Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The idea of sending a handful of Caucasian officers and men deep into the Borneo interior with the objective of organising the indigenous inhabitants had been discussed early within Allied intelligence circles. The SRD was an Australian special force with headquarters in a mansion in South Melbourne. It was directly responsible to Blamey, and its real purpose was special operations. Its most resonating success, Operation Jaywick, known only in influential circles, occurred in September 1943, when a party of Australian and British operatives, members of the Z Special Unit, commanded by a Singapore escapee named Major Ivan Lyon of the Gordon Highlanders, were selected and sent off on a captured Japanese fishing vessel named Krait from a secret camp in Pittwater, just north of Sydney, all the way to the islands off Singapore. Krait’s captain was a sixty-one-year-old engineer named Bill Reynolds. From one of the smaller islands off the former British but now Japanese fortress, a number of flimsy two-man canoes were launched from Krait and paddled into Singapore harbour, each with a supply of timed limpet mines aboard. The limpets were attached to Japanese shipping, and the canoe teams were safely back on a bluff on the island where Krait was hidden in time to see fifty to sixty thousand tons of Japanese shipping explode. Then, preposterously, they took the Krait all the way home, the lankiest, least Asiatic-looking members of the crew hiding in the ship’s sweltering hold whenever Japanese patrol boats were near. The senior Australian officer on this extraordinary mission was Captain Robert Page, a young and noble-souled medical student and nephew of Earle Page.

  Lyon and the other operatives, having become mythic figures in the secret operations community and casting their lustre on the SRD, returned in October 1944 to give a second dose to shipping in Singapore. Named Rimau, this should have been a much safer operation. From Garden Island near Fremantle, the party travelled to a rendezvous point named Merapas Island, south-east of Singapore, aboard a British submarine. There they captured a junk and transferred to it their equipment, which consisted of mines, automatic weapons and their new secret submersibles, commonly called Sleeping Beauties, which travelled just beneath the waves and meant that a raider could approach shipping with only part of his head out of the water. Sadly, the junk was intercepted by a Malayan police patrol boat working for the Japanese, a gunfight occurred, the junk had to be blown up and sunk to hide the presence of the Sleeping Beauties, and the men took off in canoes with the determined purpose of reaching Australia. Ten of them were captured by the Japanese on the way, including Page. Lyon was killed in a firefight in a place called Soreh Island.

  As they island-hopped, making for Timor and, beyond it, the coast of Australia, the other members of the party, paddling canoes, were pursued southwards. Sub-Lieutenant J.G.M. Riggs, a volunteer of the Royal Navy Reserve, was killed at Merapas after missing the rendezvous with the submarine. Some of the men may have taken their suicide pills when things became hopeless, but a twenty-two-year-old warrant officer, J. Willisdorf, paddled as far as Timor before being captured in February 1945. Many of these thirteen men on the run put in weeks of paddling, and Able Seaman F.W.L. Marsh, an Australian sailor, twenty years of age, was on the loose for three months, Private D.R. Warne of the AIF was on the run until April 1945, while Lance Corporal H.J. Pace did not die until June 1945 at Dili.

  There were further unintended tragedies as a result of the operation. A number of men and women from the Changi civilian internment camp were interrogated by the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, the terrifying Kempeitai, and some sixteen of them did not survive their rough treatment or else were executed. Thirty-three of the civilian population of Singapore, including a number of women, were executed on suspicion of involvement, and in July 1945, after a trial which emphasised that the highest honour a warrior could receive once captured was beheading, Page and nine others were executed in a clearing off Reformatory Road. Despite the oratory about the honour of it all, the beheadings were botched and brutal.

  Mysteriously, these men were never decorated. It is believed that this was because the Sleeping Beauties were retrieved by the Japanese from the shallow sea where their junk had sunk. It seemed that as proud as the SRD and the British High Command in the region had been of Jaywick, Rimau was an embarrassment to them.

  But so were other SRD operations. A number of parties sent to Timor were captured in turn because previous parties had also been captured and their radio operators forced at gunpoint to communicate false information to Melbourne. The operators included in their signals a number of prearranged words that were meant to convey that they were operating under duress, but headquarters in Melbourne did not pick up on this, and continued to send men off to capture, torture, and in some cases, death.

