Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  A later British report would declare that behaviour by undisciplined Australian troops within the city was one of the factors that caused Percival to seek a truce. The same report did not emphasise that two-thirds of the ten thousand dead and wounded in the campaign were Australians. Certainly, troops pooled in the besieged city in at best bewilderment, and at worst riot. British or Australian soldiers, with rifles and Tommy guns had on 14 February tried to capture the launch on which Bowden, the Australian civilian representative, was escaping Singapore Harbour with others, even firing on it as it pulled out. All this while, to the west of the city, around Tanglin Barracks, the most pitiable acts of valour and hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye killing were taking place in the dark, one Australian soldier trying to beat off Japanese attackers with a machine-gun tripod.

  At the Japanese 5th Division lines, Percival was told to go on with his staff to the Ford Motor Factory in Bukit Timah for a meeting with Yamashita. The surrender terms imposed in a small factory office by Yamashita, partly in bluff and on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, were severe—an unconditional surrender to occur at 8.30 p.m. Singapore time. Yamashita himself needed peace because of his resupply difficulties, but Percival was psychologically defeated anyhow and not fit to call the Tiger’s bluff.

  That afternoon Bennett ordered that his men should be supplied with new clothing and two days’ rations, and went on a tour of the Australian lines. He handed over his command to Brigadier Black Jack Galleghan, and then left to plan his escape for that night. Captain Curlewis, invited to join the escape party, expressed doubts to Major Charles Moses, future fabled leader of the ABC and also part of Bennett’s party, about the morality of leaving his men. Curlewis stayed, for honour’s sake, and became a prisoner.

  Over previous and subsequent days, the seas between Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies were crowded with small vessels full of civilians, soldiers and nurses making southwards. The nurses had been the staff of the 13th Australian Hospital and were under orders to leave. The vessel Vyner Brooke, which set out from Singapore on 12 February, included amongst its passengers sixty-four nurses. The vessel was bombed and sunk off the island of Bangka on the afternoon of 14 February. Two of the nurses were killed by the bombing, nine drifted off and were lost, and twenty-two landed with other military and civilian survivors on the north coast of Bangka. The other thirty-two were rounded up on various beaches and became prisoners. On 16 February, when it was found that the Japanese were in possession of the island, an officer walked into the nearby town of Muntok to negotiate a surrender. Civilians, including children, also walked to the town, but the nurses stayed to care for wounded Australian and British soldiers.

  Ten Japanese soldiers, led by an officer, came to take away the walking wounded, carried them into the jungle and returned wiping their bayonets and cleaning their rifles. The nurses were ordered to walk into the sea and, supporting two sisters already injured in the sinking of the Vyner Brooke, were machined-gunned. All but one were killed. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel of Broken Hill, twenty-six years of age and tall, was shot not through the heart but through the diaphragm, the bullet continuing through her body and exiting. She emerged from the drifting heap of dead and for three days remained at large, hiding in a fisherman’s hut and nursing a British soldier named Kingsley who had lost part of an arm and been bayoneted in the abdomen, and who died of his wounds. Now she was found and taken prisoner again. She concealed her wound as best she could for fear that if her captors knew what she had witnessed they would certainly execute her. The time would come when she would give evidence at the war crimes tribunals in Tokyo, but for the next three years or more her rights as a world citizen would be cancelled.

  The Mary Rose, a launch carrying Bowden, Australia’s good and wise servant, and his staff, left Singapore Harbour on the night of 14 February. Before dawn on 17 February, in the Bangka Strait between Bangka Island and Sumatra, searchlights from Japanese patrol boats detected the craft. Those on board Mary Rose were reduced to using a pair of spare underpants as a flag of surrender, and the prisoners were taken to Muntok Harbour, Bangka Island, where they were locked in a warehouse with other would-be escapees. The elderly, white-haired Bowden insisted to a guard that he be allowed to speak to an officer about his diplomatic status. An argument developed over Bowden’s gold wristwatch. Another guard arrived and the two of them escorted Bowden outside. They made him dig his own grave and shot him at its edge.

