he could lead the entire 9th Division as a coherent unit.

When the Australians came up into the line in early July, they faced Rommel on the coastal end of the British line, between the Mediterranean and the railway station of El Alamein itself. It was a season of heat and dust in the desert, but having a purpose had cheered them. During that July, the Australians launched themselves on four operations against Rommel, creating great confusion behind the German lines at ridges along the coast. They captured the summits of various tors, lost them, yet consistently defeated German counter-attacks in the terrain around them. The first of these Australian offensives began on 10 July. Morshead’s 24th Brigade was to attack the German lines on a ridge called Ruweisat, about sixteen kilometres south of the coast. In an assault of middling success on 17 July, over one thousand Italian soldiers were captured and around one hundred Germans.

As well as being remarkable in his willingness to argue with superiors, reminding the overall commander, Auchinleck, on one occasion that their job involved minimising casualties as well as incommoding Rommel, Morshead was also remarkable for going forward and visiting his troops. And his complaints about the British tank support were reiterated as a result of attacks on the night of 26–27 July, when the 28th Battalion of Western Australians, moving out from the north-east against Ruin Ridge, was to work in coordination with British forces attacking from the south. The collaboration was jeopardised by the late start, since Morshead delayed to argue that his men did not have sufficient tanks in support. Then the Australians advanced while, around them, Bren gun carriers and support trucks carrying ammunition and supplies were blown up by the German and Italian gunners. The wireless truck exploded and burned, and Colonel Lew McCarter had no radio contact. The Western Australians captured the ridge but McCarter was able to make contact with headquarters only at dawn. By then German and Italian infantry had surrounded them. ‘We are in trouble,’ he transmitted. ‘We need help—now. Are there any of our tanks helping us?’ In fact there were German tanks all around the ridge. The British tanks had been thwarted by minefields, and on the south of the ridge the British infantry thrust had been decimated. ‘We have got to give in,’ McCarter signalled at ten in the morning, and rose from his weapons pit with his hands up. Sixty-five of his men were dead and 450, wounded and unwounded, were captured. The battles of July cost the 9th Division 2500 casualties in three weeks, but Morshead and his division earned the distinction of being mocked on German radio as ‘Ali Baba Morshead and his twenty thousand thieves’.

The July raids and attacks, named the First Battle of El Alamein, put paid to Rommel’s hopes of advancing into Egypt in the near future—and, as it turned out, forever. During these operations, Morshead had been given the task of shepherding the newly arrived 51st Highland Division into desert fighting, and its commander, General Douglas Wimberley, said of him, ‘He gave me a higher feeling of morale than anyone else I had met so far.’ But Morshead also warned him in graphic idiom: ‘The staff here are mad on breaking up divisions. They’ll stuff you about for a dead cert.’

Rommel made an attempt in August to split this line near a ridge named Alam Halfa, east of Ruweisat and Ruin ridges. He had early success but then the British drove him away. An Australian attack at the coastal end of the line relieved some of the pressure on the British. By then, Auchinleck had been replaced as both theatre commander and commander of the 8th Army. General William ‘Strafer’ Gott was now to command the 8th Army but was almost at once killed when his aircraft was shot down. A commander named Bernard Montgomery was appointed in his place. Montgomery was a man to suit Morshead, an inscrutable character who believed absolutely in attack. Ironically, his father had been Bishop of Tasmania for twelve years from 1889, and had harboured a dream of recruiting Aboriginal ministers of religion on a large scale. After General Montgomery’s accession, the divisions at the front were gradually and adequately equipped. The build-up lasted till autumn, and it was decided the attack would begin on 23 October. In the interim there were many artillery exchanges. A German shell exploded in a unit kitchen and sent a sliver of metal through the shoulder and into the lung of a twenty-two-year-old shipping clerk named Jeff Moncrieff, who died of the wound.

On the eve of the battle, a new commander of the 30th Corps, to which the 9th Division was allocated, proposed that the men begin the advance from the start line at 9.30 p.m., but Morshead pointed out that the troops would have had to lie down in their slit trenches all day waiting. As well as that, said Morshead, they would have been ‘ungettatable’ during daylight hours for final instructions by the officers with whom they would be fighting. ‘I cannot conceive anything psychologically worse than such a solitary confinement in a tight-fitting, grave-like pit.’ When darkness fell, he argued, the men must have time for a relaxed dinner. ‘They do not want to be rushed off as soon as they have eaten.’

The Australians were to attack on the northern, Mediterranean side of the line while the 51st Highlanders attacked to the south. The men would march three kilometres to the start line and then go in behind a screen of tanks in the flat area known as the Saucer. There the 30th Corps, it was planned, particularly the 9th Australian and the 51st Highland divisions, would make an advance of nearly fifteen kilometres against the German 164th Division and the 15th Panzers. Did many of them understand that this was to be one of those battles fought in desert places whose results would reverberate massively throughout more temperate zones?

After the troops assembled at the start line on the night of 23 October, the advance began from 10 p.m. onwards (and in some sectors and for support troops somewhat late), the artillery roaring in positions behind the infantry. It was a fierce business, young men killing each other in the vast night for control of Axis strongpoints. The minds of the mass of German citizens were on Russia; the minds of the mass of Australians on New Guinea and the Solomons, and the young Australians killed in darkness at El Alamein were not solely a loss of life but also a loss to Australia’s defence. Morshead again complained that lack of armoured support was holding up his men to the west. Because of what happened then, Morshead and the Australian 9th Division could be argued to have had a disproportionate part in the battle since, when they stalled in their direct westwards assault, Montgomery ordered them to wheel around and advance northwards towards the railway station and the coast beyond it. The German and Italian forces felt ownership of their line and resisted ferociously, and there followed sanguinary days and nights of attack on mounds and strongpoints around the railway line and the road. The ruthless Australian advance saw Rommel rushing exceptional numbers of reinforcements into the area. Meanwhile, the Australian losses, dead and casualties, would reach six thousand. By the third night of the battle, two Australian battalions, the 24th and the 48th, had barely one company of 150 men left between them. At 1.05 a.m. on 2 November, when Operation Supercharge was launched, the last phase of El Alamein began. The 9th Division had, in military terms, ‘rolled up’ the German front after penetrating Tel el Eisa, far beyond the mountain to the west. The British to the south now burst through a line weakened by the rushing of German units north to deal with Australian incursions. By the night of 2 November, the Axis troops had to retreat to new ground, though it would be two days before the retreat began.

Throughout the battle, Morshead visited the field ambulance stations and spoke to the too-plenteous wounded. German counter-attacks were regular, since it was clear that if the Australians were dislodged from the coast the whole line would be. But by 4 November, Rommel knew he had failed, and began to withdraw. With him went so many German hopes of a link-up between Germans driving into Iran and by way of the Caucasus into Russia and territories beyond. On the Allied side, congratulations poured in, to Morshead in particular, for what could justly be called a crucial part of the entire scheme. Though it is normal for Australians to overexaggerate their impact in certain campaigns, there was no exaggeration in the case of the 9th Division. They had changed world history. They were too exhausted, however, and had suffered too many casualties, to take part in the pursuit of the Afrika Korps that now began. Even so, Morshead kept up drills, knowing that the 9th were going on to other battles, in the Pacific.

On 22 December, he held a parade of the 9th Division, still twelve thousand in strength, on the airfield at Gaza in Palestine. A month later, the division, less those in hospital in Egypt, embarked for Australia.

FLYERS

The Empire Air Training Scheme through which so many Australian airmen passed was established at the end of November 1939 by representatives of Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand at Ottawa. Nearly ten thousand Australians, after basic training in Australia, did their advanced training in Canada, often after crossing the United States by train, a stimulating experience for late adolescents from Murwillumbah, Quorn or Mandurah. Meanwhile, on home soil, the RAAF’s flight-training schools, located throughout the bush, continued until March 1943, by which time they had trained nearly forty thousand air crew.

Seventeen entirely Australian squadrons served within the overarching structure of the RAF during the war, and in Bomber Command, the Australians were found in squadrons 460 to 467. There were also Australians scattered in other multinational crews throughout the air force. The first of the Australian squadrons, 455, was formed at Swinderby, Lincolnshire, on 6 June 1941 and was not a Bomber Command but a Coastal Command squadron. It did not receive its first narrow-tailed Hampden bomber or adequate ground crew until 10 July. But young Australians looked at this vulnerable aircraft with the wonder and excitement of young men observing a miraculous—not an infernal—machine. They would escort a convoy to Russia, hand over their Hampdens to the Russian air force, return to England and be re-equipped with Beaufighters. A newer Australian squadron, 458, flew the plumper-bodied Wellington bombers. At a time when Churchill was damning Australians, especially Curtin, for their bloody-mindedness, 458 Squadron men took targets such as Berlin, Cologne, Mannheim, Essen, Dusseldorf and Hanover and were then stationed in the Mediterranean in a number of bases, including in Malta and Tunisia.

Number 460 Squadron was formed in November 1941 at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, 466 in October at Driffield in Yorkshire in October 1942, and a re-formed 462 at the same airfield in 1944. A group of new Australian aviators, arriving at the sergeants’ mess in Driffield, heard a British officer remark, ‘Well, here come the black troops from the colonies.’ From Driffield these men were involved in Bomber Command’s chief Arthur Harris’s forty-two-squadron attack on Cologne. Of the 6500 casualties suffered by the RAAF in Europe, Bomber Command would account for nearly four thousand.

The bombers flew many missions throughout 1943 to Germany’s Ruhr Valley—Happy Valley, the crews called it. They had to face night fighters equipped with the Schräge Musik—a twenty-millimetre cannon mounted at an angle behind the cockpit to enable attacks on the heavy bombers from below. The searchlight and anti-aircraft artillery defences of the Ruhr were very heavy. To be caught in that terrifying searchlight beam was considered the prelude to death. During a raid on Wuppertal in Westphalia, Flight Sergeant V.O. Vaughan’s bomber was trapped in that deadly cone of blinding light, which left him naked to anti-aircraft fire. To escape it he went into a spin from which he managed to regain control of the bomber again only 350 metres above the ground.

Some commentators claim the Ruhr was not as essential to the economy and the war effort as was depicted. But the bombing of Essen in early 1943 was highly applauded, since the great Krupp armament works dominated the centre of town. Such total successes were not necessarily common for the young aircrews.

A device named Window, however—clouds of aluminium strips cut to suit the frequency of German radar, poured out of 200-pound (90-kilogram) packages by bomber crews—somehow made it appear that thousands of bombers were approaching, and utterly confused the searchlights, batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and fighter planes. It was first used on a massive bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943. Meanwhile, H2S radar gave the bomber crews a picture of the countryside over which the aircraft was flying at night. In late October 1943, a force including bombers from two Australian squadrons flew to Berlin. Mosquito aircraft flew in low to mark the target for them with flares; marking was sometimes questionable since wind could cause markers’ aircraft to be up to eleven kilometres off target, but that night the result was considered fortunate in so far as industrial suburbs were marked. No cloud obscured the target, but neither did it the bombers, and twenty-eight British planes were destroyed, while twelve were abandoned as beyond repair on their return. The Australian 460 Squadron had a bad night, losing five of its Lancaster bombers. Its squadron leader, Eric Utz, a young grazier from New England in New South Wales, nonetheless took the positive view that it was the most effective raid that had been made on Berlin.

The Australian crews were boys from the bush and the suburbs; young men, mostly unmarried, some of them not knowing how to drive a car. They were engaged in a strategy that has been controversial ever since, some even lived long enough to question the propositions of the head of Bomber Command, the appropriately named Bomber Harris, about the carpet-bombing of cities, and about the necessity of the copious deaths of young personnel and those on the ground. Harris’s sincere belief was that he could beat Germany into submission before the Normandy landings by destroying German industry and morale. But we now know his campaign to achieve this was a failure in its own right, in that German cities were destroyed and civilians suffered in the untold ways the British had in the Blitz, but not German war industries. Ultimately all the deceptive measures devised by the air forces, Empire and American, were countered by the Germans in a way that imposed casualties and horrifying death on young flyers.

An example of the sad failure of some raids was a February 1943 mission against the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt in Bavaria, which the Americans had already hit that day. On one of the badly damaged Lancasters of 467 Squadron was a crew of Australian cinematographers documenting the mission. Back at their bases, the squadrons claimed the raids successful but they had in fact bombed two villages eight kilometres away from Schweinfurt. The following night there was a far more celebrated attack on Augsburg, where a company named MAN, the world’s largest manufacturer of marine diesel engines, was devastated. Sixty per cent of the town was destroyed by two waves of bombers, an Australian Halifax squadron in the second wave decanting their bombs straight into the fires already blazing.

The 795-bomber raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944 was a bloody night for bomber crews. The bombers flew indirect, dog-leg routes, one wave going by way of Frankfurt, the other by way of Bonn. The weather reconnaissance reported a lack of cloud on the way there but the mission went ahead, and in brilliant moonlight the bombers were intercepted by German night fighters long before they had reached either of these turning points. Ninety-five aircraft were shot down. Four Australian squadrons were involved and twenty of their aircraft were ‘lost’, a term covering a multitude of horrors. Amongst those killed was the veteran squadron leader Eric Utz, who was nearly at the end of his second tour of duty. Totally new crews commanded by flight sergeants C.H. Hargreaves and P.R. Anderson were also shot down that night. Flight Lieutenant M.F. Smith, a 467 Squadron pilot, formerly a Queensland farmer, reported the sighting of thirty burning aircraft around him as he flew between Aachen and Nuremberg. This was not to be his own last night, however; an aircraft accident would kill him in June. By now, British factories found it hard to replace the loss of aircraft, but eager young crews kept arriving by way of the Empire Air Training Scheme and from training organisations in Britain.

