Having worked so hard to support Australia’s war effort, it was a cruel twist that Curtin did not live to see Japan’s ultimate defeat. He died at the Lodge on 5 July 1945. In the two and half years since his 1943 Australia Day broadcast, Australian and American forces had become increasingly separated, and by the war’s end could no longer be described as being ‘knee to knee’. When MacArthur, Curtin and Blamey had the same objectives during 1942 and 1943, the partnership in SWPA was outstandingly successful. But the Australian and American alliance was a marriage of convenience, and Australia was always going to be the minor partner. This was most obvious in the late Pacific war, with MacArthur’s insistence on using twice the number of troops that Blamey thought necessary when relieving the American bases in New Guinea and the islands, and with MacArthur’s excluding the AIF from action in the Philippines.
Required to commit large forces in the Mandated Territories, Blamey decided on an offensive approach in New Guinea and Bougainville that would potentially free up Australian troops for discharge from the army or subsequent operations by the end of 1945. The Australians only attacked where they thought they outnumbered the Japanese and where they thought they could be successful with minimum casualties. The merit of the New Guinea and Bougainville campaigns will always be debated, but there is no dispute that the approach to New Britain was correct, and that any attempt to attack Rabaul would have incurred heavy casualties for no real return. The conduct of each campaign also fulfilled the spirit of the government’s long-stated policy of using Australian forces in Australian territory, and its perceived need to be seen as contributing to the fight in order to secure a voice in the peace that followed. Yet, with these operations being fought for practical as much as political reasons, Blamey should have been more forthcoming with Curtin and the War Cabinet about his aggressive policy from the outset. Likewise, the politicians should have paid closer attention to the rationale and conduct of the campaigns. If this had happened, Curtin could have immediately countered criticisms of Blamey and his strategy. Instead, it appeared as though Blamey had been caught out. His motives were seen to be suspect and questionable, with the government only retrospectively rubberstamping his decisions for offensive actions. The criticisms and justifications for the later OBOE operations are similar to those for the Mandated Territories, with the Borneo campaign taking place, perhaps more than any other, for political rather strategic reasons. Yet even with the Balikpapan campaign, the government demonstrated Australia’s commitment to MacArthur and honoured the original directive that had established the SWPA.
There is no question that in 1944 and 1945 Australian soldiers were fighting and dying in areas where their blood and sweat could do nothing to hasten Japan’s surrender. But this does not equate to a conclusion that such campaigns were an ‘unnecessary waste’. They were fought by Blamey in an aggressive manner in order to shorten the campaigns and free up Australian manpower, as he had been directed. They were also fought in accordance with the Australian government’s clear desire and intention to see Australian servicemen shouldering such a burden of the fighting as would ensure favourable post-war political positioning. It is worth remembering in this regard that armies exist not to win glory in what might later be seen as watershed battles but rather to act as instruments of national policy. A political objective can never be the ‘wrong’ reasons for soldiers to die – it is, in fact, the only good reason. Blamey may well be criticised for not keeping open a good line of communication with Curtin, but he cannot be damned for carrying out his government’s wishes. Nor was it Blamey’s fault that Australians did not participate in operations more ostensibly relevant to the outcome of the Pacific War. It was MacArthur, Blamey’s senior officer, who kept the 1st Australian Corps from action in the Philippines, and it was MacArthur who effectively sent the 7th Division to Balikpapan – again for his own reasons – against Blamey’ advice.
Further reading
P. Charlton, The Unnecessary War: Island Campaigns of the South-West Pacific 1944–1945, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983.
P.J. Dean, The Architect of Victory: The Military Career of Lieutenant-General Sir Frank Horton Berryman, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2011.
P. Hasluck, The Government and the People 1942–1945, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1970.
M. Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944–1945, Harper Press, London, 2007.
J. Hetherington, Blamey, Controversial Soldier: A Biography of Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, GBE, KCB, CMG, DSO, ED, Australian War Memorial/Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1973.
D. Horner, Blamey, the Commander-in-Chief, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1998.
—— , High Command: Australia and Allied Strategy 1939–1945, George Allen & Unwin/Australian War Memorial, Sydney and Canberra, 1982.
