The Spirit of the Digger

by Patrick Lindsay

  I reckon now it was perfect. After a shell goes off you get your head down and then you wait a while then stick your head up and that’s when the next round came over.

  The 25 pounders, fired over open sights from back in the valley at battalion headquarters, were very effective. We could nearly hear the shells go past as they went up the hill. You’d hear the bang, back in the valley, and fair dinkum it seemed to be just right there on you as it whistled past. It was music to us!

  When we got along there a little bit, moving in single file and staying low, and because the Japs didn’t clean us up getting into that position, we got the feeling, hey, we’re going to make it. Before that you had a feeling: this is nearly hopeless, you know, but we’ve got to go. The others have told me since that they felt exactly the same.

  After hours of clambering, sliding and crawling up the sheer sides of the hillside, dodging grenades rolling down from the heights past them and avoiding the sniping from above, Noel’s platoon eventually made it to within striking distance of the razorback:

  We got into position, jammed up together and that’s where I gave the order: ‘Fix bayonets!’ then, for some reason, I added: ‘… if you like!’ It’s not natural to push bayonets through someone. And for a split second I remember thinking, I wonder how many of us will come through this. I really did. Teddy Bear was right next to me. I seemed to think clearer after a few shots have been fired and you think of things you’d never think you’d think about.

  I was looking back and forth, making sure everybody was ready, and Teddy was saying, almost under his breath, ‘Let’s get stuck into them! Let’s get stuck into them!’ I looked again and yelled out, ‘Charge!’. The blokes looked at each other, and then at me, and we all burst out laughing! Fancy yelling out charge, you could see how steep it was but you had to give some kind of command and off we went. Our Vickers gunners were very good and they supported us beautifully. The bullets were tearing up the ground just in front of us. The Japs were dug in, with just their heads above the edge and, with the curve of the hill, their field of fire wasn’t that far. They knew we were there but not exactly where. They scattered grenades across their front, like throwing out a bag full of them down the hill.

  Noel’s men had made it closer to the Japanese defenders than they thought when they charged. Immediately it broke into vicious hand-to-hand fighting, all in! Even the reserve section charged up on the left. The Aussies yelled at the top of their voices as they charged – a tactic used to instil fear into the enemy – and it worked! Noel:

  We pushed on and the grenades came down at us. I got hit by shrapnel from a grenade but I struggled to the top. Then Teddy got a bit further ahead and I remember he’d always give the impression that he could take on the whole Japanese army. I heard ‘Hi Ho’ [Corporal Edward ‘Hi Ho’ Silver] talking to his Owen gunners, saying: ‘Johnny Crane, you stop on my left side with that gun,’ and to the other, Billy Howarth: ‘Billy, you stop on my right hand. And don’t youse bloody well move from there.’ He was a born leader of men and a very brave man, old Hi Ho.

  In any attack there’s the organised part, then there’s the hand-to-hand fighting as I see it, when nobody’s really in command because everybody’s dealing with the enemy just in front of them. And, in all of that confusion, the Japs had enough discipline to duck down in the foxholes, wait until some of our blokes went past, and then open up behind them. We were a wake-up to that most of the time.

  It went down to bayonets and you couldn’t describe what went on with your close family or friends in that sort of fight. We gradually overcame them and when the Japs were dealt with they were pushed aside until we’d taken the position.

  The official history reveals that, as did so many Diggers, Noel Pallier was underplaying the intensity of the fighting at Pallier’s Hill: on the night of 10 October 1943, a Japanese company of about 60 troops was set in strongly dug-in positions on a dominating feature overlooking Kumbarum and connected to Kings Hill by a razor-edge ridge about 1 kilometre long. The position completely cut the supply line to the 2/27th Battalion. The enemy firing from it panicked the native carrier trains which attempted to get through to the 2/27th.

  Because of the narrow and steep approach the Australians could only use one platoon in the attack. It crept to within 35 metres of the position before making its final assault.

  Teddy Bear led the initial wave with two sections, one on either side of the ridge line up almost sheer cliff faces through heavy fire and a barrage of grenades rolled down from above. Teddy was the first to the top. Hit three times, he still managed to pick off enemy troops until his rifle was empty, then he began an amazing bayonet charge, where he killed three or four and sent at least ten more to their deaths by driving them or, by some accounts, literally pitchforking them over the sheer precipice. The position was taken at a cost of more than 30 Japanese killed.

  For his part in the attack, Noel Pallier was Mentioned in Despatches. The citation read:

  Lieutenant Pallier led 9 Platoon in the attack. Although wounded in both legs in the last stages of the attack he continued to direct and encourage his men displaying a high standard of personal courage and gallantry. The operation was completely successful and resulted in over 30 of the enemy being killed and the line of communication being cleared.

