by Brian Toohey
Bewildered Americans accused their troops of being unmanly, but the blame lay largely with President Harry S. Truman and MacArthur. Headquartered in Tokyo, MacArthur was ill-served by poor military intelligence and his own sense of invincibility. Pembroke records that the Australian mission in Tokyo reported bluntly on 7 November 1950 that ‘MacArthur believed that it was time for a showdown with Communism [and] the British war correspondent Reg Thompson said he nursed “dreams of the conquest of Asia”’.6 In Washington, the leadership had refused to believe that China would be willing to fight the US. Pembroke says, ‘It was blinded by disdain for enemy it did not know or respect.’7
The stalemate on either side of the 38th parallel presented another opportunity to end the war that should never gone beyond the first three months. Instead, the US chose revenge and its retreating army adopted a scorched earth policy.
However, this was nothing compared to the carnage its air force unleashed against the north. America had a chemical weapon that was almost as terrifying as nuclear weapons: napalm, the phosphorus and gasoline gel that spread rapidly after igniting at 1150°C and that had been used extensively against Japanese cities in 1945. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 destroyed the city and killed over 100,000 people—more than were killed initially by either of the atomic bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Curtis LeMay, the air force general responsible for the fire-bombing in Japan, led the bigger onslaught with napalm against North Korea. Almost every city, town and village was destroyed by napalm or high explosives, as were basic infrastructure, dykes and dams. Australian Mustang fighter planes also dropped napalm on targets in North Korea, including Chinese troops.8 The war cost the lives of 339 Australian soldiers and pilots.
By 1951, even MacArthur couldn’t stomach what was happening, saying, ‘The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people. I have never seen such devastation … After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited … If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind.’9
This damning statement to a congressional hearing was delivered by MacArthur after Truman sacked him in April 1951 for wanting to expand the war into China, but LeMay had no qualms about continuing to pound and burn North Korea from the air until shortly before the armistice on 23 July 1953. Nor did moral concerns inhibit those who ordered soldiers to kill civilians and directed navy ships to use their 5-inch guns to kill refugees.10 The American historian Bruce Cummings described an encounter he had in the South Korean city in 1968: ‘On the street corner stood a man who had a peculiar purple crust on every visible part of the skin—thick on his hands, then on his arms, fully covering his entire head and face. He was bald, he had no ears or lips, and his eyes, lacking lids, were a greyish-white with no pupils … This purplish crust resulted from drenching with napalm, after which the untreated victim’s body was left to somehow cure itself.’11
Pembroke says the US considered using germ warfare against Korea and China in 1952, citing documented evidence that it had developed large quantities of biological weapons and was planning air-drops.12 He says there’s no documented evidence that US planes delivered them, although some accounts make a distinction between operational and experimental use. He also points out that 9500 declassified documents were reclassified in subsequent decades.
To Pembroke, the most disturbing consequence of the war is that it led to a state of permanent militarism in the US, where military spending now accounts for 54 per cent of discretionary budget spending.13 He says in an earlier age it was thought that ‘only fascists and socialists celebrated war; that only they glorified the armed struggle … that only they believed that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The civilised world regarded armed conflict as barbarism, brutality, ugliness and sheer waste … Now, no nation has more guns, weapons, ships and aircraft [than the US].’14
Journalists covering Foreign Minister Don Willesee’s 1975 visit to North Korea, including myself, confronted a suffocating cult of personality surrounding Kim Il Sung. It was worse even than the cult of Mao in China, which we had just visited. Nevertheless, glimpses of a common humanity were occasionally available.15
Following a prime ministerial visit to the Korean demilitarised zone in April 2011, Julia Gillard said she wanted more Australians to know what their country was fighting for. She said, ‘We fought for democracy.’16 But Australia did not fight for democracy. It fought on the side of the brutal, corrupt dictator Syngman Rhee against a marginally worse dictator in the north. South Korea did not become a democracy until 1988. At the time of writing, North Korea remains a totalitarian dictatorship and a peace treaty is long overdue.
Although North Korea is often described as communist, it has removed all references to Marxism in its constitution and may now be closer to a cult built around a hereditary leader. Knowledge of the outside world is severely restricted, but if Gillard’s ignorance is any guide, so too is Western understanding of the horrors of the Korean War.
50
OFF TO WAR AGAIN: MALAYA AND INDONESIA
‘The battalion conducted extensive operations on both sides of the border [in the secret war].’
Australian War Memorial1
In May 1950, Australia agreed to a British appeal for expeditionary forces to help fight a communist insurgency in Malaya. Britain had declared an emergency in June 1948 after the guerilla wing of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) shot dead three British planters, a Chinese rubber contractor and a Chinese foreman in the north of the country.2 The ‘emergency’ was really a protracted war against the guerillas, who had fought the Japanese occupation before Britain resumed control of its Malay colony and its rubber and tin resources.
