Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Captain Fuchida had led this armada in over Adams Bay to the east of Darwin, circled over the land, and then attacked Darwin Harbour from the south. The American squadron leader, Floyd Pell, was already on the ground at the RAAF airfield and ordered the five Kittyhawks who had managed to land to take off again at once. He was only five and a half metres above the runway when he was attacked by three Zeros; he was forced to bail and somehow survived the parachute descent. A Zero machine-gunned him to death when he landed. A second aircraft was blown up while ascending. A third gained altitude but was immediately set upon, its pilot forced to parachute into the mangroves. A fourth was destroyed. The fifth crash-landed, cartwheeling and shattering into pieces, but the pilot was rescued. In total, nine Kittyhawks were blown out of the sky or destroyed when barely off the ground.

  The heavy anti-aircraft guns manned by Australian soldiers opened fire. It was a new experience for them. In light of the acute national scarcity of all means of defence, they had fired only a few practice rounds in their entire military career. The fuses were wrongly set and were affected by humidity. Lewis machine guns also came into largely ineffectual use, similarly .303 rifles. The first Japanese plane to be brought down was a Zero that crashed near the navy’s shore base at Coonawarra, about ten kilometres east of the town, and the credit was given to a Lewis gunner, Darky Hudson. ‘Up his arse! Up his arse!’ cried a gunner in encouragement as another Zero was hit and exploded somewhat closer to town. At the RAAF field, which served chiefly as a way station for planes going on to the Netherlands East Indies to deal with the Japanese, Wing Commander Archie Tindal sat on the edge of a trench firing a Vickers gun at the Vals and Zeros flying low. He and other defenders could see pilots smiling at the ease of their targets. Tindal was shot through the throat and killed by a bullet from one of the planes as daisy-cutter bombs threw shrapnel across the airfield.

  The number of Japanese aircraft shot down was in the single digits. One Zero brought down was piloted by Petty Officer Hajime Toyoshimi, who would crash-land on Melville Island and be captured by a Tiwi Islander to become Australia’s first Japanese prisoner of war; later in the war he would take part in a notorious POW uprising.

  One contingent of aircraft dropped their bombs along the Esplanade. A blast wrecked Darwin Post Office. The postmaster, Hurtle Bald, with the help of one of his postal workers, had dug a slit trench behind the post-office building. When the aircraft arrived, he took to the trench with his wife Alice, his daughter, two of his sisters, his clerk, and a number of young female telegraphers. A direct hit killed them all—as well as wiping out military communication—and police saw that the horrors of modern aerial bombing that had begun at Guernica, or maybe earlier in China and Abyssinia, were exemplified by the naked body of one of the fatally concussed dead girls hanging in a tree. The residence of the administrator of the Northern Territory was hit, and a young Larrakiah woman, Daisy Martin, who worked as a maid, was killed.

  Meg Ewart and her colleagues at Darwin’s military hospital moved those patients who were able to walk out to the slit trenches in the hospital grounds. Those too ill to be moved were put under their beds, mattresses and all. Ewart shared that day the same apprehensions as Curtin’s Cabinet: ‘Another thing I think too that we did feel, was that there wouldn’t have been a raid like that unless the Japanese were going to follow it on land, and that wasn’t a very happy thought either.’

  The auxiliary minesweeper HMAS Gunbar had been passing through the opened boom net protecting the entrance to Darwin Harbour, in sleepy, tropical air, when the sky had filled instantaneously with wheeling, diving and strafing Zero aircraft. Bombs from one wave of Val dive bombers split the long, vulnerable wharf in two, killing at least twenty-one wharf labourers, paid-up members of the Australian Workers’ Union. Men were marooned on the harbour end of the wharf, with the ships they had been working on, the cargo ships Neptuna, which contained two hundred depth charges, and Barossa, similarly full of high explosive and oil. A bomb shattered Neptuna’s bridge and entered the saloon where crew and some wharf labourers were waiting out the shock of the attack. Forty-five of them were killed. A bomb that fell on the recreation shed killed men who had been having morning tea, or, as it was called then, ‘smoko’. Many wharfies and ships’ crew dived into the harbour for safety, where a railway locomotive and six trucks had already arrived, blown off the wharf. Oil from punctured supply lines running ashore filled the water.