And so it went. In the lead-up to the Normandy landings in June 1944, 460 Squadron lost three crews during the Friedrichshafen raid on the night of 27 April. Flight Lieutenant R.G. Peter, an Australian serving with 35 Squadron RAF, was the captain of a Pathfinder Halifax that was attacked by a German night fighter. With the rear of Peter’s Halifax alight and his plane spinning in night air, two crew members managed to bail out. But two gunners had suffered severe burns and fire had destroyed their parachutes, and the wireless operator had lost his through an escape hatch. Peter managed to land the Halifax on Lake Constance on the Swiss–German border, and paddled the aircraft’s dinghy, with his injured gunners and wireless operator, southwards and in darkness (except for the flames of Friedrichshafen to the north), across the lake to Switzerland. Again, as there had been in 1941 during the Blitz, there were spectacular escapes but far more death and injury and capture. The private agonies within a stricken bomber, however, are impossible to convey. Flight Sergeant Rawdon Middleton was flying for 149 Squadron when it attacked Turin in northern Italy. A shell splinter lodged in the right side of his face, destroying his right eye and exposing the bones over his other eye. It is likely he was also wounded in the body and legs. He struggled to control his damaged aircraft as it flew across the Alps and Occupied France to England. Off the English coast Middleton ordered the surviving crew members to bail out. He flew his bomber parallel to the coast to enable five of them to escape. Two who stayed behind to help Middleton jumped too late and were drowned. Middleton’s body was washed up at Shakespeare Beach at Dover. The honours that followed were public and of consolation to his family, and placed a skin of martial piety over the intimate terror of that barely controlled plane, full of frantic and valiant youths.

During March and April 1944, the Australian squadrons’ campaign was to destroy the French transport system. On the night of 3 May, three Australian squadrons contributed 10 per cent of the heavy bombers that raided the tank depot at Mailly-le-Camp in north-central France. To ensure the bombing was accurate, the force was despatched on a bright moonlit night, and the Luftwaffe were able to destroy forty-two bombers, seven of which were Australian. On the night of 10 May, six crews from 463 and 467 squadrons were shot down, and on 2 June, 466 Squadron lost two crews to night fighters. Thus the attrition continued.

During the night before the D-Day landing, Australian heavy bombers combined with other Bomber Command units to attack the shore batteries along the Normandy coast. Wing Commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith led twenty-eight Lancaster bombers from the two Australian squadrons to bomb the great gun emplacements at Maisy behind Pointe du Hoc, in the heights above Omaha Beach, but though the bomber crew felt they had neutralised the site, because of poor visibility and the density of the concrete casements, the battery there was not silenced and would cause much mayhem against the land troops the next day. Australian squadrons would fly in support of the Normandy landings, the only Australians to see anything of that epochal day.

Gunners aboard bombers were at enhanced risk, and a horrifying novel on the subject by John Bede Cusack, a gunner, is entitled They Hosed Them Out. Bomber Harris estimated the chance of bomber crews achieving a full tour at one in three. But for the tail gunners, mid-upper gunners and flight engineers, the odds were steeper still. Worst of all was the chance a rear turret would be sheared off by falling bombers and fighters.

A boy from Leichhardt, New South Wales, named Max Martin had been learning to fly Wirraways at Uranquinty in early 1943 when he got an infected carbuncle on one buttock. Due to the surgery and treatment needed, he missed graduating and was told he could line up to try again, or else become an air gunner and go more or less straight into the conflict. In the age-old fear of young men that they will miss the action, he chose to become a gunner. He was nineteen, and the great-grandson of immigrants and two Irish convicts. In training off Evans Head in New South Wales, he blew a few drogues (towed targets) out of the sky. In May 1943 he and others set out to join the conflict in the sky above Europe by way of the Empire Air Training Scheme in Canada.

On eventual arrival in England, Martin was crewed up with a pilot, Flight Sergeant Thomas, who came from Gippsland. From Lichfield in the Midlands the crew was involved in many flying exercises as they impatiently waited to join the mayhem. They became familiar with England from the air. There was further training at Marston Moor and at Leconfield in Yorkshire. By now members of 466 Squadron wanted to climb into Europe’s murderous air, to plummet through night in the flimsy tubes of obsolescent Blenheim, Hudson or Halifax bombers and later, if they lived, to fly in Lancasters, a somewhat better version of the winged tube.

Flight Sergeant Thomas and his crew, including Martin, flew their first operations in the spring of 1944 from Driffield against the gun emplacements and marshalling yards in France, all in preparation for the coming Normandy invasion. Operations on marshalling yards at places like Boulogne were regularly undertaken. On the third operation the crew beat off an attack by Junkers 88s, which could operate as both bombers and fighters. Not all crews came out of these encounters so well, and it would not have been statistically remarkable had they been brought down. In his log book Martin noted the bomb load and the flying time. For a raid on Boulogne the bomber could carry 18,000 pounds (over 8000 kilograms) of bombs. But for a much longer—more than eight-hour—raid on Berlin on 3 June, into a zone of very heavy flak, the bomb load was adjusted to 12,000 pounds (5400 kilograms). Their notes in their log book were brief—it was a matter of pride with Bomber Command that notes were laconic, and in the ninety missions Martin would fly, he would never mention what mental state damage to the bomber left him in.

On the night the invasion fleet made its way towards Normandy, 466 squadron attacked the huge guns at Maisy. Flight Sergeant Martin had a magnificent view of the dark ships crowding out the Channel and awaiting zero hour.

Within a week of the landing, Hitler’s unexpected weapons, a number of V1 rockets, were fired at London. They had an uncanny power to unnerve the British populace, since once their engine cut out it was a matter of good or bad luck for the people on the ground as to where they fell. Later the even more sophisticated V2 rockets were sent over from sites in northern France and Belgium. For 466 and other squadrons there was now a succession of raids against rocket depots. Just as at Maisy, a gulf often existed between what bomber crews reported at debriefings after return to their bases and what the reality continued to be on the ground. An operation against the French city of Caen, which was reduced to ruins, favoured resistance by the German army and made the city’s capture by the Allies harder. Bomber crews were told that the French had all fled the city, but two thousand French civilians would die in the Caen bombings.

The Halifax bomber in which Martin flew was heavily damaged over one of the rocket launch sites, but the speed at which planes could be repaired and sent up again was dazzling, and the night after the damage, at 7.40 in the evening, missions against Caen resumed. So the perilous operations continued according to the later-much-questioned philosophy of Bomber Command. Operations on Stuttgart, operations on oil refineries, operations once more against sites the French underground and the Allies wanted obliterated in France.

In mid-August 1944, one of Hitler’s as-yet-few jet fighters moved in to attack the now Pilot Officer Thomas’s plane and swept by Martin in the rear turret. In further operations in other squadrons, Martin recorded operations against Chemnitz, which kept them in the air for seven and a half hours, against Pforzheim (six and a half), and against the Politz oil refineries near Stettin (eight hours, ten minutes), while the raid on Dresden towards the war’s end would keep his aircraft in the air for eight hours and twenty minutes. In between operations the young crews visited pubs, and it was known that oxygen—which they had to take once they got to 10,000 feet (3048 metres)—was an excellent cure for hangovers.

By 24 August, Martin was able to send his mother in Leichhardt a telegram announcing he had completed his first tour of duty. By now he had moved with his pilot to 462 Squadron and was commissioned a pilot officer. His first award, a Distinguished Flying Cross, was handed him, and his parents got the telegram from the Air Ministry announcing the fact. Fearing, however, that it contained other, less positive news, they took some hours of reflection and foreboding before they opened it.

At the end of this tour of service, an elite Lancaster bomber group beckoned—a Pathfinder squadron of RAF bombers, first into the bombing area, and last out. Now Martin flew in the rear turret of a Lancaster belonging to 35 Squadron, based at Graveley in Cambridgeshire. The weather was often dismal and it could be arctic in the gun turret, and the better the visibility over the target, the more intense the resistance. He signed on for an almost unprecedented third tour. The most intensely rewarding raid of Martin’s career was the operation on Dresden in February 1945. His plane flying in low to the target, he felt the unprecedented heat from the building firestorm of the city penetrating the perspex and the gun slits. Years later he said that he knew something horrifying was happening down there. His last operation before the end of the third tour was against Mannheim.

By the age of twenty-one, Martin was a pilot officer with a Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar (the equivalent of winning it twice), the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, and memories that would have destroyed other men. He would say later that he never wanted to get close to the mid-upper gunner, since their casualty rate was high and since, if anything happened to the plane, he might have to encounter their corpse if he needed to get his parachute. If he had to bail out he needed to open the doors behind him that led into the interior of the plane, grab his chute, put it on, rotate the turret ninety degrees so that its doors faced open sky, and so release them and fall out into darkness.

There were other perils that were systemic: the oxygen supply to the tail gunners often failed, and they sometimes suffered burns from their electrically heated clothing. Any fire starting in the front of the plane was driven down the fuselage towards the gunner by Venturi effect. There were 2000 gallons (9000 litres) of fuel, miles of hydraulic oil pipelines for controls, flaps and turrets, and eight to ten tons of bombs between the rear gunner and the front of his plane.

German airpower would diminish so drastically during 1944 that 460 and 464 squadrons were selected to join ‘Tiger Force’, the strategic force to be deployed against Japan. The plan never came into operation, however, and as the war ended, planes of both these squadrons would take part in Operation Manna, after a winter of famine in Holland, dropping supplies and foodstuffs to Dutch civilians in The Hague, Rotterdam and Leiden. Transport pilots performed the same duty—in fact, 14 per cent of the Dakotas and Stirling transports were being flown by Australians.

Two Australian squadrons of two-man Mosquitoes operated over Europe. From June 1944, one of these squadrons was used exclusively to counter the incursion of the V1 rockets over southern England. The radar sites along the south-east coast of England were capable of detecting the incoming missiles at a range of 80 kilometres, which gave the intercepting fighters a six-minute window in which to do their work. Once a sighting was made, the Mosquito would dive on the rocket and fire at it at a range of 200 to 300 metres.

The Germans took to launching the rockets from Heinkel bombers, and the Australian Mosquitoes moved offshore to counter this. One of the Australian Mosquito squadrons was also, with British and New Zealand squadrons, assigned the task of breaching the prison wall and destroying the guards’ accommodation and part of the prison in the famous raid on Amiens Prison in northern France in February 1944, designed supposedly to allow 180 members of the French Resistance to escape, but sadly killing a number of them. On the way in, the group flew over the coast at fifteen metres and then picked up the poplar-lined Albert–Amiens Road so familiar to World War I Diggers.

An immensely popular Australian wing commander, Robert Iredale, a former Melbourne sales representative, was leading 464 Squadron that day and was shot down by a fighter, but managed to reach Allied lines, and survived the war. Squadron Leader A.J. McRitchie was also shot down that day, and was captured suffering from a paralysed right arm and temporary blindness. On 30 October 1944, an extraordinary mission was flown to attack German headquarters located in three of the colleges of Aarhus University in Denmark, which housed the personnel and records of the Gestapo. The twenty-six Mosquitoes were equipped not only with bombs but also with incendiaries, to ensure the Gestapo records would burn as a result of the attack. The low-level bombing was said to have been so precise that pilots saw missiles entering through the doors and windows of the building. But the ambiguity of such operations showed when a Mosquito hit a light tower and crashed into the Jeanne d’Arc School in Copenhagen, killing eighty-six children.

By August 1945, the pilots simply wanted to come home and, for the larger part, become civilians again, and persuaded the government not to commit them to the occupation forces deployed in Germany.

THE WAR OVER WOMEN

Back in Australian cities, which seemed to teem with American soldiers, airmen and sailors, the struggle was for the repute and moral uprightness of Australian women.

A twenty-year-old teachers’ college student, Patricia Jones, wrote in her diary in 1942: ‘I expressed a desire to silly Jack P. for a Yank boyfriend (Melb. and in fact all Austr. are swarming with them since Christmas) and I felt I’d missed life not having met one—Else and I spoke to some one night in the dark of Swanston Street but didn’t pick them up as most girls do now.’ Two weeks later she was able to write, ‘Anyway, I can tell my Grandchildren at least that during momentous days when Austr. was rapidly accumulating thousands upon thousands of Yanks . . . and every girl discussed her “pickups” I too had a little experience.’

It was obvious, since Patricia intended to boast of this event to her grandchildren, that ‘pick-up’ had a more innocent meaning than it would later come to possess. She is frank about her pleasure at being young and dreads ‘the blind complacency of middle age’ which will come further on her path. She hopes that her life as narrated in her diary will be a ‘nice romantic story’, the phrase itself betraying both naïveté and aspiration. Patricia records her outings to skating rinks, the pictures, the ballet, the beach, as well as her first real kiss and falling in love with a succession of boyfriends, one of whom said ‘The Words’. She hoped to have an innocent-enough association with a Yank, but worried about being forestalled by a friend, ‘an attractive little piece with all the necessary backchat.’ Patricia’s friends Delma and Arlette were true ‘Yank hunters’, she said.

