Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In Australia, people heard little of these reports, but rather the very real atrocities of Soviet-educated Ho Chi Minh and the North’s brilliant General Vo Nguyen Giap, a doctor of economics and a master of both conventional and guerrilla war. But the reaction to Diem’s tyranny in the South was that many young peasants, nationalist and Communist both, and former fighters against the Japanese and the French, joined a new organisation, the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, otherwise known as the Viet Cong, a resistance group fighting in the South with the total support of the North.

  In May 1955, the United States went deeper into Vietnam by taking over responsibility from France for training Vietnamese forces. It struggled with the reality that Diem had no wide popular support. It had to deal with three religious sects, each with its own private army, and Diem had a refugee crisis of people from the North. Plus he was Catholic in a largely Buddhist country. Yet by July 1956 with help from the West, he had by severe repression of opposition installed himself firmly. In his first two years he created South Vietnam and broke the powers of the sects, got the army under control, settled 850,000 refugees from the North, and deposed the Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai. He created a non-Communist alternative to the Viet Minh.

  One hundred and twenty thousand of the Viet Minh were taken north for further training and indoctrination, and to take part in a bloody land reform. But five to ten thousand were left behind in the South to continue the campaign. According to the Geneva Conference, there had been an agreement that Vietnam would hold elections, North and South, in 1955, but Diem refused on the grounds that to think that anything like free elections could be held in North Vietnam was naïveté. The United States agreed with him. This denied to North Vietnam what had been explicitly promised in 1954—reunification within two years. The decision was depicted in the North as a betrayal, and many sincerely felt it to be one. It also denied to North Vietnamese capital Hanoi the rice from the South it had assumed would become available with reunification and which was needed because Stalin-style collectivisation had grievously reduced the North’s harvest.

  Diem’s concentration camps or villages continued in operation, and special military tribunals judged any opponent of Diem to be Communist. Diem made a gesture towards land reform, but by 1960, 75 per cent of the land still remained in the hands of 15 per cent of the people, another trigger for Communist recruiting. From 1957 the Viet Cong insurgency in the South grew, supplied from the North along a path through the foothills called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Diem placed his forces in static positions along the border, as if he were facing a conventional invasion, which never happened. It was a guerrilla infiltration that occurred nearly everywhere.

  Though the United States was by now edgy about Diem, Australia thought that a non-Communist despot was preferable to a Communist one. President Kennedy believed in the Vietnamese imperative and the domino theory, and so did most Australians. While Eisenhower had taken a ‘limited risk gamble’, providing a small number of military trainers, Kennedy believed he had to halt Communist aggression, and proposed paying to expand the South Vietnamese army to 170,000 men and the Civil Guard to 68,000. In return, Diem was to take reform measures and hold inquiries into corruption. Diem took the aid but did not attend to the reforms. In 1961, Kennedy secretly sent four hundred special forces into the country and one hundred more military advisors, and on 11 May 1961 ordered a clandestine operation against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and using American civilian pilots to provide air transport.

  Now Vietnam was becoming a large enough part of American policy that if it pulled out, credibility would be lost. Kennedy sent his deputy Johnson to South Vietnam in May 1961. Johnson was greatly impressed by Diem, and returned to Washington with the message that Diem needed more American assistance. If the Americans would not stand in South Vietnam, said Johnson, they might as well pull back to San Francisco.

  In mid-1961, General Maxwell Taylor was sent from Washington to Southern capital Saigon to examine the position. He reported back that the Communists were well on the way to capturing South Vietnam. He doubted that Diem could stop them. He recommended that the United States move more aggressively into administration and take up a more militant role for American advisors. More American advisors were sent, along with helicopters. Still Diem refused to undertake reforms. But he did build special villages into which people would withdraw at night, supposedly safe from Viet Cong infiltration.

