Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Sapper Bert Beros would become famous for his poem about the ‘fuzzy-wuzzy angels’, the villagers who assisted Australian soldiers in New Guinea, but his verses about ‘The Coloured Digger’ remind us:

  He’d heard us talk democracy—

  They preach it to his face—

  Yet knows that in our Federal House

  There’s no one of his race.

  The first small squad of Americans to arrive in Australia was led by General George Brett of the US Army Air Forces, who flew into Brisbane with his staff on 28 December 1941, the day after Curtin’s appeal to the United States in his New Year message. They had not come in response to Curtin’s oratory, but rather to prepare Australia as a base for American forces, given that the surrender of the Philippines, like that of Singapore, was already thought by Washington to be inevitable. But even in the hour of peril the White Australia Policy overrode other considerations—the Advisory War Council on 12 January voted that no black American troops should be accepted into Australia. Curtin vetoed the decision, but only after the assurance that the African Americans who were shipped to Australia would be used for construction in Far North Queensland.

  Curtin, still receiving his regular and reliable messages from Bowden in Singapore, wrote to wife Elsie on 5 January: ‘The war goes very badly and I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily.’ Churchill’s concerns were for North Africa and India and ‘they can’t be for Australia and New Zealand. The truth is that Britain never thought Japan would fight and made no preparations to meet the eventuality . . . Notwithstanding two years of Menzies we have to really start production. But enough, I love you, and that is all there is to say.’

  Evatt expressed outrage to Curtin when the Sydney Morning Herald announced on 14 January 1942 that the US Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, had told an American audience that ‘the battle of the Atlantic was still the most important struggle of the war’. He had warned Americans against expecting ‘favourable’ and triumphant naval engagements in the Pacific in the near future. Evatt cabled Richard Casey, the sage and highly experienced Australian representative recently appointed by Menzies to Washington, and ordered him to object to the unsuitability of Knox’s statement, and also to declare that Australia’s lack of an equal voice in the discussions between Britain and the United States was unacceptable.

  But America had been worked on by the master, Churchill. In early January, while he rested in Florida after meetings with the Roosevelts, Churchill complained that the Australians were ‘jumpy about invasion’, and that their lack of a sturdy attitude towards it all was due to their being from ‘bad stock’. Earle Page—Country Party politician, Grafton surgeon, former deputy prime minister and flayer of Prime Minister Menzies for his poor performance in wartime—was now Australian representative to the British War Cabinet and high commissioner in London and there attended a British War Cabinet Defence Committee meeting at which he heard Churchill declare that Singapore might be lost but that the defence of Burma was what was important, since if Burma fell, the vital connection between India and an embattled Chinese Nationalist Army, fighting the Japanese, would be broken. Page then mistakenly reported to Curtin that Churchill was planning to evacuate Singapore. But the reality, which Curtin grasped, was that Singapore would now be left to its fate, as was the besieged British and Canadian garrison in Hong Kong. Whether the evacuation rumour was valid or not, Curtin’s resultant cable to Churchill was robust in its assertions and demands: ‘After all the assurances we have been given, the evacuation of Singapore would be regarded here and elsewhere as an inexcusable betrayal.’ He had other hard words for Churchill about the intended diversion of any Australian troops to Burma. Any Australian reinforcements available should go to the Netherlands East Indies, the fifteen hundred islands that make up present-day Indonesia. And the lack of aircraft in Australia and the region was critical, said Curtin: ‘Our experiences at Ambon and Rabaul have emphasised the urgent necessity for fighter aircraft immediately . . . It is impossible to expect us to give effective resistance with the inadequate aircraft at our disposal and we desire the allotment of United States aircraft of suitable types.’

  Further, said Curtin, ‘The trend of the situation in Malaya and the attack on Rabaul are giving rise to a public feeling of grave uneasiness at Allied impotence to stem the Japanese advance . . . The Australian people, having volunteered for service overseas in large numbers, find it difficult to understand why they must wait so long for an improvement in the situation.’

