Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  IN THE WAKE OF BOMBS

  A young public servant named Gladys Joyce, who worked as secretary to the prime minister, was in Sydney at a teleprinter receiving news of shipping that had been destroyed during the Darwin raid. She typed up for Curtin a list of the damage, the nine ships sunk and the twenty aircraft destroyed. Australia was an intimate place then. There was an intimacy to Parliament itself and to the room where the Advisory War Council met. (The cleaners of the new Parliament House in Canberra as it exists at the time this book was written have a bigger office than most 1942 Cabinet members.) Unwitting about Darwin, the council was meeting under the chairmanship of the quiet but crafty Queenslander and Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde to discuss the return of the Australian troops from the Middle East and how they should be deployed. Many conservative members of the council wanted them sent to Burma, as did Churchill. Jack Beasley, former Lang supporter and now Minister for Supply and Development, had left the room for some reason and came back yelling, ‘The Japs have bombed Darwin! That settles it!’

  The washed-out and ailing Curtin issued a statement announcing the first battle on Australian soil and invoking the idea of racial sturdiness as an Australian quality. The armed forces and the civilians of Darwin, said Curtin (not knowing whether it was true or not), had ‘comported themselves with the gallantry that is traditional in the people of our stock’. Though it would be grossly unfair to accuse Curtin of fascist ideology in any way, the suspect concept of ‘stock’ was inherent in the culture of the time. Curtin hoped an almost mythical Australia would survive because of its good and cherished stock. Churchill believed it would fall because of its bad stock.

  The young United Australia politician from Western Australia, Paul Hasluck, noticed that unlike the supposed coolness under fire of the people in Darwin, government ministers were ‘in a state of jitters’. Again, the attack on Darwin was seen not merely as part of a bombing and containment policy that would keep the Australians and Americans busy on Australian soil, but as a sign of an imminent invasion. In backyards, men continued to work on their air-raid shelters. Arthur Martin of Leichhardt in Sydney, whose eldest child, Max, was determined to fly and had gone straight from Balmain Christian Brothers into air force training, wielded his shovel energetically to make a shelter for his family. He, like other fathers, had no conception that ultimately these homemade bunkers would become cubbyhouses for his children.

  Dorothy Hewett, later a nationally revered writer, then a university student, described girls threatening to take a cyanide pill if Perth were invaded, but no cyanide pills were being offered around. Joan Comer, a soldier’s wife from Gulgong in New South Wales, was told by her doctor about the yellow contraceptive sponge sure to be issued women to prevent pregnancies from rapes committed by the invader. Mick Coyle, an engine driver on the north coast of New South Wales, was shown a revolver by his fireman, who explained that he would shoot his wife and daughters when the Japanese marched in. Young university student Niall Brennan in Melbourne was a pacifist and asked himself: ‘What would I do if the Japanese invaded Australia? I was thinking of that all the time and I never came up with an answer. I don’t know what I would have done . . . if a Japanese came at me with a bayonet or a Samurai sword. I suppose I’d have tried to hit him with a cricket bat—or something like that.’

  Hewett, however, an even feistier spirit than Brennan, would later say that delusions of racial purity influenced such fears and determinations, and that was true. But the record of atrocity in China and throughout Asia in the past few years gave anyone reasonable fear, even if we now know that Perth, Gulgong and Taree did not figure high amongst the objectives of the Imperial Japanese forces.

  Laurie Aarons, widely travelled Communist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was fortified in a resolve to fight as a guerrilla should the invasion eventuate, an impulse that many Australians of radical, liberal and conservative background shared. He and his friends established a cache of a few .22 calibre rifles and some food in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. ‘What we wanted to do was to have at least the possibility that should the Japanese invade . . . we’d have some stores, some weapons, to enable us to conduct a guerrilla war . . . what we called a People’s War . . . not just the armed forces, but also the people.’