  The system of safe villages, like any uprooting of populations, in fact worked best as a recruiting system for the Viet Cong, who soon infiltrated them even while they were being praised by Western politicians. In August 1963, a group of South Vietnamese generals approached the United States for its support to kill Diem and was told that a stable non-Communist government would be welcome. At that time monks were dousing themselves with petrol and setting themselves alight in protest against Diem and it made for bad television. Australians watched these suicidal self-immolations with bafflement. In October 1963, the United States cut off funding to Diem’s Palace Guard. The rebellious generals, with whom the CIA maintained secret contact, now rose, and when Diem tried to flee, he was murdered.

  THE VIETNAM DIVIDE

  The first request for Australian assistance reached Canberra in late 1961. It was to satisfy Kennedy that the Australians supplied counterinsurgency advisors and small arms. It was a niggardly opening. At an ANZUS council meeting in May 1962, Menzies said that his government would also supply military instructors. The American request was disguised as an invitation from South Vietnam to fellow member Australia in SEATO. The thirty military instructors were told to avoid combat.

  Early in 1963, the United States asked Australia to send a squadron of transport aircraft and sixteen additional pilots. The request was rejected because the government thought that such an enlargement could not be explained to the Australian people. On 6 May 1964, the Americans asked for an increased Australian presence. The request was for more instructors, counterinsurgency personnel, RAAF units and army medical teams. The Australian ambassador in Washington, the Sir Howard Beale so prominent in the desert nuclear tests, urged a positive answer, for it would put Australia in a strong position if it should ever need America’s help. The Australian Defence Committee recommended that a further thirty instructors should be employed in the field at battalion level, even though this could lead to casualties. Ultimately eighty-three further instructors and an RAAF transport unit of six aircraft were sent. The first Australian was killed in combat on 6 June 1964. Some of the early casualties were mere tragedy, as when Private Billy Carroll jumped off a truck in a rush to get a cold drink and a shower and somehow a pin on one of his grenades was caught and so released. The explosion blew his stomach away, and two other men, privates Mick Bourke and Arie Van Valen, suffered wounds of which they died.

  During a visit to Washington in November 1964, Paul Hasluck was told that if the bombing of North Vietnam had to be intensified, the United States would want Australian aircraft to participate, or at least stand by to protect South Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. On 11 December 1964, the Defence Committee suggested that Australia send an infantry battalion, a squadron of the Special Air Service (SAS) regiment and ten more instructors. Three days later, Johnson asked Menzies to provide a further two hundred advisors, minesweepers, and other items the Australian forces did not in fact possess. All that was sent was a further seventeen advisors. The government was very apprehensive of what America would think of such a mere gesture. Australia would support an escalation of the bombing, said the Americans; why then, they asked, didn’t the Australians send more instructors? When Operation Rolling Thunder, the intensive bombing of the North, began, the Australian government was both relieved and enthusiastic.

  The escalation of the war came in early 1965 when General William Westmoreland, the American commander, asked for troops to guard the US air base at Da Nang. On 17 March, Johnson ordered retalia
tory air strikes against the North and full-scale air war on thirty days’ notice. But America’s ally, Australia, was not informed of this move.

  The Gulf of Tonkin incident, involving a supposed attack by North Vietnamese naval boats on the USS Maddox, occurred then. In the light of this perceived and very welcome aggression, Johnson sought a congressional resolution for full military engagement, even though by now there were twenty-three thousand American advisors in South Vietnam, a virtual army in any case. Operation Rolling Thunder, the systematic bombing of the North, began.

  The bombing escalated dissent in Australia, as did the revelation that the government refused to pay for soldiers’ remains to be flown home, and the fatal casualties of Vietnam were buried at Terendak barracks in Malaysia. This fact appalled Private Carroll’s twenty-year-old wife, Mindy, who had recently given birth to their son. A Sydney businessman, Ron Wiggins, intervened and paid for Carroll’s body, and later that of Private Billy Nalder, who had been shot through the chest by a sniper, to be flown back to Australia.

