P. Dennis & J. Grey (eds.), Serving Vital Interests: Australian Strategic Planning in Peace and War, Army History Unit, Canberra, 1992.
J. Grey, A Military History of Australia, 3rd edn, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2008.
D.M. Horner, High Command: Australia and Allied Strategy 1939–1945, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982.
G. McCormack, Cold War Hot War: An Australian Perspective on the Korean War, Hale and Ironmonger, Sydney, 1983.
J. Robertson & J. McCarthy, Australian War Strategy 1939–1945, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1985.
G. Sheridan, The Partnership: The Inside Story of the US–Australian Alliance under Bush and Howard, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006.
R. Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era 1820–1920, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980.
C. Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa 1899–1902, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002.
[5]
‘THEY ALSO SERVED’: EXAGGERATING WOMEN’S ROLE IN AUSTRALIA’S WARS
Eleanor Hancock
Anzac Day is becoming Australia’s de facto national day, and Anzac our national story. Yet despite well-meaning claims to the contrary, the Anzac myth does not include all Australians. It cannot include those who have migrated here recently, for example, or those whose ancestors fought on the ‘enemy’ side. Unlike the Indigenous critique of Australia Day as a national day, this inconvenient truth about Anzac Day has not had the impact one might expect, presumably because those excluded are not in a position to criticise the mythology or the new centrality of Anzac Day out of fear of being labelled un-Australian. It is for this reason, perhaps, that those who commented favourably online on Marilyn Lake’s critical article on the Anzac myth in The Age were so careful to point out their own family links to Australian military service.1
One response to the seeming Anglo-Celtic dominance of Anzac is a process we might call the ‘they also served’ phenomenon, exemplified by the appearance of books on German Anzacs, Russian Anzacs, and the desire for groups that were previously marginalised to have their own war memorials. Yet even with the national myth’s exclusion of Australians whose ancestors arrived after the two World Wars or those who descend from the populations of nations that fought on the other side, the greatest apparent problem for Anzac as a national mythology is its exclusion of half of Australia’s population – women.
In the twentieth century and beyond, Australia has fought its wars as expeditionary wars. Except for nurses, such expeditions excluded women until 1985, when the few and relatively small women’s services were disbanded and their personnel integrated into the regular armed services. Only in 1990 were a number of combat-related duties opened to women, and only very recently, in 2011, were more direct combat-oriented occupations opened to both sexes.2 But these are all relatively modern developments. How is the wholesale exclusion of Australian women from the Anzac story prior to 1985 to be reconciled? One way has been the development of the notion that Australian women somehow managed to make an important contribution to the Australian war effort in the two World Wars. As appealing as the idea might appear, and as useful a way as it might be to avoid Anzac friction along gendered lines, it is nonetheless a lingering and powerful myth.
Readers of this and Zombie Myths will be aware of the role that academic military historians play in correcting distortions in the Australian military fable, such as those that have been created for Australian women’s participation in war. Yet there is a common misconception, even on the part of some fellow historians, that academic historians of Australian military history serve as high priests at the temple of Anzac. They do not. Instead they tend to be the most rigorous and well-informed critics of the Anzac mythology. Why then have these growing myths about the role of Australian women in war not been demolished? There are a number of possible explanations. One is this gap between military historians and the wider profession.3 The history of Australian military nurses, for example, falls between the stools. For historians of gender, it seems to be military history; for military historians, it may not appear to be military history proper. This gap results in an unsophisticated historiography about women’s participation in the war effort. Moreover, male military historians may hold back from expressing their critiques of such works from a concern that they could be misinterpreted as a sexist form of gate-keeping. Finally, while some aspects of women’s wartime participation in the World Wars in other countries have at times been seen as an advance in women’s opportunities and/or their emancipation, Australia does not fit this model. The silence of general historians may reflect a certain avoidance of this discomfiting aspect of gender relations and women’s history in this country.
In any case, Australia’s tradition of expeditionary wars has meant that – aside from the bombing of Darwin and Broome in 1942 – Australians at home have never known the modern civilian experience of war, such as the horrors of deliberate civilian bombing and the difficulties of occupation by hostile foreign troops.4 This has allowed a strict separation to exist between the military experience of war and the civilian experience in most Australian minds. This division was broken down as a result of the World Wars in nations such as Britain and Germany, but not in Australia. Its continuation in Australia has allowed many Australians to assume that civilian or non-combatant status will protect women from war’s violence, and for a long time it has allowed Australians, including Australian feminists, to conceive of war as ‘secret men’s business’. The 530-page Oxford Australian Feminism: A Companion – which defines feminism as including ‘a concern about women’s claims to full citizenship and to recognition of their social, economic, cultural, and political participation’ – has, for example, no entry on war.5
In the past, when women were expected to identify vicariously with men’s heroism, the absence of female heroines from the national story would not have been surprising or questioned. In the twenty-first century, however, a national myth that involves only half the population should be more problematic. How can women be encompassed within the Anzac paradigm? This is an issue that is important both to those who support the emerging focus on Anzac as the formative national experience and – for different reasons and motives – to historians who want to shift the focus to, or heighten the attention given to, women’s own experiences.