  When Japan had entered the war there were about 132 full-time officers and men running the part-time militia, and a further 35,000 AIF available in Australia, other than those in the Middle East. By February 1942 there were almost a quarter of a million militiamen, many of them ‘called up’ and thus not volunteers, on full-time duty—their mandate was to defend Australian territory, including New Guinea. By the end of March the total AIF troops available for fighting anywhere or in training reached over a hundred thousand. This two-tier system grew from the revulsion many Australians, including Curtin and his party, had for conscription for service outside Australia’s immediate defence. But it was a cause of sometimes more than merely jovial derision directed by the volunteer AIF (or, as its members would argue, the true army) at the militia, who were seen as a home guard, a billet for the timid, the too young, the too old. In pubs and on the street, for sport or from malice, AIF members might throw scorn on the militia as ‘chocolate soldiers’ or ‘chocos’, and civilians would come to use the same term without any necessary ill-will but simply to distinguish one group from another. Under the pressure of coming events, the distinction would grow less significant. Previously, too, the militiamen had been prevented from volunteering for the AIF, but this rule was overturned in the 1942 emergency to allow a militia unit to become AIF if 75 per cent of its membership wanted to. Ultimately, for reasons of the militia’s coming valour, and America’s insistence that the Australians should conscript for foreign service as the Americans had done, the militia would be committed to a larger sphere of the Pacific, though not to the northern hemisphere. The introduction of this limited conscription for overseas service in 1943 would create bitter divisions in Labor and, for Curtin, the contempt of many of his fellow anti-conscriptionists from World War I.

  There had been faint omens of hope even in the phase between Malaya’s invasion and the bombing of Darwin. After Pearl Harbor, some ships carrying American aircraft originally intended for US general MacArthur’s use in the Philippines were diverted to Australia. The convoy had arrived in Brisbane on 22 December 1941 with some field artillery units and disassembled planes. Four more ships with artillery units arrived in January, but none of them carried infantry. So in February 1942, a few raw American artillery and pilots, and a quarter of a million untrained militia and thirty-five thousand half-trained and recently recruited AIF volunteers, swelling out to a further sixty-five thousand recruits, along with the token Australian naval and air forces then in Australia, were ill-equipped to hold Australia. None of this was adequate to soothe Curtin’s concern.

  A few days after the fall of Singapore, at a war bond rally in Martin Place, Curtin called on his audience: ‘Australians! You are the sons and daughters of Britishers. You have come from England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland. There is, fused in you also, the best qualities of other races.’

  He was near collapse as he uttered these words, and afterwards was immediately driven to St Vincent’s Hospital with his daughter, Elsie the younger, at his side, and treated for severe gastritis. This was yet another instance of his vulnerability under the pressure of the war. He had just established an Allied Works Council to coordinate war production, and had appointed Ted Theodore, the hard-headed Queenslander, its chief, hoping for good things from him. In Curtin’s mind, there was no guarantee Theodore would be given the time he needed before the Japanese destroyed all, but at least Theodore was a friend, tolerant of Curtin’s conviction that, like other wartime leaders, he must suspend due process to allow for the summary internment of aliens and internal dissenters, and to impose press censorship. Only a few on the left wing of the party complained of this. One of them was the elderly but still idealistic Melbour
ne lawyer Maurice Blackburn, considered by Curtin a noble citizen as well as a long-time friend and fellow campaigner. To the scholarly Blackburn, there was no emergency on earth that justified the suspension of civil rights. No one would have felt the pain of these rifts between a number of friends of many decades, including Blackburn, more acutely than Curtin. Blackburn was like a father to him, and the father was condemning of the son, and would continue to be so in 1943, when Curtin amended the conscription laws.

  Meanwhile, anxiety for the safety of the troops returning from the Middle East, their survival in seas that were now dominated by the Japanese—for at this stage of the war the Japanese had penetrated the Indian Ocean as well as the Pacific—devoured Curtin. At that moment, his wife Elsie observed, Curtin harboured the sincere fear that he would be captured by the Japanese when they invaded and that he would be ‘crucified’.

