At the end of December he would have got the telegram from the Air Board saying, ‘You have been selected to undergo officers’ training course commencing seventeenth January stop wire if available stop letter containing special new conditions governing persons attending school will follow.’ And so on 17 January he moved out of our house and into the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds as Aircraftsman Grade 2, No. 254280. The volunteers were divided into five flights, with seventeen to twenty men in each. Into flights A and B went the men who had said that they were willing to serve overseas; Reg Greer was in flight A.
Flight A? Daddy, what on earth were you doing in Flight A, virtually asking to be sent overseas? Did you want to leave us? Did you think that overseas was the best way to get promotion and promotion was the best way ahead for your little family?
In my mailbag, I find among the daily ration of unsolicited advice the following: ‘Now you should be the first to know the hand-maiden of anxiety is guilt. The anxiety of the family man in 1940 was of a different order from that of the nineteen-year-old. It was composed of two conflicting questions (a) what is the first duty of a husband and father? and (b) what is the clear duty of a citizen of a threatened state?… it just wasn’t ON to say, “I can’t go. I have a family….” If you did you were seen to be ducking it. And you couldn’t get away with it, because the instant reply was, “If you don’t go, you won’t have a family after the Japs take over….” Dad never had any way of expressing his anguish for his wife and kids. He had to march off bravely. Whether he had a safe berth in stores or faced horrors in the field, whether he became a hero or a miserable slave in a POW camp, he never had an opportunity to express his guilt at leaving his loved ones….’
Perhaps the guilt at abandoning one’s wife and child in the threatened country is worse when the soldier chooses it than when it is forced on him. Did Reg Greer run away from a difficult marriage and a trying three-year-old via his officer-training course? Doubtless my correspondent, who had heard a phone-in radio programme on anxiety neurosis that I ran in Sydney, meant to help me to understand my father, but the result of his contribution was that I understood him less. No one forced Reg Greer to march away; he chose to leave us and go to the other side of the world. His anxiety state could conceivably have stemmed from that completely avoidable situation, in which case it and the long series of inadequacies it gave rise to would be harder, not easier, to forgive.
For more than a year the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, had been resisting the imperial insistence on training Australians to serve in Europe and the Middle East. Again and again he pointed out that his first duty as Prime Minister was to see that Australia had properly trained and equipped forces for home defence. As long as the Air Force, in particular, would have to rely on British matériel there was little or nothing that Menzies could do to enforce his demands. Without independent forces Australia could not influence Allied strategy and was a mere pawn in the war game. Every Australian politician and most of the Australian top brass struggled to impress upon the British that the Australians were allies, volunteering in the spirit of commonwealth, not colonials dragooned like serfs into fighting their masters’ wars. Their protestations fell on deaf ears.
The first volunteers were crazy to get into the action, which meant going overseas. Nobody wanted to submit to the tedium of training and drilling in Australia. Everybody wanted a crack at the Hun. The Australian government bowed to popular pressure and voted time and again to send its divisions overseas. Under the Empire Training Scheme, air crews began training in Australia, South Africa and Canada for service with the RAF, where they would have no chance of promotion to the command of large air formations. The greater the part they played in imperial defence, the less they could contribute to home defence. The British for their part promised to defend Singapore in the unlikely event of Japan’s entry into the war.
At first the British denied that there was a threat from Japan; then they simply insisted that the Far East would have to wait until the European situation had been dealt with. The promised naval support for Singapore never arrived. Australian forces were being used overseas in actions of which the Australian government had no knowledge. Australians doubted the competence of some of the British generals and insisted on being treated as a separate force rather than being absorbed into British divisions. The only visible effect of their insistence was that Australians made themselves unpopular with the British ‘Union of Generals’ and British ranks closed against them. Blamey lost the struggle to keep his soldiers out of action until they were properly equipped and trained. The truth was never told to the Australian people; young men still lined up to serve as cannon-fodder in North Africa and Greece, all unaware of the bitter telegrams flying back and forth between Britain and Australia. Unaware of the totally unacceptable casualty rates in wrongheaded and mismanaged actions.