This difficulty has been overcome to some degree by artificially extending Anzac to encompass women by exaggerating, wherever possible, their role and contributions to Australia’s twentieth-century wars. This has often originated from a wellintentioned desire to ‘wish away’ the exclusivity of the original concept of Anzac.6 It has resulted, for example, in a major focus on the experience of Australian military nurses. These formed the one group of Australian women to serve overseas in all major twentieth-century Australian conflicts, the only group of Australian women in a military capacity to be permitted to serve near the front until 1985, and also the only group of Australian women in a military capacity to become prisoners of war. The 38 Australian members of the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) who were imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II were the only Australian women normally resident in Australia to have an experience of danger, suffering and death equivalent to that of thousands of women in other countries during the same war.7 A wide-ranging hagiography of Australian military nurses has developed as a result, according to which Australian nurses were ‘gallant, unsung heroines’ and ‘heroic women’.8
Importantly, nurses do not challenge traditional concepts of gender roles in that they have often been historically perceived as embodying ‘female’ characteristics through their selflessness, nurturing, caring and perhaps subservience to male authority figures like doctors.9 The resulting ambivalence this creates can be seen in Kirsty Harris’s startling suggestion that the history of World War I nurses ‘contains pertinent lessons for today’s military strategists, not least of which is that the presence of Australian women in a
war zone can have immense benefits for Australian men away from home’.10 By this bizarre assertion, she suggests that Australian soldiers recover more readily when nursed by their own compatriots. Alternatively, nurses in casualty clearing stations occupied, in Ruth Rae’s opinion, frontline positions. Exaggerated claims for the comparative role of nurses versus serving soldiers flow from this, including Rae’s incredible conclusion that ‘the nurses were not combatants but they were witnesses and in many ways that can be a harder role. To endure pain is sometimes easier than to continually observe the suffering of others.’11 This sentiment is unlikely to have been shared by those actually suffering from war wounds. Such studies demonstrate a lack of realistic judgment and knowledge of the wider context of the war. Harris also claims, for example, that the execution of nurse Edith Cavell ‘highlights sharply the distinct differences in the scope of civilian and military nursing’.12 It does not. Cavell was a matron in a Belgian civilian hospital, who was executed not because she was a nurse but because she ‘was involved in resistance activities that no occupying power would tolerate’.13
The comparatively small numbers of Australian military nurses employed in overseas combat zones have been the subject of multiple detailed (although uncritical) studies. Yet at the same time exaggerated claims about their neglect by historians abound. It is a surprising kind of neglect since nursing is included, for example, in the medical history volumes of the official history of World War I. Such claims are still, however, made by historians of nursing, by popular historians and in the general literature aimed at schools and the public by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.14 Jan Bassett, for one, suggested that army nurses have been neglected or idealised by historians.15 To Rae they are ‘forgotten’; Harris considers them marginalised by historians; and to Rees they are ‘the other Anzacs’.16 As late as 2005, Rae argued that ‘there is an almost total absence of information about the role of the Australian nurse during WWI’17 – yet there are at least eight specialist studies of them.18 Why are these claims both exaggerated and repeated? Why, no matter how much is written about Australian military nurses, is this never enough? Nurses’ role in the Anzac myth, despite the best efforts of these authors, is and will necessarily remain marginal. It is marginal because their numbers, when set against the numbers of Australian soldiers who fought overseas, are minuscule. The more marginal the claim, the more, perhaps, it needs to be repeated.
For the record, the contribution of Australian nurses in World War I, and of Australian women in the women’s services in World War II for that matter, was minor. This can only be concealed by over-claiming – and indeed the numbers involved seem to climb steadily, based on generous interpretations of service.19 Harris reaches a maximal number of 3199 Australian nurses who served in World War I by counting nurses who served with any Allied military unit, not just Australian organisations.20 If Rae’s figure of 416 000 Australians who enlisted and served overseas in the first AIF is accepted, then these nurses would be some 0.76 per cent of the total (and even less, if Australian men who served in other Allies’ services were also counted). 21 Various authors give different figures for the number of men who served overseas in the first AIF – alternatively 324 000 and 416 000. Making some rough calculations, this was either 14 or 17 per cent of the Australian male population at the time. Using Harris’s generous figures for the number of female nurses serving overseas (3199), they represent just 0.14 per cent of the female Australian population at the time.