  THE MALAY BARRIER

  In early 1942, Australia had small garrisons stationed on a series of islands in an arc across the north of the continent. This deployment, in Rabaul (New Britain), Ambon (in present-day Indonesia) and Timor, was known by the grand name of the ‘Malay Barrier’. Those in Rabaul were Lark Force, those on Ambon Gull Force, and Sparrow Force had been committed to East Timor in December 1941. The Malay Barrier could not be anything like a barrier to the Japanese, and one wonders at the distractedness of the planners and politicians who, in desperation, left these three garrisons dangling in Japan’s path.

  While attention was fixed on Malaya and Singapore, by the end of January 1942, New Britain and Ambon would fall to Japanese landings. As when the Australians had captured it in 1914, Rabaul was a strategic port, a prize of empires, situated on the Gazelle Peninsula on the crescent-shaped island of New Britain. Along with the garrison there, an RAAF squadron of four Hudson bombers and eight Wirraways was in place to defend Rabaul from the air, but as in Singapore, the planes were overwhelmingly outnumbered and known to be easy meat for the Japanese air force. Before taking off to face a numerous force of Japanese bombers and fighters on 21 January, Wing Commander J.M. Lerew signalled RAAF headquarters in Melbourne, his home town, ‘Those who are about to die salute you.’ Lerew would survive, but many of his pilots did not. The Japanese, in one raid on a small position, were able to deploy sixty aircraft.

  On 23 January, a Japanese force supported by battleships and aircraft carriers landed near Rabaul. From their entrenchments at Vulcan Beach, the Australian 22nd Battalion and local civilian militia staged a strong resistance, but in a number of other places the Japanese landed unopposed. On nearby New Ireland, a small Australian force, an Independent Company, was almost instantly overrun. Colonel J.J. Scanlan, who as a civilian had been deputy governor of Hobart Gaol, had declared to his men at Rabaul, ‘There shall be no withdrawal.’ But as in Malaya and Greece, such orders would be swept away by reality, and no plan had been made for an inevitable withdrawal. An officer had suggested building up a food dump with two years’ supplies somewhere in the mountains behind the port, but the idea had not been pursued.

  European and Australian women and children had already been evacuated to Australia, but again the White Australia Policy struck—the wives and children of the Chinese population, who were also the enemies of Japan, were not included in the evacuation, and now faced both the bombs from above and, more than anything, the chance of massacre of the kind that had occurred in many mainland Chinese cities. Once the Japanese occupation began, the men were reduced to coolie status, and many of the females became ‘comfort women’.

  The order issued to the surviving Australian soldiers of the fight around Rabaul was to retreat as best they could. Small groups of soldiers began to head south through the jungle. A hundred and thirty Australian troops would be caught on the coast by a Japanese party coming ashore from landing craft near the plantation at Tol. Some soldiers surrendered, others attempted to escape and were also rounded up. At the Tol plantation house the two Australian officers who had negotiated the surrender were separated, and a piece of cloth written with Japanese script was placed on their belts. With others who had been in the surrender party, they were marched away. The rest were lined up in fours and their hands tied behind their backs. They were marched off into the undergrowth at the edge of the plantation. Private A.L. Robinson, of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a Queenslander by birth, w
ould later write, ‘I decided that this was a shooting party and that if one were to be shot one might as well be shot trying to escape as be “done in” in cold blood.’ Robinson launched himself out of the line and hid in the undergrowth. He heard one of the doomed men still in the line call to him, ‘Lower, Sport.’ After three days’ wandering in the bush, his hands still tied, he was found by a group of civilians, and eventually escaped by boat. Private W.D. Collins would also escape from a line of men who were being bayoneted to death. Private T.B. Clissold of the Field Ambulance, a farm labourer wearing a Red Cross armband, had it torn from his arm. When he asked if he could be shot instead of bayoneted, the presiding Japanese officer obliged him.

  Trying to make time through the jungle, escapees became exhausted, and a number were felled by malaria and other fevers. They were lucky to find taro roots to eat. Exhaustion and hunger delayed and in some cases defeated them. The Japanese aircraft dropped leaflets that declared, ‘You can find neither food nor way of escape in this island and you will only die of hunger unless you surrender.’ On 9 February, a Japanese force landed at Gasmata in the south, blocking the escape route, but nonetheless, in various parties, four hundred troops escaped to board small craft.