Most of the other Australians who entered the war at this relatively late stage did so because the imminence of the Japanese threat stirred in them the desire to be actively involved in the defence of their homeland and their loved ones. Not so my father. He volunteered to leave us.
We used to have a picture of me in my buttoned-up coat with a velvet collar, the kind we called a Prince Edward coat, standing on the hard sand at Elwood Beach, smiling up at someone much taller than me with my eyes all crinkled up. Mother laughed when she mentioned it, because Daddy had buttoned the coat up wrong, which I never noticed when the snapshot was still to be seen. Mother has jettisoned it now of course along with almost all my books, all the china and furniture we grew up with and all the letters Daddy ever wrote her. All I saw when I looked at that picture was the sharp delight on my baby face and the eyes shut against the glare of the sky. The person I was smiling up at, whose shadow falls across the sand wrinkles at the edge of Port Philip Bay almost to the round toes of my patent leather shoes, was Daddy. Daddy must have taken me for a walk by ourselves with the camera loaded and ready. Daddy knew he was going away, perhaps forever, but I did not.
No wonder I hate being photographed. Being photographed is the prelude to being deserted. You look up and beam all your love and trust into the shiny eye at the end of the pleated bellows, because Daddy tells you to. Watch the birdie. Say cheese. And I said cheese so hard up into the light that my eyes filled with tears. And then he was gone.
Was I in your wallet at least, Papa? Perhaps I did ride with you in your wallet. Next to pictures of Mother with her hennaed pompadour, in clinging crêpe and crisp sharkskin, or hanging on your arm in Collins Street with the tiny felt hat tipped over her eye. Perhaps you did show me when the other men showed their children, but then I forget. In your job there was no fraternising.
The A & SD course placed heavy emphasis on cyphers. The only other things learned by the new aircraftmen Grade Two were handling men on parade, how to move five hundred men, how to give a command. They did a little unarmed combat, at which Reg Greer was probably not much good, and some work with gas masks for three or four hours at a time, at which I fancy Reg Greer was even less good.
On 21 February, the volunteers were examined and appointed to the lowest officer rank of the RAAF, that of pilot officer, which they were to have for six months’ probation. Reg Greer was appointed to the Administrative and Special Duties Branch of the Citizen Air Force, called up for the duration and twelve months thereafter. Then the men of the five flights were posted to various chores at various RAAF establishments around Melbourne, which they did for five shillings a day. Every week they would ‘crack on their best salute, show their pay-book and be paid the money in their cap’. Daddy was then posted to No. I embarkation depot, at Ascot Vale. Normally the recruits slept in the barracks at the Showground. You knew you were on your way when you were given leave every night, stood down at five p.m. and back at seven in the morning for roll call. When you were given your Australia badge to sew on, you knew departure was imminent. You never knew where you were going.
Daddy took tra
ining course No. 17 along with Mr Admans who wrote me an ironical, slightly rebarbative letter. I don’t think Mr Admans liked Reg Greer very much, but he remembered him vividly. I wondered if he had felt the sharp end of Daddy’s tongue or if he thought he was a phony. Mr Admans loved talking about his war. He remembered very clearly how he was given leave at two in the afternoon and told he had to be back by five a.m. The men were given a slap-up breakfast of steak and potatoes and then driven through the back streets to Port Melbourne where the Glen Artney, 12,000 tons and too nippy to be given an escort, was waiting for them. They sailed at about 7.30, unassisted it seems by the wharfies who played cards throughout. At Altona the ship took on board 2,000 tons of dynamite. Mr Admans is still angry that the unionists demanded danger money for the loading, while the airmen made do with their officers’ pay of seven shillings and sixpence a day.
On the way to Fremantle, the officers formed a gun crew to man the four or five guns on the rear deck and the .5 machine guns on the bridges. ‘Just as well we didn’t have to fire any of them,’ says Mr Admans now. At first the officers had lived in style, double-bunking in the Glen Artney’s luxury cabins, but after they picked up 4,500 American troops everyone bunked in relays and fed in relays. The men were not told when their sister ship was ‘knocked off by the Japs’ but the Chinese crew knew all about it. The Glen Artney made a great detour, sailing so far south that the weather turned freezing. Then they crept up the African coast to Aden. That was Mr Admans’s story and he told it with relish. I never heard Reg Greer tell his.
