Hero or Deserter?

by Roger Maynard

  Certainly there are precedents which Fry believed supported his view about the timing of prisoner of war status. He cited the example of Italian soldiers who were captured during the Western Desert campaign of 1940–41 and subsequently marched to prison camps. ‘Neither the Italians nor our troops ever questioned that these were prisoners of war and had to act and be treated as such.’17

  Likewise, as Mark Clisby reminds us, during the Gulf War of February 1991, television cameras captured streams of prisoners marching from Iraq towards POW camps in Saudi Arabia well before the ceasefire was announced.

  ‘These columns of troops certainly gave the indication that they had become prisoners of war and that there was no necessity to place them physically behind barbed wire before they assumed that status,’ he wrote.18

  Justice Ligertwood’s ruling that the Allied forces in Singapore did not enjoy prisoner-of-war status, and therefore the right to escape, until they entered Changi, was clearly at odds with the experiences of soldiers in the Western Desert during World War II and Iraq some 50 years later. It also flew in the face of human instinct. Self-preservation is a powerful force, particularly in wartime, and if a man felt his only chance of avoiding capture and possible death was to flee, he could easily justify his actions.

  However, in the case of Gordon Bennett, there were other considerations. He might well have decided it was essential that his knowledge of Japanese tactics should be shared with the authorities back home in order to defend his country. But did he not also have a responsibility to his troops? Like a captain who refuses to abandon his ship and goes down with his crew, did Bennett have a duty to stay with his soldiers until the end, in whatever form that might take? At least he might have been able to exert pressure on the Japanese over camp conditions and the cruel treatment of prisoners. If the men of the 8th Division knew their commander had not forsaken them but was still there fighting for their cause and aiding their welfare, imagine the impact on morale?

  It was a point General Arthur Percival was to address in his memoirs when he alluded to arrangements to escape from Singapore in the last days of the battle.

  ‘It was more than once suggested to me that arrangements should be made for the evacuation in the last resort of important personages and of as many others as the available transport would take,’ he wrote.

  ‘This I refused to countenance. Our job was to hold Singapore for as long as we could and not evacuate it, and any suggestion that arrangements for evacuation were being made would have had a most disastrous effect.’

  Then, in what seemed to be a thinly veiled criticism of Bennett, he insisted: ‘In my view the right place for an officer, and especially a senior officer, is with his men, unless of course he is ordered away, until it is quite certain that he can be of no further service to them.

  ‘That may mean the ruin of a career and the end of personal ambitions, but one of the corner-stones in our military system is that an officer stands by his men, and that in the end will bring greater happiness.’19

  There were no prizes for guessing to whom Percival was referring. It was a near-perfect assessment of the case of Major-General Gordon Bennett.

  Percival made other more direct references to Bennett, such as his telegram to the Australian prime minister telling him that in the event of other formations falling back and allowing the enemy to enter the city behind him, it was his intention to surrender to avoid any further needless loss of life.

  ‘That seems to be a most extraordinary procedure,’ observed Percival. ‘No doubt he was perfectly entitled to communicate with his own Prime Minister but surely not to inform him of an intention to surrender in certain circumstances when he had not even communicated that intention to his own superior officer [Percival].’

  But there were kinder words for the 8th Division’s officers as a whole: ‘In the AIF also the officers were of a splendid type, but the nucleus of officers properly trained in the art of war, and especially of modern war, was very small. In jungle warfare it is more than ever the junior leader that matters, for small bodies so often get detached from the rest and have to act on their own initiative.’20

  Was Percival damning the 8th with faint praise? For wasn’t the point about the need for jungle training Bennett’s constant cry? Only his division and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had equipped themselves with the necessary jungle fighting skills. The rest of the Allied forces were singularly unprepared. No wonder Bennett could get so riled by those who dared to question his actions, and there was plenty of opportunity to dwell on long-held grudges as he pottered around his orchard.

  Now in his late sixties, he continued to work hard but his physical health showed signs of strain. He was no longer a young powerhouse, and at the age of 68 he suffered a blockage in his coronary artery. Thankfully it wasn’t fatal but it was enough of a warning sign to make him slow down.

  Bennett swapped his life on the land for the semi-rural bliss of Dural in Sydney’s northwest, but he continued to involve himself in military affairs, inevitably sparking controversy on occasion.

  In the early 1960s he flew to Japan to meet some of the officers he had fought against two decades earlier. On his return he urged his fellow countrymen to foster closer peacetime links with their old enemy, a suggestion that was not entirely welcomed.21

  By now Bennett had moved from Dural to a house in Turramurra on Sydney’s north shore. On 1 August 1962, he had a massive heart attack while driving his car in neighbouring Pymble. He managed to pull over and slumped into the arms of his wife, Bess, who had shared so many of his highs and lows.

  Henry Gordon Bennett was dead at the age of 75.

  His funeral was held two days later in St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney, where scores of men of the 8th Division formed a lane of honour through which the flag-draped casket passed slowly on a gun carriage.

