Australian soldiers in World War I were undoubtedly aware of the basic rights of the individual in battle. Generally speaking, it is difficult to see how they cannot have had some understanding of how to act toward the surrendering or captured enemy, given the British Army’s obvious – even if ambiguous – commitment to upholding international law. Translating these understandings from the manuals and applying them under the duress of combat was, however, often a process tinged with uncertainty. Such application of the laws (as they were understood) would vary with the emotional intelligence of the individual as well as the discipline and leadership within the units to which soldiers belonged. It is apparent that some Australian officers harboured an uncompromising attitude toward the enemy from the outset that was clearly communicated to their soldiers. For example, one can only surmise at what attitudes were fomenting within the Victorianraised 22nd Battalion prior to its arrival at the Western Front. At its first battalion parade, the unit was addressed by its Commanding Officer, who pronounced the regimental motto to be ‘Wipe out the bloody Germans’. Despite criticisms from prominent clerics and some newspaper discussion, the motto stuck in abbreviated form – W.O.T.B.G – and formed part of a chorus in the regimental song.22
An unsigned and undated letter held by the Australian War Memorial reveals the abhorrence of one person, at least, over alleged atrocities committed by Australian soldiers during this conflict.23 The letter was sent to Australian Administrative Headquarters in London and is worth quoting in full, not only because of the extraordinary claims it makes but also because of the principled (if occasionally misspelled) position that the writer adopts:
Dear Sirs,
I have been told by wounded soldiers in hospitals and walking cases storeys [of ] cruelity and murder of German wounded and prisoners committed by Australian soldiers. From the evidence I have, there can be no doubt.
I asked a soldier in Kings College Hospital if [he] had seen any German prisoners he said Yes – he saw some been brought in by English Tommies and when they got near the Australians the Australians told the English Tommies to clear or they would kill both of them. The Australians killed the whole of the German prisoners – now this was simply cold blooded murder. Another Australian told me he and another was coming back after a trench raid, the other fellow had two German prisoners and they could not get along as fast as they would like so he killed the two German prisoners. Brave men these, where they not – A Canadian told me he (an officer) had seen the Australians jump on the wounded Germans as they lay on the field of battle and told German prisoners to go back [as] they did not want them and when they turned to go back they turned the machine guns on them and mowed them down – A A.M.C.A. [medical corps soldier] told me one of his stretcher-bearers carried a razor in his pocket and when he came to a wounded German he would finish him off by cutting his throat and he is still doing it – all these and other men have signed their statements. Disc nos given and names of places where these events took place – I am engaged in collecting evidence from all classes of soldiers both sides not from Govt. statements. I have seen some of these and even these prove that the British Army and the Allies are [far] from been saints or even civilized.
Facts are stubborn things and this book will not be plesent reading for young Australians or cover those [who] fought in this war with glorey – I thought if your attention [is drawn] to this matter you might be able to do something to stop the crulity and murder. For two wrongs don’t make a right. We ought to show the Germans we are far above this kind of work. If the men saw the officers were determined to put a stop to it, they would [not] do that wich spoils the fine work they have done during the war. At present the officers only wink at it the men say and take no steps to stop it.
Yours trully24
Unfortunately, the statements that the writer mentioned do not accompany the letter. They have either been lost, destroyed or are still to be discovered. Nonetheless, the commandant of the Australian Administrative Headquarters kept the letter for posterity’s sake and after the war forwarded it to the Australian War Museum section for preservation – an indication, perhaps, that he did not reject the claims out of hand. It would be easy to dismiss such claims as outrageous. The thought that a stretcher-bearer was engaged in slashing the throats of German prisoners seems highly unlikely given the compassion generally understood to have been extended by such men collecting the wounded of friend and foe alike. One is certainly less sanguine, however, about dismissing the possibility that Australian soldiers could act in such a manner given the incidents Bean portrayed with regard to ‘ratting’ at Pozieres and the events which followed Captain Moore’s death at Passchendaele.