On 3 April Daddy was called to No. 4 embarkation depot in Adelaide and learned that he had been officially attached to the RAF. He embarked on the same day. He probably followed much the same route as Mr Admans, crossing the Indian Ocean out of range of Japanese submarines and hugging the African coast as far as Aden.
First landfall Aden, huh, Daddy? They really dropped you in it, didn’t they? Stinking, hot, dry, filthy Aden, brutalised by generations of military occupants, a town of prostitutes and beggars, baksheesh, baksheesh, steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. I don’t imagine that you prowled the Casbah in search of the exotic. I reckon you would have dashed to the nearest officers’ watering-hole for a cold beer and a collective shudder. What a hell hole. Who would go with such women? Who could abide the sight of such children, dirty, emaciated, desperate, tugging at your sleeve, the incessant refrain, baksheesh, baksheesh, steal the cigarettes—and the matches—out of your pocket. You wrote your enlistment number on your cigarette packet and your matchbox so when you grabbed the little thieves you had proof positive that it was your pocket they had stolen from. That was the world you were risking your life to save.
The expression ‘culture shock’ had yet to be coined. The merchant sea-men on Daddy’s ship might have warned them of the squalor that lay ahead, but nothing can have prepared them for the pressure of the desperate humanity that descended on them as their lawful prey. They had to learn fast that giving to one filthy cripple displaying his running sores meant giving to all. Before they could get over their astonished pity and revulsion, they were laying about them, mercilessly. Cute children no older than the ones they had left behind rubbed up against them to slip a hand in a pocket or undo a watch strap. If the men lingered to talk to them, the children told theatrical lies, ‘Fazzer caput, mozzer caput.’ and opened their eyes wide or squeezed out a tear. ‘Give me money.’
Reg Greer thought of himself as sophisticated but in Aden and Cairo and Alexandria he was a mere babe. He could not have known that such towns are clearing houses for all the human debris that falls out of a repressive and unforgiving system. He could not have known that the leprous brothel that surrounded the clean and fragrant foreigners in their brand-new uniforms was created by their very presence. Frightened and revolted, the Australians fled for the nearest watering-hole. ‘Kem wiz me to ze Casbah,’ Daddy used to say, in his Charles Boyer imitation. Poor Daddy. He was too frightened ever to go there.
After twenty-four hours in Aden, the Australians were moved up through the Suez Canal to Cairo, and there they were interviewed to find out in which field of Administration and Special Duties they felt best able to serve. After the war, Flying Officer Magnus, A.C, of the RAAF tried very hard to track down Australian officers serving with the RAF. He found out that the first request for thirty ‘Australian gentlemen’ for cypher duties was made in September 1940. ‘Eventually 212 officers of RAAF Volunteer Reserve went to the Middle East as civilians, and were posted when they got there’; from 1 July, 1941, A & SD personnel were recruited from the RAAF. At the conclusion of a rather brief report, F/O Magnus could only write: ‘there must be other files dealing with the subject but they are difficult to come upon.’ Of the two hundred men of the RAAFVR and the two hundred of the RAAF attached to the RAF, all of them about forty years of age, we know only that many resisted the pressure to go into cyphers and chose other work, most enduring, according to F/0 Magnus, ‘arduous conditions of service’. Reg Greer stuck with cyphers and he found it arduous indeed.
Reg Greer arrived in Cairo at the beginning of the hottest month of the year; the mean daily temperature was 97.8. Like most newcomers he would have celebrated his arrival with an attack of gastro-enteritis. He would have been issued with salt tablets to fend off heat exhaustion. Ten thousand Egyptians died of louse-borne typhus that year; all ranks would have been warned against brushing up against Egyptians in the streets, so Reg Greer would have stayed in the officer ghetto, ‘Grey Pillars’ and the Kiwi Club and ‘wallah higori’. The lice were a better deterrent than the risk of venereal infection which had lost its terrors after many millions of rubber sheaths had been captured with the Italians. Even if the Berka brothel in Cairo had not been closed down by the authorities, apparently after being identified as the source of a serious intelligence leak, I doubt Reg Greer would have been attracted to the poon tang.