  Also in the harbour were the seaplane tender USS William D. Preston, the destroyer USS Peary, the Australian corvettes HMAS Deloraine and Katoomba, the sloop HMAS Swan, the depot ship HMAS Platypus and the above-mentioned auxiliary minesweeper HMAS Gunbar, which were all armed, and the unarmed hospital ship Manunda. HMAS Swan was tied up beside Neptuna and quickly cast off and headed for open water. HMAS Katoomba could not move since it was in the floating dock being refitted, but it had many machine guns on board which were now manned.

  The USS Peary was a veteran of the early assaults on the Philippines, and its crew had already been attacked in the open Pacific earlier in 1942 with torpedoes and bombs. Peary had unluckily been put into Darwin early that morning to pick up fuel, and its commander was wary, getting fuelled up as quickly as he could and hoping to leave harbour soon, when the Japanese planes appeared. A number of bombs fell on the destroyer, including one that landed in the ammunitions store. A seaman on the nearby William D. Preston later remembered that his own flesh was seared by the fury of the fire aboard Peary.

  The blazing and doomed Peary had got underway though, dragging herself towards open water, firing. She sank quickly, still in the harbour, and more than a hundred of the crew died of wounds and burns or were drowned. The William D. Preston was badly damaged too. Even now people were putting out into the harbour in rowboats and dropping other small craft into the water to go out and rescue people.

  It is not known whether Japanese aircraft deliberately or indeliberately hit the Manunda, a veteran hospital ship that had made four journeys to and from the Middle East to repatriate the wounded. It was true that Manunda was moored fairly close to Peary, yet it seemed to all witnesses that it was deliberately targeted. A near-miss killed with shrapnel four men on Manunda’s deck. The ship then suffered a direct hit, and its crew quarters and navigation instruments were destroyed by the impact. Thirty men had been blown into the harbour and were now retrieved, all with burns. A nurse, Margaret de Mestre, was killed, and thirty-three men died from wounds and burns either then or soon after. In the wards, as the damaged and burned were brought in to join the more than 260 military casualties already on board, Matron Shumack exercised a calm control over treatment.

  The first raid over, Group Captain Scherger at the RAAF base ordered his three undamaged Hudsons to go out on a preliminary search to strike at the aircraft carriers from which the Japanese planes had come. He also had Wirraways and A24 American dive bombers to the south in Batchelor, but with telephonic communication wiped out there was no ground-to-air communication with them or the Hudsons. Scherger tried desperately to put communications in place but would not manage it before another raid began, this time by heavy bombers, sent out from the Celebes Islands and the airstrip on Ambon for whose sake a battalion of young Australians had been sacrificed.

  By afternoon the raids were over, but people took the road south to Adelaide River by any means they could. Although the exodus from Darwin would later be called the Adelaide River Stakes, the impulse to flee the town before the Japanese struck again seems reasonable enough, based on the number of planes, the volume of explosives, and the incapacity of the defence. Because of a confusion of orders, many RAAF men joined the exodus, hitching rides on army vehicles; one man actually turned up in Melbourne thirteen days later. George Telfer, a civilian working south of Darwin, saw the bombers go over for the second attack. In his utility truck he and a companion made towards what is now the Stuart Highway and before long met ‘the outgoing people from Darwin—motor cars, people on foot, p
eople with handcarts, this mass of people moving south, getting out of town’. One of the trucks was the night-soil vehicle, the legendary dunny wagon.