  Curtin is credited with seeking to return veteran divisions to Australia. In fact it was Churchill who first suggested, at the end of December 1941, that a division of Australian troops from the Middle East might be moved back to Asia to face the rampant Japanese. But Curtin did not want a division going to India or Burma, as Churchill desired, though it is likely that had an Australian division arrived in time from the Middle East, Curtin would have agreed to let it reinforce Singapore. Churchill remained determined that at least one of the Australian divisions should be sent off to Burma. In trying to persuade Curtin to commit a division to the Burmese capital, Rangoon, Churchill talked Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Earle Page into helping him, and also recruited Roosevelt. Churchill reminded Curtin that he owed him a favour, that Churchill had allowed a British division to reinforce Singapore rather than go to Burma, and that that division had now been gobbled up. If Curtin refused his request, said Churchill, ‘a very grave effect will be produced upon the President and the Washington Circle, on which you are so largely dependent’.

  But the fall of Singapore had brought out the steel in Curtin’s soul. Churchill had urged the Greek campaign with similar eloquence, and it had been a disaster. He had spouted the benefit of Singapore, and it had served as a mere appetiser to Japanese intentions.

  Curtin suspected, but could not yet be sure, that the British and Americans had made a secret commitment by which the Pacific theatre would be the poor relative of the European. In fact, the meeting at which this undisclosed agreement was forged in Washington was known as the Arcadia Conference on 14 January 1942, Arcadia being a code name. The agreement they came to bore the title WWI. It was never announced, but nonetheless Curtin planned to send the Foreign minister and lawyer Herbert Vere Evatt to Washington and London to argue the case for the Americans and British to support Australia in its need.

  Before Evatt left, Curtin made a broadcast to the United States on 14 March. If the Japanese invaded, he said, ‘there will still be Australians fighting on Australian soil until the turning point be reached, and we will advance over blackened ruins, through blasted and fire-swept cities, across scorched plains, until we drive the enemy into the sea’. He was, above all (and in spite of the warning he had received that if the Japanese landed in south-eastern Australia, many business leaders were preparing to cooperate with the invaders), trying to sedate any American suspicion that Australia would make a separate peace with Japan the way France had with Germany. In the struggle to defend themselves, he said, Australians recognised that America was now their leader. ‘If Australia goes, the Americas are wide open,’ he warned his American audience.

  Meanwhile, setting off on his mission, Evatt was accompanied by his wife Mary Alice and the amiable businessman William Sydney Robinson, who were less nervous flyers than Evatt was when it came to crossing the contested Pacific. Evatt had to travel by naval aircraft, and he was a terrified flyer. Jack Beasley, the old Lang Labor man who had returned to the Labor fold, would write, ‘If medals of bravery were being given out, poor bloody Evatt would have as many as a dray horse’s harness. He’d be crawling aboard those little planes at night, without lights, no heating, freezing to death, the stink of petrol everywhere, and sit for hours in a roar that would knock your ears off, with the plane trembling all round him.’ And had not many of Menzies’ most talented ministers been killed in an air crash in Canberra?

  Evatt’s weeks in Washington would be rendered partly futile by the existence of the secret WWI agreement, but as a result of his representations the Americans formed a Pacific War Council to keep him and Australia happy. During Evatt’s visit he made the mistake of encouraging Richard Casey, Australia’s experienced representative in Washington, to take up the job of British representative in the Middle East, with British Cabinet status. He did so because he believed Casey was one of those who favoured the Empire first and so was little use in Washington. As well, he reasoned, now that General MacArthur had fetched up one morning in Australia, Australia’s needs would be adequately supplied by America. He did a good job of quieting any fears that Australia would make a separate peace with Japan.

  In letting Casey go, Evatt, given his American-born wife, might have wanted the Washington position for himself. In any case, Casey’s new appointment to the Middle East was announced by the British government on the BBC on 19 March, without Evatt or anyone else first letting Curtin know. Curtin and Churchill sent acid cables to each other. The cables were put forward by Churchill to convince the British War Cabinet that Curtin was ‘behaving deplorably’ and giving in to ‘a childish fit of temper’. Since the Americans were fed the same version, Evatt’s mission in Washington, during which he pleaded that the United States send to Australia six weeks’ worth of Britain’s allocation from the United States’ war production of aircraft, tanks, guns and other material, was undermined. This largesse, he argued to the Americans, would actually re-establish the position of the British government in the Australian mind implicitly damaged by Singapore to full flower and reignite affection for the old country.

