Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  FOREIGN PARTS

  In 1939, at war’s outbreak, Eddie Ward, the ‘Firebrand of East Sydney’—frightened of Menzies’ tendency to favour conscription—was arguing that just as some citizens had the liberty to volunteer to fight beyond our shores, people ‘should never surrender the right to decide whether or not they should go overseas to render military service’. The militia could be conscripted to fight in Australian territory, but beyond that defensive duty, no one should be compelled. Though he uttered these opinions in 1939 in opposition, he would maintain them after the ALP gained power and the Japanese entered the war. Menzies, in any case, declared himself to have no interest in introducing conscription.

  Still in opposition in 1941, Curtin declared that there were too many volunteers in the militia being turned away for there to be a need of compulsory service. But he took the chance to criticise the pay of soldiers—five shillings a day for the soldier, three shillings a day for his wife, with a shilling a day for each child. The three shillings a day, he said, would be sufficient merely to pay the weekly rent.

  Only towards the end of 1942 did Curtin reach the decision that the Defence Act should be amended to enable the militia to serve outside Australian territories. In effect, this would combine the militia and the AIF into one Australian armed force. He was under pressure from the Americans, who considered that if conscription was fair enough for them, it should operate in the case of the Australians too.

  Curtin came sincerely to believe though that the problem of Australian defence was a strategic one, and if an area—a set of islands—was vital to Australian strategy, that was one to which the Australians should be able to bring full force to bear. In Parliament in early 1943, Curtin would reiterate his chief arguments, including the one that said, ‘The defence of Australia is not confined to its territorial limits.’ But the American issue was strong too: ‘Because of the debt of gratitude owed to the US, Australia should be able to say that Australian resources would go on with them and maintain supplies and bases to them from islands close to Australia which, if not held, could be bases for the enemy to attack the US forces.’

  In his broadcast to the American people in March 1942, Curtin had brushed aside the difference between the militia and the AIF with his claim that Australia had a complete call-up. While he might have liked to merge the two forces, he realised the issue was weighed down with the emotional baggage of Labor Party anti-conscription for overseas service in 1916–17. But he sprang the matter on the unsuspecting delegates of the party conference held in Melbourne on 16 November 1942.

  ‘The enemies of Labor are jubilant,’ wrote the aggrieved Labor Call on 3 December 1942. ‘They have always wanted conscription for military service beyond Australia and its adjacent territories, and now, at long last, they think their dream is coming true. Labor’s Prime Minister has proposed that the Defence Act be amended to permit the militia forces to be used anywhere in the Southwest Pacific, and Labor’s enemies believe the proposal will be agreed to by a Special Federal Labor Conference to be held on January 4th next.’

  Maurice Blackburn, Curtin’s mentor when he first came into the House, and who had been expelled from the Labor Party in 1941 by the anti-Communist Victorian branch because of his stand on Spain and sympathy for Russia, produced, in January 1943, his tract entitled Against Conscription, 40 Questions Answered. Some of them were answered thus: ‘Mr Hughes asked Power to compel Australians to fight anywhere, while Mr Curtin wishes to be able to send men to fight anywhere the Government chooses in the South West Pacific. Question: What is the South West Pacific area? Answer: No official definition has been published . . . Question: What do you say about America? She is helping us. Are not you anti-conscriptionists ungrateful to her? Answer: No question of gratitude arises. We value America’s friendship, but friendship did not bring Americans to Australia. Without the surprise of Pearl Harbor and the loss of the Philippines, we might never have seen the Americans.’

  Back in late October 1942, Curtin was still mulling it all over. He and Elsie went back to Western Australia to attend the wedding of their daughter, who was marrying a dentist from Cottesloe. Curtin then returned for the November Federal Labor Conference, but as he travelled back eastwards by train across the Nullarbor, he began to suffer acutely from neuritis. It is not the first time we could ask how many of Curtin’s illnesses were caused by inner tension and even by dread. He had to have hospital treatment in Adelaide but was fit enough to speak at the civic reception hosted by Tom Playford, conservative premier of South Australia, as if forewarning his followers that: ‘no Labor government had ever been as bad as its opponents had suggested, nor as good as its admirers had hoped. That went for governments of all parties.’