The War Memorial’s brief history says, ‘Despite having no more than a few thousand members, the MCP was able to draw on the support of many disaffected Malayan Chinese, who were upset that British promises of a path to full Malayan citizenship had not been fulfilled.’ In Dangerous Allies Malcolm Fraser says there is no doubt the communists were heavily involved, but Britain ‘contributed to the problem by not consulting or accommodating different ethnic groups within Malaya over the future status of their nation’.3 Malaya gained independence in 1957, but the war wasn’t over.
Initially, Australia contributed a significant deployment of destroyers, frigates, aircraft carriers, and bomber and transport aircraft, plus artillery and two army battalions. By the war’s end in 1963, thirty-nine Australian servicemen had been killed and twenty-seven wounded.
The Malaya commitment had barely ended before Australia again dispatched expeditionary forces—this time to a secret war against Indonesia, which had adopted a policy of ‘Confrontation’ against what it considered a British Imperial policy of encirclement using the new federation called Malaysia. Indonesia’s President Sukarno claimed Britain had pressured Malaya into joining this federation with Singapore and the newly independent British colonies of Sarawak and Sabah in the non-Indonesian side of Borneo. Confrontation was mostly confined to boisterous Indonesian propaganda and military harassment and incursions, rather than a full-scale war against the new federation of Malaysia.
Prime Minister Robert Menzies wanted to send troops to Borneo after Britain called for a military commitment, but he held back initially because of the attitude of his own diplomats and the US. Conscious of the long-term need for good relations with Indonesia, Australian diplomats counselled caution. As discussed in Chapter 25, President John F. Kennedy bluntly told Menzies in July 1963 that the US would not supply ground troops to support the Australians. Following this humiliating lesson on the limits of ANZUS, the government waited until 1965 before secretly participating in what remained an undeclared war against Indonesia.
The public was told almost nothing about what was happening. The fact that Australian and New Zealand forces were under British command did not help rebut Sukarno’s claim that he was
reacting to a form of neo-colonial encirclement. Although the Australian and New Zealand troops were based in Sarawak on the Malaysian side of the border with Indonesia, they conducted deadly cross-border raids.4 The potential for a more difficult conflict was real, especially if Indonesia extended the war to its border with Papua New Guinea, for which Australia still had territorial responsibilities. Instead, Confrontation fizzled out after General Suharto took power from Sukarno amid horrific communal violence sparked by military action in October 1965. Indonesia and Malaysia negotiated an end to hostilities in August 1966, Indonesia having achieved one of its aims when Singapore left the Malaysian federation in August 1965.
Australia’s cross-border raids remained classified until 1996, but Coalition ministers still publicly refused to admit Australian troops had crossed the border to fight Indonesians. In March 2005, Veterans’ Affairs Minister De-Anne Kelly was the first government minister to commemorate the sacrifices of Australian troops in Borneo forty years earlier. However, Age journalist Mark Forbes noted on 23 March that year that Kelly still maintained the official fiction about their role by saying, ‘The soldiers patrolled the jungle areas to intercept enemy incursions’, without referring to the fact that they made combat incursions into Indonesia.
That conflict cost twenty-three Australians their lives. Meanwhile, another war, this time in Vietnam, was underway.
51
VIETNAM: STOPPING AN ELECTION, THEN LOSING AN UNNECESSARY WAR
‘Yes, we did kill teachers and postmen. But it was the way to conduct the war. They were part of the Vietcong infrastructure … Everyone goes over the speed limit from time to time.’
Brigadier Ted Serong1
When Australian troops first arrived in Vietnam in 1962, they joined a war in which resistance groups had long opposed foreign occupiers, the latest being the French, Japanese and Americans. France’s colonial presence in Vietnam began in Da Nang in 1858 and expanded to include much of present-day Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos (collectively called Indochina). The French crushed successive rebellions until the Japanese replaced them between 1940 and 1945. The Japanese met serious opposition from the Viet Minh, a coalition of communist and nationalist groups led by Ho Chi Minh, who had spent thirty years in exile.
The US supported the Viet Minh against the Japanese and briefly rejected restoration of French colonialism. In January 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, ‘France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants—for nearly a hundred years and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.’2 This approach didn’t survive Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Undeterred, Ho Chi Minh declared independence in September. Postwar, the French resumed both their colonial role and their fight with the Viet Minh. Ho Chi Minh again declared independence in 1950, releasing a constitution that drew directly on the US Declaration of Independence. Looking through a Cold War lens, America saw Ho Chi Minh solely as a communist, not a strong nationalist as well.
In 1950, the US announced it would provide military aid and advisers to help the French. The historian Fredrik Logevall says that in April 1954, the Menzies Government rejected a US request to help provide naval support for the French, followed shortly afterwards by a noncommittal response to a question about a possible military contribution in Vietnam—prompting President Dwight Eisenhower to complain that ‘the Menzies government seemed unwilling to act independently of London’.3 In his Cabinet submission opposing the assistance, External Affairs Minister Richard Casey said, ‘Australia’s destiny was not so completely wrapped up with the United States as to support them in action which Australia regarded as wrong.’4 Despite their supposed ‘special relationship’ with the US, successive British governments refused to become militarily involved in Vietnam.