  The dividing line between desertions and escapes was one that plagued Bennett and many other soldiers for the rest of their lives. Since there had been a report in Singapore that the surrender occurred in the late afternoon of 15 February to take effect that night, many believed they were within military rules and, indeed, faced with the military imperative to initiate their escape in the time interval. On the night of the surrender, General Bennett and Major Moses, with some local planters who had been serving in the volunteer forces, commandeered a native craft and reached the east coast of Sumatra. They made their way across the island to Padang, were then flown south to Java and Batavia (Djakarta or Jakarta), and travelled by a Qantas plane to Australia. When Bennett reached Melbourne and reported to the Chief of General Staff, General Sturdee, ‘To my dismay, my reception was cold and hostile.’ Sturdee told him that his escape was ill advised. The Chief of Staff, like the General Staff, like the nation and like Curtin, was shocked at the scale of losses. In total, including killed and imprisoned, the Australian military losses came to eighteen thousand soldiers and innumerable civilians, all within a span of days.

  The implications for Australia seemed illimitably horrifying.

  DAYS OF BRAINS AND BRAWN

  Australians had to accept some responsibility for their gullibility over many years in the matter of Singapore and its capacity to protect itself and Australia. Now, however, they needed to act. On 15 February, the day of Singapore’s capitulation, General Sturdee again called Curtin to insist that troops urgently be brought home from the Middle East. Singapore was only hours away from falling. Roosevelt put some pressure on Churchill to agree to allow the Australians to leave North Africa: ‘It seems to me that we must at all costs maintain our two flanks—the right based on Australia and New Zealand, and the left on Burma, India and China.’ Churchill misemphasised this message of Roosevelt’s to push the idea that Australia’s first duty was not the defence of itself but of Burma, a front that would within a short time prove as futile as Singapore had.

  On the day Singapore fell, the Reverend Hector Harrison had invited Curtin to speak at the rededication of a Presbyterian church founded by pioneers on the road to Yass in New South Wales. Curtin’s mistress, Belle Southwell, was also there, because the church was on Southwell land. In that idyllic pastoral scene (dry as the pastures were at the end of a drought), Curtin the agnostic saw an encapsulation of that precious Australianness which was now imperilled. When he spoke to the assembled people he was edgy, but the tropes of his normal oratory kicked in, and he declared that the ‘fatherhood of God was closely related to the brotherhood of man’.

  It was early the next morning when confirmation of Singapore’s surrender reached Canberra, where Curtin declared the event ‘Australia’s Dunkirk’. He immediately sat down to write to Churchill demanding the return of the Australian troops from the Mediterranean. Churchill would try everything to prevent it, enlisting the aid of Stanley Melbourne Bruce at Australia House and of Earle Page, Australia’s representative on the British War Cabinet. Churchill was disgruntled that Curtin had talked him into sending the British 18th Division to Singapore just in time for it to be eaten whole, when it could have been sent to Burma (and thus ultimately eaten whole there); this increased Churchill’s determination to fight Curtin over the return of Australian troops.

  But Curtin, beneath a less thunderous exterior than Churchill’s, had an equal if not greater determination in the matter. Though later historians would very much doubt that the Japanese intended to invade the huge continent of
Australia, believing that they hoped instead to bomb the crucial Australian cities in a manner that would destroy the war effort and sap Australia’s enthusiasm for the American alliance, Curtin believed—as did his fellow Australians—that invasion was the Japanese plan, and that the harshness shown in other places by the Japanese army would descend on the Australian populace. A day of prayer after the fall of Singapore involved hundreds of thousands of Australians in an appeal to God during the morning hours, and in a start on the digging of their own backyard air-raid shelters during the afternoon.