(Now there’s a thing. I must have overheard that expression and remembered it. When Mother once invested in a cut-price side of lamb which proved to be half rotten, I was commissioned to dig a hole in the vegetable garden and bury it. This was a job very much to my taste; I dug until the sides of the hole rose up over my head and then we children held a ceremonial funeral with singing and flowers for what we called the ‘poo-tanger’.)
A discrepancy appears in the record at this point. The Air Force Office of the Australian Department of Defence says that Daddy was disembarked at the RAF Transit Centre at Almaza on the 7th of May, 1942. His service record as given by the department of Veterans’ Affairs has him arriving at something called MECCS on the second of May and staying there for eight weeks. I assumed the initials stood for Middle East Codes and Cypher School, which would make sense. The problem is that officially no such institution ever existed.
By now every schoolboy knows that the Allies broke the German codes and exploited their knowledge through the operation called Ultra. Because through Polish ingenuity the Allies had been able to copy the German encoding machine, which they called Enigma, they were able to intercept enemy signals enciphered by the machine, read them and distribute the intelligence they contained to commanders in the field. The system could only work as long as the Axis powers did not suspect its existence. Information based on the decrypts was transmitted in code from Bletchley, and passed on to the intelligence staffs of Wavell, Auchinleck, Alexander and Montgomery, by Special Liaison Units. The SLUs were always a shoestring force, with a handful of low-ranking officers pottering around inconspicuous trucks parked on the periphery of the headquarters of the commanding officers they were supposed to brief. The trucks held their transceivers and their precious one-time pads or Type-X machines; one of the problems was to persuade other personnel in the event of an enemy advance that this unmarked truck was too important to leave behind. Not all the commanding officers were convinced of the value of Ultra, nor of the importance of keeping this source of information totally unsuspected. In a case like that of Air Marshal Coning
ham, who used to stuff his Ultra papers into the top of his flying boots, the SLUs were obliged to exert their authority without the benefit of rank. In the last resort they could radio Whitehall and Fred Winterbotham himself would intervene. In the Middle East all the SLUs wore RAF uniform.
Some of the encoded material received by the SLUs was decoded by using a one-time pad, printed under conditions of tight security in England and distributed personally to the units. They then delivered the decrypts personally to the commanding officers or the officers designated to receive them, who were to read them and give them back to the SLU officer who destroyed them at once. No Ultra signal was to be transmitted or repeated. Information derived from Ultra was sometimes ascribed to interrogation of POWs, or to aerial reconnaissance, or to no one in particular. ‘It has been learned’, ‘we have come to know’. In the Middle East staff officers would refer to ‘Uncle Henry’ from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, ‘Always believe what your Uncle Henry tells you’. Sometimes it was called after Winterbotham, ‘Fred’.
Liaising between Bletchley and higher command accounted for a relatively small proportion of the immense volume of Sigint activity in the Middle East; encyphered German wireless traffic was routinely intercepted, the meaningless material evaluated, re-encoded in a British cypher and transmitted to Bletchley for decrypting. RAF intercepts in Malta were passed on to RAF Sigint ME and then to operational commanders. Distinguishing between Bletchley material and material to be decrypted in the Middle East cannot always have been easy; there was moreover some chafing at the inevitable delay in receiving decrypts back from Bletchley and some rivalry between the services for better access to Sigint. It is possible that RAF commanders in the Middle East tried secretly to pre-empt Bletchley, but if this ever happened it has no place in the record.
There is another possibility that is even less likely to figure in the official record. Australian casualties in the Middle East and Mediterranean were unacceptably high. From Australia it seemed that the strategies were wrong, the leadership blimpish and feeble, and logistic support completely inadequate. Continuous pressure from Australian politicians and military commanders for greater participation in decision-making and independent deployment of Australian forces was producing no results whatever. In 1941 it would have seemed no more than the patriotic duty of an Australian officer seconded to the RAF to spy on the British, especially as Australian High Command was not fully in the picture about Ultra. Indirect enquiries at the Air Force Office of the Australian Department of Defence have secured information that they know more than they have any intention of telling me. (My own feeling is that whatever they are not telling me does not amount to much.)
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 16