Advertising in the 1920s had promoted feminine daintiness and ‘grace and refinement’. By the late 1930s, in time for the war, the idea of ‘sex appeal’ came to dominate advertising. By the 1940s, femininity was expressed not in breeding power but in sexual attractiveness, and a number of writers, including Freud and Havelock Ellis, whom most of these young women had never read, had nonetheless influenced popular culture as well.

The films to which young Australians and Americans flocked in Sydney and Melbourne were Jane Eyre, Fantasia, Irene, Rebecca, Sandy Is a Lady, The Woman in the Window and The Valley of Decision. Roughly one million American soldiers would pass through Australia in their pressed uniforms, seeming to have stepped straight out of the movies themselves, and displaying in many cases a more polished and polite approach to women and even their parents than most Australian soldiers could deploy. The sexual freedom suggested by films and advertising seemed to offer itself in the persons of these alien and yet somehow familiar troops potentially doomed in battle.

But there was confusion in the community. Australian women and American men had to conduct their courtships in public places, where they faced curfews, assaults by gangs of Australian soldiers, and even civilian ‘sex patrols’. On the one hand, the Vice Squad tried to break up US–Australian couples in parks, and the girls were condemned from pulpits (the much-needed Allies themselves were never lambasted). Melbourne artist Albert Tucker, husband of that other fine painter Joy Hester, painted Victory Girls and Images of Modern Evil, condemnatory works showing Australian women offering themselves cheaply to what he saw in part as the occupier. The Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Irishman James Duhig, declared that decency had largely vanished due to the disgusting public conduct of girls and servicemen. And then, on the other hand, girls were told to serve as virginal ‘Victory Belles’, dancing with Yanks at public dance halls where strict rules applied. But the sharp uniforms and the smooth manners enchanted many an Australian girl. Would the Victory Belles slip from their plinths and become Victory Girls?

As well as the young Americans’ charm and gleam, early in the war in particular they were seen as liberators. Private Ron Berry, a Rat of Tobruk, arriving back in Fremantle on 20 March to save Australia’s bacon, found that none of it was available to him. ‘The town is overrun with Yank soldiers, who swank around the streets, telling us that they had to come over here to win the war for us.’ An Australian woman declared, ‘Americans have the gift of making the girls they escort feel like the finest ladies in the land. Americans did not seem ill at ease with women as Australian men did and seemed genuinely to like them.’ As for the Yanks, a Newcastle girl who ultimately married one gave her own, more Havelock Ellis explanation: ‘They knew how to pleasure women.’

Gradually, however, they ceased to be such glamorous and novel presences, and came to be seen as predatory. The women’s magazines began to emphasise loyalty to absent Australian husbands, fiancés and boyfriends. Dating an American could come to seem an act of betrayal. ‘Stick to your digger boyfriend,’ went a headline in Woman. ‘Our boys overseas are doing a job that is made possible only by the knowledge that back home things are flowing smoothly.’

The question of venereal disease (VD) was one addressed by the US army and Australian civic bodies: the Christian Temperance Union, the Country Women’s Association, the Mothercraft Association, the Queensland Trades and Labour Council, the Father and Son Welfare Movement, the Australian Natives’ Association and various churches, and other groups raised the concern and urged chastity. Sir Raphael Cilento, Director-General of Health and Medical Services in Queensland, and Ned Hanlon, the Labor Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, began to wage a crusade against VD as early as 1942; reasonably enough they were concerned about the drain such diseases constituted on medical services. Dr John Cooper Booth, the Director-General for Health in New South Wales, described women as ‘reservoirs of venereal disease in the community’. There were cries for the consumption of alcohol to be denied to women. Though girls could be depicted as ‘khaki-mad dabbler[s] in sex’ and thus ‘amateur saboteur[s]’, contradictorily the medical corps of both armies provided men with condoms and offered regular testing. Women with VD were locked away in closed wards, and Dr Booth recommended head-shaving for women who required VD treatment more than once.

In May 1943, Jessie Street, the fifty-four-year-old progressive and the president of the United Associations of Women, wrote to the Daily Telegraph deploring that Sydney was a ‘cesspool of vice’ and regretting that the authorities had opted to make ‘sex indulgence’ safe rather than preventing it, but calling for the punishment of seducers of young girls instead of those seduced. Her belief was that economic independence would free women from their attachment to sex. Female emancipation was economic, she believed, rather than sexual. Therefore, chastity was the necessary precondition for women’s economic advancement in society. But such figures as Street were not listened to by the young women heading for the Friday-night dance.

The US authorities frankly blamed civilian Australian women for the spread of sexual diseases, ‘stressing the cleanliness and patriotism of American women back home’. The American authorities were worried about the phalanx of what they called ‘amateurs’ as well. There was an imputation they were looking for rewards in kind rather than in cash. Some of these women were teenagers, others had no regular employment, and others were ‘Jekyll and Hydes’, shop and office workers by day and sexual freebooters by night.

But Australians secretly saw the Americans as the chief tempters and thus the chief problem. Admittedly, the US army had no monopoly on sexually transmitted diseases, but in the popular mind their apparent sophistication and frank appetites seemed to imply they were majority shareholders. Nonetheless, Australian military officials had the same concept of their own countrywomen as the Americans did. Salt, a journal of the Australian army, warned readers to be on their guard against ‘gold-digging’ harpies (a strange description of women who might be dating lower ranks, given the modesty of Australian army pay rates) and ‘lounge Lizzies’, who were just one step from professional prostitution.

So the possibility of venereal disease was the caveat now laid down to keep girls Victory Belles. The National Health and Medical Research Council, however, declared the idea that a serious proportion of the community carried venereal disease was ‘gravely misleading’. The complete figures for Queensland revealed a decline in the cases of syphilis amongst the civilian population during the war.

Some twelve thousand young Australian women married American servicemen for love but also, perhaps, in the hope of finding a new and less repressive milieu elsewhere. In the smaller towns and the suburbs of the United States, they would not always manage to discover it.

REBOUND

On the advance back across the mountains and to and along the New Guinea north coast beginning in September 1942, the Australians were now healthier and better supplied than their enemy. The common foe was the mosquito, who was able to breed in the millions even in pools caught in indented bootmarks in the jungle mud. But the hungrier you were, the more susceptible you were to malaria. The great preventive was quinine, the world supply of which was held by the Japanese. However, earlier in the century, German chemists had synthesised a drug named Atabrine, and fortunately the American company Winthrop had acquired manufacturing rights to it. By the end of 1942, it was in the hands of the troops in New Guinea, though some of them did not trust it, thinking it some sort of trick drug from a high command they didn’t respect. Atabrine did not infallibly save you from malaria, but what was certain was that it turned your skin yellow.

Winning or losing, fevered or clear-headed, New Guinea was still hell. It was, in that old phrase, war to the knife. Tom O’Lincoln, an Australian soldier, heard a pungent joke about it, a joke with a smell of sulphur. A wounded Japanese says to an Australian, ‘You think you’re going to be home for Christmas,’ to which the Digger replies, ‘And you think you’re going to hospital!’ Behind the joke is the fact that in New Guinea men on both sides were unlikely to get quarter in battle. One of the reasons, says the historian Paul Ham, is that the plump and comfortable General Blamey had notoriously accused the 21st Brigade of the 7th Division, drawn up on parade on 9 November 1942 and willing to be sent back into the battle, of ‘running like rabbits’ before the Japanese. ‘Remember it is the rabbit that runs who gets shot, not the man with the gun,’ he counselled. He also mentioned that some of their officers had failed in the field. ‘These are the men who saved Australia despite your mistakes,’ the 16th Battalion’s padre told Blamey. The bitterness on the Port Moresby parade ground that day had been palpable, and Blamey and the Japanese would pay for it. Australian soldier Ken Clift writes that after a victory at Oivi near Kokoda in November 1942, ‘very few of the enemy escaped. Many surrendered and were exterminated.’ Major-General Paul Cullen confirmed in 2001 that Australians had bayoneted Japanese prisoners to death in New Guinea. Peter Medcalf of the 43rd Battalion writes simply of one battle on New Guinea’s north coast: ‘We took no prisoners, or wounded.’ We had no scruples about shooting any wounded who lay about a captured position—that was the only safe way.’ And who could fully tell, unless they were there.

Yet there might have been other methods. Archival footage shows that Americans, now attacking Buna, ordered Japanese who were surrounded to take off their clothes. By doing this the Japanese showed they had no concealed weapons. But, wrote the war correspondent Osmar White, ‘You can’t fight this war without hate . . . If you don’t hate enough, you’re going to be beaten.’

Another commentator argued that the Australians knew they were fighting against a ‘truly merciless enemy . . . consequently they matched the Japanese with a savagery equal to their own, and like them would sooner die than surrender’. A perceptive veteran said that fighting the Japanese brought out something Australian commanders had previously found difficult to awaken—‘the killing instinct’. Captain Henry ‘Jo’ Gullett, Oxford- and Sorbonne-educated, son of the war historian and member of Menzies’ Cabinet who had been killed with other government ministers in that devastating air crash at Canberra airport in 1940, explained, ‘We never gave them a chance if we could help it. If an Italian or German were running away, one might let him go, but never a Japanese. You would kill him as you would kill a snake.’

An AIF soldier accurately described the New Guinea fighting as ‘an exercise in extermination’, and the idea of its being such came from the top, from General Vasey himself, whose directive to troops in Papua read: ‘One does not expect a live tiger to give himself up to capture so we must not expect a Japanese to surrender. He does not. He must be killed . . . truly jungle warfare is a game of kill or be killed.’

The new brigades chasing the Japanese back towards Kokoda were skilfully managed. The Australians occupied Ioribaiwa, the furthest ridge Horii had taken, and were surprised to reach Myola by 9 October. The Japanese were ghosts now, harrowed, abandoning equipment. Although there were what could be considered healthy garrisons on the north coast at swamp-girt Buna, Sanananda and Gona, and further west at Lae and Salamaua, Horii would lose four out of five of the men who had set out on the track to take Port Moresby. As the Australians pushed along the track, they waged war with rifles and grenades, fighting screens of sick men in slit trenches, ready to resist them to the limit, or more strictly, to the point of obliteration. The Australians were still learning to read the jungle, to see by the disposition of leaves where a lethal enemy might be. They crawled forward over slime impregnated with excreta and decomposing body parts, and fell victim to dysentery as a result.

The casualties from illness were phenomenal. The 25th Brigade lost sixty-eight men killed and a further 135 wounded but nearly eight hundred felled by illness. The Papuan bearers collapsed on the track, sick, and some deserted, escaping that muscle-splitting, breath-sapping and health-depleting track. The 25th pushed the enemy back to Eora Creek, scene of desperate military options during the earlier retreat. Japanese mountain artillery and mortars poured in fire, and the Australian supply line suffered as bearers continued to collapse with fever and hunger.

Brigadier General Potts was called back to Port Moresby to report first-hand on 22 October, and was immediately told he would be replaced, unjustly, having fought one of the most meritorious—and perhaps the most remarkable—battles. He was philosophical, and told his wife he had known there had to be some sackings and it was just bad luck.

Now it was the 7th Division’s Tubby Allen whom MacArthur and Blamey accused of dallying. MacArthur complained that the enemy seemed to be allowed to delay the Australians ‘at will’, and on 27 October, when the Japanese were pulling out of Eora Creek, General Allen paid the price, as had Rowell and Potts. Allen was told half-diplomatically by Blamey, ‘Consider that you have had sufficiently prolonged tour of duty in forward area.’

When on 22 November the 25th Brigade took Kokoda, transport planes were able to supply the men, and the Battle of Kokoda was at a close. The new general, Vasey, assembled the now resting native porters, thanked them for their efforts and awarded medals to a number of them. On 11 November, two of Vasey’s battalions surrounded the Japanese main force at Oivi-Gorari near the Kumusi River and a few got away to Buna. Horii did not. While he and four of his officers were crossing the river near the bridge the Papua New Guineans called Wairopi (wire rope), a name which also attached to the location, their raft struck a tree. Horii and others took to a canoe, which was swept to the estuary of the river and overturned in the surf, where Horii, drained of strength, let go. The man who had sought to dominate Australia from Port Moresby drowned.

Roughly parallel and to the east of the Australians, Americans were crossing the mountains by the Jaure Trail on their way to attack Buna. Other American regiments were flown over the mountains for that purpose. The Australians from Milne Bay were also flown in, ready to attack the Japanese on the coast.

From the bottom of the mountains stretched soggy kunai grass plains ending in jungle and palm groves along the north coast. The men of the 2/14th Battalion, veterans of the desert and Syria, retrained and rested, boarded planes on 25 November 1942 at the Seven Mile drome near Port Moresby to fly over the mountains to Popondetta, 32 kilometres from Gona on the coast. The unit consisted of just 341 men now, one of them Harry ‘Jarmbe’ Saunders, a young Aboriginal man from Lake Condah, near Portland, Victoria, brother of the soldier Reg Saunders, who had by now escaped from Crete.

Australians and the American 32nd Division were in action against the Japanese at Buna, but Harry Saunders’ unit was sent forward to assault Gona, further west along the coast. Sanananda sat between them, another stronghold. The Japanese entrenchments at Buna, Sanananda and Gona were located on solid ground between the ocean and inland swamps. Blamey understood the peril of the situation and asked MacArthur for naval support to shell these strongholds. Any of the heavy cruisers deployed in the Solomons would have suited Blamey’s needs. But MacArthur believed the Allies would quickly overrun the Japanese positions, even without much artillery to back them up.