  Australian troops serving overseas themselves felt an immediate need to return to the Pacific area. Thousands of Australian aircrewmen were campaigning far from home. One of them, pilot Jerry Judd, had a father who was in the 8th Division and now a hostage to fortune. Ordinary Seaman Roy Hall was training in Portsmouth Barracks, ‘and there was a great deal of anxiety and agitation about the whole thing, and many of the men there volunteered to go back to Australia because that’s where they felt they should be’. Niall Brennan, Melbourne Irish, had always doubted the Imperial proposition: ‘A lot of us had felt for a long time that we had been misled, that the whole idea of supporting the Empire . . . because Britain would come to help us if we needed it, that that was hogwash.’ Ken Hall, the filmmaker and head of Cinesound Newsreel, noticed that in some quarters there was considerable concern when Curtin said that he looked to America. ‘But what was Britain to do for us,’ Hall asked, ‘when they were at their wits’ end trying to save themselves? . . . Menzies was so utterly British, bowing the knee and touching the forelock and all that stuff. We were already a nation but Menzies didn’t want us to be a nation, he wanted us to be an appendix to the British, which was all wrong for policy.’

  Merv Lilley, a rural worker in Queensland, who had not thought of joining up to defend the Empire, now decided to do so for Australia’s sake. Enlisted, he was given an old service rifle from World War I ‘that didn’t throw true any longer’. Spanish Civil War volunteer and leading figure in the Australian Communist Party, Laurie Aarons, whose home had been raided—along with the homes of all Australian Communists—in 1940 (during a phase when those who had not left the party over the pact then in force, between Hitler and Stalin, or even those who had been expelled from it, were considered traitorous), was working in a boot factory but also went down to the recruiting depot in Woolloomooloo, though he would be rejected.

  Cole Nowlan, a soldier in Darwin, was sent off with a detachment to arrest Japanese on the pearling luggers in the harbour and to send them to an internment camp in Adelaide. The leading photographer in Darwin, Morikami, was Japanese. Because he had a camera he was now considered doubly suspicious and was part of the round-up.

  Canberra, a bush town still, suddenly became an epicentre of the struggle against Japanese militarism. In a pharmacy in New South Wales the day after Singapore fell, the author, then six, witnessed a woman possibly no more than forty years old burst into tears while waiting at the counter. Australian women did not easily weep in public then—it was still considered bad form. But the times were exceptional. Her friend told the pharmacy girl, ‘You have to forgive Mrs Ellis. Her son was in Singapore.’

  The Australians went on shopping and seeking each other’s society, but the reality—that the world had changed, and that Deakin’s vision of Australia could well be gobbled up in a matter of days or weeks—riveted the country as it had never been riveted before, and filled the individual hearts of men and women with terror, and the communal heart with a chancy resolve. The great social laboratory that Australians believed their Commonwealth to be might now vanish within days. ‘The fall of Singapore opens the battle of Australia,’ said Curtin in a press statement. ‘He would be a very dull person who could not discard all his preconceived ideas of strategy and war, and who does not accept the fall of Singapore as involving a completely new situation . . . The days of bets and beer are gone, the days of brains and brawn have come.’

  In her flat in Sydney’s Darlinghurst Road, Dame Mary Gilmore—survivor of William Lane’s Paraguay settlement and a rare case of a royally honoured radical—expressed outrage at British incompetence and Japanese militarism.

  Whose was the fault she betrayed our troops?

  Whose was the fault she failed!?

  Ask it of those who lowered the flag

  At once to the mast was nailed,

  Tell them we’ll raise it on Anzac soil

  With hearts that are steeled to the core

  We swear by our dead and captive sons

  REVENGE FOR SINGAPORE!

  Revenge would be slow. When the Pacific War erupted there were two Australian armies: the volunteer AIF, 152,000 strong and mainly serving overseas, and the conscript Home Army of 213,000, only half of whom were serving full time because there wasn’t enough military equipment to put the whole of the conscriptees under arms. Even fully manned units lacked transport or modern weapons, as did both the navy and the RAAF.