Under the military leadership of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Viet Minh ultimately won a decisive victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The French surrendered and left. Later that year, an international conference adopted the Geneva Accords that divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel between the north and the south and specified that a general election to unify the country be held no later than 1956—a commitment that reflected the UN Charter’s support for self-determination. But the US and South Vietnam never signed the Accords. With US encouragement, prominent warlord Ngo Dinh Diem, a fervent Catholic in a predominantly Buddhist country, took over as the south’s leader in 1955. With the CIA’s Colonel Edward Lansdale as adviser, Diem accepted US advice not to participate in the election, which even Eisenhower conceded Ho Chi Minh would have won.5
US intervention prevented the scheduled 1956 election being held at all—an extreme action in comparison with the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. Had Ho Chi Minh won, the country might have been reunified without a protracted war involving foreign intervention. Denied the promised elections, the Viet Minh started a guerilla insurgency in the south, where the local insurgents were known as the Vietcong.
Australia and the US began discussing a small contribution of Australian military instructors in 1961. However, the defence minister, Athol Townley, told the external affairs minister, Garfield Barwick, in March 1962 that the initial reaction from the American generals in Saigon ‘was rather unenthusiastic’ as they considered they had sufficient troops of their own.6 The US had at least 11,000 advisers in Vietnam and more rapidly arriving. The Australian Army was not desperate to go—it offered ten officers and possibly a few non-commissioned instructors.7
The State Department wanted to avoid the appearance of unilateral US action and the offer of instructors was accepted. Townley announced in parliament on 24 May 1962 that Australia would commit thirty military instructors ‘to assist in the training of the ground forces of South Vietnam’. It’s unclear whether Cabinet was told that some members of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (usually known as ‘the Team’) would come under the direct control of the CIA rather than the Australian Army. A small number of the Team later joined the CIA’s notorious Phoenix program that assassinated suspected supporters of the Vietcong. This was kept secret from the Australian public.
Colonel Ted Serong promptly put his hand up for the job of leading the Team—a job for which he was disturbingly unsuited. He wrote to the chief of the general staff (CGS), General Reg Pollard, in February 1962 suggesting that Australia needed the shooting practice. He said, ‘The only Australian shooting is me [an exaggeration]. We must keep in the action, or we will be also-rans. I would lead them myself. The advantages are obvious—continued operational experience, prestige and a gesture of Allied solidarity.’8
Historian and Vietnam War veteran Bruce Davies’ detailed outline of Serong’s career contains nothing to suggest Serong was a counterinsurgency expert, as widely described, partly due to his own self-promotion and tireless networking. The hype continued after his death. An obituary in News Weekly in October 2002 said Serong shared the view of his close friend Bob Santamaria, the leading Catholic political activist, about the importance of the struggle against communist totalitarianism: ‘The final resolution of the struggle—the defeat of communist insurgencies in Asia—owed much to the efforts of Brigadier Serong over many years.’ Apparently News Weekly was under the delusion that Serong defeated the communist insurgency in Vietnam.
Davies says Serong had spent most of World War II in Australia, with brief periods in Port Moresby where he was a staff officer in the administration. He didn’t engage in combat. Surprisingly, for someone so keen to take the fight up to the communists, he didn’t serve in Korea or Malaya, nor gain any counterinsurgency experience. It was not taught when he was at the Canungra jungle warfare training base in south-east Queensland—rather, Australian soldiers were taught how to fight a conventional war in a jungle environment.9 Moreover, the Australian trainers who were sent to Vietnam agreed to follow US training methods.
In her 2001 biography of Serong, written with what she called a ‘generous’ Aust
ralian Army history grant, Anne Blair says US Secretary of State Dean Rusk asked Australian ministers to make Serong the Team’s first commanding officer.10 Davies says Serong then put a lot of time into networking among US military, diplomatic and CIA officials in Saigon and elsewhere. After reading a cutting about Serong being in Munich, new CGS General Wilton asked an aide, ‘What on earth is the bloody man up to now?’11
As well as instruction in jungle warfare, training in clandestine operations occurred at the ASIS base on Swan Island near Geelong. Some army officers, including Serong, were told they would be working as part of ASIS. Meanwhile, ministers were kept in the dark. Although Barwick had ministerial responsibility for ASIS, he later told Blair he did not know of Serong’s connection with ASIS. Its director, Major General Walter Cawthorn, had a background in military intelligence in Egypt and India, but there was no obvious reason why Team members should be working for ASIS. The rationale was that some members would operate under CIA control—but ASIS did not decide what they could do in Vietnam while they were working for the CIA.
Blair wrote that Serong, who gave her unfettered access to his private diaries, recorded that Cawthorn instructed him to ‘Get me 10 years’—a reference to the time needed to stop a communist victory.12 Cawthorn was usually regarded as much less gung-ho than this. Even if Serong’s account is accurate, which is most unlikely, the instruction was fanciful: the Team never had more than 100 men, and Cawthorn wasn’t in a position to give Serong instructions. The CIA did that.