It is also clear that, despite Bean’s willingness (albeit somewhat guardedly) to address the issue officially, some senior officers of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) wished to avoid any controversy that might besmirch the name of Australian soldiers. Brigadier General ‘Pompey’ Elliot, for example, was keen to distance his soldiers from allegations of unseemly behaviour. In the New South Wales Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia journal Reveille, he penned a rebuttal to a claim by Robert Graves that Australian troops had murdered German prisoners at Mourlancourt.25
In a similar vein, the correspondence generated between Brigadier General John Gellibrand and Bean, in response to an article published in the Sydney Sun by the recently repatriated commander of the 9th Brigade, Brigadier General Alexander Jobson, is also of special interest. Jobson claimed that troops under his command had openly and deliberately ignored the rules of war and given ‘no quarter’ to enemy troops. An outraged Gellibrand wrote to Bean expressing his doubt as to the veracity of such claims, stating he had only heard of two cases in the whole war and that both were hearsay. He suggested Jobson had been ‘gulled’ or was suffering battle strain. ‘If it is true’, Gellibrand wrote, ‘it is not typical of our men or officers and it is an abortion of spirit if it is false’. Gellibrand urged Bean to publish a letter celebrating ‘the Australian as a fighter, with clean hands and a clean record’.26 Yet Bean did not provide the unequivocal response that Gellibrand was looking for. Instead he replied:
Candidly I don’t know what to do in that case. I am up against this, that one has so constantly heard our men and officers talk as if these things did happen, and laugh about them, that I am half inclined to think they must have happened more often than we would like to believe. I have never had any first hand evidence of this on either side except in one or two cases; but if the rumour does get round that it happened, at least our men and officers have done nothing to stop the rumour being spread … Whether these things are done or not, one hates the attitude which approves of them, and the publication of them could only excuse the German for refusing to take prisoners from amongst our own men … You see I cannot well come out and say I don’t believe that this is done, because I have heard so many wild stories which I don’t know the truth of.27
The stories were not so wild. In another incident an officer of the 27th Battalion shot seven prisoners with his revolver after a corporal, commendably, had refused to do so.28 Such episodes were far more widespread than senior commanders wished to acknowledge. Australians, too, were sometimes on the receiving end of unlawful treatment when captured by the Germans. Australian wounded were killed and Australian prisoners shot down for no apparent reason. Whether this was a response to Australian indiscretions, as Bean had feared, cannot be determined.29 More likely the incidents were examples of the same brand of spontaneous unregulated violence.
Bean argued that a ‘primitive bloodthirstiness’ took possession of most men, particularly in close-quarter fighting. He accepted its presence as inevitable on both sides because men were ‘wrought up by the strain to an intense desire to strike’ with orders ‘to inflict as much loss as possible’. In trench raids in particular their duty required that ‘they spend the few allotted minutes in striking at everything around them, killing, wounding, or captur
ing’. The introduction of such trench raids as an Allied tactic on the Western Front, born of frustration at the usual stalemate, undoubtedly compromised a soldier’s ability to act lawfully: such raiders operated with time limits, had to look to their own safety, and were ordered specifically – in contravention of existing rules of war – to kill the enemy as opposed to taking a position. In any case, Bean admitted that the details of the actions of some Australians did not make pleasant reading, and in another footnote cited the case of a German sergeant who was hauled from a dug-out and shot several times after showing plucky resistance. The German was described as sinking helplessly to the ground, although Bean does not state whether he was dead or not, and the ‘brave man’ was later ‘brained by the knobkerry of some soldier whose lust for blood was not yet satisfied’. Bean was not condoning such behaviour. Yet he reconciled his disappointment against the argument that such an act was ‘inseparable from the exercise of the primitive instincts’.30 The wider question for us is whether we should accept such a premise or is it at its heart incompatible with understanding humans as rational and moral beings?
The history of the 3rd Battalion provides one of the most illuminating examples of the idea of ‘no quarter’ and how it was enacted. Its account of the unit’s part of an attack on Bayonet Trench, on 5 November 1916, raises a number of issues. The bomb and bayonet work that was proudly described shows that giving quarter was simply not countenanced. Privates Weger and Meaker were the first two bayonet men in this encounter and were instructed to ‘start the dirty work’ – the killing of the unlucky German survivors in the dug-outs after a bomb had been thrown in. The pressure on inexperienced men to engage in this ‘standard’ practice was immense. One soldier reported to his sergeant that he had found a German in a shelter. He was told to ‘fix’ the German, but he replied that he could not kill a man that way. The sergeant’s reply was devoid of morality and compassion: ‘Go on, you haven’t killed one yet; I’ll give you one more chance and then I’ll fix him myself ’. To his credit the soldier in question did not compromise his stand and it was left to the sergeant to kill the hapless German. The victim was clearly beyond the point of being a threat. In all likelihood he would have attempted to convey some sign that he wished to surrender and to plead for mercy. There was no justifiable legal or even military reason to kill him. However, the men had been addressed prior to the fight by a Lieutenant Loveday and told that the upcoming battle was ‘an excellent opportunity to avenge the death of their colonel’, who had been mortally wounded a few days beforehand.31 Killing as retribution was something that was specifically outlawed in the Hague Rules.
During the 3rd Battalion’s assault, some Germans were actually taken prisoner. One was described as ‘smaller than the others’ and able to speak some English. His diminutive stature (and possibly youth), along with the fact that he could speak English, appear to have contributed to his survival. He was one of two unwounded Germans captured during the action, but the Australians proceeded to slaughter the wounded prisoners in their care. One Sergeant Yorke, who was asked to take a message back to headquarters, agreed, then added laconically: ‘All right, I’ll go back through the trench and fix up those —— Huns, their moaning has been getting on my nerves’. When the order finally came to retire, the small German prisoner was carried back but other prisoners were euphemistically noted to have gone ‘for a stroll’.32 The incident is corroborated in the diary of Sergeant A. E. Matthews:
Orders came through from Brigade for us to evacuate our position and to leave no live Germans behind. Guessing that there would be dirty work for somebody killing the wounded prisoners, I and a Lance Corporal volunteered to escort the two unwounded prisoners back to Battn Hqrs and we had just got away when we heard the awful screams of the men who were being slaughtered through military necessity.33
For their heroic conduct in this attack, Weger and Meaker received the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Loveday the Military Cross, and Yorke was recommended for an award by his brigade commander.34 If, as Matthews states, the orders to kill the enemy wounded emanated from brigade headquarters, then the Australian commander, Brigadier General James Heane, is deserving of condemnation, the more so because as a senior officer there could have been no question as to his misunderstanding the rules of war.
