Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The 9th Division’s second amphibious operation was set for 22 September, only five days after the fall of Lae. They were to land on Scarlet Beach, seven kilometres from the town of Finschhafen. The pre-dawn assault ran into navigation problems at first, but the town was taken. The Japanese garrison was quickly overrun by the veteran Diggers (although some of the garrison as ever flitted away to the west). In little more than three months the Australians had given MacArthur total victory in New Guinea. Finschhafen provided MacArthur with the base he needed, the one from which he would return to Manila to retake the Philippines. Meanwhile, by the end of 1943, four thousand Australians had lost their lives in the campaign.

  Rabaul on New Britain was left alone except by the air force. By the end of 1943, Rabaul was no longer a Japanese naval base and the Japanese concentrated their aircraft in other areas. The well-equipped Japanese garrison was marooned there, and connected to Japan only by submarine or by wireless. The hundred thousand Japanese troops and naval personnel would spend the remainder of the war growing food for themselves on the Rabaul hillside terraces, and waiting for the Allies to arrive.

  Following the capture of Finschhafen in 1943, the Australians moved further west. On 19 January 1944, a party of 9th Division engineers found a metal box that had been dumped into a water-filled pit by the retreating Japanese at a furiously-fought-for area named Sio. The box contained Japanese code books—with current cipher keys. This discovery was probably the most important of the war in the Pacific. For the remainder of the war, Allied intelligence used them to get the entire Japanese order of battle and to update it. MacArthur, and the Allies in general, benefited greatly from them. So sensitive was the captured material that no message concerning its content or use could be sent by radio. The information could only be delivered to Washington by ‘safe hand’ courier.

  The few weeks between the discovery of the codes and their delivery to the Joint Chiefs were seen by MacArthur as his ‘window of opportunity’. He knew from intercepts that Japanese troops in the Admiralty Islands, on Manus and Los Negros, which sat north of the eastern end of New Guinea, numbered only a little over four thousand. In bringing in two divisions to obliterate the Japanese in the Admiralties, he used three armed merchant cruisers of the Australian navy, the Manoora, Kanimbla and Westralia, as landing ships. Each of them was equipped with twenty-five landing craft. MacArthur also had four cruisers, including the Australia and the Shropshire (the two heaviest Australian cruisers) and two American light cruisers. Amongst officers and troops on the ships there was some questioning about the necessity of the landing. Since MacArthur had enunciated the arguments for bypassing islands and instead cutting off the garrisons manning them, why the Admiralties? For a quick and spectacular PR coup for the general—that was why!

  MacArthur travelled with Admiral Kincaid aboard the US cruiser Phoenix, and inspected Los Negros on 28 September, after an American battalion had landed there and taken it. He permitted himself to be decorated on the beach, an event covered by the press corps just before filing time for the morning editions of American east coast newspapers. Then he returned to the Phoenix and departed the region. That evening the Japanese counter-attacked the young Americans, who lacked all heavy equipment. They suffered horrifyingly but held. So Douglas MacArthur was as willing to claim a victory off the backs of young men he had as good as abandoned on Los Negros as he was to gainsay the fibre of the Australians while claiming credit for their victories.

  MAKING THE GOLDEN SOCIETY

  Soon after the Japanese had been driven out of Kokoda again, on a hot 22 December 1942, Curtin created a Department of Post-war Reconstruction. Herbert ‘Nugget’ Coombs was its secretary, a man who came from a less privileged family—his English father had been a minor railway official in the town of Kalamunda east of Perth, where the boy was given the nickname he would take into a later, eminent life. Coombs’ mother was Irish, daughter of a graduate of Trinity College; his grandfather, Nugget would say, came to Australia ‘under a cloud’. Mrs Coombs was bookish and so was her son, a scholarship boy par excellence. Beginning as a schoolteacher, he went on in 1931 to study Keynes at the London School of Economics, where he was instructed by Harold Laski, said to be one of the most influential Marxists of the twentieth century. In 1933, Coombs was awarded a PhD for a thesis on central banking.