  In honour of his magnificent effort in leading his men to capture that remote hill, Noel Pallier’s superiors named the feature ‘Pallier’s Hill’. The official citations give weight to the enormity of the achievements of ‘the boy’ and his men: Pallier and Lance Corporal ‘Lofty’ Back were Mentioned in Despatches; Corporal E.P. ‘Hi Ho’ Silver and Corporal J.H. ‘Bluey’ Whitechurch won the Military Medal; and Sergeant L.A. ‘Teddy’ Bear won the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Teddy Bear’s recommendation read:

  The success of this most difficult attack was largely due to the magnificent part played by Sergeant Bear. He showed complete disregard for his own safety and displayed outstanding personal gallantry throughout the attack. The example he set was an inspiration to his men.

  Noel Pallier has never forgotten the feelings he experienced when the battle died down:

  ‘Bluey’ Whitechurch later wrote that we all seemed to be hysterical after we’d done it and he was sort of right. It was a feeling that it was unbelievable that we’d made it to beat them on that hilltop. Then things cooled down and machine gun from the Japs’ reserves further back started to pick us up. We thought a counterattack was coming but it never amounted to anything.

  Somewhere on the hill, in the fighting, I got hit again. At first you don’t even pinpoint when you got hit. The pain hits you later. You can feel the bullets hit the ground but you don’t realise you’ve been hit immediately because your blood’s up.

  ‘We weren’t cold-blooded men but we had to use the bayonet then. We had no choice. You’re fighting for your life. When you see a man getting out of a foxhole, clipping his bayonet on, you know it’s either him or you and you do what you were trained to do. Correct action becomes instinctive. You were trained to make the correct move but you don’t think about it. You couldn’t imagine Teddy Bear to be ruthless but that’s what happens in war. Had we not fought like that, we would never have survived.

  In his early eighties, Noel Pallier looked at an old photo of Pallier’s Hill and the surrounding countryside. It showed a ridge line like a giant Stone Age axe protruding, cutting-edge up, out of the jungle:

  I find it hard to believe that we could have taken that hill. We were so isolated. We were so on our own. It was like a mediaeval castle. Every man that day did his job. I didn’t see everything. I didn’t see Billy Parfray who got his arm almost blown off. He did an excellent job. Every man who went in with me should have been decorated but the Australian Army don’t do things like that.

  It was about 9 o’clock at night when they got us wounded blokes back down and the doctor had a go at us. The blokes helped us down with one on each arm and they skidded down the hillside. Tha
t bloody hurt, I can tell you.

  Teddy got one which skidded through the back of the shoulder, one across the knee, two or three bullets or bits of shrapnel. He could still sort of half walk but he was using a rifle as a crutch, leaning on the barrel. When he cooled down he looked at it and saw there was one up the spout and the safety catch off. He was so annoyed at himself that he hurled the rifle off into the valley. One day somebody will find that rifle.

  Noel Pallier and Teddy Bear remained mates for the rest of their lives. After he recovered from his wounds, Teddy was chosen for officer training. He topped the course, won the Baton of Honour and served as a platoon commander in Borneo. After the war he named his son Nolan, after his mate. Typically, he made no special mention of the name to Noel. It wasn’t until young Nolan’s wedding, many years later, that Noel Pallier received the confirmation he always suspected:

  It wasn’t until the wedding breakfast that he told everyone how his son Nolan was named. He said he was lying on a hill in New Guinea, wounded, with another bloke not far away also wounded, and he said: ‘If ever I have a son I’ll call him after this fellow.’ He never said anything to me but he never forgot it. Typical Teddy.

  Teddy Bear was, in many ways, the embodiment of the Digger. He had a ready wit with an ever-present smile, a loyal mate. He worked his way through the ranks, serving his military apprenticeship as a private, then a corporal, in the Middle East, where he showed superb courage and leadership skills. At Isurava he rose to the occasion again, taking command of his platoon after his CO and sergeant had been killed and charging into the advancing enemy with a Bren gun.

  He showed remarkable endurance and courage again after Isurava when, crippled by his wounds, he and a mate, Russ Fairbairn, took a fortnight to inch their way back down the Kokoda Track to Moresby. Because of his wounds, Teddy could only shuffle sideways. Russ had a bullet near his spine. Together they linked in a bizarre, excruciating marathon dance through the mud, across the streams and up and down the steep hills and gullies, pulling and pushing each other to safety. Both recovered.

  Then Teddy came back for more in New Guinea and rose to new heights, passing on his skills to Noel Pallier as sergeant of his old platoon, a platoon which by war’s end had become one of the most decorated in history, winning one Victoria Cross, one Distinguished Conduct Medal and seven Military Medals. Finally he rose to become an officer. It’s hard to imagine a man better suited to lead in battle.

  After the war Teddy reverted to the other, more dominant, side of his personality and took a Diploma in Bible Studies. He and his wife, Martha, worked as youth counsellors in schools. Alzheimers disease claimed Teddy in 1999.

  The Japanese resistance in New Guinea was fatally undermined by the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, which prevented their forces from being reinforced. The Australian 3rd Division took Lae and Salamaua and the 7th Division fought through the Markham Valley to win Dumpu. After bitter fighting around Shaggy Ridge, the 9th Division took Finschhafen. The Australian forces were then withdrawn home and readied for the last, island-hopping campaigns of 1944–45 which saw the Japanese threat finally extinguished.