On being landed, the men of the 14th Battalion marched thirteen kilometres on the Sanananda track towards Gona, through kunai grass, which gave way then to coastal swamps and, bunkered beyond them, between the wetland and the beach, the Japanese garrisons. Close to the coast and its black volcanic sand beach, the gun pits they came up against were reinforced with logs and covered with dirt that even mortars could not penetrate. Snipers sat in the coconut palms around the gun pits. The remnants of one of the 25th Brigade’s other battalions were just pulling back. More than three out of four of them were casualties one way or another, from illness or the resistance of the enemy. A sergeant of the 25th claimed that everyone had a temperature of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), but did not report as sick until they reached 105 degrees (40.5 degrees). They had been fighting alongside a further battalion of their own 7th Division and two remaining ones of their 25th Brigade.

Here was a miserable place for the 14th Battalion’s years of warriorhood to end, but it would be a grave to nearly three hundred of the attacking force, which was ordered forward at dusk on 29 November. The last three kilometres to their starting point lay through a chest-deep sago swamp, crossing which they had to hold their rifles above their heads. The instant the first soldier moved out of the swamp into the beach area he was shot down. Without having been given the time for a proper reconnaissance, the Australians were being thrown away.

The Australians withdrew at 11.30 p.m., after much carnage. The next day the mission was bombed to prepare it for assault. Again there had been no proper reconnaissance and no chance to build up a coordinated plan of attack. The attack nonetheless went forward at 9.30 that morning. Twelve fighter planes dropped bombs on the Gona installations, and three heavy fighters called Havocs machine-gunned the beach area. The air attack did not cause as much damage as the Australians, moving forward, expected it to have. The attack by land predictably failed, and yet another one was hurriedly planned.

Some of the Japanese gun pits they had tried to capture or, as the term has it, ‘reduce’, had been lined with life preservers to absorb bullets. Each pit contained roughly seven men, including at least one machine-gunner. They were in shadow and foliage and the Australians could barely see them. When a 14th man named Mokka Tracy was killed by a sniper, Bren gunners then shot the sniper out of his tree. But many of the slits through which the Japanese machine guns were fired were too small for a grenade to be pushed through.

Harry Saunders was killed in that morning attack by a bullet through the head. A further attempt was made that afternoon. The next day, patrols began to locate the Japanese positions. A blasting of the gun posts with rifle brigades followed, and a coordinated attack on snipers in the trees. Australian units circled around the beachside and staged a bayonet attack. The Australians now held a kilometre of beach within the Buna–Gona area. But it would take time, and much pain, before the central Japanese fortifications fell.

When bombs often had little effect on the strangely constructed and well camouflaged Japanese entrenchments, Allied ships brought in a few tracked Australian Bren gun carriers, light vehicles indeed, of which the Bren gun was the armament. Not only did they bog, and ‘belly’ on logs, but around one such vehicle the Japanese set alight the kunai grass and the crew was burned to death trying to escape. Many of the US Stuart tank crews advancing on Buna suffered in the same way.

To deal with bunkers, the Diggers used an explosive device improvised from a hand grenade secured to a bully beef tin full of high explosive. By mid-December the Japanese blockhouse had been stormed. Defenders and attackers were cut to remnants of flesh, and young men with jungle fevers in their blood fought each other intimately in sweat and slime. The coastal town of Gona on the left flank fell to the Australians. The Australian 18th Brigade was sent to help the 32nd Division capture Buna. In total, there were nearly three thousand Allied soldiers killed and wounded in these attacks, a thousand of them Australians.

Sanananda held out in the middle. General George C. Kenney of the US Army Air Forces had told MacArthur that there were only a thousand of the enemy there. In fact, Australian and American forces killed more than fifteen hundred, and it is estimated that twelve hundred sick and wounded were taken off by sea at night, while more than a thousand escaped to the west of Gona. Six hundred Australians and three hundred Americans lost their lives taking Sanananda.

Just under four thousand Australian and American soldiers died in these terrible confrontations, seizing the north coast. In the fighting between Japanese and US forces on Guadalcanal in 1942–43, the casualties were lower—despite impressions to the contrary—than in these three savage coastal battles. But before the battle was over, MacArthur claimed it had been won (he needed an end-of-year announcement) with only some skirmishing left to attend to. Buna was the first great US army victory of the Pacific War, but he did not mention the name of his field commander, US General Eichelberger.

To the west along the coast, the Japanese still held Lae and Nadzab, at the base of the broad peninsula named the Huon, and Salamaua and Finschhafen (a name left over from the days Germany governed the area) near its tip. Further west still were the coastal towns and ports of Madang, Wewak and Aitape—all of them on the agenda of the Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Their capture would allow Kenney’s bombers and the Australian air force squadrons to move further to the west and closer and closer to certain enemy targets.

Lae is on the southern base of the Huon Peninsula, Salamaua is down the coast eastwards, and both are reached by the village and airstrips of Wau, inland in the kunai grass plains. The Japanese broke out of Salamaua and fought to the edges of the Australian garrison at Wau before being defeated. As battles, the capture of Lae and the attack on Salamaua were massively removed from the undersupplied and primal struggle on the Kokoda Trail. The military might describe them as a brilliant combination of sea, air and land resources. But they were still bitter affairs. The campaign began in March 1943 and ended a year later with Australian forces advancing along the coast to Madang. Blamey rotated commanders and formations as troops became exhausted from battle, terrain and sickness. But he kept attacking with five divisions, three of whom were militia, trained on the Atherton Tablelands.

Early in 1943, Damien Parer flew back to Port Moresby while there was a lull in the land fighting. The Japanese attack from Salamaua had been defeated on the fringe of the Wau airstrip, and the Australians were being reinforced there for the final offensive against Salamaua.

In Port Moresby, Parer attached himself to 30 Squadron RAAF, flying Beaufighters from Port Moresby. The casualty level amongst Beaufighters was high, but that did not give him pause. The Beaufighters were attacking Japanese airstrips and installations from a low level on the far side of New Guinea, and that was filmic, but to get to them they needed to climb over the Owen Stanleys, and there was oxygen enough only for the pilot and the observer.

Parer stood behind Torchy Uren, the pilot who had volunteered to take him, with his legs braced on either side of the four-feet-by-two-feet (120 by 60 centimetres) well of the plane, his hands gripping the front spar above the pilot’s head; when he wanted to film he leaned with his elbows on the spar, steadying his camera on Uren’s head, and shot through the windshield. Uren thought him odd, doing things he didn’t have to do, and on top of that, passing out for lack of oxygen in the well of the plane as they cleared the mountains. As they strafed a Japanese-held village near Finschhafen, Parer started shooting film. He didn’t realise that when Uren pulled out of the dive, gravity would make the camera weigh five times as much as usual. Parer overbalanced and fell into the well. They repeated the strafing run and the same thing happened.

Intelligence reported that on 28 February 1943, a large Japanese convoy prepared to sail from Rabaul, eight transports carrying nearly ten thousand reinforcements for Lae and Salamaua, accompanied by eight destroyers and a fighter screen of Zeros. When it was within range of the Beaufighters—an event for which Parer waited for some days with the same impatience as the air crews—a report came through that the convoy was within range. ‘I had a funny feeling,’ Parer said. ‘Today it would be all or nothing. Either the greatest scoop in newsreel history, or Torchy . . . and I would be in the drink.’

Parer passed out again over the Owen Stanleys and revived by the time the Beaufighters reached their rendezvous point off Cape Ward Hunt. They found themselves circling above a squadron of US attack bombers, and above them were Mitchells, and above that, Flying Fortresses; last of all, on top, was the fighter cover. ‘It was the greatest show I’d ever seen.’

When the destroyers opened fire on the Allied aircraft and the Zeros descended, there was chaos. Uren swung away from the destroyers to take on the transports, whose decks were crammed with men. Their plane was at mast level for Uren’s first strafing run. Parer filmed Uren’s tracer as it hit the ships. There were Japanese soldiers crouching in a lifeboat on one of the ships’ davits, and Parer the sensitive Catholic and Labor man cried, ‘Poor bastards, you poor bastards!’ as the Japanese on the decks and in the water were reaped by machine guns.

Uren pulled up into the sky, levelled off and made two more runs, both filmed by Parer. Nearby, a Zero shot down an American Flying Fortress. Uren dived down yet again on a burning transport. But Parer did not get the footage he wanted and began to swear and reload. ‘Can you go in over those two burning ships again? I missed ’em.’ And Uren did it, with a flight of Zeros above him. By now most of the ships were sinking or blazing. In this confrontation, which would become known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the 51st Japanese Division lost almost three thousand men and most of its experienced officers.

The next morning, Parer flew over the mountains again in a Boston bomber looking for a Japanese destroyer but it was already sunk by the time the bomber got there. That day, Uren’s aircraft received a Japanese machine-gun round just behind the pilot’s seat where Parer’s head would have been. The next day Parer made two more Beaufighter flights, with the inevitable altitude unconsciousness. He stayed on in the 30 Squadron lines to round out his film. It, too, was considered a documentary masterpiece by everyone except Parer.

Now Parer joined the Australian assault on Salamaua, and he was delighted to tell Chester Wilmot, ‘I was able to go up with the forward boys of the infantry. Attack is easier for the cameraman, and while the valleys are heavily jungled, there was only light timber on the ridges. I had room to operate . . . [it was] the best film material I’ve come across.’ From June to August 1943, he lived with the troops. Once he lumped shells forward to a three-inch mortar that had run out of ammunition. He also worked as a stretcher-bearer when a commando was shot through the chest and both arms. He handed his camera to the man next to him and joined three others who crawled out under fire to drag the wounded man out of danger. When a Japanese soldier charged a foxhole he was in Parer began frantically focusing on the man, yelling, ‘Don’t shoot the bastard yet!’ The Australian soldier actually held his fire and allowed Parer to film the lethal shot.

This footage would all go into his film Assault on Salamaua. For the attack on Timbered Knoll, Parer filmed planning and the passing of orders down from the brigade to section leaders. He filmed the mortars and machine guns giving covering fire, then he accompanied a raid led by Lieutenant John Lewin up a narrow steep ridge to the top of the knoll, filming Lewin from a metre away. He was crouched close to Private H.W. Robins when Robins was wounded and two of the commandos applied field dressings and dragged him to cover. His footage follows Private W.H. Dawson dashing towards the Japanese weapon pits, hurling grenades and firing.

Parer was beside Sergeant Andrew ‘Bonny’ Muir when Muir was killed. And he was with the section that charged the top of Timbered Knoll, where he filmed the dead Japanese in their foxholes. He also filmed the drained faces of the attackers afterwards, the digging of graves, the burials of Sergeant Muir, Corporal Donald Buckingham and Corporal Percival Hooks while men stood with their heads bare in the rain.

After a stint with commandos on Timor, in August 1943 Parer received an invitation from Paramount News in New York offering him roughly eight times his Australian salary. He resigned from the Department of Information and accepted Paramount’s offer. He was not happy thereafter. He covered the American invasions of Cape Gloucester on New Britain, the Admiralty Islands and Guam. He became a legendary figure to the marines on Guam, following their tanks in their advance from the beach head, filming the infantry from the front as he had in North Africa.

Other combat cameramen were killed yet he astonishingly remained. Parer’s method with the Americans was to follow close behind the tanks and thus film the most dramatic moments of the marine infantry’s charge almost as if he were in the enemy foxholes. Though he continued to film in this perilous way, he felt that by accepting Paramount’s offer he had sold out.

Back in Australia from the Admiralties, he met up again with Elizabeth Cotter, a twenty-two-year-old clerk from Sydney whom he had known for eight years, and became engaged to her; the following Thursday, they married. They had a film honeymoon, in that Parer saw every motion picture he could. Elizabeth Parer would later say, ‘I would give the whole of my life for another five minutes with Damien.’

On 17 September 1944, he was covering the landing of the Americans on Peleliu Island, Palau. A company attack on a set of Japanese bunkers had fallen off and the tanks were called in. Parer followed the left tank into the attack, filming the marines from the front again. He was on a mound of coral behind the tank, filming the advancing marines, when a Japanese machine gun concealed nearby opened up. He was shot in the chest, stomach and thighs and seemed to die at once. The tank wiped out the nest and the marines came on Parer’s body and buried him that morning. In ignorance, someone opened his camera and exposed the film.

Parer was thirty-two years old.

With regard to the campaigns at Wewak and on Bougainville during late 1944 and 1945, Blamey has been criticised for employing an offensive policy when, it was agreed, it might have been better to protect the Allied bases by patrolling and waiting for the war to finish. Blamey declared to the Advisory War Council in 1944 that the troops’ morale and health would deteriorate if they were not involved in an offensive. If he eliminated the Japanese divisions, he said, the army could be reduced from six to three divisions, one of which could be made available to MacArthur. He also argued that Australia had a duty to liberate the natives from Japanese domination.

MacArthur now had three American divisions under his command, but only two regimental combat teams were battle ready. The snappily uniformed and worldly Yanks (a term applied to them by Australians, in ignorance of the basic facts of the American Civil War, whether they came from Maine or Mississippi) were visible in every urban venue in Australia, as long as they were white. Occasionally a coloured GI would make an appearance in a city pub or café and amaze, appal and fascinate the citizens of White Australia.