In World War II, 726 543 men enlisted in the 2nd AIF, comprising 21.57 per cent of the Australian male population. Taking Patsy Adam-Smith’s figure of 66 718 women in the women’s services and military nursing services, this was 2.04 per cent of the Australian female population.22 The Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ own figures for male and female service in World War II indicate that 66 160 women served in all the women’s services, while 926 500 men served in the three armed services: giving women 6.6 per cent of the total Australians in military service.23 These figures are based on crude computations and need to be refined by closer statistical analysis, but they do give a sense of the relative insignificance of the role permitted to Australian women in both wars. Comparatively and proportionately, women’s service was unimportant. It has gained disproportionate historical attention because nurses and other medical staff were the only Australian women allowed to serve near the front line.24 It is therefore, for most of the twentieth-century military history of Australia, the only way that Australian women could claim some of the aura or lustre of Anzac. The exaggerated service of Australian nurses thus served to prove that ‘Australian women were just as capable as Australian men of meeting the challenge of war’.25
Equally, the various cliches of popular belief about a distinctively Australian military ethos –usually differentiated from that of the British – are replicated for Australian women in war. A.G. Butler, author of the World War I official medical history, claimed that ‘Australian nurses, wherever they went, were courageous and tactful standard bearers of Australian democracy’.26 Other historians depict Australian nurses as similar to the ‘digger’ in their civilian ethos, their differences from the British, their bravery, their mateship, their egalitarianism and their loss of life.27 Harris even claims ‘a uniquely Australian set of practices for military nursing’. It is not clear what she considers these to be, although earlier in the book – based solely on the claims of Australian nurses themselves, and on one report of an Australian medical services’ director – she asserts that Australian nurses were used to more responsibility and displayed more initiative than their British counterparts. She does not make any comparison to the military nurses of other Dominions. Here is a case of the Anzac myth influencing the interpretation of historical evidence. The information Harris herself provides also contains examples from which it might equally be concluded that British and American nurses had superior experience, training or were permitted to undertake responsibilities from which Australian nurses were excluded.28
Overall, the history of Australian women’s involvement in Australia’s wars is the history of an absence, but an absence which needs to be explained. In both World Wars, there was a clear gap between women’s desire to participate actively in the war effort and the lack of wider social and political support for them to do so.29 What remains then to be investigated is the reluctance to use Australia’s woman-power more extensively in the period 1941 to 1943, when the nation appeared to be facing a crisis of national survival. Contemporaries expected a Japanese invasion, yet the Australian War Cabinet ruled in 1943 that no servicewomen were to be sent overseas except in the medical services. More than 24 000 women joined the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) and over 400 eventually served overseas – mainly in New Guinea in clerical and signalling positions – but only after New Guinea was no longer judged to be a combat zone.30 Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) personnel employed in the Allied Intelligence Centre at Air Force Command in Brisbane were not permitted to go outside Australia when the centre moved off-shore: instead US Women’s Army Air Corps’ staff had to be trained to replace the Australian servicewomen overseas.31 Equally, the most senior officer of the AWAS, Colonel Sybil Irving, claimed that she refused permission for AWAS to fire anti-aircraft guns, because ‘they will be the future mothers of Australia and one would not wish them to have the spilling of the blood of other mothers’ sons on their hands’.32
It is also important to note that while Australian women may have felt they had possibilities for emancipation during World War II, what is striking is how narrow these possibilities actually were when contrasted to those of women in other nations, such as Britain or Germany. Comparative studies would highlight how minor the roles permitted to women in Australia actually were, which may be one reason such studies have not been done. The reasons for these restrictions are historically understandable in context. The gendered Federation settlement that had protected the interests of men as wage-earners mea
nt that Australia was always ‘one conflict behind’ in war’s effect on opportunities for women.33 In World War I, the Australian Army Nursing Service was separate from the armed forces, while its British equivalent, the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, was incorporated within the British military medicine structure. While women’s service units were already formed in Britain in World War I, it was not until World War II that similar units were formed in Australia.34 In 1938, Britain formed the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in June 1939. The WAAAF was the first such service formed in Australia, but not until February 1941.35 Sir Percy Spender claimed to Gavin Long that the army was responsible for this delay because of its strong hostility to the concept of women’s services: ‘Women’s Services were ridiculed at the outset, and strongly opposed by the [Australian] Army. This was in spite of the fact that they were being built up in England.’36
Even in World War II, Australian gender attitudes remained conservative. The editors of the most recent significant study of gender and war in Australia (published some 16 years ago), Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, recognise that the war raised the issue of women’s right to paid work symbolically rather than numerically, and they can only claim that women were enlisted and conscripted into employment on ‘a large scale’.37 Equally, Pat Grimshaw and her fellow authors claim that ‘large numbers’ of women were drafted into the metal trades and munitions (50 per cent of munitions workers by 1943).38 And Kate Darian-Smith reports that in 1944, when female paid employment was at its peak, ‘women constituted almost 25 per cent of the total workforce, and almost one third of all women aged fifteen to sixtyfive years were in paid labour’.39 However, more accurate figures reveal that ‘almost 25 per cent’ is, in fact, 24.1 per cent, while ‘almost one third’ is more accurately 31.6 per cent.40 Rounding these numbers up makes them seem greater. The percentages of women described as ‘munitions workers’ obviously depend on the historian’s definition of munitions. Using figures provided in the official history of the war economy, women workers made up 41.15 per cent of those employed in government munitions factories, and 24.88 per cent of those employed by private contractors, making women overall 26.73 per cent of the combined workforce in munitions.41
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