  Two hundred and fifty-two Allied soldiers and civilians were killed that day. The two 19 February raids would be followed by sixty-two further raids on the town, in April, June, July and November that year and extending well into the following year. And it was not only Darwin that saw enemy planes. On 3 March 1942, Broome in Western Australia was attacked. The day before, a number of Dutch flying boats had landed in Broome with Dutch evacuees from Java and elsewhere. Many of the passengers were exhausted and stayed in Broome overnight, and when the refugees returned on board the next morning, yearning for the relative safety of southern cities, a flight of Zeros swept in across the tropical sky and sank every such aircraft in the bay. A Dutch pilot named Guy Winkel, waiting to refuel, discovered there was no RAAF plane at all in Broome to resist the Zeros overhead. During the attack he fired one of the machine guns on his aircraft, the sole riposte to the Japanese empire. Later he expressed the view that the Japanese could have taken Broome with twelve soldiers, and he was probably right.

  Eighty-eight people were killed that day in Broome. Women and children had already moved out, but after the attack the remaining civil servants, including the police, took to the road. ‘And you can understand the panic,’ said Ralph Doig, a Western Australian public servant. ‘Nobody then in Australia had previous experience of being bombed like that . . . there was no defence against [the Japanese].’ Similar attacks occurred on Wyndham, Port Hedland and Derby in Western Australia, as well as Katherine in the Northern Territory, and Townsville and Mossman in Queensland. These raids were not seen by Australians as a substitute for invasion, but as a prelude to it.

  Darwin’s bombing signified to Australians even more emphatically an enemy’s desire to invade their country. But modern historians declare that Japan’s aim was in fact to create a defensive rim around the region where all the riches lay—the raw materials of the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya and elsewhere. Thus the Japanese, like the Dutch in the seventeenth century, had an interest in the boundary lands of Australia but not in its complete possession.

  THE JAPAN–AUSTRALIA SOCIETY

  The Depression had left Australia on the verge of bankruptcy by 1931, and only Japanese wool and wheat purchases that year helped ease the mounting economic crisis of capital. By 1934–35, Japanese purchases of Australian wool and wheat rivalled those of Britain. On this basis of Australian trade interests, the Japan–Australia Society was formed, and its membership included leaders of the pastoral, finance, retail, brewing, mining and shipping interests.

  It was particularly Japan’s attempted conquest of China that created a new market for Australian wool, wheat and metals. This Japanese aggression drew little protest from Australian business or from conservative governments. In fact, many leaders of business took a vocal pro-Japanese stand in 1936, when a trade diversion controversy began. British capital, such as film distributors, and textile and automobile manufacturers demanded that their government put pressure on the Australian government to ensure their markets in Australia were protected from American and Japanese competition. The Lyons coalition government put in place barriers to the United States and the Japanese, and in return America and Japan introduced a boycott of Australian exports. In the meantime, Sydney’s pastoral, retail and banking interests condemned the trade diversion policy, especially as it applied to trade with Japan. In 1936, a Japanese company, Nippon Steel, attempted to establish operations to mine and export iron ore from Yampi Sound off Western Australia. The Lyons government declared that iron deposits in the Pilbara were limited and that extraction was not in Australia’s interest. Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was willing to export scrap iron to Japan but not to allow a Japanese competitor to threaten its monopoly over iron ore. Members of the Japan–Australia Society criticised the Federal government’s denial of a Japanese company’s right to mine in Australia. Had Japan succeeded in its application, not only would its reliance upon BHP have ended, but it would have established a foothold in northern Australia.

  From 1929 until 1941, the Japanese consulate in Bligh Street, Sydney, commanded an intelligence network which easily amassed information about Australian economics, politics and society and promoted friendship between Japan and the city’s elite. The Japan–Australia Society came into being because of the benefits of Australian trade with Japan, as well as for the sake of interest in Japanese society and culture on the part of many intellectuals and academics. When Percy Spender, barrister and minister stood for the federal seat of Manly—as an independent and soon-to-be United Australia Party member—he was given support by some of the businessmen involved with the society. As Minister for the Army, at a time when many were not yet fully convinced of the threat from Japan, he permitted a Japanese army officer, Major Hashida, to tour BHP in Newcastle and Port Kembla. Hashida’s intelligence reports were a factor in allowing the withdrawal of Japanese assets from Australia some weeks before hostilities began in the Pacific, but many reasonable people thought Spender’s permission to Hashida was not reckless. Indeed, Adrian Curlewis, a lawyer and army officer who would soon be a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, would mention in passing to an English-speaking officer, that he had been a functionary of the Japan–Australia Society.