  It was not until London in May 1942 that Evatt found out about the strategic priority given to defeating the Nazi regime. His tendency would have been to accuse Churchill and his War Cabinet of treachery, but his reaction was tempered by the sage Robinson’s advice. Churchill believed, unlike Evatt, that a full-scale invasion of Australia by the Japanese was very unlikely. Evatt settled down to get what he could, including three Spitfire squadrons, though the crisis of a further Rommel advance in the Middle East delayed them. Evatt was also demanding the return of the 9th Division, and that Britain should give consent to the proposal he had already put to the Americans, that a part of American war production normally sent to Britain should go to Australia. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was worried not about the safety of Australia but about the rift in the relationship between the British and the Australians, and he had no sympathy for Evatt’s attempt to get for Australia those six weeks of allocation from America.

  Altogether, Evatt’s mission was not a success. In Churchill’s mind, Australia’s loss could be tolerated better than more strategic losses in Burma and India. What had changed everything, though, was the arrival of the defeated but grandiose American general MacArthur at the Pacific’s last-chance saloon, Australia.

  CHAPTER 6

  The prophet and the heroes, the politicians

  and prisoners

  MacArthur, Curtin; war and the people

  THE APPARITION

  General MacArthur had arrived in Australia on 17 March 1942. He would sometimes express the thought that if the Japanese invaded Australia, it would be a strategic blunder on their part, but he still considered that they might take on Australia for symbolic reasons—to assert their superiority over the white race. In any case, Australian politicians and people believed the onslaught would come within eight weeks of the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin.

  Douglas MacArthur, the general of an abandoned and defeated American army in the Philippines and a refugee from onslaught, was welcomed as an angel of victory, a manifestation. To get to Australia he had escaped
by torpedo boat from the Philippine island of Corregidor. After flying south-east to Darwin with his young wife and little son and the remnants of his staff, he and his party caught a train southwards and arrived in Adelaide almost unexpectedly. It was more an indication of the psychological state of Australians and of the success of his own public-relations team that MacArthur was greeted as a messiah. Wise heads, however, knew that his arrival would at least bring American troops and arms to Australia. MacArthur declared to welcoming members of Parliament in Canberra’s parliamentary dining room on 26 March that his presence was ‘tangible evidence’ of the ‘indescribable consanguinity of race’ between the two countries, invoking an alliance of whiteness, even though some black troops were slated to come to Australia. He declared to great applause and to the great comfort of the Australian people that ‘all the resources of the almighty power of my country and all the blood of my countrymen’ were pledged to saving Australia and driving the Japanese back across the Pacific.

  In 1932, as United States Army Chief of Staff, MacArthur had taken personal command of the infantry, cavalry and tanks when troops dispersed thousands of his fellow World War I veterans who were marching on Washington seeking the payment of a World War I bonus. Despite this—and Curtin had to know of it—he and Curtin became friends. As already mentioned, Curtin found friendship across political lines sometimes less fraught than that between political allies.

  Again, as soon as MacArthur landed, his publicity machine went into operation on a scale at that time abnormal in Australia. According to the general, he had been pursued closely by Japanese fighter planes and narrowly escaped Japanese bombers at Batchelor airfield in the Northern Territory (in fact there is no record of this occurring). The Australians found such fables easy to accept because they wanted to believe that someone mythic had come to save them. MacArthur from then on controlled the news the outer world, including the United States, saw. Press releases in matters considered vital in the defence of Australia would never be phrased in terms that praised Australians. The exaltation of MacArthur himself was first priority, and the matter was attended to with PR dazzle by General Richard Sutherland, his chief of staff in ‘the Bataan Gang’, MacArthur’s party from the fallen Philippines. Napoleon had to create his reputation by his own mouth; MacArthur was the first general to travel with his own press office.