Hero or Deserter?

by Roger Maynard

  Bennett’s reference to the British may have been sincerely felt but was it also an attempt to find favour with them? A cynical view maybe, but given the controversy he was about to face back home, he needed all the friends he could find.

  Interestingly Carty would write to Bennett some months later to inform him that after accomplishing their mission at Singkep Island, his party escaped to Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka), where they reported for duty. By then Carty had been promoted to the rank of captain.7

  Bennett seemed sorry to leave Djambi, where he had managed to buy some emergency clothing to replace the rag-tag kit he’d been wearing since Singapore. He was taken with the community, who appeared overawed by the threat of the Japanese invasion.

  ‘It seemed dreadful that these quiet, peace-loving people who were living in the backwash of humanity and who were so amiably disposed to all whom they met, should be subjected to the terrors and horrors of this Japanese war of aggression,’ he observed.

  ‘They were living quietly among themselves and were harming no one. They were very happy under Dutch rule and could never be happy under the domineering, cruel rule of the Japanese.’8

  Was Bennett an old softy at heart or was it merely another attempt to curry favour with his hosts in a bid to enhance his wartime image? I cannot prove his motives one way or the other but I suspect his emotional attachment to the people of Djambi was genuine.

  Bennett had to get away – and fast. A bus was provided to transport the remaining members of the party to Muaratebo, which entailed a lengthy drive along the banks of the beautiful Djambi River. Once again they arrived unexpectedly and were directed by the Dutch governor to the local rest-house for refreshments.

  The one breakthrough at Muaratebo was the discovery of a telegraphic link with the outside world. Bennett couldn’t wait to fire off a telegram to General Wavell advising him of his safe arrival in Sumatra and asking for a plane to be sent to Padang so he could continue his journey south.

  There was no reply and after breakfast the following day they got back on the bus for the final stage of their drive across Sumatra to Padang. The road was busy, with many buses transporting native soldiers to do battle with the Japanese. Oddly, a lot of them seemed to be taking their wives and children along for the ride.

  At one village they drew up alongside an ambulance that contained two British women who had been wounded when their ship was bombed in Singapore. They had eventually made it to the Riau Archipelago, where they were picked up and brought to a hospital in Sawahlunto on the road to Padang.

  By now this part of Sumatra was resembling a refugee camp; hundreds of men and women from Singapore were being housed in makeshift accommodation. All the survivors had their identities recorded and Bennett recognised the names of a number of Australians who had been evacuated by ship from Singapore on 13 February.

  The Dutch provided Bennett, Moses and Walker with a car, which reached Padang about 7 pm. On arrival it seemed half the British Army and Air Force were also there, most of them from Singapore. An office had been set up to handle all the refugees and Bennett took the opportunity to send another wire requesting air transport from Padang to Batavia, now known as Jakarta. This time General Wavell was quick to respond, eager to find out what had happened in the final few hours before the fall of Singapore. He especially wanted to know more about reports of stragglers and deserters.

  ‘I told him that there was in fact a large number of battle stragglers in the streets of Singapore during the last few days and that the proportion of Australians was very small.’9

  This latter claim may have been an exaggeration, but truth is always the first casualty of war.

  Bennett, Moses and Walker spent a comfortable night in a hotel and assembled at the wharf before daylight to be ferried out to a waiting Catalina flying boat with a Dutch pilot and crew. It was an agreeable conclusion to their ten-day adventure on the high seas and travelling the back roads of Sumatra. Next stop Batavia. From there Australia was merely a hop, skip and a jump away.

  The air-raid siren that greeted them on arrival in Java seemed ominous, but Bennett and his team had been through enough by then not to be fazed by such alarms. Apart from anything else there was lunch to consider. The party arranged to be driven to the Hotel des Indes, where they enjoyed a substantial meal in the restaurant. It appeared to be a favourite haunt of the military. Bennett had hardly sat down when he recognised an Australian friend at a neighbouring table.

  Ramsay Ray was an Australian officer serving in Britain’s RAF and had just managed to escape from Palembang before the Japs arrived. The two got on famously and when Ray offered Bennett and his men a lift to Bandoeng after lunch, they were quick to accept.

  Bennett was keen to catch up with Wavell, who was staying there, but on arrival later that afternoon, he discovered that the general had closed his HQ and flown to India earlier in the day.

  By this stage about 2000 troops had arrived in Java, including the 2/3rd Motor Transport Company from Malaya and an advance party of Australians from the Middle East. At the helm was General John Lavarack, head of I Corps, who had arrived ahead of men from 6th and 7th Divisions, who were being redeployed from Egypt to the Far East to fight the Japanese.10 Bennett was on the lookout for a flight home and when he heard that ‘Joe’ Lavarack was in town and was about to fly to Australia himself, he decided to ask a favour.

  However, to add to military tensions, a fierce power struggle was going on between senior officers of the AIF at the time and when Bennett telephoned Lavarack’s office to enquire about air travel out of the country, the request went down like a lead balloon. Bennett, Lavarack and Blamey all had their eyes on the top job – commander-in-chief of Australian forces. Bennett was told there was no chance of joining the flight due to leave the next morning with Lavarack and two of his senior officers.11

  The implications did not escape Bennett’s attention: he was being effectively superseded by Lavarack as commander of the AIF in Malaya. Then again, why was the head of I Corps planning to leave for Australia at such a crucial time?