  Coombs was not a Marxist but an economist of a particular stripe: ‘The publication of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 was for me and many of my generation the most seminal intellectual event of our time.’ Keynes was, above all, the economist who appealed to those like Coombs who saw the state as a welcome player and intervener in the sphere of economics, and as a guarantor of minimum human dignity through policy. Coombs was a rebel against the classical economic theory that dominated Treasury at the time. When the Australian Labor Party under John Curtin came to power in 1941, Coombs found himself in a political environment that suited him. Now in his mid-thirties, and with a good if short record as Director of Rationing, Coombs was the sort of thinker Treasurer Ben Chifley wanted as secretary of his new department.

  In proposing a great post-war society, a society that was at a polar remove from the horrors of the Depression, Coombs would recollect that weekend staff conferences of the new department in offices amongst the eucalyptus bushlands of Canberra had the intensity of revivalist meetings. Newly brought-in economists and planners knew that their work for creating post-war Australia, trying to forge a new relationship between citizens and government, was taken seriously by the sturdy, polite yet direct Chifley. An important ally of Coombs and his friends was the economist from the University of Melbourne and wartime Prices Commissioner, Douglas Copland, an energetic and stellar economist professor who introduced price ceilings on goods and subsidised industries so that they could manufacture enough items to keep prices level. As for Chifley, Coombs remembered he ‘always read what you wrote’.

  Since the group of young economists had great cohesion and were resented by much of the rest of the public service—Coombs was often reminded he and his fellow planners were considered ‘interlopers’—they were like economic Rats of Tobruk, insulted and proud of it. For Coombs would later declare that he ‘was attempting to express in general terms what I believe to be the hopes and aspirations of the people of Australia in the post-war period’. If this sounded ‘a bit priest-like’, he argued there was universal agreement that ordinary Australians wanted stable employment, rising living standards, and security against the risks of sickness, unemployment and old age—everything the Depression had deprived them of. To him, relying on the decisions and preferences of consumers and investors was not enough; it exposed Commonwealth economies to booms and busts and so to waves of sackings during crisis periods until uncontrolled capitalism created the next boom. Coombs and his department wanted to represent the interests of ‘the male breadwinner’ rather than those of the holders of political, bureaucratic and financial power.

  To quench industrial unrest, he and his disciples and colleagues wanted to retain some degree of control over post-war prices and ensure that wages reflected increases in productivity. But he also wanted men’s lives to take on ‘new colour, new intensity and new dramatic quality’. That could not be achieved merely by the consumption of ‘things which are bought and sold in the market’. It was provided by collective goods: schools, libraries, parks and playgrounds, museums, picture galleries, public health services, roads, and opportunities for political activity and sport. Coombs saw community facilities as equal to capital equipment in industry. The public facilities were where ‘the essential business of human life is carried on’, where men met their friends, lovers, rivals, and even enemies, and pursued the personal relationships that constitute a fulfilling life.

  In an election far ahead, in 1949, Australians would ultimately reject Coombs’ and Chifley’s formulas. For already, in 1942, the young planners knew that consumers’ desires were not alway
s rational and, as the war proceeded and became more hopeful, were being worked on and distorted by advertising and marketing. In other words, as Coombs’ opponents might argue, he believed that housewives who to keep food fresh had had to await the regular delivery of ice, toted to back doors by a man with a sack on his shoulder and a block of ice resting on it and held in place by tongs, might in too many cases lust after refrigerators. Yet despite his worries about irrational consumerism, Coombs’ post-war vision for women—at this stage, mid-war—was not concerned with their employment or equal pay, but involved very much labour-saving devices ‘to provide respite from the strain of being isolated at home with young children . . . It is probably true that nothing could contribute so much to the well-being of so large a number of people as provision which would make it possible for every mother to have four hours a day, one night a week and three weeks every year free from her children.’