  Meanwhile, Hasluck argued, ‘The US could not withdraw without necessarily considering the worldwide impact of such a withdrawal . . . if the US did withdraw, the same conflict would be renewed elsewhere. Within a brief period the struggle . . . would be shifted to Thailand. If there was abandonment in Thailand, it would shift to Malaysia—to Indonesia, to Burma, to India and further.’ The dominos would be under assault. For that reason, on 4 April 1965 Menzies told a British audience that the US intervention in Vietnam was ‘the greatest act of moral courage since Britain stood alone in the Second World War’, and that this was ‘one of the greatest ever manifestations of justice and principle’.

  Two days later he openly opposed negotiations with the North as a way to a solution. In this, Menzies showed himself to be more fervent for action in Vietnam than many of the American officials. He held out the bait of a possible Australian battalion’s involvement to encourage them. But a battalion could only be provided by way of the ritual of a request from South Vietnam, to show that Australia was operating not on the bidding of the United States but as a SEATO member.

  In August 1964, the Australians in Vietnam were built up to a battalion; in March 1966 it was replaced by a taskforce of two battalions with its own logistic support, and a squadron of helicopters and transport planes. In December 1966, a guided missile destroyer was attached to the US 7th Fleet, the army strength was augmented by more than a third, and another squadron of bombers was sent off. In October 1967, another army battalion was sent off. By that month, there were more than eight thousand Australian troops engaged in Vietnam. Ultimately sixty thousand Australians served in Vietnam, and the casualties numbered just under four thousand, of whom 521 died.

  Given that the 1960s were the ‘counter-culture’ decade, an era characterised on one side by Johnson’s sleight of hand in infiltrating Cambodia and ultimately secretly bombing it (a secret that inevitably got out), and on the other by the rebelliousness of a vivid tribe of the young, generally students, and the overturning of sexual and social beliefs, there was bound to be conflict on the streets. A number of challenging propositions had been let loose, chiefly in the United States but picked up in Australia with varying degrees of sincerity and opportunism. One was the concept that peace had just to be given a chance and it would reign. The chief enemy of peace was the ‘military–industrial complex’, an engine of democracy to the young of World War II but now a criminal promoter of conflict.

  Combined with the counter-culture was a number of claims that were sometimes percipient and sometimes daft. The university sit-ins had much to do with ending the war but also with student demands to be able to have a hand in their own education. The true criminals were not in prison but, above all, in Washington and Canberra; the sane people were confined to asylums and the mad walked abroad; and above all that idea of drugs as a portal. Illicit drugs, including cannabis, became an issue as American soldiers arrived in Australian cities from Vietnam for Rest and Recreation. If you had not ingested LSD, then you had not touched reality, for that took you through the mirror to a truer world than the dreariness of a plain one governed by three plain dimensions and Newton’s boring laws. And the licit drug, the contraceptive pill, and the fact that sexually transmitted diseases were more easily curable than at any time in human history, made it possible for the young rebels at least to think of universal love, body and soul.

  Not all opponents to the war were subscribers to the New Age. The Reverend Alan Walker of the Methodist Church in Sydney was opposed to the war, and so was the Seamen’s Union, which refused to accept cargoes for Vietnam. Jim Cairns of the Labor Party and devout Catholic author Morris West were opponents, and a group of mothers of the organisation SOS (Save Our Sons). Amongst high-school students, protests and ‘teach-ins’ (a group of students commandeering a space to discuss Vietnam) were not unknown—Camden High School in New South Wales saw a number of such events. Some young men whose numbers had come up at the draft burned their draft cards in public.

