The same level of hostility was not evident between Australians and European enemies in other theatres of war. In stark contrast to the propaganda-influenced views of the bestial ‘Hun’ of World War I, the Germans and the Vichy French of World War II were generally seen by the Australians as civilised, worthy and respected opponents (even if the Italians, whose fighting ability was much maligned, were largely seen as a joke).42 These were not feelings that easily engendered the necessary malevolence to engage in atrocities. That is not to say that such things did not occur. Margaret Barter in her book about 2/2nd Battalion cites a story, which had gained currency as a factual heinous act, of Australians throwing grenades into compounds of Italian prisoners. It appears, however, that the incident derived more from a bad practical joke in which an Italian grenade, rated no better than a basket bomb on cracker night, was rolled in at the feet of some sleeping prisoners. Five Italians were wounded and a digger found guilty over the incident.43 Worse, however, was an incident in which a member of an Australian patrol machine-gunned 20 Germans captured at Tobruk for no apparent reason. His act was viewed as ‘treacherous and brutal’ by the rest of the patrol.44 Nonetheless, Australian higher commanders were, as in World War I and in the Pacific, implicated in deliberately advocating conduct that sat outside the rules of war. During the German invasion of Crete, soldiers of the 2/11th Battalion were told not to take prisoners, and at Alamein fighting patrols had limits placed on the number of prisoners they could take.45
The vast majority of illegal incidents perpetrated by Australian soldiers has occurred in land operations. Two actions involving Australian airmen, however, ought to be included in this discussion. In World War I, Australian airmen from No. 1 Squadron participated in an attack on a retreating Turkish column at Wady Fara in Palestine on 21 September 1918. The gorge through which the Turks were attempting to retreat became blocked through the destruction of vehicles and transports which were abandoned by their drivers. Turkish infantry scattered and tried to find alternative means of escape, but their efforts were hampered as they were continually strafed by British and Australian planes. According to the Australian official history the attack began with a sortie by two Australian planes which fired off ‘600 machine gun rounds into the confusion. That was the beginning of a massacre … the panic and slaughter beggared all description.’46 Throughout the course of the day, a further 44 000 machine gun rounds were fired and six tons of bombs dropped upon the trapped and fleeing Turkish infantry. By day’s end the airmen had given up estimating the losses inflicted and ‘were sickened by the slaughter’.47 At question here is whether excessive force was used. This is a central philosophical consideration of both just war theory and the rules of war. Having disrupted the Turkish column and put it to flight was it necessary to return again and again to attack a retreating column, to attack men who no longer presented any immediate threat?
Similarly, after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, in which eight Japanese transport ships carrying approximately 6400 soldiers and marines were sunk, Australian and American fighter squadrons spent several days strafing survivors stranded in barges and life boats. The official history regarded this work as a ‘terrible yet essential finale’, one for which it admitted the air crews ‘had little stomach’ and some of whom suffered ‘acute nausea’ as a result.48 Such reactions were understandable in those being asked to kill essentially defenceless men. The argument in favour of the action was that these survivors would ultimately reinforce the Japanese land garrisons, and that it was better to kill them while the opportunity allowed than at a later time when they would be fortified and more difficult to overcome. This is a dangerous line of logic and might equally be used to justify the execution of prisoners, for example, in a wide range of circumstances. Certainly, however, the Australian public appeared to hold few misgivings about the attack. Cinesound cameras accompanied the fighters, and film of the strafing run featured in a newsreel that was screened at cinemas. The commentary, which can only be described as gleeful, described the Japanese as getting what they deserved and being sent back to their ancestors. A direct hit on a defenceless lifeboat was acclaimed as excellent shooting.49
One would have thought that the racism exhibited toward the Japanese during World War II would have carried through into the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The outright hatered that was mustered against the Japanese, however, was notably lacking against North Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers. To be sure, racist comment still informed the soldiers’ private writings, but as Richard Trembath has argued in his study of Australia’s Korean War soldiers, those diggers made a genuine effort to ‘understand’ their enemy and this lack of hostility was ‘evidence of how the camaraderie of war can mediate traditional lines of prejudice’.50 Only one of the veterans interviewed by Trembath alluded to the adoption of past practices: ‘N. Koreans had a reputation as cruel to extreme’, he reported, ‘they received short shrift from us … few prisoners were taken.’51
The wars mentioned thus far were fought on traditional lines in so far as it was one military force pitted squarely against another. Vietnam changed that paradigm. The way the Viet Cong exploited the civilian population meant that distinguishing friend from foe became an increasingly difficult and stressful aspect of war. Booby traps and mines were used on a previously unimagined scale. One incident that shaped many people’s perceptions about how the war in Vietnam was being fought was the massacre of civilians at Mai Lai by American soldiers in March 1968. The methodical barbarity of this atrocity, carried out against women, children and old men, in many ways heralded the collapse of support for the war amongst the Australian and American public. Australian soldiers did not commit any atrocities on an equivalent quantitative scale, but as allies of the perpetrators they were tarred with its dirty brush.
