Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In any case, Blamey set out at MacArthur’s orders to examine the situation in New Guinea. General Frank Berryman, on Lavarack’s 1st Army staff, said that Blamey was now fighting for his own military career. Either he was to take decisive action or MacArthur would lobby Curtin to have him dismissed, and there was every chance Curtin would agree. Blamey was aware of his unpopularity and the yearning of generals Robertson, Lavarack and even the Malaya escapee Bennett for his position. On the other hand, when Blamey’s performance had earlier been raised at the Prime Minister’s War Conference in Canberra on 11 July 1942, Shedden’s notes recorded that MacArthur said he considered Blamey ‘to be the best of all the Australian generals’. Though elsewhere MacArthur recorded that Blamey possessed a ‘sensual, slothful and doubtful character’, Curtin told the press, ‘The Government was seeking a military leader, not a Sunday school teacher.’

  But when the Advisory War Council met on 17 September 1942 to examine the deteriorating situation in New Guinea, it was obvious to Blamey that some members were blaming him for the lack of success until now. One of his options was to sack General Rowell, overall director and careful planner of the campaign. The spiky and righteous-minded Rowell must have been not entirely hard for Blamey to contemplate sacking. He was one of those officers who, in Palestine a year and a half earlier, had lectured Blamey on being too obese and unfit to campaign.

  When Rowell had first arrived in New Guinea in July 1942, he had visited Owers’ Corner, the beginning of the track proper, and at once saw how hard it was going to be to supply the troops. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he told Osmar White, ‘I’m willing to pull back and let the enemy have the rough stuff if he wants it. I’m willing to present the Jap with the supply headache I’ve got.’ At the same time he knew this option was politically risky, and went on, ‘But there are those who think otherwise. We need a victory in the Pacific and a lot of poor bastards have got to get killed to provide it.’

  Before his own visit in September 1942, Blamey had written ahead to Rowell saying that he hoped Rowell would not think that Blamey’s imminent arrival in Port Moresby meant any lack of confidence in him personally. It arose from the inexperience of politicians, said Blamey. On the evening of 23 September, Rowell and Blamey had a discussion about their respective roles that was ‘at times acrimonious’. Rowell had no wish to become merely Blamey’s Chief of Staff, and submitted that Blamey should establish an army headquarters in Moresby to control all New Guinea operations, including Milne Bay and elsewhere, leaving Rowell to concentrate on the operations in the Owen Stanley Ranges. But Blamey had no intention of staying in New Guinea indefinitely. They also argued about bringing Lavarack and his 1st Army forward to New Guinea. Rowell said perceptively that if an Australian army headquarters wasn’t set up in New Guinea, then an American headquarters would be.

  Acting on a suggestion from MacArthur, and without telling Rowell, on the morning of 25 September, Blamey flew to Milne Bay and ordered General Clowes to send a force by air to Wanigela in the north-east of Milne Bay. Rowell was angry that Blamey had given orders that should have come from him. ‘I fairly rose,’ Rowell wrote to Clowes later. ‘I then got off my chest what I’ve been storing up since April 1941.’ It must have been a scene, this after-dinner exchange!

  That night, Blamey wrote to MacArthur and told him the defensive phase in New Guinea was finished. There was now a plan to advance on three axes. The first was along the Kokoda Trail via Ioribaiwa to Kokoda. The second route, to be taken by the American 32nd Division, was to be further east along the track through Juare, and the third was a sea-and-land route from the direction of Milne Bay. The 32nd Division would be the first full United States army division (as distinct from the Marines fighting on Guadalcanal to the east of New Guinea under ultimate control of the navy) to be committed to combat with the Japanese, and it would have successes in the Philippines later in the war. But here it was rushed into combat only partly trained and with little experience of jungles.

  General George Vasey, who had endured the finance-starved inter-war years as Rowell’s brother officer, and more recently experienced North Africa and the Greek campaign with him, had arrived in New Guinea with members of his 6th Division. Vasey knew Blamey certainly had something to gain by getting rid of Rowell, but Rowell made it easy for him by his attitude. ‘We’ve had three first class brawls,’ Rowell further informed Clowes. ‘I would never have believed a senior officer would have taken what I said to him.’