The 1st Cavalry Division, not yet trained for jungle warfare, arrived in Australia in early 1943. The same was true of the 24th US Infantry Division. MacArthur also had under his command the 1st US Marine Division, which had fought at Guadalcanal and needed to be built up with reinforcements. They would not be ready for battle until the end of 1943. So, if MacArthur wanted Lae and Finschhafen, he would have to depend upon the Australians again.

The 7th Australian Division was ready again for battle by mid-1943, despite its heavy casualties in 1942. One brigade of the 6th Division was also available after having taken part in the defeat of the Japanese at Milne Bay. The 9th Division was freshly arrived home from the Middle East. Trained on the Atherton Tablelands, the 9th Division troops about to be sent against Lae and Salamaua were, however, of a different order from the eighteen-year-old conscripts who had fought and held on the Kokoda Trail the year before.

Iven Mackay had the overall command in New Guinea now and estimated the Japanese had eleven thousand men at Wewak, to the west of Madang, six to eight thousand at Madang itself, and five to six thousand in the Lae–Salamaua area. The 5th US Air Force using Mitchell bombers bombed both the Japanese positions and the ships that supplied them, as did the Australian Beaufighters.

A force of landing craft brought an American combat team into the coast, but they were landed in the wrong place and many of the landing craft were destroyed when, withdrawing through the surf, they broached and were swamped. The combat team was led inland by Australian guides, but it was understandably nervous and fired at sounds in the jungle, inflicting many casualties on itself, including killing eighteen of its men.

But in the end in August and September 1943 a combined force of Australians and Americans exerted such pressure on Salamaua that Japanese forces were drawn away from Lae to reinforce them. In the meantime, the 7th Division advanced inland against Nadzab, at the base of the Huon Peninsula, and an amphibious landing by Major-General Morshead’s 9th Division led to an advance on the Japanese forces in Lae from the west. Four destroyers had shelled the beach to make way for Morshead’s men, and by midday there were over seven thousand troops and more than fifteen hundred tons of stores landed. There was no Japanese opposition and the Australians formed up and moved towards Nadzab.

On 4 September, 302 fighter, bomber and transport planes took off from airfields in Moresby and elsewhere to carry paratroopers of the American 503rd Parachute Regiment to the Nadzab airstrip, which had not previously been able to sustain a landing by so many planes. Another three carried 25-pounder field guns and their Australian and American crews, all of whom were about to make their first parachute jump. General MacArthur travelled in one of the transport planes, covered by fighters and B17s. On 16 September, patrols from the 7th Division entered the abandoned town of Lae and drove through to the seashore. Salamaua fell shortly afterwards. The 7th Division had suffered thirty-eight men killed and 104 wounded. The 9th Division lost seventy-seven men killed, and seventy-three were missing (a troubling statistic given that neither side was showing much mercy), while four hundred men were wounded. More than six thousand Japanese had escaped from the area to rejoin forces on the north coast of the Peninsula around Finschhafen.

The 9th Division’s second amphibious operation was set for 22 September, only five days after the fall of Lae. They were to land on Scarlet Beach, seven kilometres from the town of Finschhafen. The pre-dawn assault ran into navigation problems at first, but the town was taken. The Japanese garrison was quickly overrun by the veteran Diggers (although some of the garrison as ever flitted away to the west). In little more than three months the Australians had given MacArthur total victory in New Guinea. Finschhafen provided MacArthur with the base he needed, the one from which he would return to Manila to retake the Philippines. Meanwhile, by the end of 1943, four thousand Australians had lost their lives in the campaign.

Rabaul on New Britain was left alone except by the air force. By the end of 1943, Rabaul was no longer a Japanese naval base and the Japanese concentrated their aircraft in other areas. The well-equipped Japanese garrison was marooned there, and connected to Japan only by submarine or by wireless. The hundred thousand Japanese troops and naval personnel would spend the remainder of the war growing food for themselves on the Rabaul hillside terraces, and waiting for the Allies to arrive.

Following the capture of Finschhafen in 1943, the Australians moved further west. On 19 January 1944, a party of 9th Division engineers found a metal box that had been dumped into a water-filled pit by the retreating Japanese at a furiously-fought-for area named Sio. The box contained Japanese code books—with current cipher keys. This discovery was probably the most important of the war in the Pacific. For the remainder of the war, Allied intelligence used them to get the entire Japanese order of battle and to update it. MacArthur, and the Allies in general, benefited greatly from them. So sensitive was the captured material that no message concerning its content or use could be sent by radio. The information could only be delivered to Washington by ‘safe hand’ courier.

The few weeks between the discovery of the codes and their delivery to the Joint Chiefs were seen by MacArthur as his ‘window of opportunity’. He knew from intercepts that Japanese troops in the Admiralty Islands, on Manus and Los Negros, which sat north of the eastern end of New Guinea, numbered only a little over four thousand. In bringing in two divisions to obliterate the Japanese in the Admiralties, he used three armed merchant cruisers of the Australian navy, the Manoora, Kanimbla and Westralia, as landing ships. Each of them was equipped with twenty-five landing craft. MacArthur also had four cruisers, including the Australia and the Shropshire (the two heaviest Australian cruisers) and two American light cruisers. Amongst officers and troops on the ships there was some questioning about the necessity of the landing. Since MacArthur had enunciated the arguments for bypassing islands and instead cutting off the garrisons manning them, why the Admiralties? For a quick and spectacular PR coup for the general—that was why!

MacArthur travelled with Admiral Kincaid aboard the US cruiser Phoenix, and inspected Los Negros on 28 September, after an American battalion had landed there and taken it. He permitted himself to be decorated on the beach, an event covered by the press corps just before filing time for the morning editions of American east coast newspapers. Then he returned to the Phoenix and departed the region. That evening the Japanese counter-attacked the young Americans, who lacked all heavy equipment. They suffered horrifyingly but held. So Douglas MacArthur was as willing to claim a victory off the backs of young men he had as good as abandoned on Los Negros as he was to gainsay the fibre of the Australians while claiming credit for their victories.

MAKING THE GOLDEN SOCIETY

Soon after the Japanese had been driven out of Kokoda again, on a hot 22 December 1942, Curtin created a Department of Post-war Reconstruction. Herbert ‘Nugget’ Coombs was its secretary, a man who came from a less privileged family—his English father had been a minor railway official in the town of Kalamunda east of Perth, where the boy was given the nickname he would take into a later, eminent life. Coombs’ mother was Irish, daughter of a graduate of Trinity College; his grandfather, Nugget would say, came to Australia ‘under a cloud’. Mrs Coombs was bookish and so was her son, a scholarship boy par excellence. Beginning as a schoolteacher, he went on in 1931 to study Keynes at the London School of Economics, where he was instructed by Harold Laski, said to be one of the most influential Marxists of the twentieth century. In 1933, Coombs was awarded a PhD for a thesis on central banking.

Coombs was not a Marxist but an economist of a particular stripe: ‘The publication of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 was for me and many of my generation the most seminal intellectual event of our time.’ Keynes was, above all, the economist who appealed to those like Coombs who saw the state as a welcome player and intervener in the sphere of economics, and as a guarantor of minimum human dignity through policy. Coombs was a rebel against the classical economic theory that dominated Treasury at the time. When the Australian Labor Party under John Curtin came to power in 1941, Coombs found himself in a political environment that suited him. Now in his mid-thirties, and with a good if short record as Director of Rationing, Coombs was the sort of thinker Treasurer Ben Chifley wanted as secretary of his new department.

In proposing a great post-war society, a society that was at a polar remove from the horrors of the Depression, Coombs would recollect that weekend staff conferences of the new department in offices amongst the eucalyptus bushlands of Canberra had the intensity of revivalist meetings. Newly brought-in economists and planners knew that their work for creating post-war Australia, trying to forge a new relationship between citizens and government, was taken seriously by the sturdy, polite yet direct Chifley. An important ally of Coombs and his friends was the economist from the University of Melbourne and wartime Prices Commissioner, Douglas Copland, an energetic and stellar economist professor who introduced price ceilings on goods and subsidised industries so that they could manufacture enough items to keep prices level. As for Chifley, Coombs remembered he ‘always read what you wrote’.

Since the group of young economists had great cohesion and were resented by much of the rest of the public service—Coombs was often reminded he and his fellow planners were considered ‘interlopers’—they were like economic Rats of Tobruk, insulted and proud of it. For Coombs would later declare that he ‘was attempting to express in general terms what I believe to be the hopes and aspirations of the people of Australia in the post-war period’. If this sounded ‘a bit priest-like’, he argued there was universal agreement that ordinary Australians wanted stable employment, rising living standards, and security against the risks of sickness, unemployment and old age—everything the Depression had deprived them of. To him, relying on the decisions and preferences of consumers and investors was not enough; it exposed Commonwealth economies to booms and busts and so to waves of sackings during crisis periods until uncontrolled capitalism created the next boom. Coombs and his department wanted to represent the interests of ‘the male breadwinner’ rather than those of the holders of political, bureaucratic and financial power.

To quench industrial unrest, he and his disciples and colleagues wanted to retain some degree of control over post-war prices and ensure that wages reflected increases in productivity. But he also wanted men’s lives to take on ‘new colour, new intensity and new dramatic quality’. That could not be achieved merely by the consumption of ‘things which are bought and sold in the market’. It was provided by collective goods: schools, libraries, parks and playgrounds, museums, picture galleries, public health services, roads, and opportunities for political activity and sport. Coombs saw community facilities as equal to capital equipment in industry. The public facilities were where ‘the essential business of human life is carried on’, where men met their friends, lovers, rivals, and even enemies, and pursued the personal relationships that constitute a fulfilling life.

In an election far ahead, in 1949, Australians would ultimately reject Coombs’ and Chifley’s formulas. For already, in 1942, the young planners knew that consumers’ desires were not always rational and, as the war proceeded and became more hopeful, were being worked on and distorted by advertising and marketing. In other words, as Coombs’ opponents might argue, he believed that housewives who to keep food fresh had had to await the regular delivery of ice, toted to back doors by a man with a sack on his shoulder and a block of ice resting on it and held in place by tongs, might in too many cases lust after refrigerators. Yet despite his worries about irrational consumerism, Coombs’ post-war vision for women—at this stage, mid-war—was not concerned with their employment or equal pay, but involved very much labour-saving devices ‘to provide respite from the strain of being isolated at home with young children . . . It is probably true that nothing could contribute so much to the well-being of so large a number of people as provision which would make it possible for every mother to have four hours a day, one night a week and three weeks every year free from her children.’

The society the new department was planning for in Chifley’s name was seen by many—especially the young conservative bureaucrat and future parliamentarian from Western Australia, Paul Hasluck—as authoritarian and socialist. The failure of Nugget Coombs and his colleagues to realise their vision of post-war Australia rested in part on the gap between their mythological creation of the sturdy male breadwinner and what the actual man and his wife might desire and covet. The problem would arise from the way ‘Australian working men and their wives’ would behave after the war.

The group Coombs was worried about was factory owners, their lack of innovation and their contentment with old-fashioned methods. Before the war, it had been Japanese-made goods that had always been mocked as shoddy and pointed to as a reason Japan could not fight a modern war. (The author can remember Australian parents boasting at birthday parties that they had bought the Australian- or British-made toy over the cheap and tinny Japanese one.) In fact, it was Australian entrepreneurs, protected against imports by tariffs, who had a history of being slow to take on new methods and new techniques. One aspect of the solution, argued Coombs, was to diminish the relative impact of businessmen’s decisions by expanding the state’s ownership of business and its share of economic activity. Government economic experts would thus become more important than private entrepreneurs!

There was less polarisation of opinion between Coombs and capital than might have been expected. Interestingly, some leading businessmen themselves, men such as William Sydney Robinson, a mining entrepreneur who had once quarrelled with Billy Hughes over German-owned metal businesses, who had accompanied Evatt on his Washington and London meetings, and who had been one of the founders of the aluminium industry in Australia, agreed that the suffering and waste of the pre-war years could not be tolerated. Robinson endorsed the government’s pledge of full employment and individual security provided by what would become known as a ‘safety net’ of social services. Herbert Gepp, industrialist and business publicist, who as a young explosives chemist had worked with the renowned Nobel company, and whom Billy Hughes considered so important to Australia’s future that during World War I he had called him back from the ranks of the 1st AIF and sent him to America to market zinc concentrates, said that between the wars the views of entrepreneurs on the whole had been ‘confined and selfish’. Gepp declared: ‘The emphasis of policy (in post-war era) should be on profits and service and not profits alone.’ Gepp too had been much influenced by Keynes and, impatient with the torpor and lack of imagination with which most Australian businessmen approached their roles, did not disagree with the vision of post-war society articulated by Coombs and Copland.

In fact, an economic revolution was underway in Australia, and it would run between the rise to power in 1941 of Curtin and the retirement of Menzies as Liberal prime minister in 1966. It was greatly influenced if not dominated by personalities who brought with them different contributions and convictions, and Robinson and Essington Lewis were remarkable amongst them. Their work spanned virtually the whole of the modern period to 1965. Both men were born in Australia: Robinson in Melbourne in 1876, Lewis in South Australia in 1881.