  The cry that Australia’s involvement was at base a means of improving trade with the United States, a ‘blood for dollars’ or ‘Diggers for dollars’ affair, outraged Menzies. But the ACTU, with its broad membership, was ambivalent. The Labor Party was in a bind. Calwell opposed the war, but many Caucus members were ambiguous or in favour. Early in the war, Calwell knew that disloyalty to America was electoral poison, so though he opposed the war he urged the United States to negotiate with the South and the North. Menzies tried to push Calwell to say harsh things about the United States and its unwillingness to try to settle things peaceably, not to know that by the end of the decade what was political poison in 1965 would take on a more golden hue. It was still possible, but not reliable, by mid-decade to depict opposition to the war as left wing and as exhibiting ingratitude for Australia’s perceived salvation by the United States in World War II. At the start of the Australian commitment, 72 per cent of Australians believed China and its proxy Vietnam endangered Australia.

  The war was visited nightly on television, and Australian journalists such as Mike Carlton, Peter Luck and Iain Finlay reported events with a high degree of professional dispassion, letting the images speak for themselves. The flesh-consuming chemical napalm was an image that increasingly spoke for itself as a begetter of horror. Its use in World War II had not been particularly noticed by the Western public. Now, however, they saw women and children burned by it, and the name of Dow Chemical, which made it, became increasingly accursed.

  Menzies’ retirement at the beginning of 1966 was a case of an Australian prime minister at the apogee of his renown choosing the moment of his going. He intended to travel and write, rather in the manner of his World War II Svengali, Churchill. Though his books could inevitably not quite have the same pulse of urgent history that characterised Churchill’s writing, Afternoon Light and The Measure of the Years are smooth and engaging, and stylistically would be matched by few after him except for the as yet relatively obscure rising man of the opposition, Gough Whitlam. Menzies had his successor chosen—the efficient and loyal Harold Holt, who would inherit a party in fine electoral form. Holt was at the height of his vigour, and was photographed in his swimming gear. He would relax some restrictions on Asian immigrants. He had a problem, though, in that the oratory of Whitlam, the Labor deputy leader (about to become leader in 1967), seemed to leave him struggling for a clear line of response.

  On the night of 21 June 1966, a rally on the Vietnam War was held at Mosman Town Hall in Sydney. Calwell, who had spoken at the event, was getting into the front seat of his Commonwealth car afterwards when a young man approached with a sawn-off rifle and fired, close up, at him. The shot broke the partly unwound window and Calwell’s jaw was covered with blood. Two assumptions hung in the air—that Calwell had been struck by a bullet, and that the conflict over the war had claimed Calwell as a victim. In fact it seems that the damage to Calwell was done by the broken glass, and the bullet was
found, spent, in his lapel. Things could have been more lethal if luck had not favoured the nineteen-year-old who fired, Peter Kocan, and Calwell himself. Kocan, homeless, a victim of violence in his childhood, seems not to have been driven by attitudes to the war but by a sort of psychiatric bewilderment one doctor described as ‘borderline schizophrenic’. He received a life sentence and was sent to prisons for the criminally insane, notably to that in Morisset on the New South Wales central coast. To his credit, Calwell did not consign Kocan to the pit but wrote to him a number of times, offering help with his rehabilitation. The poet Michael Dransfield, a brilliant young writer with his own problems of ill health and addiction, and who would die at the age of twenty-four, corresponded with Kocan and fuelled his interest in writing. Kocan would eventually be released and write poetry and novels, one of which won a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award.

  It was six years before Labor would return to power, although even under Holt, the first of Menzies’ successors, discontent about Vietnam, previously suppressed by Menzies but tolerated by the easygoing Holt, was growing. On a visit to the White House in 1966, however, Holt declared that Australia would go ‘all the way with LBJ’, a brand of effusiveness that even some of his party found exorbitant. Holt’s fashionable wife Zara always claimed that there was more than mere politics between Johnson and Holt, that over Holt’s Washington trip and Johnson’s turbulent three-day visit to Australia in October 1966 they became friends. When Holt disappeared in early 1968, Johnson continually called the Australian Embassy in Washington for news.