  The Port Kembla Pig Iron Strike of 1938–39 had rallied Sydney’s pro-Japanese leaders. They condemned the fight of the wharf labourers to refuse to load a cargo of pig iron bound for Japan because of the wharfies’ belief it would be converted into bombs and bullets to kill Chinese in Japan’s invasion of China. The wharf labourers had seen in their local cinema the footage of what the Japanese had done to the population of Nanking. Members of the Japan–Australia Society urged the Lyons government to break the strike, and the scrap iron was eventually shipped to Japan.

  The influence of Japan did not stop at business leaders, however. During the 1930s, Japanese intelligence sought out and gained support from senior Australian intelligence officers such as Colonel John Prentice, who was also a Sydney radio broadcaster. Prentice convinced another radio celebrity, Charles Cousens, a disgraced former officer in the British Indian army, to work with Kenno Suki Sato, a Japanese journalist and intelligence agent, on a joint Japanese–Australian magazine that would carry articles on Australian businessmen prominent in relations between the two countries. During the later Pacific War, Sato would boast to Australian prisoners of war at Ofuna Camp near Tokyo that he had been chosen as the chief civil administrator of a Japanese-controlled Australia. Sato was certain that had Cousens administered Australia, ‘many leading Australians would have been willing co-operators’.

  Charles Cousens was a frequent visitor to the Japanese consulate before the war. Later, as an officer in the Australian army after the Allied surrender at Singapore, Cousens volunteered to assist the Japanese rather than remain in Changi. Before sailing to Japan, Cousens explained to his captors that if Japan invaded Australia he could be parachuted into Australian-held territory to negotiate a separate peace between Australia and Japan. Given money and his own Tokyo apartment, Cousens instructed Tokyo Rose and other broadcasters in the art of radio propaganda. After the war, he was arrested by the Australians and charged with treason, but the case was not proved and he returned to his civilian occupation as a radio broadcaster.

  Major Jack Scott, a Great War veteran and Old Guard commander in chief, was also a leading friend of Japan in Sydney. Had New South Wales premier Jack Lang refused to go on his dismissal in 1932, it was Scott who was to enforce the Old Guard plan to drive Lang from office and install a military dictatorship. In 1934, Scott was invited to travel to Japan and the recently captured Manchukuo (Manchuria), and assess its social and economic development. After a two-week tour, both Scott and F.H. Cutlack, an Australian intelligence officer and senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist, praised the Japanese experiment in occupied China for its social order an
d commercial progress.

  Returned to Australia, Scott would pay a number of agents—including such members of Australia First as the Pankhurst-Walshes, John Sleeman (journalist, former ally and biographer of Jack Lang) and Inky Stephensen—for their services to Japan. In early 1941, now a lieutenant-colonel, Scott was appointed commander of the independent company Gull Force, whose mission was to harass Japanese forces occupying the island of Ambon. Believing his troops to be overwhelmed, he surrendered. As a prisoner of war on Hainan Island off China, Scott was separated from the other Gull Force prisoners, who despised him for his arrogance and for handing over several of his men for punishment.

  Inky Stephensen and a number of other members of his Australia First organisation were imprisoned during the war. Stephensen had been subsidised by Japan for his pre-Pearl Harbor denunciation of British and American imperialism, his isolationism, and his group of pro-Japan lobbyists. The selective arrest and internment of Australia First members left many more influential friends of Japan free of any stain.

  With the arrest of the Australia First members, the search for traitors ended. Even so, Professor E.P. Alchin, a University of Sydney anthropologist and a member of the Prime Minister’s Morale Committee, sent a memo to Curtin expressing his view that ‘many in the Sydney business community believed a Japanese take-over was inevitable and arrangements to cooperate with them should be made immediately’.

  Later events made Alchin’s panic and perhaps the willingness to collaborate on the part of others an historical irrelevance.