Certainly civilians were killed as a consequence of Australian actions in Vietnam. The most well-known incident occurred at Binh Bah, a village occupied by the Viet Cong and large numbers of civilians. Australian infantry and armour attacked on 6 and 7 June 1969 and, according to Paul Ham, they went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, trying to evacuate terrified villagers and refraining from firing indiscriminately during the fighting. Nevertheless a number of innocent villagers were killed, causing the action to be remembered – inexplicably to Ham – as a civilian bloodbath by some soldiers. Ham argues that such memory reflects ‘the play of guilt and trauma on the mind’ of some of the soldiers present.52 Perhaps some of these men of the 5th Battalion believed that not enough was done to protect the civilians. One can only sympathise with their plight in being placed in the situation of an engagement in a populated zone.
One’s empathy might be tested, however, by an incident recounted by an Australian soldier in Michael Caulfield’s The Vietnam Years:
Anyhow, somebody had walked on a mine or whatever … we still think that somebody set it off, he didn’t actually walk on a mine and it went boom. Because there was a woman and a couple of kids or a child I think just quite close by. And – anyway, it didn’t kill him, it blew his leg off. But things like that, you didn’t trust them … The woman was shot. And it would never have hit the Australian news for obvious reasons. I mean there was an instinct in guys – they didn’t take her away and shoot her, not like a firing squad. The guys at the scene just swung around and mowed her down. First reaction. She’s standing there and this bloke just got blown up, whether she was guilty or innocent, you know … There was more of that sort of stuff happens than you will ever hear about for obvious reasons … I think the child was shot too of course and imagine the uproar, ‘Australians mowing down innocent civilians – blah blah blah’.53
It is difficult to reconcile the killing of this woman and child as unavoidable, or that the soldiers’ reaction was so instinctive that they could no longer discern their status as civilians. Caulfield alludes to the application of ‘the forgiving haze’ to justify such acts, and he points out that despite the appalling nature of suc
h crimes one must still accept that the lot of the soldiers was that of ‘a halfway decent bloke in a very bad place who made a decision he still cannot explain or forget’.54 Overall Caulfield argues that at Nui Dat and Phuoc Tuy Province, the Australians tried to uphold their humanity and that, while ugly incidents occurred, they were not reflective of the general behaviour or attitude of Australian troops.