  In the final campaigns, public opinion had tired of the war. Many people, including Diggers, were questioning the necessity of risking lives in what became known as ‘backyard’ campaigns (mopping up Japanese forces that had been bypassed by the main Allied advance and left to wither on the vine).

  Ironically, the campaign to capture Balikpapan on Borneo in July 1945, the last large-scale campaign of the Pacific war, was the biggest Australian joint-forces operation of World War II.

  According to his biographer, William Manchester, MacArthur was aware of the doubts creeping into the troops as the war ground to an end. He exposed himself to danger by attending the landings at both Brunei and Balikpapan to assure the troops that he was not asking them to do something for which he himself had no stomach. Whether the Diggers who saw him regarded his actions the same way is open to debate. Nevertheless, the Australians fought with their customary flair and courage, and soon cracked the defences of the desperate, dug-in defenders.

  By this stage the Americans had decided that they had suffered enough casualties (particularly after the bloody fighting at Iwo Jima and Okinawa) in trying to bring the Japanese to their knees. US military planners estimated it could cost another million casualties if they continued their current conventional operations to conquer Japan itself. They decided to use the atom bomb. The impact of that decision, first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, brought the Japanese Emperor out of centuries of seclusion to surrender personally, telling his stunned people that they must ‘endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable’.

  MacArthur accepted the surrender on board the US battleship Missouri on 1 September 1945. General Sir Thomas Blamey signed the document on Australia’s behalf. (Among the witnesses was Sergeant ‘Bluey’ Whitechurch, who won a Military Medal at Pallier’s Hill.) General MacArthur captured the feeling of the moment when he spoke at the ceremony:

  Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death – the seas only bear commerce – men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight … and in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way …

  By war’s end, the Australian Army had suffered 18,000 deaths, 22,000 wounded and 20,000 prisoners of war out of the 400,000 who had served outside Australia. The Diggers of World War II had matched, and in many cases, surpassed the deeds of their fathers. They had enhanced the reputation of the Digger.

  CHAPTER 14

  War in Korea

  Sadly, the peace, which the world so desperately hoped for after the end of World War II, did not eventuate. While Australia struggled with the demobilisation of the half-million servicemen and women still in uniform at war’s end, Europe and the Super Powers were embroiled in the tensions that became the Cold War.

  With the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin ruthlessly wielding power both at home and against his neighbours, the communist expansion began to gather pace. By 1948, Poland disappeared behind what Winston Churchill called the ‘Iron Curtain’. Czechoslovakia followed soon after. Germany was split in half, with the communists controlling East Germany. A Soviet push to swallow Berlin was thwarted only when the Allies broke the blockade with a remarkable airlift of supplies. The communists also made rapid gains in Asia, taking control of the great prize of China when Mao Tse-tung defeated the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. The French were struggling against the Viet Minh in Indo-China while Malaya, Burma and Indonesia were all trying to contain communist insurrectionists.

  Many dreaded World War III. Indeed, the Americans prepared for that eventuality. They tried to counter the communist expansion: first, with the Marshall Plan, which provided aid to threatened nations; second, by joining with its Western European allies to form a military alliance called the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO.

  But a test of strength between the two forces was inevitable. The showdown was eventually played out on what was effectively neutral ground – the remote Korean peninsula. Here, in the predawn of Sunday, 25 June 1950, the tension exploded into violence when the North Koreans, trained and backed by the Soviets, invaded South Korea, armed and trained by the USA. The North Koreans launched a massive artillery bombardment against the South Korean defences along the 38th parallel, the artificial boundary since 1945. Since 1910, Korea had been a Japanese Protectorate. After Japan’s World War II capitulation there was a rush to fill the void. The Russians occupied the northern half, which contained most of the country’s industries, while the Americans hurriedly countered with a blocking move into the southern half, which served as Korea’s agricultural base. The Soviets provided the North Koreans with all the modern weapons of war. On the other hand, the Americans withheld many essential elements – tanks, heavy artillery
and fighter planes – because they were concerned the South might try to conquer the North. Consequently, the South was no match for the might of the North, and within three days the communists overran them and captured many key southern cities, including the capital, Seoul.

  The United Nations dismissed the absurd North Korean claim that it was not invading the South but merely defending itself against a South Korean invasion. The UN Security Council passed a motion calling for an immediate end to the conflict and demanding that North Korea withdraw its forces back above the 38th parallel. That same day, US President Harry Truman ordered General Douglas MacArthur, then in supreme command of the Occupation Forces in Japan, to use his forces to assist South Korea.

  Then, for the first time in its history, the UN Security Council called for member states to come to the aid of South Korea and to help it repel the attack. Truman proposed MacArthur as commander of the UN forces in Korea, and the participating nations agreed. Australia was one of the first countries to answer the call, firstly with the RAN’s frigate HMAS Shoalhaven and then with the destroyer HMAS Bataan. Operating in his usual style, using carefully controlled press releases, MacArthur requested the use of the RAAF Mustang Squadron, stationed in Japan, then promptly released his request to the world media. An embarrassed Robert Menzies agreed to the request.