Hero or Deserter?

by Roger Maynard

  Of course, there is one other factor in what is now a largely academic discussion and it applies to the morality of Bennett’s decision. Regardless of military law, was he right to leave his men behind? I am indebted to Colonel Helen Macpherson, who recently retired from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, for her considered analysis of Bennett’s actions. She believes that he had a duty to remain with his division come what may. ‘I base this on a moral imperative, in that having given the direction for his men not to abandon their posts, he indeed did,’ she states. ‘Regardless of the time in history, I feel it is the function of a leader to remain with their team, irrespective of the impending circumstances.

  ‘It is worth considering the impact which may have occurred had every commander down to battalion commander elected the same option. From a command imperative Bennett was the GOC AIF Malaya. The GOC Malaya was Percival. At no time prior to his departure did Bennett seek permission from Percival to withdraw. He did so without permission and voluntarily relinquished command to Brigadier Callaghan on 15 February 1942. I cannot comment in detail as to whether Bennett was directly under command of Percival. However, if this wasn’t the case, then it is worth noting that no such withdrawal permission was sought by Bennett from Australia either.

  ‘So what if he had stayed? Did he consider the cause and effect of such an option? Bennett was a bombastic and dogmatic commander who possessed a universal dislike of the Staff Corps, which most of his senior officers were from. The relationship between him and his immediate subordinate commanders was always strained.

  ‘Strangely, though, he was universally liked by his soldiers. I suspect this is because there was always a veneer of separation between the enmity he held for his senior commanders and the soldiers under their command. I suspect the face of Bennett that the soldiers saw was significantly different to the one seen by his commanders and immediate staff.

  ‘We will never know what went through Bennett’s mind in electing to leave when he did. He said he had great knowledge of fighting in jungle conditions against the Japanese – this is without question. However, if we considered he’d stayed with his men what would have been the result? Of note, senior commanders were not removed from Changi until around August 1942. While the senior officers were separated from soldiers while at Changi, the compound was confined. I suspect Bennett’s personality would not have changed in captivity and may have been more readily obvious to the soldiers under his command. Given his personality, it’s reasonable to surmise he would have been a divisive influence in Changi, which may have exacerbated the lowering of morale within the Australian forces. Indeed, had they sensed discord, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Japanese then used this to their advantage.

  ‘Bennett must have been aware of his personality. Did he realise that his manner may well have become a disruptive influence? If so then could this have in some measure informed part of his decision-making for his departure?

  ‘I suspect unless you could directly ask Bennett this, then we will never know. He would never have offered this up at his Court of Inquiry for to do so would indicate a significant failing on his behalf.’5

  These reflections are reinforced by a note to me from Brigadier Dianne Gallasch, Duntroon’s first female commander, whose thoughts, it is fair to say, encapsulate modern Australian Army thinking.

  ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing and with this luxury and viewing the episode through today’s contemporary lens and my own leadership style, I personally would not have left my men and I would have stayed in Singapore,’ she says.

  ‘Army’s current values are courage, initiative, respect and teamwork. For me teamwork means you always place the team before self and in this case I would view my command as the team I had to place before myself or before the bigger army.’ 6

  We can talk forever about the rights and wrongs of Bennett’s decision, but in the final analysis it is his men who had to carry the can and therefore deserve the final word. With the 8th Division Association now no more, I turned to the few remaining old soldiers, whose memories I have recorded in this book, to reflect on those momentous days.

  When asked about the experience of being a prisoner of war, Alan Gaudry answers the question by pointing out that the Australian soldiers were the bravest and toughest ever encountered by the Japanese:

  We had delayed their planned advance, inflicted many casualties on their crack troops and wiped out some 800 of them in the ambush at Gemas.

  While the Australian losses had been heavy and we had been reduced to filling the ranks with untrained reinforcements straight off the ships, we remained an effective fighting force, confident that we could meet the Japanese on their own terms at any time.

  Consequently, news of the surrender of Singapore came as a terrible shock. Only the revelation of the slaughter of the civilian population in the ceaseless bombing and shelling of the final days and the certainty that this could go on as long as the war continued, was sufficient to persuade us not to fight on until the end. I cannot even attempt to describe the bitter despair and shame which possessed me when I learned that we had apparently fought in vain and that our beloved country was now at the mercy of the Nipponese.7

  John Chippendale, who never thought he’d get back to Australia alive, remembers sailing through Sydney Heads, thinking of the mates he’d left behind. His final thoughts were for the medics who saved so many. ‘I cannot end without saying that if it wasn’t for all the doctors we had on the line, I don’t think any of us would have survived. They were magnificent and they had it very bad. They were bashed and kicked as they tried to stop sick men being sent off to work. This story takes me back years, yet it seems like only yesterday.’8

  Jack Boardman was haunted by the memory of the mass execution of Chinese on the beach near Changi. ‘Some of us were ordered to bury the bodies which littered the beach. They were well-dressed and had good shoes on. They must have been on some hit list because the Japanese just rounded them up and machine gunned them.’