  A few days after the fall of Rabaul at the end of January, Gull Force on Ambon Island faced a Japanese landing. They tried to defend the Laha airstrip, but were overrun. Over nearly a fortnight, three hundred prisoners were taken in small groups into the jungle around the airfield and killed, an even worse atrocity than Tol. Three-quarters of the remaining Australian prisoners taken on Ambon would die in captivity.

  On Timor, Sparrow Force divided itself between Dutch and Portuguese Timor. Japanese air attacks began on Australia Day 1942. But Sparrow Force was still holding out and awaiting the inevitable Japanese invasion.

  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  In Australia, workers, at least, were now in a heady and unfamiliar position of power, and they exercised it with stoppages on wharves and in the mines. Many unionists were conscripted into the militia, certainly more out of urgency than vengefulness. Curtin’s Caucus opponent, pugnacious Eddie Ward from the then working-class purlieus of Paddington and Darlinghurst in Sydney, wanted him to nationalise all essential industries.

  But even while the Japanese were bombing the Australian garrison at Rabaul, and their troops were about to land there, Curtin was already exhausted. Given that he possessed a strange compound of toughness and almost neurotic sensibility, and that he was the sort of person who saw himself as bearing the prime culpability should things go wrong, and hearing that he was so haunted at night that he walked out of the Lodge to talk to drovers in nearby camps, his Cabinet insisted he take a break to go home and see Elsie in Cottesloe. Meanwhile, to describe the situation, Curtin quoted from Lord Byron’s ‘The Eve of Waterloo’: ‘nearer, clearer, deadlier than before.’ When he left Canberra on 21 January, the BBC reported, to his acute embarrassment, that he was on holiday. Indeed, he made speeches in Adelaide and in the west, and was back in Canberra later in the month to attend the marriage of one of Belle Southwell’s nieces in the Presbyterian church in Canberra, a ceremony conducted by the Reverend Hector Harrison, a near neighbour, on whom he sometimes called for comfort.

  As Singapore looked ready to fall in early February, Menzies, on the opposition benches, wrote to Curtin advising him against reinforcing the Netherlands East Indies against the Japanese, since the Australians would merely be gobbled up. It was a reasonable alert. The 6th and 7th divisions were now on their way back from the Middle East, sixty-four thousand troops in all, and were originally slated to help the Dutch on Java and Sumatra. It quickly became clear that they would indeed be thrown away, as Menzies argued, if they were sent to the East Indies. The idea was that the troops would go now either to Burma or Australia, and General Sturdee, the chief of staff in Melbourne, was insistent that it should be Australia. It was a fortunate insistence, given that the British and Indian forces in Burma were soon to be devoured whole by the Japanese.

  FIGHTING THE TIGER

  Captain Adrian Curlewis, a lawyer and a member of Australian General Gordon Bennett’s staff in Singapore, on 5 December 1941 was reflecting on his imminent fortieth birthday, to be spent far from his wife and family. He expressed the worry that when he returned at the end of the war he would be asked what he had done during it, and would have to say apologetically, ‘I was in Malaya.’

  But once the Japanese invasion began, Curlewis’s sense of ennui and futility vanished. He had been given charge of a convoy moving up across the causeway that connected Singapore to Malaya, leaving at 5.30 p.m. on 7 December—that is, in the last hours of peace. The camp they reached the next morning was full of rumours of landings. ‘Did I worry? My oath I did.’ He was aware that the code word ‘Raffles’, a signal for assuming the first degree of preparedness, had come through. Within a few days he heard gunfire at sea and realised later that what he had heard was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.

  And it would be like Greece and Crete from then on: the enemy superior in the air, penetrating and outflanking so-called ‘fixed lines’—tactics assuming that the Japanese would oblige the Allies by attacking them frontally and across open ground. Some Scottish, Gurkha (Nepalese) and Indian troops were holding up the Japanese in the north-west of Malaya. But in the end the mobile Japanese units encircled the prepared positions, captured bridges over Slim River and caused the British to retreat down the peninsula. By 12 December, retreating in Johor Bahru, Curlewis described a short jungle break: ‘I stood around in the wettest of mud, I swallowed quinine, I ate what I could, I drank dozens of mugs of filthy tea . . . I went two days without a bath in sweaty clothing . . . Four hours off in thirty-six to lie in a dank, insect-infested tent.’ There was a stream of Chinese and Tamil evacuees.