  Although advised against travelling, Curtin joined the night train to Melbourne so he could address the Armistice Day commemoration. On the way, several servicemen and servicewomen forced their way enthusiastically into his reserved compartment and refused to leave; as a result he arrived in Melbourne without having had any sleep and needed to go again to doctors. Meanwhile, he had forewarned Chifley and his old friend Scullin of what was to happen, for he trusted them and knew they agreed with him.

  At that November conference, Arthur Calwell tried to prevent Curtin being heard. Eddie Ward and Don Cameron attacked Curtin as expected. Ward denounced him for ‘putting young men into the slaughterhouse, although thirty years ago you wouldn’t go into it yourself ’. In return, Curtin produced an interesting variation on his argument: ‘A man could be sent to Darwin, where he would be bombed, but not to Timor [which then belonged to the Dutch and the Portuguese, though occupied by the Japanese] to save Darwin from being bombed. The militia could be forced to fight in Papua but could not pursue the Japanese across the border into Dutch New Guinea.’

  Though at one stage Curtin could be seen to weep, he was immovable. His tears were possibly for the lost idealism of 1916–17, and for the friends he would now offend by what he proposed, as well as being caused by stress. But there was a serious difference between the present idea and Hughes’ ambitions in World War I. Under Curtin’s proposal, the region to which conscripts could be sent was in the Pacific and did not go north of the equator.

  A hostile Calwell moved that the matter be referred to state executives and be brought back to a special federal conference in January 1943. Curtin received warmer Christmas wishes from Menzies for the ‘many personal courtesies’ than he did from his own side. He was on his own that Christmas of 1942, Mrs Curtin and daughter Elsie in Perth, son Jack in Adelaide.

  The special Labor conference for 1943 approved the change to overseas service, by twenty-four votes to twelve. The AIF and militia were at one in where they might be committed.

  SECOND- AND THIRD-PHASE PERIL

  Although Allied success in the Coral Sea delayed Japanese plans, a victory for the Japanese at Midway Island in the mid-Pacific would have meant complete domination of the Pacific Ocean and weakened Australia and New Zealand’s tenuous link with the United States geographically. At least one historian argues that Japanese victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea might have seen Australian cities heavily bombed and might even have seen Australia invaded. Victory at Midway, in waters off an atoll of that name just north of the equator, would have made both of these a certainty.

  The battle began on 4 June 1942, almost exactly a month after the Battle of the Coral Sea. US fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, commanding from Hawaii, knew he could not fight the Japanese head-on, but he had accurate intelligence and other advantages—as it turned out, luck and the complicated deployment of the Japanese fleet were two of them. The Australians did not take part, but they had the excuse that their Pacific navy was fully preoccupied further south. The Australian official historian of the Royal Australian Navy would later find himself going to some lengths to explain why a British battleship could not be transferred from the Indian Ocean to help Nimitz out. It was true that some Royal Navy ships had been damaged in a submarine atta
ck on Madagascar that was staged almost simultaneously with that on Sydney a few days past.

  Midway was a battle in the pattern of, but on an even larger scale than, the Coral Sea, with fighting for Midway, where an American Marine garrison was located, one of its aspects. Four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and the number of young Japanese men consumed for the sake of their admiral’s ambitions was nearly ten times that of American casualties.

  The Battle of Midway was also a problem for General MacArthur. It wasn’t his victory. He had been in Australia less than three months and had yet to strike a significant blow at the enemy. In this period, although his communiqués were full of tales of contact with the Japanese, few soldiers were in contact with them other than the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles and the two independent companies that made up Kanga Force. As a first step in getting engaged with the Japanese, he moved his headquarters from Brisbane and, to give himself an edge, without reference to Washington changed his own title to Commander in Chief, South West Pacific Area. By now he felt that he was able to inform Prime Minister Curtin, at a conference on 11 June, that the threat to Australia was over. Yet if Port Moresby were captured by the Japanese, there would be a third and climactic round of peril. Still, the publicity emphasis remained on MacArthur as the man about to save Australia, and he would manage to seize that mantle from the admirals Nimitz and Spruance (the latter had commanded the fleet at sea off Midway).