  ‘I thought that Lavarack was deserting his men just before the battle and should not escape while there was fighting to be done,’ Bennett wrote.12

  Perhaps the delicious irony of Lavarack planning a carbon copy of Bennett’s own flight to freedom had not occurred to the former commander of 8th Division, though he was quick to point out that a week later, the head of I Corps had joined in the chorus that condemned Bennett’s escape.

  For the record, Lavarack was made acting Commander-in-Chief of Australia’s military forces in March, before Blamey assumed the appointment on his return from the Middle East. By that time Bennett was out of the running, his future under a cloud.13

  Bennett’s eventual departure from Java was dogged by incident. First Moses was knocked down by a taxi and had to be taken to hospital. (He and Walker subsequently made it back to Australia by boat in March.) Then Bennett attempted to thumb a lift to Tjilatjap, on Java’s south coast, in the hope of securing a flight to Australia. Once again his luck held and he hitched a ride with a party of British officers. On completing the 150-mile (250-km) journey he found the seaport was teeming with refugees and military personnel, including American Army, Navy and Air Force servicemen.

  On the local airstrip he found a Qantas plane that was scheduled to fly out the next day. Unfortunately it was a charter flight and the pilot couldn’t sell him a ticket, but Bennett was undeterred. He simply stowed away on the plane the night before. 14

  At least this was the story he related to Frank Legg. In an earlier account that he wrote for his memoir, he claimed that he obtained a passage for himself and opted to sleep on the plane before it departed because he couldn’t find a room in town.15

  This wasn’t the only story to conflict with later reports, which claimed the aircraft was a flying boat. What is not in doubt is that Bennett and his fellow passengers, all of them civilian refugees, took off at dawn on 27 February.
As they made height over Tjilatjap they saw a convoy of ships preparing to leave port crowded with passengers. Most were heading for India but at least one was hoping to make it to Australia. They would be the last merchant vessels to depart before the Japanese took control of the Dutch East Indies, dooming the native population and those Dutch civilian and military personnel left behind, as well as thousands of POWs, to three-and-a-half years of servitude.

  Bennett finally got back to Australia in the late afternoon, the Catalina cruising to a halt just off the coast of Broome at 5 pm. A pearling lugger came out to meet it and ferry the passengers ashore to the Governor Broome Hotel. It was a moment that would leave an indelible impression on Bennett.

  ‘To me Broome will always have a sentimental attachment,’ Bennett would say later. ‘To the ordinary visitor, Broome is just Broome, a not very inviting place. To me it was Australia, home. What is more I had succeeded in escaping. How different I felt when I left Singapore 12 days ago. Then the prospects of coming through alive looked hopeless and almost impossible.’16

  Bennett enjoyed every minute of his newfound freedom. He headed to a local hotel to tuck into a typical bush meal before retiring to the bar. Everybody congratulated him on his escape, which he found ‘flattering’ and reinforced his view that the decision to leave Singapore was the right one.

  They were all worried about Japan’s victory and the army’s relentless drive south into Sumatra, which made him even more determined to head back to Melbourne and brief his fellow officers and the government about the enemy’s tactics.

  Bennett evidently wanted to put his own version on the record before anybody else had time to question his motives. He claimed he wanted to tell Prime Minister John Curtin and his ministers the full story of Malaya, how well the diggers had fought and how the lessons learned might place Australia in a much stronger position to meet an enemy invasion.

  ‘That was the main object of my escape,’ he made clear. And to further justify his position he pointed out that it was the first duty of every prisoner to avoid capture. ‘Anyway I did not relish the idea of cooling my heels in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp while fighting was to be done,’ he added. ‘I felt that I could give valuable service, especially now I had learned Japanese methods at first hand.’17

  These were admirable sentiments on the face of it but were they merely a convenient pretence? Whatever the truth nothing was going to get in the way of Gordon Bennett’s speedy return to Army HQ. The most direct route to Melbourne was via Perth but it turned out to be quicker to fly via Charleville in Queensland and then on to Sydney. A Dutch Douglas aircraft was available and Bennett booked himself a seat. He and his fellow passengers – a Dutch family – took off from Broome at first light and reached Alice Springs, nearly 900 miles (1500 km) away, by lunchtime.

  During the refuelling stop he had time to send a wire to the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, announcing his safe return and advising Forde that he expected to be in Sydney by the following day. Having hoped to surprise the authorities, Bennett had the wind taken out of his sails when he learned that the BBC had already broadcast news of his escape thanks to a tip-off from Charles Moses in Batavia.

  Following another long flight from Alice, the travel party arrived in Charleville soon after sunset. The town was bursting at the seams with hundreds of American airmen; the bars were packed with them. Once news leaked out of Bennett’s presence he was warmly welcomed by the locals, many of whom wanted news of their relatives left behind in Singapore.