  In 1945, about the time the Rimau men were trying to escape down the archipelago of Indonesia, SRD secretly landed operatives in Borneo. They had two main objectives: the gathering of intelligence, and the training and arming of local inhabitants into resistance groups to wage guerrilla warfare. In early March 1945, Major F.G.L. Chester, who had been landed in Borneo in 1943, landed near Labuk Bay and made contact with the SRD personnel already in the area. Drop zones were established on nearby Jambongan Island, on Borneo’s east coast, in late April and early May. A signal station was established, and a hospital for native inhabitants. In Sarawak on the north coast there were plans for SRD groups to be parachuted into the mountainous hinterland of Brunei Bay. Before 10 June 1945, D-Day for Oboe 6—the code name for the Australian invasion of that sector—SRD operatives in North Borneo and Sarawak were relaying intelligence to Blamey’s advance land headquarters on the island of Morotai north-west of New Guinea. Four days before the launch of Oboe 6, one of the groups, Semut 2, had captured the Japanese wireless station at Longalama, and on the eve of D-Day Semut 1 attacked small Japanese garrisons in the Brunei Bay area. They were able to identify the infantry battalion defending Kuching, and report on enemy defences and troop movements.

  The 9th Division was on record as being very happy with the information the SRD operatives sent and the preparations they made before the Oboe 6 landing. There was one major issue unattended to, however. Between 1942 and 1943, some 2750 Allied prisoners of war, mainly Australian and British, had been shipped from Singapore to Sandakan on the east coast of Borneo and used as hard-driven labour for the construction of an airfield. Captain Hoshijima Susumi, the Sandakan camp commandant, overworked, underfed and brutalised the men he held prisoner. For example, a hidden radio was found in the camp in mid-1943, and those adjudged responsible were turned over to the Kempeitai, moved back to Singapore and executed. As a security measure, the Japanese despatched most of the Australian and British officers to the main POW and internment camp near Kuching. Only eight officers remained behind at Sandakan with the mostly enlisted men, where the death rate was obscene: between December 1943 and May 1945, eleven hundred prisoners died.

  To avoid recurring Allied bombings of the airstrip and the camp, which began early in 1945, the Japanese decided to move the surviving POWs in forced marches inland, the first group in January, the second in May. Only those so sick as to be immovable were left in Sandakan, and all of these would die or be massacred. Out of the approximately two thousand who participated in the two marches, less than half reached Ranau, 260 kilometres into the jungle, the others falling down on the track, expiring or being bayoneted.

  Albert Cleary, twenty-two years old (and thus only nineteen when Singapore fell), tried to escape from Ranau. He was beaten and otherwise abused, and then his friends were permitted to wash him and take him to die amongst them. By May 1945, only thirty or so prisoners were still alive there. Richard Murray and Keith Botterill stole rice to accumulate it for an escape, and when Murray was caught, he took full blame and was bayoneted to death in a bomb crater. Botterill was one of the four who did somehow escape from Ranau, and one of the six survivors of the tragedy. Two Australians managed to escape during the second march, and another four survivors (including Botterill) succeeded in escaping from Ranau into th
e jungle. No one else survived at Ranau, and there were no survivors from the three hundred who still remained at Sandakan after the second march.

  SRD operatives in the field possessed detailed and accurate information on the movement of POWs at Sandakan in groups to Ranau. The question is asked why there was no attempt to liberate the Sandakan POWs by a paratroop or other unit. Blamey’s speech at the Second Annual Conference of the Australian Armoured Corps Association in Melbourne on 1 November 1947 concerned Lieutenant-Colonel John Overall’s paratroop battalion, which had been training at the Atherton Tablelands for a covert operation that never eventuated. These soldiers knew nothing of the details of their mission until Blamey’s address. ‘We had complete plans for them,’ he claimed. ‘Our spies were in Japanese-held territory. We had established the necessary contacts with prisoners at Sandakan, and our parachute troops were going to relieve them . . . but at the moment we wanted to act, we couldn’t get the necessary aircraft to take them in.’