  In his biography, MacArthur declares that he had now decided to abandon the plan to hold the Brisbane Line and to move his troops a thousand miles (1600 kilometres) forward into eastern Papua and ‘to stop the Japanese on the rough mountains of the Owen Stanley Ranges of New Guinea’. Curtin and his advisors had decided that Port Moresby should be built up strongly, and as early as 1 May, General Blamey received a note from MacArthur asking whether there might not be a chance for his troops to raid Lae and Salamaua from Port Moresby. The request showed an utter lack of knowledge of the realities of the terrain, even though MacArthur was supposedly a great exponent of taking terrain into account. In this case, he and his staff had seen the map as a two-dimensional one and failed to take into account its human contours.

  General Basil Morris had been a permanent soldier since 1910 and was described by General Vasey as ‘no brains, but very honest and stout-hearted’. In Port Moresby he began to assemble Maroubra Force, organised around the 39th Militia Battalion, which had a few AIF reinforcements, including officers. With some reluctance and at Blamey’s orders, he sent the 39th Militia Battalion up over the exhausting, rain-slicked and overgrown mountains to garrison Kokoda, a small village which had an airstrip and was situated on the far side of the Owen Stanley Ranges but on the lower northern slopes. A walking track and a road connected it to Buna 60 kilometres away on the coast. Morris had had a lot of trouble supplying Kanga Force outside Salamaua. He prophetically believed that the main Japanese invasion force would land at Buna, but also believed that no matter how many men it had, and how much equipment, on the way across the mountains the force would suffer such attrition and be so affected by disease that it could not reach Moresby. It would also need to move without heavy artillery, since these could not possibly be manhandled over the mountains. He saw that in being ordered to send troops forward to Kokoda he was creating for himself the very problems he foresaw for the Japanese. No wheeled vehicle could go more than a few kilometres towards Kokoda, and though it had an airstrip, there were not sufficient aircraft to supply it by air, even if the weather and the mountains were not such a challenge that pilots would need consummate skill to socket their aircraft safely onto the cramped airstrip surrounded by peaks. So native New Guinean carriers, each man carrying no more than twenty kilograms, would be the main method used to provide for whatever troops were committed in an attempt to defend Kokoda.

  On 2 July, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff upped the situation when, perhaps operating off the same map as MacArthur, they ordered him to take steps to seize and occupy those parts of New Guinea not already held by the Allies.

  MacArthur’s first plan was to attack New Britain and New Ireland, the long narrow islands off the north coast of New Guinea. The jewel of New Britain was Rabaul. He asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to provide him with a division of marines and two aircraft carriers. The navy said they would not commit their aircraft carriers without adequate land-based aircraft cover.

  Two divisions of American infantry had by now arrived in Australia, the 32nd and the 41st. After Midway, MacArthur ordered them both from the southern states up to Queensland. The 32nd went to a camp west of Brisbane and the 41st to train between Rockhampton and Yeppoon. He issued an outline plan for the creation of airfields and other installations at Buna on the north coast of New Guinea to provide support for the planned recapture of Rabaul and New Britain. Australian infantry and American engineers were to cross the Kokoda Trail from Port Moresby to the north New Guinea coast before the Japanese grabbed it, and to ‘seize an area suitable for the operation of all types of aircraft and secure a disembarkation point pending the arrival of sea parties’. He also ordered airfields constructed at Milne Bay at New Guinea’s eastern extremity. By mid-July 1942, an Australian fighter squadron equipped with American Kittyhawks was operating from the Gili Gili airstrip at the extreme end of Milne Bay, and a brigade of Australians was sent to defend the area.

  Before that could happen, a Japanese float plane machine-gunned the mission at Buna, and a Japanese cruiser and a destroyer escorting two troop transports appeared off the beach at Gona, fifteen kilometres to the west, on 21 July 1942. General Horii from Rabaul had gazumped the Allied plans, and the amphibious assault on the Buna–Gona coastline continued. It became apparent the Japanese did intend to march along the precipitous track to Port Moresby. The only Allied troops north of the ranges were the men of Kanga Force, and the 39th Battalion at Kokoda. Most of these militiamen, the choco soldiers, were boys of eighteen years of age. They were exhausted from their trek over the ranges, they were ill-supplied and hungry, and going down with malaria. By the end of August their commander would be an AIF man, Brigadier Arnold Potts.