  If anybody doubted the high regard in which Bennett was held, they had only to be in George Street that day. Five thousand people crammed into the cathedral and its surrounds while an estimated 15,000 more lined the streets. The crowds extended for several hundred metres, as far as Grosvenor Street to the north.

  Among the mourners were many men of the 8th Division, including Wilfred Kent Hughes, and several hundred more ex-servicemen who wore their decorations. A four-man army guard of honour with arms reversed stood either side of the coffin, which bore the general’s cap and ceremonial sword alongside a bunch of red carnations.

  ‘Australia has lost one of its most distinguished soldiers and revered citizens,’ Canon A.B. Begbie, the Anglican Chaplain General, told the congregation.22

  Speaking from a pulpit draped in a green banner bearing the insignia of the 8th Division, he said Gordon Bennett had spent his whole life believing his highest hope and ambition was to make a worthy contribution to the defence of the country he loved.

  ‘The 49 years of his military career gave to the world one of its most colourful, yet controversial, military figures,’ he added.

  Turning to Bennett’s escape from Singapore, Canon Begbie revealed that the general had maintained he had done the right thing until the day he died.

  ‘Singapore was the greatest thing in General Bennett’s life,’ he said in closing.23

  For a man who had been crucified by the military establishment, the funeral, the oration and the crowds who came to honour his memory were Bennett’s vindication.

  Eight pallbearers, including Brigadier Galleghan and seven generals, carried the casket from the cathedral, where it was escorted by three white-helmeted military policemen on motorcycles along George Street. Two hundred soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment followed the cortege and another escort of 200 troops met the procession at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium.

  Following a brief ceremony, a bugler sounded ‘The Last Post’ and ‘Reveille’ and a 15-gun salute was fired from a battery of howitzers.24

  One of the most extraordinary characters in Australian military hist
ory had fought his final battle.

  EPILOGUE

  It is 15 February 2017, the 75th anniversary of the fall of Singapore and nearly 130 years since the birth of Henry Gordon Bennett at Balwyn, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. There is no tin-can band marching down the main road, only the distant rattle of a tram as it makes its way through the shopping parade on this warm summer’s day. Balwyn is no longer the sleepy backwater where the future commander of the AIF’s 8th Division spent his formative years, but a bustling middle-class community of people who would have little in common with the boy who led his school mates through the streets to celebrate the relief of Mafeking. These days few of the locals would be aware Bennett was born here on 15 April 1887, but 80 miles (130 km) away at Ballarat his name will be remembered by those surviving members of the force who served under him.

  There is no reference to the controversial senior officer during the official service to commemorate the fall of Singapore at the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial, but then this ceremony is in honour of the 15,000 Australian servicemen who were captured.

  Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, an ex-army man himself and a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, is there to pay tribute to the men who sacrificed so much. He talks of the strategic defeat which brought such a terrible human cost, and declares:

  For thousands of Australians who surrendered along with so many others it marked the beginning of an ordeal of unimaginable horror and brutality at Changi, at Sandakan, on the Thai-Burma railway and beyond. A pain that should be visited on no human being, they suffered as no one should ever suffer. They were treated as slaves, degraded, starved and beaten, marched and worked to the brink of exhaustion, to the edge of death and beyond. It belies comprehension. There could be no justification.1

  He praises their resilience, ingenuity, compassion and camaraderie. ‘For those magnificent, gallant men and women, whether in uniform or not, theirs was not the explosive and immediate courage of the battlefield, on land or at sea or in the air. It was instead a form of slow-burn courage, stoic and enduring often until death, a courage of daily sacrifice and determination not to give in, not to despair.’

  It was, he says, this unquenchable fortitude that got so many through those dark times, easing the suffering of those who did not survive and preserving the dignity and humanity that captivity and ill-treatment could not dampen or displace. The governor-general concludes: ‘Three quarters of a century on, we remember the fall of Singapore – an event which led in so many ways to a further definition of our Australian spirit, of our fortitude and of our place in the world.’

  There are several hundred people in the congregation, most of them relatives of long-gone prisoners of war, here to honour their loved ones. And to the side, beneath a marquee shielding them from the blistering sun, the few remaining old soldiers alive today who suffered the indignity of defeat and enjoyed the triumph of survival remember their comrades who didn’t make it.

  It is a historic moment but only the ABC and a few local commercial TV channels are there to record the occasion. There is little or no coverage of the commemoration in the metropolitan newspapers the next day. Such is the dwindling level of interest in events that were once of burning importance to Australia and the rest of the world.

  A similar ceremony in Sydney’s Martin Place is attended by nearly 500 people, including eight veterans, six of whom were POWs, and five widows. The governor of New South Wales, retired General David Hurley, is there, as is Lieutenant-Colonel Neil James, executive director of the Australia Defence Association.

  After the governor delivers the epilogue, the 8th Division’s old banner is officially retired, though a new one will still be carried in future Anzac Day parades. Given that this is the last ceremony of its kind to be held in Martin Place, there is an added poignancy to this historic occasion, but again there is scant coverage in the following day’s newspapers. I have to turn to the Straits Times in Singapore to find a front-page story which does justice to the 75th anniversary.