K. James, ‘The final campaigns: Bougainville 1944–1945’, PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, 2005.
G. Long, The Final Campaigns, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1963.
P. Stanley, Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy, Allen & Unwin, 1997.
S.R. Taaffe, MacArthur’s Jungle War: The 1944 New Guinea Campaign, University of Kansas Press, Kansas, 1998.
[8]
LOST AT SEA: MISSING OUT ON AUSTRALIA’S NAVAL HISTORY
Alastair Cooper
It is a bit strange that a country like Australia – where the overwhelming majority live on the coastal margins of an island continent, whose modern incarnation was founded by a navy, and which is as deeply dependent on maritime trade and industry as any country – should have so little public appreciation of its long naval history. Contemporary public understanding of Australian naval history is highly variable, with some aspects known very well, while others are not well recognised at all. While Australian military history is for good reason dominated by the ‘Anzac’ tradition and army or land-based narratives, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) as an institution has consistently failed to overcome the ‘silent service’ approach. This may have been fitting up until the middle of the twentieth century, but is certainly no longer appropriate. This chapter examines the state of naval history in this country, investigates some of the key reasons that such a situation has come about, and suggests some topics of Australian naval history worthy of much greater attention. Australia is missing out on its naval history, and it is time for a change.
Certainly, when considering what parts of a nation’s history receive the most attention or largest volume of published outputs, it is very easy for historians or devotees of a particular subject to claim that their subject of interest is unloved or under-appreciated. Moreover, stirrings of jealously might encourage a lament that there ought to be much less of ‘this’ and much more of ‘that’. This chapter explicitly rejects such sentiments. History should not and does not have to be a zero sum game. A greater breadth and depth to Australian naval history, for example, does not have to come at the expense of that of the other armed services. In part this is because the development of the field can come from the Australian Navy as an organisation better understanding the importance of its own history, both for itself and as a part of Australia’s national heritage. It is also in part because it would be both improbable and perhaps undesirable to attempt to recast the dominant Anzac land-based tradition. Yet there are many subjects, people and events in Australian naval history that are worthy of greater attention. One subject, HMAS Murchison’s operations in the Han River in Korea in 1951, will be examined later in this chapter in some detail. It is not that Murchison’s operations have never been recorded or that there are not other subjects of equal or even greater merit: what is significant is that her operations are an amazing story of skill, determination and bravery, but one which is completely absent from the public mind. It is a case of ‘prime’ historical material that has never been offered for wider public consumption and it is an example of the type of missed opportunity which pervades Australian naval history as a subject area.
There is a ‘negative’ version of this type of discussion: that some aspect of history is over-represented. The most common recent iteration of this argument is that Australian military history occupies a predominant position in the national psyche and that this is undesirable, if only because it excludes other aspects of the national heritage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is most commonly observed in the lead up to Anzac Day. This ‘beggar thy neighbour’ approach is unproductive at best: watching historians fight is, with only one exception this author can think of, very unlikely to generate a broader interest in any aspect of the subject.1 The only productive way to achieve balance, if indeed an imbalance exists, is for historians and devotees of a particular subject to do the research, give the lectures, and write the books that meet the demands of varying audiences. In so doing they expand the contribution of history to Australia’s heritage and public discourse, as well as advancing the subjects and causes that they care about. This is a much more positive method of contribution.
In any case, the fact is that the public does not have a very good understanding of Australian naval history. Certainly there are well-known battles, such as the first HMAS Sydney’s sinking of the German cruiser Emden in November 1914, or the second Sydney’s sinking of the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni in July 1940. Some other well-known episodes in Australian naval history focus on the sinking of ships and other more difficult issues: the loss of the second HMAS Sydney in November 1941 (when all 645 crew died), of her sister ship HMAS Perth in February 1942 (353 crew died, over half the ship’s company), and that of HMAS Canberra at Savo Island in August 1942 are cases in point during the World Wars. A little later, the sinking of HMAS Voyager in 1964 and USS Frank E Evans in 1969 in collisions with the carrier HMAS Melbourne – and the subsequent Royal Commissions – managed to capture public attention for a time. In more recent times, the treatment of servicewomen in the Navy in general, and in ships at sea in particular, has generated a great deal of print.