Robinson described himself as having been ‘born, as you will see, in the candle and kerosene, horse and buggy, bread and dripping, and hand-setting age’. He is believed, when young, to have been the first journalist in Australia to type his material. Lewis, on the other hand, was born into the establishment, attended St Peter’s College, and graduated from the South Australian School of Mines to work for BHP for two years, starting at five shillings per week and rising to be shift boss.

Robinson would be an advisor to Curtin, Evatt and Chifley, and helped Chifley attract General Motors to Australia to create the Holden, the first one available for sale in 1948 (the vehicle itself was named after the carriage works and car family of Holden in South Australia). He had earlier been involved in establishing the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, which built Australia’s first metal aircraft, the less-than-effective Wirraway, in 1939. But through Alfred Sloan junior, president of General Motors in New York, he had induced General Motors to invest capital in the aircraft corporation. Both he and Lewis foresaw World War II; having foreseen the future after visits to Japan and Germany in 1934, Lewis began to gear up a section of BHP’s manufacturing resources at Newcastle and Port Kembla for war. During the war, Lewis became Menzies’ director-general of Munitions, his pay in that job what it had been as a mine worker in 1904—five shillings a week.

Both men were very chary of publicity. Robinson was tall, a footballer and long-distance runner; Lewis was sturdy, tough and broad-shouldered. He was keen on horseriding and would die of a heart attack at the age of eighty while on horseback. Lewis and Robinson were paternalistic men who urged management to spend money on houses, parks and swimming pools, and Lewis had ambitions to convert BHP from ‘a bitter feuding industry into a calm, peaceful, united community’. Though he was a conservative he was very good friends with Ted Theodore, and during the Depression sided with the Scullin government’s resistance to the rigidity of the Bank of England.

In 1949, Winston Churchill declared that Robinson had made manifold services to the British Commonwealth. Bernard Baruch, American industrialist, described him to US president Herbert Hoover as ‘one of the very few men I met in my life who had the elements of real greatness’. It was assumed he was rich but, though he achieved modest affluence, it was not so.

Men of their time, the planners of post-war reconstruction, failed to give much attention to women as more than ‘the working man’s wife’. In winning the vote in 1902, women’s organisations had campaigned for the franchise specifically on women’s place as mothers. Feminists in the 1930s made some progress not only in advancing health services for women and children, and achieving the maternity allowance and child endowment allowance, but also in the appointment of some women as police and health inspectors. The concept of woman as worker began to compete with the idea of the woman as mother in the minds of the women of the suburbs, not just in feminist politics. The 1933 Census had shown that three out of ten women workers were sole breadwinners, generally working for low wages in dressmaking, millinery and the textile industry. But unions fought to have married women, sole breadwinners or not, rejected by employers.

World War II was changing all. There were thousands of young women volunteering for military service. Fifty-five thousand would be in the ranks by 1945, and these women—and others outside the military—did the jobs of men. Many other girls, such as eighteen-year-old Marie Coyle of Kempsey, came to the city and learned to be welders. Between 1939 and 1941, nearly a hundred thousand additional women entered the workforce, mainly in munitions factories and other war supplies. Industry and the women’s military services gave young women a taste of freedom from parental control; this of course helped stoke the ‘moral panic’ depicted earlier in this chapter, and raise the fear girls would never ‘settle down’. Lady Gowrie, wife of the wartime Governor-General and Curtin’s friend and passionate promoter of the Australian diva Joan Hammond, told the mainly young women who had enlisted in the women’s military forces, ‘We do not want our service-women to become hard-faced and tough. After the war we want them to remain women and set up homes just as they would have done had there been no war.’

In 1942, the same year as Coombs’ new department was established, the government set up the Women’s Employment Board to decide on women’s wages, which were set at about 90 per cent of the male rate—on the grounds of women’s lesser physical strength and supposed greater absenteeism. But employers would not comply. E.C. McGrath, Federal Secretary of the Printing Industry Employees’ Union, writes of women playing a magnificent part in the war industries, but he believed that when the war was over, any woman expecting her employment to continue was likely to suffer ‘unfortunate disillusionment’. Employers would always prefer men, he said, because ‘a woman, whether trained or untrained, is unstable in industry by reason of her marriage . . . or by reason of physiological and domestic complications which are not the common lot of man’.

Significant steps included the appointment in 1944 of Kathleen Best, a Sydney nurse in her early thirties, as assistant director of Women’s Reestablishment. As a member of the 5th Australian General Hospital, Best had survived both the drive against Mussolini’s colonies in Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1941 and the Western Desert campaigns. She had served in and escaped from Greece, even though, with three dozen other nurses, had volunteered to stay behind with the wounded. Ordered to evacuate to Crete, she was ordered to leave there. She had then commanded a staging depot, nicknamed ‘Katie’s Birdcage’, for nurses in Palestine. Best was altogether a formidable and gifted organiser but also a charming comrade to her nurses, and her job now was to plan for the post-war management of the retraining for work of women released from the workplace and the army depot. She did not want to resign from a career herself, and she was sure many women did not.

A former nurse, Mary Ryan, a friend of Chifley’s, was appointed to the Housing Commission in 1943, and slaved for two years allocating and improving housing. She knew whereof she spoke. Her own home in Portland, New South Wales, lacked electrical appliances, had a coal-fired stove and no internal water. Throughout the Depression, her husband had been an unemployed billiard-marker. Her vision was to improve housing and other benefits so that women who—due to social or biological pressures—had to choose the home would live there in some dignity.

The truth is that both women, though their struggle was noble, did not acknowledge in the majority of women any hunger for a career outside the house. Both these women were criticised by women’s organisations as being members of the ‘women’s place is in the home’ camp.

But Ryan’s influence, like Best’s, was substantial, and could be argued as being at least a stage along the way to an imagined enlargement of women’s lives. Ryan was assertive in other ways as well. Though a practising Catholic, she was an early critic of conservative Catholicism and priestly bullying, even though her second son entered the priesthood.

AUSTRALIA WILL BE THERE?

In July 1944, MacArthur blithely told Blamey that he intended that an Australian division should be used in a landing at Leyte in the Philippines and in another one at Lingayen Gulf. They would each fight in an American corps. This was a problem Blamey’s World War II commanders had experienced with the British in World War I—the question of independence. Blamey wrote to MacArthur, ‘There is no adequate reason why the Australian corps should not be employed [in the Philippines] as a corps under its own commander.’

But MacArthur’s plans for Australians seemed vague, and the government began to worry that their place in post-war negotiations would be undermined if they did not continue to assault the enemy. Curtin had said in 1943 that Australia’s ‘military effort should be on a scale to guarantee her an effective voice in the peace settlement’. Australian shipyards meritoriously turned out a huge number of destroyers, frigates and corvettes, and on top of that the provision of labour for the Americans was one of the major factors which meant that Australia was the only Allied country to end the war with a credit balance in its Lend Lease account, the system by which the United States supplied military materials to its allies. As well as specifically Australian RAF units, there were plenty of Australians flying in Bomber Command, in squadrons throughout the Pacific and even on aircraft carriers associated with American fleets. Surely that counted for something.

On St Patrick’s Day 1944, MacArthur had been in Australia for two years and Curtin hosted a dinner at the Lodge to celebrate the fact. After the dinner, MacArthur, Curtin and Sir Frederick Shedden met privately, and MacArthur told Curtin that the invasion on the Philippines would be spearheaded by three Australian infantry divisions and one of American paratroopers. But just nine days before, General Sutherland, MacArthur’s aide, had presented the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a proposed order of battle for the Leyte operation. No Australian unit was mentioned. General Berryman, Blamey’s Chief of Staff, wrote that it was obvious ‘that General MacArthur hopes to get into the war against Japan proper and leave us over 250,000 Nips to look after . . . a secondary role’.

Curtin knew that to be heard he must take up the persistent invitations from Roosevelt and Churchill and visit them. As ever, his health was not good. Earlier in the year he had been unwell and recuperating in Cottesloe. He received birthday greetings on 8 January, in which we can see others’ awareness both of his exertions and of his underlying and chronic illness. A belated telegram from the conservative Lord and Lady Gowrie a few days later read, ‘May your successful achievements as national leader mitigate some of the personal sacrifice which we know only too well is involved. All good luck, salutations and long life.’ The personal sacrifices were shaping up to kill him within fifteen months. MacArthur, prey neither to doubt nor pain, sent a similar birthday telegram: ‘It is a day for which all Australians should rejoice and give thanks. From your American comrades there is a heartfelt desire to tell you of their admiration, their confidence and their affections. I personally pray that God’s blessing may continue to surround you and your great and imperishable country.’

And in the same spirit as Curtin harboured, beyond the anguish and the aching, Dame Mary Gilmore sent him a potential anthem for Australia.

Strong be thy walls, and mighty be thy gates,
Deep be thy loves, and terrible thy hates!
Where challenge threats, and sounds the battle cry,
Where onset thrusts, and runs the conflict high,
No alien foot shall tread the sacred sand,
Ours, in thy Totem, oh Churinga-Land!

Going to the United States and Britain was not advisable in medical terms, but Curtin believed he must. On 24 March, all the senators and members gathered in the parliamentary dining room to wish him well, Menzies making a warm speech, Billy Hughes swinging his glass of ginger beer back and forth to the tune of ‘Why Was He Born So Beautiful?’

In early April, Blamey, Shedden, Don Rodgers the press secretary, Curtin and wife Elsie joined the Lurline, a troopship full of American troops being transferred to the American west coast and to other duties. Curtin had asked Elsie to travel with him for emotional support and to sustain him. On 31 March, just before Curtin’s departure, his friend Maurice Blackburn, twice expelled from the Labor Party and opponent of conscription, died in Melbourne. It was Blackburn’s condemnations of Curtin’s conscription policies that had hurt Curtin far more than did the lashing he received in the House from Ward and Calwell.

Above all, though, Curtin faced continual obstruction from unions. These organisations had been founded after great struggles against the misuse of miners and wharf labourers during the Depression and earlier. Now, maintaining and displaying their power over employers remained a stronger and more enduring matter than were the supposed urgencies of the war. Since 1942, Curtin had been subject to such shocks as when it turned out that the Australian garrison at Milne Bay had no protective clothing because a wharf strike at Townsville had prevented it being loaded in time. The Americans in particular shook their heads over Australian industrial affairs and union slackness. They became enraged when the radar station at Green Island near Cairns was unable to go on air when sixteen US Vultee Vengeance bombers became lost returning from a raid on Rabaul. In the emergency, an Australian, Sergeant H.T. Tolhurst, had opened a box marked ‘radio valves’ to replace the dead ones in its system. He found they were gone, all pilfered. ‘It was possible that we could have guided those doomed aircraft back . . . All the personnel keenly felt the loss of those . . . young lives. Our feelings were not helped by the scorn of the US Air Force personnel.’

The government took over coal production in February 1944, in part as a means of reducing conflicts. (In his extremes of feeling Curtin described some coal-strike leaders as being gainfully employed otherwise as dog trainers, billiard-room owners, taxi drivers and SP bookies.) But waterside struggles continued. Curtin told one group of striking waterside workers, ‘I am fed up. I can’t satisfy you. I grant you conditions you have been demanding over the years . . . I can’t satisfy you. What will satisfy you? There’s a war on.’

During the trip to Washington in 1944, Elsie was sick on board the troopship—a reaction to a smallpox injection—and Curtin nursed her. This journey marked a decline in Blamey’s influence as chief military advisor. Previously Curtin had dealt with Blamey only on a professional basis but they were now thrown together socially. Curtin disapproved of Blamey’s raucous parties on board the supposedly ‘dry’ ship, while Shedden commented about him, ‘though good as a commander-in-chief, he is not suitable as a member of a Prime Minister’s party’. Blamey’s arrival in Washington was delayed by his insistence on travelling by train (Curtin was uneasy about flying too, and no journey was easy for him).

In Washington at last, Curtin was feted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Elsie was entertained by Eleanor Roosevelt, then Curtin flew down and visited President Roosevelt in South Carolina, where FDR went for his health (and to spend time with his mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford). The president complimented Australia and said it was pulling its weight. Earlier, Roosevelt had suggested they spend time at the White House discussing Australia’s security and role in the Pacific, but then he was briefed about an Anzac Conference held in Canberra between the Australians and New Zealanders in which both countries resolved that the sovereignty of Pacific nations (over such areas as New Guinea) should not be changed without their agreement. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, urged Roosevelt to tell Curtin—whom he said was more reasonable than Foreign Minister Evatt—that the United States was affronted by the Anzac Conference and its implications that America could not quite be trusted. Curtin made peace and returned to the White House, where he had further talks with officials, but then fell ill with neuritis and high blood pressure. He next needed to get to his meeting with Churchill and other dominion prime ministers in London on 1 May. He left Elsie in Washington and with his party caught a flying boat. It flew them to Bermuda and then Ireland, where he took a Dakota to London.

In Britain, Curtin avoided cosy meetings with the British Labour Party, believing his main task was to make peace with Churchill, which he tried to do at events at Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and elsewhere. He proposed a reduction in what was now an Australian army of nearly half a million, to free men for the production of food and other goods, and Churchill agreed it was a good idea.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Curtin proposed greater imperial cooperation. His motives at the time were much surmised at. Did he really dream of real and renewed defence connections between the United Kingdom and Australia instead of the sham ones of 1941–42? It was summery in London and no bombs fell while he was there. With Blamey in tow he proposed an invasion of the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) and Malaya involving the AIF divisions and British troops. Would MacArthur go along with these ideas? In any case, Curtin’s journey bespoke uncertainty about Australia in an Empire under challenge and in a renewing world. Indeed, he was at the Ritz Carlton in New York on his way home when the D-Day invasion fleets left southern England for Normandy.