  Under the headline, ‘Never forget darkest time of Singapore’s history’, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says the lessons learned from the Japanese occupation must never be forgotten. ‘Singapore will always be small and vulnerable. No one owes us our sovereignty or security. These are truths we must never forget,’ he says. It is a salutary reminder to the free world, as relevant today as it was three-quarters of a century earlier.

  Back at the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, the service is moving towards its climax. Wreaths are laid by local and visiting dignitaries, the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ is read and ‘The Last Post’ is delivered by a lone bugler, followed by a minute’s silence. Nothing stirs. Only the distant squawk of birdlife permeates the peace.

  The catafalque party dismounts, slowly making its way out of the memorial area into the parkland, and the 75th anniversary commemoration of the fall of Singapore is over. Those who have shared in this moving celebration rise and mingle with fellow guests for the next few minutes, recalling old times and the long-departed loved ones who are central to their story. And the few ageing POWs who remain remember what it was really like to be in Singapore on that fateful February day.

  Only these men know the truth and, arguably, only they have the right to judge the behaviour of others. They are eager to talk and it takes only a few questions to rekindle their support for their former leader.

  Among the POWs who have made this final pilgrimage is Leslie ‘Bunny’ Glover, aged 96 and late of the 2/26th Battalion. I ask him if he believes it was right for Gordon Bennett to escape when he did.

  ‘Yes,’ he replies without hesitation. ‘The war was over and he felt he would be able to give more back to Australia by escaping than being in a prison camp.’

  Other old boys share his sentiments, including Jim Kerr, who was a member of the 4th Anti-tank Regiment. Did everybody feel that way about Bennett at the time, I enquire.

  ‘Well, the troops did, although the higher-ups didn’t. But he was the only one who had any idea of the Japanese tactics and why they inflicted such a defeat on the forces in Malaya,’ he responds.

  Given the fact that Jim and most of his mates feel the same today as they did then, I am curious to know whether the difference of opinion between the army brass and other ranks over Bennett’s escape still exists. It is a sensitive issue which also raises questions about Australian military law and the extent to which any changes have been made relating to the rights and obligations of prisoners of war since 1945.

  Amazingly my research suggests that if a carbon copy Gordon Bennett episode happened today, much the same rules would apply. Under the Australian Defence Force Discipline Act a member is guilty of an offence if he or she leaves their post, position or place while engaged on service without reasonable excuse for their conduct. More specifically, a member of the defence force is guilty of desertion if he or she departs from their place of duty to avoid active service without having a reasonable excuse for doing so. The maximum penalty is five years’ imprisonment.

  The important point here is whether Bennett had a ‘reasonable excuse’ by assuming the Allies had agreed to surrender at 8.30 pm. Unfortunately there appears to have been no legal clarification of what officially constitutes a surrender since Justice Ligertwood’s Royal Commission found against the former commander of the 8th Division in 1945. And as Thomas Fry pointed out in the University of Queensland Law Journal in 1948, international law and the facts of the case ‘provide reasonable grounds for an opinion contrary to the Royal Commissioner’s findings’.

  Fry’s view is supported by Professor Anthony Cassimatis, who teaches public international law at the TC Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland. He believes that the Royal Commission’s suggestion that military personnel might cease to be combatants but might also not be prisoners of war, essentially at the whim of the opposing party to the conflict, is powerfully undermined by Fry’s analysis.

  He says the
case law that Fry cites also undermines the Royal Commission’s view that the establishment of prisoner-of-war status required Australian troops to have been moved behind barbed wire. ‘Australian forces in Singapore became prisoners of war from the moment hostilities ceased,’ he declares.2

  What is clear is a soldier’s obligation to escape once he or she is classified as a prisoner of war. The Third Geneva Convention provides numerous protections for POWs who escape or attempt to do so. Therefore there is no doubt that Bennett was in the right if the law regarded him as a prisoner of war at 8.30 pm on 15 February 1942.

  While the same sort of legislation applies today, the reality is that modern warfare is substantially different from military conflicts of the past. These days the sort of war in which combatants might invoke their entitlement to prisoner-of-war status is rare. As Australian Army legal officer Colonel Jim Waddell points out:

  By far the majority of armed conflicts in the world today are non-international in character, and the occasion for applying rules for the conduct of prisoners of war in international armed conflict rarely arises. While there are certain rules for the taking and treatment of prisoners in modern conflicts involving non-state actors, most states in 2017 have little experience of dealing with prisoners of war. The laws relating to prisoners of war, while extant, seem quaint and almost belong to another age of warfare.3

  Colonel Waddell, who co-wrote Justice in Arms: Military Lawyers in the Australian Army’s First Hundred Years, rightly points out that nowadays rules relating to the duty of escape are probably more focused on surviving as a hostage or detainee than as a prisoner of war.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Lachlan Mead suggests that the key issue of Bennett’s escape from a modern perspective may not be so much about technical military law that applied to prisoners of war at the time, as the friction between Coalition command authorities and national command prerogatives. In other words, was Bennett bound to obey an order given to him by a senior officer from another national military force, when countervailing action may have been required by Australian national interests or directives.4