The same patterns of behaviour were again evident in World War II and, if anything, they were more openly admitted. Ivor Hele, an official Australian war artist, actually produced a sketch entitled: ‘Shooting wounded Japanese prisoners, Timbered Knoll’. It was dated 30 July 1943. By that time, if any doubt had existed previously, the war against the Japanese had assumed the ugly face of a race war – most certainly from the Australian perspective. Each side depicted the other as barbarians and non-human. In this context little empathy was cultivated and an uncompromising ruthlessness imposed itself: the rules of war were flagrantly disregarded by officers and men of both sides. In an address to his soldiers General Sir Thomas Blamey, Australia’s Commander in Chief, referred to the Japanese as an ‘inhuman foe … a curious race – a cross between the human being and the ape’. They were ‘vermin’ to be exterminated.35 General Paul Cullen, whose men were known to have bayoneted Japanese prisoners, found himself unable to condemn his soldiers, ‘It was my battalion and I felt guilty’, he reflected, ‘but it was understandable. I’m not critical of the soldiers.’36
The range of incidents of such atrocities was wide and evidence of them is easy to uncover. Charles Lindbergh, the famous American aviator, spent four months with the Americans in mid-1944 and kept a journal in which he documented numerous acts of barbarity toward the Japanese. Mentioned among the incidents he described was the Australian practice of throwing prisoners from airplanes and then reporting that they had committed hara-kiri (suicide).37 How true this was is open to debate in the face of no obvious admissions by Australian troops. It cannot be discounted, however, and given the openly expressed desire of officers and men to annihilate the Japanese, as Paul Ham has suggested, the victors can be relied upon not to leave records of their wartime disgraces.38
In another noteworthy display of a singular lack of any sense of ‘fair play’ in this conflict, on 29 December 1944, during operations at Bougainville, Brigadier R.F. Monaghan signalled to men of the 42nd Battalion: ‘For the present we have enough information to require no further prisoners. For now slaughter will commence and every Jap seen will be promptly and ruthlessly killed. Information all ranks.’39 A week later Monaghan chose to revisit his order in rather more civil tones. (It is likely that superiors felt his language had been too blatant and that if such uncompromising actions were to be advocated they should at least be veiled, if only thinly, with a modicum of decency.) The new message hardly hid the original intent and was well short of being a mea culpa:
Further to my 0241. This instruction should not be in any way interpreted to infringe the Hague convention laws and usages of war. Enemy prisoners who fall into our hands alive must be treated with the greatest humanity and will be of value but the painstaking special efforts in setting traps are no longer for the present required. They may, however, be necessary again. Further it is asked that the killing urge be maintained in troops and the trapping urge no longer predominant. Pamphlets have been dropped promising immunity to the enemy who must repeat must be given safe conduct. Read to all ranks and certify completion of promulgation.40
Treating prisoners with ‘the greatest humanity’ was commendable and the right thing to do. They had to be allowed the opportunity to surrender, of course, but this was a courtesy rarely extended to the Japanese. When they were captured – usually in an emaciated and exhausted state – there was no guarantee of safe passage. The number of references in Australian battalion histories of captured Japanese being shot while ‘trying to escape’ defies belief, given their generally chronically weak condition at the moment of capture. The truth of the following 42nd Battalion account, for example, given the attitude being cultivated by Monagha
n, is open to question:
A Jap armed with a bayonet and carrying some Australian biscuits gave himself up. He was worn out and seemed unable to fight any more against hunger and exposure. Afterwards when he had rested and fed, he must have repented his action, for when he was being escorted back to the Battalion Headquarters he attempted an escape and was shot.41
The discovery of dead Australian soldiers mutilated by the Japanese during the fighting at Milne Bay in August 1942 is often cited as a turning point in Australian attitudes toward their enemy in this theatre. Any thought of giving quarter was cast from the men’s minds. Although the post-war period would reveal the extent of Japanese atrocities, there had really been little opportunity for such knowledge to reach the men in the front line up until late 1942. It is important to note, however, that those discoveries were fuelled by a long history of ‘white supremacy’ and fear of the ‘yellow peril’ that made it easier for uncompromising attitudes to foment. One cannot discount the possibility that the celebration of a national ‘hardness’ evident in World War I reportage and folklore also created a standard of ruthlessness to which some men aspired in battle and so acted out when given the opportunity.
Anzac's Dirty Dozen Page 13