  He suffered nightmares for years afterwards, often imagining there was a Jap soldier just up the hill ‘and I had to go and knock him off’. When he got near the soldier in his dream he’d start to belt him, only to wake up and discover he’d been punching his wife, Barbara.9

  Jack continued to love playing the piano and, until his death in 2017, regularly entertained fellow residents at his retirement home near Gosford. It was one of the few comforting reminders of life in Changi more than three-quarters of a century before.

  Noel Harrison, who had always wanted to be a soldier, believed the army moulded his character as he endured the highs and lows of military life. There was mateship, heart-ache, hilarity and, surprisingly, optimism. ‘The morale of the troops was always high as we knew we would be home for Christmas,’ he recalled. ‘Despite the fact we missed out on three, the carrot was always there – we made the fourth.’

  Sadly Noel passed away at the age of 99, a few days after our meeting. His first wife, Laurel, whom he had met at the army training camp in Bathurst, had died of a heart attack some 30 years previously. He was survived by his second wife, Lois, who joined us for lunch. As Noel tucked into a glass of beer and a chicken curry he acknowledged his good fortune at having ‘two bloody good women’. 10

  Then there is Arthur Kennedy, who surprised his family with his low-key return to Sydney in 1945. There was no welcoming party as he got off the train from Queensland; nobody knew he was coming. On arrival at Central Station he was given two weeks leave and an army car took him home. ‘When I arrived there wasn’t a soul there but I remembered you could lift the front window and crawl in.’ And that’s just what he did. Arthur slumped on the bed and promptly fell asleep, giving his family the shock of their lives when they got back from work.11

  Later, he would write his life story for his children and grandchildren to read in years to come. His concluding paragraphs convey his characteristic feistiness.

  ‘We were the victims of Al
lied propaganda about the impregnable fortress of Singapore, which was only an air-filled paper bag ready for the bursting,’ he wrote.

  ‘It seems clear, however, that only the destruction caused by the dropping of a single bomb on one town, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of Japanese, saved thousands of prisoners and the troops who were committed to the invasion of Japan. I leave you to judge whether the ends justified the means.’12

  Understandably many men remained deeply scarred by what happened all those years ago, and some of them have spent the rest of their lives in search of closure.

  Bart Richardson confided that he had a lot of nightmares. ‘No one can go through a POW experience without having some after-effects,’ he said. ‘I kept on dreaming I was lost and didn’t know where I was going.’

  When in 2011 the Returned Services League invited him on a trip to Japan as guests of the Japanese government, Bart declined. He said he wasn’t interested in Japan or the Japanese and that ‘Japan was the last place I would go to.’

  Overnight, however, he had second thoughts, conceding that after so many years it was probably time for reconciliation.

  Bart, accompanied by several other POWs, was stunned by the reception. ‘We had an official welcome by the Foreign Minister, who gave us the first of three apologies we received for our treatment during the war.’

  The experience was to have a considerable impact on his attitude to the old enemy. ‘Reconciliation is a great thing. I can’t forget and now there is no one to forgive, but there is no point in continually hating people, now dead, for something they did many years ago.’13

  They are admirable sentiments which, in some small way, help to cushion the sadness and the loss of so many.

  The official commemorations to mark the fall of Singapore and the imprisonment of 15,000 Australian troops will inevitably be fewer in number from now on, but the proud record of the men who fought under the 8th Division banner will survive for generations to come. Each year, starting from 15 February 2018, the plan is to pick one of the 8th Division members from the list of names on the Memorial Wall of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra to be recognised, as ‘The Last Post’ is played at the end of the day. It will be a fitting tribute to the men who sacrificed their lives and those who lost their freedom.

  And what of the man who led and left them? Major-General, later to become Lieutenant-General, Henry Gordon Bennett was forced to fight his own battles for the rest of his life. Was this the punishment he deserved or was he unfairly treated by a military hierarchy bent on ruining his reputation as a soldier?

  Perhaps the law of the day did suggest he was wrong to escape, but that verdict still rests on the interpretation of the Allies’ surrender and the time it officially took place. Little has changed since then to provide a fresh perspective on what was once the most heated military controversy of the age.

  You either support Bennett or you don’t. I leave it to the men who were there to decide whether he was right or wrong. Almost with one voice they applauded his actions. To them the tragic defeat of the 8th Division was not of Gordon Bennett’s doing and his decision to leave was largely justified.

  Not surprisingly his family always stood by him, especially Joan, his only child. Joan was born on 4 February 1918 in Britain in the south-coast city of Southampton. Her mother, Bess, had gone to join her husband while he was serving in World War I.

  When the family returned to Australia they settled in Sydney, and after Joan finished at Kambala School for Girls in Rose Bay she trained as a physical education teacher. She was employed in teaching jobs in Melbourne and Bathurst before joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), which provided field nursing services. As a member of the VAD she was eligible to enlist in the Australian Army Nursing Service and eventually attended an officer training college in Victoria. Graduating as a lieutenant, she was sent to Japan with the occupation forces and demobbed in 1946. Bennett would have been proud of her.