  Ninety-six kilometres north-east of them, more Japanese infantry and engineers were storming ashore, where they ran into small Australian squads, the priest and nuns from the mission, and a plantation manager and his staff. Many of the latter, including six women, were captured by New Guineans and handed over to the Japanese, who beheaded nearly all of them.

  Two young Anglican nuns, May Hayman and Miss Mavis Parkinson, were attached to the mission and had refused to leave for Port Moresby or Australia when everyone else had earlier in the year. The Japanese opened fire at Buna and then Gona. One of the women cried, ‘Scrummy! A real naval battle.’ The Anglican priest James Benson gathered the women and some of his servants, some blankets, mosquito nets, and tins of food, and got out just ahead of the troops. The Japanese advanced so quickly that he and the others found their route of escape to inland Popondetta cut off. They moved into the jungle to make their way by means of Father Benson’s compass.

  One can ask why no Allied army waited on the shore and why no navy opposed this landing. A few Allied planes inexpertly attacked the fleet, and the transport ship Ayatozan Maru ran aground. Pilot Officer Warren Cowan of 32 Squadron RAAF attacked the enemy ships leaving Buna in his old Hudson bomber. Nine Zeros pounced on him, one of them piloted by an ace, Saburo Sakai, and shot him down. He crashed into the jungle and was killed.

  So General Horii came ashore in the Buna–Gona area with more than thirteen thousand men, well trained, many of them veterans of China and Malaya. The Kokoda campaign began on the afternoon of 21 July 1942 when James Benson looked out over his garden to see a Japanese transport ship flanked by warships approaching the beach at Gona. The Orokaiva and Binandere people had already disappeared into the bush, cognisant of what was about to happen. Horii landed his white horse, which he intended to ride over the mountains. The outnumbered 39th Battalion were ordered by Morri
s to fall back from Kokoda before they became trapped there.

  This gave MacArthur welcome grounds to condemn the Australians. As members of the 7th Division AIF commanded by General Tubby Allen began to arrive on 11 August, New Guinea became a corps command under Lieutenant-General Sydney Rowell, who took over from Morris. Rowell had served on Blamey’s staff, but was not an admirer of his and had already made that clear in the Middle East. But it was MacArthur’s orders that astounded him. Rowell was told by MacArthur’s headquarters to reconnoitre the Kokoda Trail for a summit pass that might be readily blocked by demolition. MacArthur’s people asked if The Gap at the peak of the Owen Stanleys could be defended by a small group of men like the Greeks at Thermopylae. The Gap was a twelve-kilometre-wide dip in the mountains; because it was less vegetated, it was one of the places where more open military operations could take place and small parties of Allied forces overrun. Rowell replied, ‘The amount of explosive which could be carried by native porters for the ten days’ trip . . . would hardly increase the present difficulties of the track [for the Japanese]. Some parts of the track have to be negotiated on hands and knees and the use of tonnes of explosives would not increase these difficulties.’ Then, he said, ‘I sent [the order] back asking whether it was this week’s funny story.’ Nor had MacArthur seemingly heard of the fate of the Australians defending the real Thermopylae area in Greece in 1941.

  Often a planeload of officers from general headquarters would arrive at a New Guinea airfield and spend the day sightseeing around Port Moresby before returning to Brisbane, their journey designed to qualify them for a campaign medal. The Australians were correct in assuming that medals came easily for some Americans. MacArthur had already awarded the Silver Star to Lieutenant Commander Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), future US president, for gallantry in action in the vicinity of Port Moresby and Salamaua on 9 June 1942. Johnson had flown on a ‘hazardous aerial combat mission’ from Townsville and his plane had been intercepted by eight hostile fighters. ‘The plane was forced to turn back alone, providing a good target to enemy fighters.’ There have been claims that Johnson’s plane never reached the target and never came under fire. Robert Dallek, an LBJ biographer, said the medal was given to Johnson because of ‘his growing power as a young Congressman in Washington and to ensure that he would lobby the President for greater resources for the Southwest Pacific theatre’. In any case, Johnson flew just the one mission and then returned to Washington.