  If Blamey had arrived five days later, it would have become obvious that the Japanese retreat had begun and there would have been less pressure on him. However, three days after Blamey arrived, Rowell was stripped of his command. Edmund ‘Ned’ Herring, another regular soldier between the wars but one who was able to relate well to other people and was also a friend of Blamey’s, took over the command. His successes in New Guinea would be considerable. But Major-General Richard Dewing, the British army representative in Australia, wrote that MacArthur was ‘working steadily to exclude the Australians from any effective hand in the control of land or air operations or credit in them, except as a minor element in a US show’.

  Both Curtin and Menzies felt sympathy for Rowell, and particularly when the Australian advance back over the mountains to Kokoda became so successful. They organised a post for him as a liaison general in the Middle East, but he found it a dispiriting, make-work job.

  YOUR DOCTOR, MY DOCTOR

  When one mentions the term ‘prisoner of war’ in an Australian World War II context, there is a tendency to think of prisoners of the Japanese, and the name ‘Changi’—the large barracks that became the chief prison of Singapore—dominates the imagination.

  It seems, however, that if one was a prisoner of the Japanese empire, Changi was the best of many bad places to be, although that is perhaps not saying a great deal, given that the Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. But Australians at Changi were well organised in terms of their own administration, and lived to an extent under a normal military hierarchy. Captain Victor Brand stated, ‘They talk about the “infamous Changi hospital”; well, that’s nonsense. Changi was a very pleasant spot. The only trouble of course was the lack of food. But compared to other places it was a tremendous place.’ This is a common theme in the journals and memories of men who survived the building of the Burma Railway in Thailand. Captain Colin Juttner, on returning to Changi, declared that the men still there ‘just piled this good food into us . . . they looked so marvellous themselves . . . it was like coming home’.

  Private Stan Arneil, who returned to Changi from the hellish railway in December 1943, had been stuck in one of the F Force camps on a section of the railway. F Force was a group of seven thousand men who suffered the greatest death rate—44 per cent—of all the alphabetically labelled ‘forces’ of prisoners and coolies the Japanese used to work on the project. On 8 April 1943, the Japanese had announced that, commencing on about 16 April, seven thousand medically fit British and Australian prisoners were to move from Singapore by rail. This group was dubbed F Force. Early rumours of this move had created excitement and a sense of possibilities, all of which was soon to be tragically negated. They were not informed of the purpose of the move, but Captain Adrian Curlewis heard that the force was to be distributed over seven camps, each accommodating a thousand men. The prisoners were informed that the force was not to be employed as a working party, and so the inclusion of a high percentage of the unfits was not discouraged—in fact, the Japanese authorities suggested many men would have a better chance of recovery from ill-health in new and pleasant surroundings. All those going were vaccinated and inoculated against cholera and plague, though it was only the first injection in each case, without follow-ups. A band could accompany each thousand men, and gramophones would be issued after arrival. The men were entrained in unutterably hot steel rice trucks into which twenty-seven or -eight men were crowded so that only a few could lie down at any time and practic
ally none could even sit in comfort. There was, if they were lucky, one meal a day. There was no provision for sanitation. One Australian train was without water from midday of one day until nightfall on the next. The force detrained across the Malayan border in Ban Pong, Thailand.

  The camp, when they arrived, consisted of four atap-thatched huts built on low-lying ground in a constricted area. From there, Curlewis’s group was to walk 290 kilometres to a place called Nieke on the River Kwai, near the Burmese border. They set out at 10.30 p.m., stocked up on food purchased from the Thais. By three in the morning their gear and their boots were beginning to fall apart. At one of their stops on this via dolorosa there were no latrines and ‘the ground was fouled in all directions, flies abounded, and the stench was particularly offensive’.