Aside from the problematic nature of civilian casualties, it is evident that the practice of killing wounded enemy, as had occurred in the World Wars, also happened in Vietnam. Terry Burstall, a veteran of the Battle of Long Tan, recalled the shooting of two wounded Viet Cong soldiers after that battle. He quotes a colleague as describing them, prior to their murder, as ‘just sitting there looking pretty helpless’.55 Burstall revisited the theme of killing prisoners in an article in The Age marking the twentieth anniversary of the battle: ‘There must have been 20 blokes alive there when we went back through them in the morning. I’d say we killed about 17, murdered them. We murdered those poor bastards and then we started to clean up.’56 Bob Buick took particular exception to Burstall’s revelations, claiming it was not true and stating ‘Our commanders and I mean at all levels would not permit such an atrocity’. Buick admitted that the shooting of wounded enemy soldiers did occur, but argued they were mercy killings since the victims were mortally wounded.57 One might counter that it is not the role of soldiers to make that judgement.
Caulfield’s observation about the Vietnam experience of Australian soldiers is applicable to diggers who have fought in all wars: that the ‘memories of lives taken wrongly, bad deeds done’ was ‘the lot of the men we send to war, the burden we demand they carry but never want to know’.58 Since the Vietnam War, Australia has deployed troops in numerous peace-keeping exercises and in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. These actions have been conducted with much smaller forces than the armies of the World Wars and Vietnam. In that time, the professionalism of the Australian armed forces has increased markedly, as has international scrutiny of soldiers’ behaviour in combat, certainly those from Western nations. More recently still, social media has meant that unofficial records of soldiers in action and in war zones have created a broader public arena in which infractions might become known. This may act as a further deterrence for soldiers to act illegally. Modern-day soldiers enter combat well instructed about the rules of engagement and are even provided with rules of engagement cards. However, no amount of training will ever overcome the fraying effects that combat can have on soldiers. They are under immense psychological stress and one cannot say with any certainty that atrocities will not be committed in the future by Australian service personnel. We can say that the vast majority of Australian soldiers have not committed atrocities. We can also say that the chances of such incidences occurring are much reduced through better training and scrutiny. It can only be hoped that the blatant killing of prisoners and wounded men that was tacitly approved by higher commanders in the World Wars, and overtly so in the war in the Pacific, will not be practised by Australia’s military forces of the future.
Further reading
D. Blair, No Quarter: Unlawful Killing and Surrender in the Australian War Experience 1915–1918, Ginninderra Press, Canberra, 2005.
J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, Granta Books, London, 1999.
M. Caulfield, The Vietnam Years: From the Jungle to the Australian Suburbs, Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2007.
J. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Faber & Faber, London, 1986.
B. Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Penguin, Melbourne, 1975.
D. Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Little Brown, New York, 1996.
P. Ham, Kokoda, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010.
—— , Vietnam: The Australian War ~ The Illustrated Edition, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010.
International Committee of the Red Cross, International Law Concerning the Conduct of Hostilities: Collection of Hague Conventions and Some Other Treaties, Geneva, 1989.
M. Johnston, Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War II, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000.
J. Keegan, The Face of Battle, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976.
G. Kewley, Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts, VCTA, Melbourne, 1994.
R. Trembath, A Different Sort of War: Australians in Korea 1950–1953, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005.
[7]
THE UNNECESSARY WASTE: AUSTRALIANS IN THE LATE PACIFIC CAMPAIGNS
Karl James
Prime Minister John Curtin began in his 1943 Australia Day broadcast with ‘Australia is the bulwark of civilization south of the Equator. It is the rampart of freedom against barbarism.’ Speaking to the nation, with additional listeners in Britain and the United States, Curtin set out Australia’s ongoing contribution to and the sacrifices already made in World War II. The Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) warships and the airmen of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) were serving all over the world. Australian soldiers had endured bitter retreats in Greece and Crete, but had won glory at Tobruk and had been at the spearhead of Allied troops at El Alamein. In the Pacific, Curtin pledged, those Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese would be ‘revenged thrice over’. In Papua, Australians had fought in some of the worst conditions of the war to wrestle Kokoda, Buna, Gona and Sanananda from the Japanese. American soldiers and airmen fought ‘knee to knee’ alongside the Australians. This, Curtin concluded, was ‘Australia’s fighting record’.1
It was an impressive record. Between 1940 and 1942, Australian forces were prominent in the Mediterranean and North Africa fighting the Italians and Germans. Closer to home, Australian forces had helped stem Japan’s southern-most thrust in desperate battles in Papua during 1942, with the last shots having only been fired days before Curtin’s broadcast. In the coming year, Australians and Americans would continue to fight ‘knee to knee’, advancing along New Guinea’s north-east coast. American forces also conducted a series of amphibious operations in the Solomon Islands and New Britain that, together with the New Guinea offensive, successfully encircled and isolated Rabaul, the main Japanese base in the south Pacific. During 1944, General Douglas MacArthur’s ‘island hopping’ campaign took Americans into Dutch New Guinea and on to the Philippines. By year’s end, Japanese cities were subjected to a terrifying bombing campaign, first from American long-range bombers flying from China and Saipan, in the Central Pacific, and from April 1945 by carrierborne aircraft. Planning was well underway for an American-led invasion of the Japanese home islands when the war came to a devastating end in August 1945. Until that point the war in the Pacific had been expected to continue at least until 1946.