  The society the new department was planning for in Chifley’s name was seen by many—especially the young conservative bureaucrat and future parliamentarian from Western Australia, Paul Hasluck—as authoritarian and socialist. The failure of Nugget Coombs and his colleagues to realise their vision of post-war Australia rested in part on the gap between their mythological creation of the sturdy male breadwinner and what the actual man and his wife might desire and covet. The problem would arise from the way ‘Australian working men and their wives’ would behave after the war.

  The group Coombs was worried about was factory owners, their lack of innovation and their contentment with old-fashioned methods. Before the war, it had been Japanese-made goods that had always been mocked as shoddy and pointed to as a reason Japan could not fight a modern war. (The author can remember Australian parents boasting at birthday parties that they had bought the Australian- or British-made toy over the cheap and tinny Japanese one.) In fact, it was Australian entrepreneurs, protected against imports by tariffs, who had a history of being slow to take on new methods and new techniques. One aspect of the solution, argued Coombs, was to diminish the relative impact of businessmen’s decisions by expanding the state’s ownership of business and its share of economic activity. Government economic experts would thus become more important than private entrepreneurs!

  There was less polarisation of opinion between Coombs and capital than might have been expected. Interestingly, some leading businessmen themselves, men such as William Sydney Robinson, a mining entrepreneur who had once quarrelled with Billy Hughes over German-owned metal businesses, who had accompanied Evatt on his Washington and London meetings, and who had been one of the founders of the aluminium industry in Australia, agreed that the suffering and waste of the pre-war years could not be tolerated. Robinson endorsed the government’s pledge of full employment and individual security provided by what would become known as a ‘safety net’ of social services. Herbert Gepp, industrialist and business publicist, who as a young explosives chemist had worked with the renowned Nobel company, and whom Billy Hughes considered so important to Australia’s future that during World War I he had called him back from the ranks of the 1st AIF and sent him to America to market zinc concentrates, said that between the wars the views of entrepreneurs on the whole had been ‘confined and selfish’. Gepp declared: ‘The emphasis of policy (in post-war era) should be on profits and service and not profits alone.’ Gepp too had been much influenced by Keynes and, impatient with the torpor and lack of imagination with which most Australian businessmen approached their roles, did not disagree with the vision of post-war society articulated by Coombs and Copland.

  In fact, an economic revolution was underway in Australia, and it would run between the rise to power in 1941 of Curtin and the retirement of Menzies as Liberal prime minister in 1966. It was greatly influenced if not dominated by personalities who brought with them different contributions and convictions, and Robinson and Essington Lewis were remarkable amongst them. Their work spanned virtually the whole of the modern period to 1965. Both men were born in Australia: Robinson in Melbourne in 1876, Lewis in South Australia in 1881.

  Robinson described himself as having been ‘born, as you will see, in the candle and kerosene, horse and buggy, bread and dripping, and hand-setting age’. He is believed, when young, to have been the first journalist in Australia to type his material. Lewis, on the other hand, was born into the establishment, attended St Peter’s College, and graduated from the South Australian School of Mines to work for BHP for two years, starting at five shillings per week and rising to be shift boss.

  Robinson would be an advisor to Curtin, Evatt and Chifley, and helped Chifley attract General Motors to Australia to create the Holden, the first one available for sale in 1948 (the vehicle itself was named after the carriage works and car family of Holden in South Australia). He had earlier been involved in establishing the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, which built Australia’s first metal aircraft, the less-than-effective Wirraway, in 1939. But through Alfred Sloan junior, president of General Motors in New York, he had induced General Motors to invest capital in the aircraft corporation. Both he and Lewis foresaw World War II; having foreseen the future after visits to Japan and Germany in 1934, Lewis began to gear up a section of BHP’s manufacturing resources at Newcastle and Port Kembla for war. During the war, Lewis became Menzies’ director-general of Munitions, his pay in that job what it had been as a mine worker in 1904—five shillings a week.