Back from London, Blamey grew even more enamoured of a separate British–Australian offensive into the Netherlands East Indies, an offensive he hoped to command. He therefore directed much of his planning staff ’s work into preparations for the new British command. He also told MacArthur that the assault divisions he intended to use in Java—but which MacArthur wanted to take over from his own men in New Guinea, Bougainville and elsewhere—would not be ready for some time. MacArthur, who wished to have his divisions freed from New Guinea to invade the Philippines, was angry and had his pretext to approach Curtin. Blamey, he said, was plotting to change the present command arrangements in the South-West Pacific area. And if Australian assault divisions would not be ready in time, MacArthur added, then they could not be used in the invasion of the Philippines.

Curtin pleaded with MacArthur to make one last attempt to include the Australians in the Philippine campaign, and in due course MacArthur produced a plan, but one highly unacceptable to Blamey. It involved splitting the 1st Australian Corps and equipping the Australian divisions with American arms and equipment. The Blamey idea was never realised. It appeared that he miscalculated severely in pressing for the use of British forces, because at the Allied conference in Quebec in September 1944 it was decided that the British contribution to the Pacific would be the British Pacific Fleet of the Royal Navy, not troops.

And the complete takeover of the New Guinea, Rabaul and Bougainville fronts by Australia occurred as MacArthur had planned. There were two divisions of Americans at Aitape in New Guinea, two on New Britain, and two at Torokina on Bougainville, each with a small defensive perimeter. On 18 October 1944, the Australians took these over; Blamey’s instructions to General Sturdee, Chief of the General Staff, required that 1st Army should destroy enemy resistance without committing major forces.

There were three main concentrations of Japanese left by October 1944—the remnants of three divisions on the north coast of New Guinea, thirty-five thousand strong, concentrated in particular at Wewak and led by General Hatazo Adachi, who would survive the war but then be tried and commit suicide with a paring knife. By now Adachi’s losses made those of Horii seem small—by the end, 110,000 of his men would have died. There were also thirty thousand enemy soldiers on Bougainville in addition to twenty thousand Japanese naval personnel; and at Rabaul on New Britain, Japan’s 8th Area Army consisted of more than ninety thousand soldiers, sailors and marines.

The 6th Australian Division was sent to Aitape to face the remnants of Adachi’s men at Wewak, while militia divisions were deployed elsewhere in New Guinea and on Bougainville. Some call this the ‘backyard war’, but Adachi had been ordered to hold the Americans by any means. There, two Australian divisions remained on the Atherton Tablelands, and MacArthur wanted them for amphibious landings in Borneo and Java.

These ‘backyard’ battles were disproportionate in casualties. Wewak was captured after the 6th Division relieved the Americans at Aitape and advanced. Ten thousand Japanese were killed in its defence, and by war’s end there were only 13,500 Japanese troops left in New Guinea. By contrast, the Australians had suffered the deaths of 442 men and a little over a thousand wounded. For these young men and their families these figures were a disaster, but on the Japanese side, a crisis in supply and military conviction meant that these men, far from home yet still responsible for holding the line, had lost all expectation of success and gained an expectation of unavoidable death.

On their approach to Japan and in the Philippines, the Americans had to deploy massively and fight hard, but their ultimate death casualties, though fourteen thousand, would be less than 5 per cent of those suffered by the Japanese in the same conflicts. The 5th Australian Division (earlier divisional numbering methods having been abandoned now that the military forces were, in real terms, merged) took over in Jacquinot Bay on the south coast of New Britain, and it fanned out to exclude the Japanese from all of the island except the Gazelle Peninsula, the extreme eastern end of the island on which the fortress of Rabaul stood. Here the Australians were able to hold a line, one division against five. Air cover and total control of the waters around Rabaul helped the equation. Rabaul became in effect a vast POW camp. The 5th Division would lose fifty-three men killed and 150 wounded in the campaign. That obscene term ‘light casualties’ flickers at the lip; if you are one of them, nothing is ‘light’.

In early 1945, the 3rd Australian Division began a campaign to clear Bougainville of the Japanese. Here the total Australian casualties were over two thousand, but an extraordinary 23,500 Japanese surrendered, an indication that in the last months of the war, surrender no longer carried quite the burden of guilt and dishonour it had.

No Australian achievement in Bougainville or elsewhere appeared in the American press—it was filtered out by MacArthur’s publicity screen. The Australians waited another five months before they received their orders for the Borneo campaign.

In mid-November 1945, Blamey would be pushed aside as the government’s chief military advisor, such was the depth of feeling he had aroused in Labor ranks, and Vernon Sturdee replaced him. Shedden wanted to establish the primacy of the Department of Defence and Blamey had intruded on that ambition.

What to make of Blamey? For some he was a narcissist general pursuing his own interests at every turn, and thus a reflection of MacArthur. To others he was Australia’s wisest and most gifted general in terms of administration and politics. Like Monash, his chief in the past, he certainly fought strenuously to maintain Australian independence in military matters. He is said to have worried about the welfare of his troops, even if so many of them and the public didn’t believe it.

THE LAST CAMPAIGN

The Japanese had invaded Borneo in 1941, and before the close of January 1942 they had reached the south coast and taken the Dutch oilfields of Tarakan and Balikpapan.

In 1945, the task of retaking from the Japanese the former British Borneo territories of Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo (Sabah) was assigned to the Australian military forces. Borneo did not really figure high on MacArthur’s plans. He meant to commit no US troops there. He had the Philippines to attend to. And in any case, the American navy was cutting off Japanese sea lanes between the home islands and the bases in the Pacific from which Borneo’s oil could be shipped. Over past months Allied bombing raids had been continually carried out on oilfields and other strategic areas of Borneo from Australia, and that could have been continued. Many senior Australian staff and field commanders had doubts about the need for and wisdom of the operation.

But other reasons moved MacArthur too. He certainly did not wish to share Philippine glory with the Australians. He had brokered a deal with the Dutch government in exile that to facilitate his reconquest of the Philippines he would have ‘complete authority in the East Indies during any military operation’; in return, he promised to restore Dutch authority over their colonies as rapidly as possible after recapture. Dutch imperialism, it seemed, could help justify and balance American. It was for that reason that retaking Borneo became part of MacArthur’s plans. The seizure of Borneo would also offer bases from which to launch an offensive against Java. And the Borneo oilfields would be able to be used by the Allies.

To prepare for the invasion in May 1945, members of the Australian Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD) were dropped off ashore in Sarawak and at Labuk Bay in North Borneo. Their job was to gather intelligence, survey the terrain and organise local resistance.

The idea of sending a handful of Caucasian officers and men deep into the Borneo interior with the objective of organising the indigenous inhabitants had been discussed early within Allied intelligence circles. The SRD was an Australian special force with headquarters in a mansion in South Melbourne. It was directly responsible to Blamey, and its real purpose was special operations. Its most resonating success, Operation Jaywick, known only in influential circles, occurred in September 1943, when a party of Australian and British operatives, members of the Z Special Unit, commanded by a Singapore escapee named Major Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, were selected and sent off on a captured Japanese fishing vessel named Krait from a secret camp in Pittwater, just north of Sydney, all the way to the islands off Singapore. Krait’s captain was a sixty-one-year-old engineer named Bill Reynolds. From one of the smaller islands off the former British but now Japanese fortress, a number of flimsy two-man canoes were launched from Krait and paddled into Singapore harbour, each with a supply of timed limpet mines aboard. The limpets were attached to Japanese shipping, and the canoe teams were safely back on a bluff on the island where Krait was hidden in time to see fifty to sixty thousand tons of Japanese shipping explode. Then, preposterously, they took the Krait all the way home, the lankiest, least Asiatic-looking members of the crew hiding in the ship’s sweltering hold whenever Japanese patrol boats were near. The senior Australian officer on this extraordinary mission was Captain Robert Page, a young and noble-souled medical student and nephew of Earle Page.

Lyon and the other operatives, having become mythic figures in the secret operations community and casting their lustre on the SRD, returned in October 1944 to give a second dose to shipping in Singapore. Named Rimau, this should have been a much safer operation. From Garden Island near Fremantle, the party travelled to a rendezvous point named Merapas Island, south-east of Singapore, aboard a British submarine. There they captured a junk and transferred to it their equipment, which consisted of mines, automatic weapons and their new secret submersibles, commonly called Sleeping Beauties, which travelled just beneath the waves and meant that a raider could approach shipping with only part of his head out of the water. Sadly, the junk was intercepted by a Malayan police patrol boat working for the Japanese, a gunfight occurred, the junk had to be blown up and sunk to hide the presence of the Sleeping Beauties, and the men took off in canoes with the determined purpose of reaching Australia. Ten of them were captured by the Japanese on the way, including Page. Lyon was killed in a firefight in a place called Soreh Island.

As they island-hopped, making for Timor and, beyond it, the coast of Australia, the other members of the party, paddling canoes, were pursued southwards. Sub-Lieutenant J.G.M. Riggs, a volunteer of the Royal Navy Reserve, was killed at Merapas after missing the rendezvous with the submarine. Some of the men may have taken their suicide pills when things became hopeless, but a twenty-two-year-old warrant officer, J. Willisdorf, paddled as far as Timor before being captured in February 1945. Many of these thirteen men on the run put in weeks of paddling, and Able Seaman F.W.L. Marsh, an Australian sailor, twenty years of age, was on the loose for three months, Private D.R. Warne of the AIF was on the run until April 1945, while Lance Corporal H.J. Pace did not die until June 1945 at Dili.

There were further unintended tragedies as a result of the operation. A number of men and women from the Changi civilian internment camp were interrogated by the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, the terrifying Kempeitai, and some sixteen of them did not survive their rough treatment or else were executed. Thirty-three of the civilian population of Singapore, including a number of women, were executed on suspicion of involvement, and in July 1945, after a trial which emphasised that the highest honour a warrior could receive once captured was beheading, Page and nine others were executed in a clearing off Reformatory Road. Despite the oratory about the honour of it all, the beheadings were botched and brutal.

Mysteriously, these men were never decorated. It is believed that this was because the Sleeping Beauties were retrieved by the Japanese from the shallow sea where their junk had sunk. It seemed that as proud as the SRD and the British High Command in the region had been of Jaywick, Rimau was an embarrassment to them.

But so were other SRD operations. A number of parties sent to Timor were captured in turn because previous parties had also been captured and their radio operators forced at gunpoint to communicate false information to Melbourne. The operators included in their signals a number of prearranged words that were meant to convey that they were operating under duress, but headquarters in Melbourne did not pick up on this, and continued to send men off to capture, torture, and in some cases, death.

In 1945, about the time the Rimau men were trying to escape down the archipelago of Indonesia, SRD secretly landed operatives in Borneo. They had two main objectives: the gathering of intelligence, and the training and arming of local inhabitants into resistance groups to wage guerrilla warfare. In early March 1945, Major F.G.L. Chester, who had been landed in Borneo in 1943, landed near Labuk Bay and made contact with the SRD personnel already in the area. Drop zones were established on nearby Jambongan Island, on Borneo’s east coast, in late April and early May. A signal station was established, and a hospital for native inhabitants. In Sarawak on the north coast there were plans for SRD groups to be parachuted into the mountainous hinterland of Brunei Bay. Before 10 June 1945, D-Day for Oboe 6—the code name for the Australian invasion of that sector—SRD operatives in North Borneo and Sarawak were relaying intelligence to Blamey’s advance land headquarters on the island of Morotai north-west of New Guinea. Four days before the launch of Oboe 6, one of the groups, Semut 2, had captured the Japanese wireless station at Longalama, and on the eve of D-Day Semut 1 attacked small Japanese garrisons in the Brunei Bay area. They were able to identify the infantry battalion defending Kuching, and report on enemy defences and troop movements.

The 9th Division was on record as being very happy with the information the SRD operatives sent and the preparations they made before the Oboe 6 landing. There was one major issue unattended to, however. Between 1942 and 1943, some 2750 Allied prisoners of war, mainly Australian and British, had been shipped from Singapore to Sandakan on the east coast of Borneo and used as hard-driven labour for the construction of an airfield. Captain Hoshijima Susumi, the Sandakan camp commandant, overworked, underfed and brutalised the men he held prisoner. For example, a hidden radio was found in the camp in mid-1943, and those adjudged responsible were turned over to the Kempeitai, moved back to Singapore and executed. As a security measure, the Japanese despatched most of the Australian and British officers to the main POW and internment camp near Kuching. Only eight officers remained behind at Sandakan with the mostly enlisted men, where the death rate was obscene: between December 1943 and May 1945, eleven hundred prisoners died.

To avoid recurring Allied bombings of the airstrip and the camp, which began early in 1945, the Japanese decided to move the surviving POWs in forced marches inland, the first group in January, the second in May. Only those so sick as to be immovable were left in Sandakan, and all of these would die or be massacred. Out of the approximately two thousand who participated in the two marches, less than half reached Ranau, 260 kilometres into the jungle, the others falling down on the track, expiring or being bayoneted.