  In the perhaps unjust view of the truculent Australian commander of the 8th Division AIF, Major-General Henry Gordon Bennett, a citizen soldier, clothing manufacturer and public accountant, the British were incompetent and poorly led (the young Australian gunner Braddon would have agreed with him but included Bennett in the mix of incompetence as well). General Arthur Percival, the overall British commander on the ground, was certainly totally out-campaigned by the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, Tomoyuki Yamashita. And above Percival, the Commander in Chief Far East, and commander of the short-lived ABDACOM (American–British–Dutch–Australian Command), was General Archibald Wavell, who had been surprised by Rommel the previous northern spring in Africa.

  Percival himself had complaints about Bennett. ‘Bennett campaigned more for the well-being of the AIF than for anything else,’ he claimed. It sounds a nonsensical quibble, given that even the opinionated Bennett knew that he and Percival, and the Australians, Indians and British in general, must survive or be obliterated together.

  On 6 January 1942, Bennett reported to Curtin in Australia, ‘Unless great changes in outlook take place withdrawal will continue, exposing my left flank [on Malaya’s west coast] and ultimately creating impossible position for AIF.’ Wavell, visiting Singapore the next day, expressed the unrealistic hope that the Australian corps might be brought in from the Middle East to launch a counter-offensive. But Singapore would fall long before the troops in North Africa could be loaded on ships. In the meantime, Wavell was confident in Bennett and the Westforce, of which Bennett took command on 10 January. It consisted of the 9th Indian Division, the 8th Australian Division (minus a brigade), and various artillery and other units, including a battalion of the Norfolk regiment, the Norfolks. Their task was to stop the Japanese in Johore. In his prediction, Wavell expected air reinforcements—ambiguously promised by the War Cabinet in London, but which would never come.

  Bowden, the Australian representative on the Far Eastern War Council in Singapore, was not confident as the Australians went forward. He cabled Evatt that Duff Cooper, the resident British Cabinet minister in Singapore, and a writer like his chief, Winston Churchill, was an able man but not
a dominant one, and did not provide the council with strong leadership. Air Chief Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham, had shown, said Bowden, ‘an extraordinary diffidence of manner for a man in his position’, and in Bowden’s opinion was too old for the job. Bowden declared that Percival did not appear to be a strong personality; that Air Vice-Marshal Conway Pulford was ‘very worried and greatly overworked’, a situation understandable in view of his ineffectual and increasingly outnumbered aircraft; and that the governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Shenton Thomas, appeared better at finding reasons for not doing things than for doing them.

  Even in the hour of peril, White Australia yet again asserted itself. Sir Shenton Thomas asked Australia to serve as a refuge for Singaporeans displaced by the Japanese invasion. Thomas wanted Australia to accept five thousand Chinese and Eurasians. On 23 January, he declared himself shocked by the Australian government’s decision to admit only fifty Chinese and fifty Eurasians. Two representatives of the Chinese government had spoken bitterly to Thomas about it: ‘In this city of 600,000, of whom 85 per cent are Chinese, it is absolutely essential that we should have this assistance . . . temporary asylum for wives and children of those who wish to send them away.’

  Against a background of less than administrative and military competence, Percival told Bennett that his forces, which were to be stretched westwards from Batu Anam, on the main north–south road through Johore, across to Muar, and the Muar River crossing, and then on to the west coast, must hold their line. ‘If this position is lost, the battle of Singapore is lost,’ said Percival. ‘It is naturally disturbing to learn that the Japanese have been able to overrun the whole of Malaya except Johore,’ Curtin cabled Churchill. ‘It is observed that the 8th Australian Division is to be given the task of fighting the decisive battle.’ He therefore urged Churchill to send reinforcements as soon as he could.