  Both men were very chary of publicity. Robinson was tall, a footballer and long-distance runner; Lewis was sturdy, tough and broad-shouldered. He was keen on horseriding and would die of a heart attack at the age of eighty while on horseback. Lewis and Robinson were paternalistic men who urged management to spend money on houses, parks and swimming pools, and Lewis had ambitions to convert BHP from ‘a bitter feuding industry into a calm, peaceful, united community’. Though he was a conservative he was very good friends with Ted Theodore, and during the Depression sided with the Scullin government’s resistance to the rigidity of the Bank of England.

  In 1949, Winston Churchill declared that Robinson had made manifold services to the British Commonwealth. Bernard Baruch, American industrialist, described him to US president Herbert Hoover as ‘one of the very few men I met in my life who had the elements of real greatness’. It was assumed he was rich but, though he achieved modest affluence, it was not so.

  Men of their time, the planners of post-war reconstruction, failed to give much attention to women as more than ‘the working man’s wife’. In winning the vote in 1902, women’s organisations had campaigned for the franchise specifically on women’s place as mothers. Feminists in the 1930s made some progress not only in advancing health services for women and children, and achieving the maternity allowance and child endowment allowance, but also in the appointment of some women as police and health inspectors. The concept of woman as worker began to compete with the idea of the woman as mother in the minds of the women of the suburbs, not just in feminist politics. The 1933 Census had shown that three out of ten women workers were sole breadwinners, generally working for low wages in dressmaking, millinery and the textile industry. But unions fought to have married women, sole breadwinners or not, rejected by employers.

  World War II was changing all. There were thousands of young women volunteering for military service. Fifty-five thousand would be in the ranks by 1945, and these women—and others outside the military—did the jobs of men. Many other girls, such as eighteen-year-old Marie Coyle of Kempsey, came to the city and learned to be welders. Between 1939 and 1941, nearly a hundred thousand additional women entered the workforce, mainly in munitions factories and other war supplies. Industry and the women’s military services gave young women a taste of freedom from parental control; this of course helped stoke the ‘moral panic’ depicted earlier in this chapter, and raise the fear girls would never ‘settle down’. Lady Gowrie, wife of the wartime Governor-General and Curtin’s friend and passionate promoter of the Australian diva Joan Hammond, told the
mainly young women who had enlisted in the women’s military forces, ‘We do not want our service-women to become hard-faced and tough. After the war we want them to remain women and set up homes just as they would have done had there been no war.’

  In 1942, the same year as Coombs’ new department was established, the government set up the Women’s Employment Board to decide on women’s wages, which were set at about 90 per cent of the male rate—on the grounds of women’s lesser physical strength and supposed greater absenteeism. But employers would not comply. E.C. McGrath, Federal Secretary of the Printing Industry Employees’ Union, writes of women playing a magnificent part in the war industries, but he believed that when the war was over, any woman expecting her employment to continue was likely to suffer ‘unfortunate disillusionment’. Employers would always prefer men, he said, because ‘a woman, whether trained or untrained, is unstable in industry by reason of her marriage . . . or by reason of physiological and domestic complications which are not the common lot of man’.

  Significant steps included the appointment in 1944 of Kathleen Best, a Sydney nurse in her early thirties, as assistant director of Women’s Reestablishment. As a member of the 5th Australian General Hospital, Best had survived both the drive against Mussolini’s colonies in Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1941 and the Western Desert campaigns. She had served in and escaped from Greece, even though, with three dozen other nurses, had volunteered to stay behind with the wounded. Ordered to evacuate to Crete, she was ordered to leave there. She had then commanded a staging depot, nicknamed ‘Katie’s Birdcage’, for nurses in Palestine. Best was altogether a formidable and gifted organiser but also a charming comrade to her nurses, and her job now was to plan for the post-war management of the retraining for work of women released from the workplace and the army depot. She did not want to resign from a career herself, and she was sure many women did not.