  Bennett flew into Sydney’s Mascot aerodrome at lunchtime on 1 March to be greeted by his wife, Bess, daughter, Joan, and dozens of press photographers. It was an exciting moment as he stepped onto the tarmac, but the emotion was mixed. He admitted later that the joy was dimmed by two factors – as the bearer of bad news to Australia and the fact he had left so many friends behind as POWs.18

  Was Bennett’s conscience pricking him again? If so there was little opportunity for second thoughts, given the clamour of reporters and admirers who descended on him at the Australia Hotel in Castlereagh Street in the city. Everyone wanted to congratulate him on his escape. Everyone, that is, except the military.

  The first hint of a problem came when General Henry Wynter, who had met Bennett earlier at Sydney airport, took him aside and advised him not to make any public statements about the Malaya campaign and the Allies’ defeat.

  Bennett couldn’t believe his ears. At Broome and every other stop, he had been besieged by anxious relatives who had expressed their concern for their loved ones and now he was being told to shut up. Surely they deserved reassurance, he reasoned. After all he was hardly going to reveal any state secrets the Japanese did not know already.

  During the evening, as the beer and spirits flowed, Bennett was handed a message that he was expected in Melbourne the next day to meet the War Cabinet. A plane was put at his disposal and he flew into Essendon aerodrome the following morning.

  Bennett, still in his makeshift army uniform, told the Cabinet the full story of the fall of Singapore and, to his relief, the prime minister and the rest of the government expressed their appreciation for his efforts. More specifically his escape also received their backing, a level of personal support that was then communicated to the media in a formal statement. The prime minister wrote:

  I desire to inform the nation that we are proud to pay tribute to the efficiency, gallantry and devotion of our forces throughout the struggle. We have expressed to Major-General Bennett our confidence in him. His leadership and conduct were in complete conformity with his duty to his men under his command and to his country. He remained with his men until the end, completed all formalities in connection with the surrender and then took the opportunity and risk of escaping.19

  In a few sentences Henry Gordon Bennett had been exonerated by the Australian government. Unhappily for him, not everybody would share the Cabinet’s view.

  Chapter 16

  BENNETT’S FALL FROM GRACE

  On the same day he addressed the War Cabinet in Melbourne, Bennett called on Major-General Vernon Sturdee, at Victoria Barracks, which then housed the Department of Defence.

  Anticipating a warm reception, the 8th Division commander entered the Chief of General Staff’s office to find the conversation was formal and the atmosphere cold and hostile. Sturdee, whose rank for many years had been junior to Bennett’s, told the commander that his escape from Singapore had been ill-advised.

  You could have cut the air with a knife. During the excruciatingly uncomfortable silence that followed, Sturdee looked down and carried on working, while Bennett was left to stand there like a naughty schoolboy.

  How had it come to this? Everyone else had been full of praise, except for the Military Board, who chose to ignore him.

  Once again the Australian Staff Corps, who felt their long and uninterrupted employment by the army gave them added rank and privilege over mere militia men, had shown Bennett who was boss. They were the military establishment. He was the Johnny-come-lately who had chosen a life in civvy street after his daring exploits in World War I.

  Bennett was furious and returned to his hotel room ‘white and shaking’.

  ‘Let’s pack,’ he told his wife. ‘We’re going home in an hour.’1

  On the flight back to Sydney he explained to Bess how shocked and shaken he was by Sturdee’s reception. Hadn’t he left his Singapore HQ and begun his dangerous escape after the surrender was signed? What more could he have done to help his men? Once the Japanese had found him they would almost certainly have marched him away, probably never to be seen again, he told her.

  Bess may have provided a convenient shoulder to cry on at that moment, but Bennett was a fighting man and the Military Board’s response only served to further convince him that he was right to escape. Now he was more determined than ever to prove the wisdom of his ways and to convince the authorities of the need for the kind of training which would prevent such disasters as the defeat of Mal
aya in the future.

  Bennett was adamant that the most important reason for the Allies’ failure was the rigid adherence to inappropriate textbook tactical methods. Military action had been based on experience gained in Europe and North Africa, and the jungles of the Far East demanded different thinking. Malaya had provided a prime example of poor military strategy, he claimed. Years later, when he collaborated with biographer Frank Legg, he articulated these ideas most succinctly:

  In jungle country, particularly, an attacker can move around the flanks of a defensive position and cut off the defenders by establishing road blocks or some other obstacle in the rear.

  Having isolated them he can continue his forward movement, leaving the defensive position miles behind his advancing troops. The psychological effect on the defender is superlatively depressing. This, together with a strong attack on the weak points in the defence, brings about victory for the attackers and defeat for the static defenders.2

  Then there was the issue of war-like aggression. Bennett was highly critical of the British system’s inability to develop the psychological side of a soldier’s training. The Malayan campaign was different to the old days, when men fought shoulder to shoulder under the direct orders of officers who could see all their men.

  ‘In modern war, especially in jungle warfare, officers can control only a few men who are within their sight or within range of their voices,’ he pointed out. In the jungles of Malaya soldiers had to carry on fighting under their own initiative and often without the guidance provided by their leaders.

  ‘To train a soldier how to use his weapons is not enough. He must be trained to be bold and determined and even to die,’ he thundered.