  Some historians, including Lynette Ramsay Silver, have denounced Blamey’s claim about ‘getting the necessary aircraft’ as utter nonsense. No request for aircraft was made to MacArthur. If the Americans were reluctant, as was claimed, the RAAF had its own pool of seventy-one transport planes, and had the plans been followed, only thirty-four aircraft were needed.

  Altogether, the failure to save the POWs seems to have been not a work of malice on the part of Blamey and the SRD but merely one of incompetence. John Overall believed the story of the lack of air transport, and so did Athol Moffitt, the Allied prosecutor at the Labuan War Crimes trials. Overall declared, ‘Yes, there had been a plan to rescue the Sandakan prisoners . . . General Morshead pressed the plan, and I understood General Blamey wanted it, but the US would not release the planes to make the drop.’ Denis Emerson-Elliott, a member of the UK Special Operations Executive Far East, said of the SRD operations in Borneo: ‘It was a mess from beginning to end. The intelligence was a disaster. The bungling on the planning side was dreadful, so Blamey decided to blame MacArthur.’

  The Australian troops of the 1st Australian Corps, the 7th and 9th AIF divisions under the command of Leslie Morshead, were the troops allotted to retake Borneo. They were to land on 1 May at Tarakan Island in the southeast (Oboe 1); at Brunei Bay and Labuan Island on 10 June (Oboe 6), these being located along the north-east coast in the former enclave of British North Borneo; and at Balikpapan on 1 July (Oboe 2). There would be American naval and air support. The attack on Tarakan Island had to occur on 1 May to take advantage of the high tide, so that men and vehicles of a brigade of the 9th Division had a chance of avoiding getting stuck on the muddy, open beaches. Even so, there was just one narrow strip by which tracked vehicles could enter the hinterland. Here there was close fighting, to the extent that the electric wiring of the 12th Field Ambulance post delivering the light by which surgeons operated was shot through continuously, and an orderly declared that they were, at 150 metres, the closest any field post had ever been to the front line. The fighting on Tarakan would continue until the end of the war, in August.

  The Australian 9th Division, except for one brigade, was also involved in the Oboe 6 landing in the Brunei Bay area and Labuan Island. The prime objective was to secure the vicinity for a naval base as well as to give access to oil and rubber in the area. By contrast with the Tarakan landing, within four days of the 10 June D-Day, all the initial targets were attained. By mid-July the AIF was greatly involved in civic action, and their military role was increasingly becoming redundant.

  AIR WAR AND POLITICS

  A future Australian prime minister flew at Milne Bay, one of many whose work MacArthur considered supernumerary or inadequate—John Grey Gorton, the illegitimate son of a wealthy orchardist and entrepreneur and of a handsome mother named Alice Sinn (sometimes history is too cruel). In England during the 1930s he learned to fly aircraft and married twenty-nine-year-old Bettina Brown, an American Fine Arts student at the Sorbonne. Having completed an MA at Oxford, jovial Gorton served in Britain before being posted to Singapore with 232 Squadron RAF. Before the fall of that fortress, his Hawker Hurricane, which had only been uncrated the week before, was shot down, and when he crash-landed and was thrown against his instrument panels he suffered severe facial injuries. Evacuated from Singapore by ship, which was then torpedoed, he was photographed by a crew member of an Australian corvette that rescued him, with other men on a wallowing, near-sinking dinghy, a photograph which in its terrible informality indicates the perils of getting away from Singapore. Gorton would never trumpet his wartime experience, and MacArthur’s press office was unlikely to trumpet such men either.

  Gorton began flying Kittyhawks of 77 Squadron from Darwin with the RAAF and engaged in operations against the Japanese barges and land troops at Milne Bay. It was crucial to the Allied success that Japanese ground forces fail to gain command of the two critical airfields. Number 1 strip was virtually under water and bogged in deep mud that caked the aircraft so the control surfaces and main planes were constantly having to be replaced. Two RAAF Kittyhawk fighter squadrons, 75 and 76, commanded by Wing Commander Russell Thomas, a Queenslander, acted in direct support of the Australian army from here. The planes operated within five minutes’ flight of the army units in contact with the enemy.

  In 1943, Gorton’s aircraft crashed at Milne Bay during take-off—such accidents were sadly common and took their toll of young pilots. He was considered a proficient pilot and came back to Australia to become a flying instructor before being discharged in December 1944. He underwent only partially successful facial reconstruction at Heidelberg Hospital in Melbourne.