  One day was spent in having cholera and malaria tests and smallpox vaccinations from Japanese doctors. Further into the march, troops were warned of the dangers of Thai bandits attacking men straggling behind. Warnings were also issued about tigers. According to Curlewis, these twin threats had an impact on the guards as well, who placed themselves in the middle of the column of prisoners. Eventually they entered continuous jungle. Men began to wonder about the distance still to be covered, but they could find out nothing from the guards. They reached Barangali, which would in the end be seen as the halfway mark. By now every fit man was carrying a sick man’s bundle as well as his own, and a suggestion from an officer that the sick be left in the camp there led to his being beaten and his hand broken.

  It is impossible to describe the profound misery of the camps along the railway, and as much as can be described has been by the men who endured it. At the camp in Takanun in Thailand, Curlewis felt that more Allied officers should have declared themselves fit for work than the six out of thirty who did. But he found the work of digging latrines too gruelling for a forty-two year old. By the time his group were moved on to further wretchedness at Tamarumpat in June, he had suffered malaria and recurrent diarrhoea and mild beri-beri. Tropical ulcers, dengue fever, dysentery were already pervasive amongst his men and colleagues. Malnutrition made it easy for opportunistic diseases to strike, including cholera. On 19 May, the daily ration at Takanun had been three-and-a-half ounces of dry rice and one-third of a cup of onion water three times a day. On other days the rice was served with bamboo shoots. ‘Cholera in next camp until control,’ he would write before the move, ‘but five deaths.’ Yet up and down the line, cholera visited again and again and compounded the level of fatality. Suddenly, before the end of May, Curlewis was reporting forty-nine deaths from cholera. Skeletal sick were driven out to work on the rail bed.

  Sometimes there was a windfall, like the arrival of pay for their labour, and rations might be supplemented with condensed milk and other small comforts. But never enough to delay an aching attrition of the human system that would come during the following months.

  On 11 December 1943, there were seventeen hundred prisoners left in Stan Arneil’s camp on the Burma railroad, and the deaths were unsustainable, seventeen having died in the past day. Suddenly they were all moved out, their work on the railroad finished; they were put in boxcars and railed south and were, as Arneil wrote, ‘at the end of our physical resources when we arrived at Changi’. And there he found that the food was, unexpectedly, sufficient to halt the illness and weakness that had plagued him and his fellows. ‘Ah Changi!’ he later declared. ‘You were heaven to us then.’ He was able to shower and rid himself of lice. ‘The food here is delicious but there is not enough of it for us although the quality is first rate. We even have fried shark which is very good. The menu for Xmas Day is colossal.’

  The Burma Railway, not Changi, was the great killer of F Force. The rates of death were so great, Arneil remembered, that there was not time or sufficient men strong enough to dig graves, and so the dead were cremated on bamboo fires, and a handful of their ashes placed in bamboo containers.

  Of the nearly eight thousand Australian prisoners of war who died in Japanese camps, Changi had the lowest death rate. The Burma Railway had more in common with other appalling camps in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Manchuria, Formosa, Ambon and Hainan, and camps on the Japanese mainland. Borneo and Ambon were proportionately the most lethal camps, although the level of general suffering, physical and mental, amongst prisoners military and civilian was such as to make the numerical comparisons close to odious.

  Weary Dunlop, the boxing star who, although a Victorian, played rugby for Australia in 1932 and 1934, became the best known of the medical heroes of the Burma Railway and the most renowned amongst the 106 Australian military doctors who worked in Japanese captivity. He deserved renown. He stood up to his captors, protected the desperately weak, and was well liked and heartily praised by his colleagues. By the time of his capture he had served in Jerusalem, Gaza, Alexandria, in the Greek and Crete campaigns, and as senior surgeon at Tobruk. Returned to the home front, he was captured in Java at Number 1 Allied General Hospital at Bandung, in early March 1942. On 20 January 1943, he left Singapore for Thailand in charge of ‘Dunlop Force’ to work on the railway. Many attributed the relatively lower death rate amongst Australians in the camps at Konyu River, Hintok Mountain and Hellfire Pass to his impact as a leader, surgeon and physician.