  After the war Joan returned to nursing, training as a midwife in Sydney before moving to Mudgee and ultimately Parkes, where she spent the rest of her career. In her spare time she ran the local Girl Guides Association. Joan bought a hobby farm about 19 miles (30 km) out of town, where she lived like a hermit in her retirement, though she formed a close friendship with Christine Curteis, her housekeeper.

  Christine’s husband, Alan, remembers Joan as tough and fiercely protective of her late father. ‘Whenever his name came up she would always defend him,’ he says.

  She never married or had children and when Alan once asked her why she hadn’t wed, she replied that it would have meant losing her independence.

  ‘Joan was a very private person and could be very prickly, but once you got inside the gruff exterior and got to know her she was lovely,’ Alan adds.

  Other acquaintances in Parkes remember her as intensely patriotic, but she rarely discussed her father. If Joan was in any way embarrassed about the publicity surrounding her father’s controversial past, she didn’t show it. She preferred to keep herself to herself, while standing proud of his legacy.

  As I wrote the final few sentences of this book I made a most unexpected discovery. Joan Bennett is still alive, although suffering from dementia. She manages to walk a few steps around her nursing home but is quite frail, which is not surprising considering her age.

  Now almost 100 years old, she will take the memory of Gordon Bennett to her grave – not as a deserter, but as her hero and loving father.

  ENDNOTES

  Introduction

  1 Bennett, H. Gordon, Why Singapore Fell, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1944.

  2 Bennett Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, 807/10.

  Chapter 1: The Early Days

  1 Legg, Frank, The Gordon Bennett Story, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, p. 5.

  2 Bennett Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, box 22, item 1.

  3 Legg, Frank, The Gordon Bennett Story, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, p. 11.

  4 Bean, C.E.W., Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, vol. I, The story of war to the end of the first phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, 4 May, 1915, p. 416.

  5 Ibid., p. 418.

  6 Lodge, A.B., The Fall of General Gordon Bennett, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1986, p. 3.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid., p. 140.

  9 Bennett Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, box 22, item 1.

  10 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1957, chap. 3, pp. 33–4.

  11 The Sun, 12 December 1937.

  12 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, chap. 3, p. 34.

  13 Bennett papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney, 807/10.

  Chapter 2: Readying for War

  1 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1957, chap. 3, p. 35.

  2 Byrne, Joe, interview with author, Ramsgate, June 2006.

  3 Daldry, George, interview with author, Bondi, August 2006.

  4 Wall, Don, Singapore and Beyond, 2/20th Battalion Association, Cowra, NSW, 1985.

  5 Maynard, Roger, Hell’s Heroes, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2009.

  6 Axis Alliance in World War II, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005177

  7 Gilbert, Max ‘Eddie’, interview with author, Melbourne, 8 June 2012.

  8 Hicks, Walter, interview with author, November 2012.

  9 Maynard, Roger, Hell’s Heroes, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2009.

  10 Mudie, Jack, interview with author, May 2006.

  11 Wall, Don, Singapore and Beyond, 2/20th Battalion Association, Cowra, NSW, 1985.

  12 Boardman, Jack, interview with author, August 2016.

  13 Dietz, Henry, interview with author, June 2006.

  14 Alchin, Don, interview with author, July 2006.

  15 Boardman, Jack, interview with author, August 2016.

  16 Mudie, Jack, interview with author, May 2006.

  17 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanes
e Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, chap 4, pp. 60–61.

  18 Arneill, Stan, Black Jack, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983, p. 76.

  19 Maynard, Roger, Hell’s Heroes, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2009.

  Chapter 3: ‘Give Us More Men’

  1 Legg, Frank, The Gordon Bennett Story, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, pp. 166–67.

  2 Bennett, H. Gordon, Why Singapore Fell, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1944, chap. 5, p. 19.

  3 ‘Tactical Notes for Malaya’, issued by General Staff, A.H.Q., Melbourne, 1940.

  4 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1957, chap 5, p. 67.

  5 Ford, J.M., Allies in a Bind: Australia and the Netherlands East Indies in World War II, Australian Netherlands Ex-Servicemen and Women’s Association, Loganholme, Qld, 1996.

  6 Timbs, Kevin, interview with author, Dapto, May 2006.

  7 Legg, Frank, The Gordon Bennett Story, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, p. 170.

  8 Gilbert, Eddie, interview with author, May 2012.

  9 Maynard, Roger, Ambon, Hachette, Sydney, 2014, p. 20.

  10 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, chap. 5, p. 72.

  11 Thompson, Peter, The Battle for Singapore, Portrait, 2005, p. 81.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Newton, R.W., et al., The Grim Glory of the 2/19 Battalion AIF, Part 1, 2/19 Battalion AIF Association, 1st edn, 1975, p. 108.

  14 Maynard, Roger, Hell’s Heroes, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2009, p. 47.

  15 Wigmore, Lionel, The Japanese Thrust, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, chap. 6, p. 102.

  16 Gordon Bennett’s diary and related papers, ML MSS 773. PRM520 AWM. Roll no. CY783.

  17 Elphick, Peter, & Smith, Michael, Odd Man Out: The Story of the Singapore Traitor, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1993.