  The Curtin government sought volunteers from the conscript militia for service in the territory of New Guinea, as the Defence Act 1903 forbade the use of the conscript troops in an overseas conflict. By January 1942 a militia brigade had been deployed to Port Moresby but it still lacked basic equipment. A leavening of experienced AIF officers and non-commissioned officers were injected into the brigade. Too many of the Port Moresby garrison were used labouring on the wharf or building fixed defences for them to be properly trained. It was not until 21 March that an RAAF fighter squadron arrived, the 75th Squadron. It would be steadily worn down through attrition of aircraft and exhaustion of pilots. A further militia brigade was sent to Port Moresby, and another to Milne Bay at the eastern end of New Guinea. AIF brigades from the veteran 7th Division would follow later in the year. Now the 39th Militia Battalion was slated to begin the march along the track to Kokoda to occupy Buna, but the Japanese would get there first.

  This Kokoda trail, soon to acquire its capital letter, was built in the New Guinean manner, in that it connected villages that were on high ground, one to the other, and was designed for the passage of one person at a time. Having reached a mountain, it then descended into a valley and climbed up the next ridge. And so it went, on and on. A pre-war Papuan administration report on the trail held that white men could not carry loads, and natives would have to be limited to seven kilograms each. It was not good in the rain, yet most of the coming mountain campaign would be fought in the wet season.

  Papuan carriers, conscripted and controlled by Papuan administration patrol officers now turned soldiers, were the lifeline for the troops struggling against an enemy superior in training, numbers and weapons. The Papuans also carried out many of the wounded or sick, eight carriers to each stretcher. But many of the sick and wounded had to crawl their way back to the road head outside Port Moresby.

  BOMBING NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

  On 19 February, just days after the fall of Singapore, Japanese bombers, fighter-bombers and fighters appeared in huge numbers over Darwin, bombing town and port. The naval task force was based on four aircraft carriers under Vice-Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, who had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. After these aircraft had spread ruin and flown off, the Australian government did not dare tell citizens how many enemy planes were involved, how many bombs were dropped or how many casualties there were. But in the suburbs and country towns of Australia, the very fact that it had happened created a further sense of terror and of imminence.

  Earlier that morning, six Hudsons from the RAAF’s Number 2 Squadron had taken off from a landing strip in Timor, abandoning their base according to orders they had received, and made for Darwin. As these bombers approached Darwin, anti-aircraft guns in Fannie Bay opened fire on them. They had survived to land at the Darwin military airfield, and considered that sufficient action for the day. A Catalina flying boat commanded by an American officer, Thomas Moorer, was by then patrolling the coast of Bathurst Island. He had experienced Pearl Harbor and had taken off dur
ing that raid to save his plane. Now nine Japanese Zero fighters descended on him and shot his plane to ribbons. He crash-landed in the sea with half his crew wounded, but all were rescued by the passing freighter Florence D. Moorer had not had time to warn Darwin by radio.

  The eleven fighters available on the day to defend Darwin were there by accident—nine Kittyhawks of the US 33rd Pursuit Squadron who had taken off for Timor, on their way to join the fight against the Japanese in Java, but were being forced back to Darwin by adverse weather. Two had needed servicing and stayed behind. Coastwatchers on Bathurst and Melville islands were the first to see the Japanese air fleet on its way. But when the message was sent to Darwin, RAAF intelligence concluded that what was seen were the nine returning Kittyhawks. The intelligence staff officer, Lieutenant-Commander J.C.B. McManus, wanted to sound the alarm at once but was overruled by the RAAF. The nine American Kittyhawks were indeed returning to Darwin from the west, but at about the same time as the mass Zeros, ‘Kates and Vals’ were arriving. The Japanese raiders were led by Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had earlier led the raid on Pearl Harbor.

  One of the returning US Kittyhawks, flown by Lieutenant Jack Peres, was shot down and crashed fifteen kilometres north of Darwin. Lieutenant William Walker, wounded badly in the left shoulder, landed his plane at the RAAF field and ran to a trench; glancing over its rim, he saw his aircraft destroyed by the Zeros now attacking the airstrip. Another pilot was forced to abandon his plane, and Lieutenant Oestreicher, who had taken off in his re-serviced Kittyhawk, was the lone Allied plane in the sky facing an enemy fleet that included thirty-six Zeros, seventy-one ‘Val’ dive bombers and eighty-one ‘Kate’ bombers, and would survive being surrounded by those numbers.