  He was by no means the only Australian surgeon to behave impeccably. As one historian says, ‘Many prisoners in other places had their version of Weary Dunlop.’ Captain John Akeroyd cared for prisoners in Ichioka, in Osaka, Japan. This officer was, according to one prisoner, ‘repeatedly beaten and knocked about because of the strong stand he took regarding sick and ailing men . . . a great deal of credit goes to him for the few deaths recorded in this particular camp’. With no anaesthetic, he depended on his orderlies to hold patients down for necessary surgery. A number of Japanese officers and guards, including a man named Nosu, the so-called ‘Mad Butcher of Ichioka’, abused him for his direct protests about the health of the men and the plundering of Red Cross parcels by guards. By the end of the war he had tuberculosis, but recovered to lead a robust post-war life.

  Dr Kevin Fagan, saviour of an ultimately famous British sapper named Ronald Searle (a cartoonist who, amongst all else, would create the St Trinian’s cartoon series), was able to return to Australia when liberated and resume specialist surgical practice in Macquarie Street, Sydney. A former POW named Bob Goodwin recalls, ‘I was a personal recipient of his compassionate care. His surgical skill halted the progress of the ulcer, and I have always felt I owed my survival to him.’ On that basis he nominated Fagan for the award of the Australian Medical Association gold medal.

  In his time in Thailand with H Force, Fagan’s efforts were spent on preventing a severe epidemic of cholera, rampant dysentery, and tropical ulcers. Kanu Number 2, Fagan’s post, was a camp in which terrible casualties occurred. The party of 3500 troops with whom Fagan had first moved from Changi to Thailand travelled by freight car to Ban Pong, then marched 150 kilometres into the jungle, and was immediately put to work for twelve to fifteen hours a day, making a cutting in solid rock. Their rations were deficient in protein, fats and vitamins, particularly thiamine, B1 complex. Fagan wrote that: ‘Very soon our men were reduced to the status of a malarial, dysenteric, underfed and overworked slave gang. An epidemic of cholera killed 25 per cent of the camp strength in six weeks. With this classical background an epidemic of acute phagedenic ulcers appeared six weeks after our arrival.’ The spread of the lesion, he said, ‘was accompanied by intense pain and moderate toxaemia’, that is, blood poisoning. His description of a man suffering from these ulcers is hard to forget. The victim retained a thin strip of intact skin down the calf or outer side of the leg, ‘the rest of the leg being . . . a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus; sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses.’ He would treat these cases by cutting out the massive ulcers. Sometimes chronic diarrhoea caused infection of the ulcers, and amputation was the only poss
ible treatment. There were no adequate drugs after the operation, but ‘amputation enabled many of these unfortunate men to die in greater comfort and dignity’. Fagan’s operating theatre was at first open-air, later under a tent fly, and later still, in the plains of Kamburi, ‘a luxurious affair of palm leaf with a mud floor’. Sterilisation of instruments was done in a four-gallon ‘dixie’ on an open fire.

  Towards the end of his ordeal on the Burma Railway, Fagan was ordered by the Japanese to detail one hundred men to remain and continue working, while the remainder were to be shipped south, probably back to Singapore. He would later say that it was the worst thing he had ever been ordered to do, and he knew the men he chose to stay must have hated him. But he remained with them himself, and they were sent by rail to a place named Konkoita, a hundred kilometres away.

  By the time H Force was evacuated back to Singapore, Fagan was in a state of physical exhaustion and was mortally ill with cerebral malaria. One survivor of Kanu and Konkoita, Lieutenant Don Lee, said that during Major Fagan’s illness, half-hourly bulletins were issued on his condition, such was the interest his fellow prisoners had in him. He survived.

  At the end of the war, Fagan would declare, against the normal suspicion to the contrary, ‘that the returned prisoner of war is in most cases not only a normal man except for some temporary physical disability, but one who has had intellectual and emotional experiences which give him a decided advantage over his fellows. He has learned to appreciate the minor pleasures of life. He knows the essentials of existence. He has a high threshold for the pinpricks of ordinary life. He knows man for what he is—his courage, his cowardice, his limitless generosity, his gross selfishness, his nobility and his utter meanness.’