Albert Cleary, twenty-two years old (and thus only nineteen when Singapore fell), tried to escape from Ranau. He was beaten and otherwise abused, and then his friends were permitted to wash him and take him to die amongst them. By May 1945, only thirty or so prisoners were still alive there. Richard Murray and Keith Botterill stole rice to accumulate it for an escape, and when Murray was caught, he took full blame and was bayoneted to death in a bomb crater. Botterill was one of the four who did somehow escape from Ranau, and one of the six survivors of the tragedy. Two Australians managed to escape during the second march, and another four survivors (including Botterill) succeeded in escaping from Ranau into the jungle. No one else survived at Ranau, and there were no survivors from the three hundred who still remained at Sandakan after the second march.

SRD operatives in the field possessed detailed and accurate information on the movement of POWs at Sandakan in groups to Ranau. The question is asked why there was no attempt to liberate the Sandakan POWs by a paratroop or other unit. Blamey’s speech at the Second Annual Conference of the Australian Armoured Corps Association in Melbourne on 1 November 1947 concerned Lieutenant-Colonel John Overall’s paratroop battalion, which had been training at the Atherton Tablelands for a covert operation that never eventuated. These soldiers knew nothing of the details of their mission until Blamey’s address. ‘We had complete plans for them,’ he claimed. ‘Our spies were in Japanese-held territory. We had established the necessary contacts with prisoners at Sandakan, and our parachute troops were going to relieve them . . . but at the moment we wanted to act, we couldn’t get the necessary aircraft to take them in.’

Some historians, including Lynette Ramsay Silver, have denounced Blamey’s claim about ‘getting the necessary aircraft’ as utter nonsense. No request for aircraft was made to MacArthur. If the Americans were reluctant, as was claimed, the RAAF had its own pool of seventy-one transport planes, and had the plans been followed, only thirty-four aircraft were needed.

Altogether, the failure to save the POWs seems to have been not a work of malice on the part of Blamey and the SRD but merely one of incompetence. John Overall believed the story of the lack of air transport, and so did Athol Moffitt, the Allied prosecutor at the Labuan War Crimes trials. Overall declared, ‘Yes, there had been a plan to rescue the Sandakan prisoners . . . General Morshead pressed the plan, and I understood General Blamey wanted it, but the US would not release the planes to make the drop.’ Denis Emerson-Elliott, a member of the UK Special Operations Executive Far East, said of the SRD operations in Borneo: ‘It was a mess from beginning to end. The intelligence was a disaster. The bungling on the planning side was dreadful, so Blamey decided to blame MacArthur.’

The Australian troops of the 1st Australian Corps, the 7th and 9th AIF divisions under the command of Leslie Morshead, were the troops allotted to retake Borneo. They were to land on 1 May at Tarakan Island in the southeast (Oboe 1); at Brunei Bay and Labuan Island on 10 June (Oboe 6), these being located along the north-east coast in the former enclave of British North Borneo; and at Balikpapan on 1 July (Oboe 2). There would be American naval and air support. The attack on Tarakan Island had to occur on 1 May to take advantage of the high tide, so that men and vehicles of a brigade of the 9th Division had a chance of avoiding getting stuck on the muddy, open beaches. Even so, there was just one narrow strip by which tracked vehicles could enter the hinterland. Here there was close fighting, to the extent that the electric wiring of the 12th Field Ambulance post delivering the light by which surgeons operated was shot through continuously, and an orderly declared that they were, at 150 metres, the closest any field post had ever been to the front line. The fighting on Tarakan would continue until the end of the war, in August.

The Australian 9th Division, except for one brigade, was also involved in the Oboe 6 landing in the Brunei Bay area and Labuan Island. The prime objective was to secure the vicinity for a naval base as well as to give access to oil and rubber in the area. By contrast with the Tarakan landing, within four days of the 10 June D-Day, all the initial targets were attained. By mid-July the AIF was greatly involved in civic action, and their military role was increasingly becoming redundant.

AIR WAR AND POLITICS

A future Australian prime minister flew at Milne Bay, one of many whose work MacArthur considered supernumerary or inadequate—John Grey Gorton, the illegitimate son of a wealthy orchardist and entrepreneur and of a handsome mother named Alice Sinn (sometimes history is too cruel). In England during the 1930s he learned to fly aircraft and married twenty-nine-year-old Bettina Brown, an American Fine Arts student at the Sorbonne. Having completed an MA at Oxford, jovial Gorton served in Britain before being posted to Singapore with 232 Squadron RAF. Before the fall of that fortress, his Hawker Hurricane, which had only been uncrated the week before, was shot down, and when he crash-landed and was thrown against his instrument panels he suffered severe facial injuries. Evacuated from Singapore by ship, which was then torpedoed, he was photographed by a crew member of an Australian corvette that rescued him, with other men on a wallowing, near-sinking dinghy, a photograph which in its terrible informality indicates the perils of getting away from Singapore. Gorton would never trumpet his wartime experience, and MacArthur’s press office was unlikely to trumpet such men either.

Gorton began flying Kittyhawks of 77 Squadron from Darwin with the RAAF and engaged in operations against the Japanese barges and land troops at Milne Bay. It was crucial to the Allied success that Japanese ground forces fail to gain command of the two critical airfields. Number 1 strip was virtually under water and bogged in deep mud that caked the aircraft so the control surfaces and main planes were constantly having to be replaced. Two RAAF Kittyhawk fighter squadrons, 75 and 76, commanded by Wing Commander Russell Thomas, a Queenslander, acted in direct support of the Australian army from here. The planes operated within five minutes’ flight of the army units in contact with the enemy.

In 1943, Gorton’s aircraft crashed at Milne Bay during take-off—such accidents were sadly common and took their toll of young pilots. He was considered a proficient pilot and came back to Australia to become a flying instructor before being discharged in December 1944. He underwent only partially successful facial reconstruction at Heidelberg Hospital in Melbourne.

A most eccentric aviator was the young lawyer Gough Whitlam, in that few flyers had such a sense of the urgencies of politics and the Constitution as he. He was married to Margaret Dovey, daughter of a lawyer and, ultimately, judge. She was tall, eloquent and intelligent. She was also a notable swimmer, Australian breaststroke champion in 1937, and had qualified for the Commonwealth Games in Sydney in 1938, designed to celebrate 150 years of European settlement. But by the time of the games, Margaret had contracted a debilitating streptococcal infection and missed her events.

On leave from the air force, Whitlam proposed to Margaret as Singapore was falling in 1942. He wrote, ‘Sleeping at the College on the night of 21st April and being married next day . . . at St Michael’s Vaucluse, to the most admired student of SCEGGS, Darlinghurst.’ Whitlam received his call-up papers and joined the 13th Squadron, soon to be equipped with navy Venturas and flying out of Darwin and Gove in the Northern Territory.

The demands of war, and the necessity for national instead of state-based planning for any ultimate peace would highlight for the young aviator Whitlam the crucial flaws in the Australian Constitution. He applauded the wartime powers, and wrote, ‘John Curtin . . . saw that he was presiding over a passing phase. He was not content with the paradox that the Labor Party was free to enact its policies in times of war alone.’

Home on leave during the Curtin government’s election campaign of 1943, Gough attended with Margaret a crowded rally addressed by the local Labor member, the East Sydney firebrand Eddie Ward, and the Minister for Information, Arthur Calwell. Further to the young flyer’s political development, Whitlam was granted a period of leave early in 1944 for the birth of a son, Tony. While still on leave, Whitlam and his father, Fred, Crown Solicitor, attended the Australian Institute of Political Science summer school in Canberra on post-war reconstruction in Australia. At this meeting, Whitlam met Nugget Coombs, the renowned Keynesian economist appointed by Curtin as Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction. This encounter increased Whitlam’s enthusiasm to extend federal power, as the coming Post-War Reconstruction and Democratic Rights Referendum proposed. He favoured making permanent the until now purely temporary emergency powers of the Commonwealth. ‘For many in my generation the proposed referendum rivalled the Beveridge reports in Britain in raising hopes of a better society than we had known before World War II. What people were being asked was to continue into peace time the powers they had given the Federal government in wartime.’

Evatt drove the referendum legislation, crying that ‘if democracy is to live . . . it must show itself in bold and imaginative action . . . if there are constitutional limitations on such bold and imaginative action, then the Constitution has become the instrument of reaction. Let us not fear to change it.’

Just after Christmas 1943, Whitlam landed in a Ventura at Archerfield airbase in Brisbane. The plane was loaded with depth charges and the brakes failed. As it skidded off the end of the runway and up a small hill, the crew leapt out, but were horrified to see the Ventura rolling back down the hill towards them. They escaped this by speed and by the good fortune that the Ventura failed to explode, and so Whitlam was free to think further on greater constitutional powers for the Commonwealth government. In August 1944, 13th Squadron was operating from Merauke in Dutch New Guinea. Flying Officer Lex Goudie and his navigator Whitlam undertook extensive raids on Japanese positions, supply dumps and installations. Then the squadron moved back to the mainland at Gove, a mining town beside the Aboriginal settlement of Yirrkala. Whitlam encountered the usual race attitudes of the Australians of the era when the Fijian pastor in charge of the mission was not permitted to read the Methodist rite over a dead airman. ‘The CO designated me to do it because he didn’t see fit for a Fijian to conduct funerals over Australian . . . officers and sergeants who’d been killed.’

Whitlam was still at Gove when the referendum on post-war reconstruction was put to the Australian people in August 1944. It was designed to override the states by centralising economic power in Canberra. On this small stage of a squadron on the edge of an Aboriginal settlement, Whitlam was vocal on the subject that if there was a return to the conditions of the Great Depression of the 1930s, without centralised powers the Federal government would be powerless in the face of inevitable post-war shortages and unemployment.

And without centralised powers, Aborigines would remain in the shadows. From living at Yirrkala and from reading, Whitlam believed that power over Aboriginal issues should be centralised. Before serving in the RAAF, he had met no Indigenous Australians. But in Cooktown and the Gove–Yirrkala area, he witnessed the habitual forms of discrimination. He disliked missionaries, and was pleased that the Indigenous people at Gove had only had them for the past ten years, because missionaries, he argued, ‘destroyed Aborigines’ self-respect. Now these are strong words. But I knew, I saw it.’ It was at Yirrkala too that Whitlam first met the Yunupingu family, whose members would play a crucial role in the agitation for Aboriginal civic recognition and land rights.

But the referendum proposal, rather pushed at the Australian people by Evatt, failed to gain a majority vote nationally, and though carried in two states, was supported by only 46 per cent of voters. Still, it obtained majority support within the armed forces, and 13th Squadron, no doubt instructed by Whitlam himself, voted heavily in favour. The young navigator was appalled by the eventual result: ‘The campaign had an immediate and lasting effect on my attitudes and career.’ The Labor defeat in the referendum meant that ‘reform would be protracted and piecemeal’, and Menzies’ opposition to the constitutional change seemed to Whitlam like vulgar opportunism.

Far away in the New South Wales country town of Albury, before the Union Jack, the Liberal Party of Australia was inaugurated in December 1944 by the leader of the UAP opposition, Robert Menzies, a new definition of the conservative political impulse in Australia. Though it did not seem so then, and despite the fumbling of the early war years, Menzies was on his way back.

From its base in Gove the 13th Squadron carried out anti-submarine patrols and bombing raids on Japanese targets in Timor and the Netherlands East Indies. With Goudie at the controls, Whitlam’s aircraft flew seventy-six missions in September 1944, eighty-seven in October, and eighty-six in November. They were, by comparison with the European theatre, short-range missions, but each one involved a potentially dangerous take-off and landing, and an encounter with the enemy in between. Whitlam got airsick on the smell of fuel as it mixed with that of oil and smoke from flares when they flew below 2000 feet (600 metres). ‘He could have got out of it anytime he thought things were getting too risky,’ said Goudie, ‘but he never did.’

On 15 January 1945, Whitlam’s Ventura made a low-level attack on shipping in Bima Harbour in Sumbawa, an Indonesian island. A bullet passed through the starboard engine, filling the plane with smoke and disabling the engine. It was feathered and everything was jettisoned to lighten the load, and the gunners went to the nose of the aircraft. They were still 420 nautical miles (780 metres) from base. The plane lost height at six metres a minute and was down to 210 metres when for no reason it rebounded to six hundred. A Catalina seaplane flew alongside them, ready to collect survivors. But they got back to Yirrkala–Gove.

Whitlam’s crew did not continue with 13th Squadron when it left Gove in 1945. It was not, however, because Whitlam had become aware of hearing damage during his final tour. Whitlam and his pilot, Goudie, were the flyers of the only RAAF aircraft flying for MacArthur’s headquarters at Leyte and then Manila. His crew flew generals from the Australian, British, Indian, Canadian and New Zealand forces from Australia to the Philippine headquarters and back again. In June, Whitlam attended the opening of the Philippine Congress, getting a seat amongst the press. Both houses of the Congress had been elected before the Japanese invasion but had never managed to convene until now. Whitlam would later claim that from his experience of the Philippines he got a sense of Dutch, Spanish, German, Japanese and American imperialism, and thus of Australia’s pretensions to imperialism in New Guinea and elsewhere. ‘I was convinced the European, as well as the Japanese, empires in the Pacific and Indian Oceans had no future.’ On the death of John Curtin while he was home on leave, Whitlam applied to join the Australian Labor Party.