During the later phases of the Pacific War, however, Australia was left far behind. The Australian Army was excluded from operations in the Philippines and beyond. Instead, Australians fought on ‘mopping-up’ Japanese troops in Australia’s Mandated Territories of New Guinea and Bougainville, and on Borneo. Australian forces were, in fact, more heavily engaged during 1945 than at any other time in the war, but it was at the same time a period of disagreement and disappointment – and has remained so ever since. In early 1945, for example, an Opposition Senator asserted that Australian forces were being ‘whittled away on a more or less “face-saving” task’ in New Guinea and Bougainville.2 Such sentiments were widely echoed in the press, debated in Parliament and discussed by the soldiers themselves. Brigadier Heathcoat ‘Tack’ Hammer, an infantry commander on Bougainville, later commented:
Every man knew, as well as I knew, that the Operations were mopping-up and that they were not vital to the winning of the war. So they ignored the Australian papers, their relatives’ letters of caution, and got on with the job in hand, fighting & dying as if it was the battle for final victory.3
Sergeant S. E. Benson, of the 42nd
Battalion, was more blunt, writing bitterly that it had been ‘a purely political decision’ to fight an aggressive campaign on Bougainville in what was obviously a ‘strategic backwater’.4
From 1945 to the present, veterans, journalists and writers have repeated this notion, almost as a mantra, of Australia’s final campaigns in the Pacific as an ‘unnecessary war’ – where men’s lives were wasted needlessly for political rather than strategic reasons. Others, most notably journalist Peter Charlton, have argued that the campaigns were fought for the self-aggrandisement of old generals. War correspondent-cum-historian Max Hastings has even more recently alleged that Australian forces were ‘bludging’ in the islands rather than fighting elsewhere in the Pacific.5 Such orthodoxy, such a consistent stream of complaint over time, however, does not make it true. The idea of an ‘unnecessary waste’ in the late Pacific campaigns is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.
The main villain in the myth of wasted Australian lives is usually General Sir Thomas Blamey. He is an easy target. Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, Blamey served with distinction during World War I to become Lieutenant General Sir John Monash’s chief of staff in 1918. Blamey soldiered on during the interwar period, but his time as Victorian police commissioner during the 1930s attracted scandal. When war was declared in 1939, Blamey was appointed to command the newly formed 6th Division when the second Australian Imperial Force was raised, and he subsequently commanded the 1st Australian Corps in the Middle East. Short and rotund, Blamey was a skilled staff officer with a cutting intellect and forceful personality. He was also tactless and attracted controversy. But as Curtin once told a group of newspapermen, in 1939 the government ‘was seeking a military leader not a Sunday school teacher’.6 Blamey returned to Australia on 26 March 1942 with the 1st Australian Corps where he received the news that he had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, Australian Military Forces. There was no fanfare.
Anzac's Dirty Dozen Page 14