  A most eccentric aviator was the young lawyer Gough Whitlam, in that few flyers had such a sense of the urgencies of politics and the Constitution as he. He was married to Margaret Dovey, daughter of a lawyer and, ultimately, judge. She was tall, eloquent and intelligent. She was also a notable swimmer, Australian breaststroke champion in 1937, and had qualified for the Commonwealth Games in Sydney in 1938, designed to celebrate 150 years of European settlement. But by the time of the games, Margaret had contracted a debilitating streptococcal infection and missed her events.

  On leave from the air force, Whitlam proposed to Margaret as Singapore was falling in 1942. He wrote, ‘Sleeping at the College on the night of 21st April and being married next day . . . at St Michael’s Vaucluse, to the most admired student of SCEGGS, Darlinghurst.’ Whitlam received his call-up papers and joined the 13th Squadron, soon to be equipped with navy Venturas and flying out of Darwin and Gove in the Northern Territory.

  The demands of war, and the necessity for national instead of state-based planning for any ultimate peace would highlight for the young aviator Whitlam the crucial flaws in the Australian Constitution. He applauded the wartime powers, and wrote, ‘John Curtin . . . saw that he was presiding over a passing phase. He was not content with the paradox that the Labor Party was free to enact its policies in times of war alone.’

  Home on leave during the Curtin government’s election campaign of 1943, Gough attended with Margaret a crowded rally addressed by the local Labor member, the East Sydney firebrand Eddie Ward, and the Minister for Information, Arthur Calwell. Further to the young flyer’s political development, Whitlam was granted a period of leave early in 1944 for the birth of a son, Tony. While still on leave, Whitlam and his father, Fred, Crown Solicitor, attended the Australian Institute of Political Science summer school in Canberra on post-war reconstruction in Australia. At this meeting, Whitlam met Nugget Coombs, the renowned Keynesian economist appointed by Curtin as Director-General of Post-War Reconstruction. This encounter increased Whitlam’s enthusiasm to extend federal power, as the coming Post-War Reconstruction and Democratic Rights Referendum proposed. He favoured making permanent the until now purely temporary emergency powers of the Commonwealth. ‘For many in my generation the proposed referendum rivalled the Beveridge reports in Britain in raising hopes of a better society than we had known before Wo
rld War II. What people were being asked was to continue into peace time the powers they had given the Federal government in wartime.’

  Evatt drove the referendum legislation, crying that ‘if democracy is to live . . . it must show itself in bold and imaginative action . . . if there are constitutional limitations on such bold and imaginative action, then the Constitution has become the instrument of reaction. Let us not fear to change it.’

  Just after Christmas 1943, Whitlam landed in a Ventura at Archerfield airbase in Brisbane. The plane was loaded with depth charges and the brakes failed. As it skidded off the end of the runway and up a small hill, the crew leapt out, but were horrified to see the Ventura rolling back down the hill towards them. They escaped this by speed and by the good fortune that the Ventura failed to explode, and so Whitlam was free to think further on greater constitutional powers for the Commonwealth government. In August 1944, 13th Squadron was operating from Merauke in Dutch New Guinea. Flying Officer Lex Goudie and his navigator Whitlam undertook extensive raids on Japanese positions, supply dumps and installations. Then the squadron moved back to the mainland at Gove, a mining town beside the Aboriginal settlement of Yirrkala. Whitlam encountered the usual race attitudes of the Australians of the era when the Fijian pastor in charge of the mission was not permitted to read the Methodist rite over a dead airman. ‘The CO designated me to do it because he didn’t see fit for a Fijian to conduct funerals over Australian . . . officers and sergeants who’d been killed.’

  Whitlam was still at Gove when the referendum on post-war reconstruction was put to the Australian people in August 1944. It was designed to override the states by centralising economic power in Canberra. On this small stage of a squadron on the edge of an Aboriginal settlement, Whitlam was vocal on the subject that if there was a return to the conditions of the Great Depression of the 1930s, without centralised powers the Federal government would be powerless in the face of inevitable post-war shortages and unemployment.