The history of the Australian Navy and its contribution to Australia, however, is much more than these discrete and often painful events. From escorting and carrying troops in wartime to surveying the harbours and sea routes that support much of Australia’s economic prosperity; from conducting rescues at sea in the most difficult of circumstances to contributing to Allied intelligence breakthroughs, the Royal Australian Navy has a broad and rich history that is worthy of better understanding. The problem is that it has been a history that has never been well publicised, or well received by the wider community.
Even for those events that are well known, what is often lacking from the public discourse is the context for these events and the conduct of the naval personnel. It is not that naval history should only deal with its positive aspects, but that the successes and the disasters, the defining events and the broader context, the ships and the people, should all be understood in something approaching equal measure. The sinking of many Australian ships in war, for example, often occurred in the course of transporting or escorting troops, so although there may be controversial aspects to each individual event, the ships and their crews were contributing to a worthwhile objective in a risky environment. In this context Piers Macksey’s criticism of histories covering British leadership in the American War of Independence is also appropriate to an assessment of the operational history of the Royal Australian Navy:
The men who conduct a war are more intemperately and uncharitably criticised than those who run an administrative machine in peacetime. Statesmen and commanders are equally victims; for in war the results are swift, harsh and measurable, and censure readily precedes understanding … To understand the war, one must view it with sympathy for ministers in their difficulties, and not with the arrogant assumption that because they were defeated they were incompetent, and that all their actions proceeded from folly.2
This is not an argument for the idealisation of the Navy as an institution. In addition to the public discussion of naval history, including an understanding of the objectives and risks of naval operations, the Navy also needs to understand where and how its people and procedures have succeeded and where they have been found wanting. In many ways, people within the Navy have made strides to address this, particularly in the last twenty or thirty years, but it is questionable whether the Navy has truly institutionalised a commitment to its own history as a guide to its future. There is much to be learnt not only from operational history, but in the study of the organisation, the people within it, and its relationships with other institutions in Australia. The history of women in the Navy, for instance, and the extent to which that experience has mirrored Australian society, certainly deserves further study: it is also likely that the contemporary Navy would learn much of use from such work. Simply to know whether contemporary problems are enduring themes or exceptional events in naval history would be valuable information. To know to what degree the Navy’s problems were its own or part of larger issue in Australian society would be even more important. Similar arguments can be advanced for understanding Navy’s relationship with other institutions, particularly its industrial suppliers and its political leadership.
There are two main reasons why public knowledge of Australian naval history is patchy: the dominance of the army in the Anzac tradition; and the lack of long-term interest by the Navy in its own history. The starting point to understanding the dominance of army history is that size matters. While the writings of Charles Bean and the widespread resonance of the Anzac tradition with the public are inextricably linked with army history, they are in some ways simple reflections of the numbers involved. Although the RAN Bridging Train served throughout the Gallipoli campaign, for example, it was numerically a much smaller organisation than the army units. During World War I, almost 417 000 men – over half of the eligible white male population – enlisted in the Australian armed forces, the overwhelming majority in the army.3 The Navy had 3800 personnel at the start of this war, and over 5000 at the end. Of the 55 306 Australians who died in the conflict of 1914–1918, only 108 served in the RAN.4 This theme of relative size is consistent throughout the twentieth century: in World War II the Navy was much larger, peaking at about 40 413 personnel in June 1945, but the peak size of the army was around 542 000 in August 1943 and the Royal Australian Air Force’s reached close to 182 000 people in August 1944.5 As a result, through the last century of Australian history the pool of people with direct experience of the Navy is relatively small and this has mattered as far as historical attention is concerned.
This issue of relative size is given further emphasis if the Navy’s history is narrowly cast on operational subjects, because it leaves out so many parts of the service’s history. For example, navies are capital- and technology-intensive organisations and their operational effectiveness is directly related to the efficiency and appropriateness of their industrial support base. But the understanding of the impact of industrial and dockyard activities on the effectiveness of the Australian Navy has never been systematically studied. Another example is the extent to which the Navy has mirrored Australian national priorities: ships are discrete units and their location and employment quickly and directly reflect the priorities of the government. The Australian Navy is no different to other navies in this respect but – in an echo of the ‘other people’s wars’ myth discussed by Craig Stockings in Chapter 4 – the prevailing impression is that the Royal Navy and British associations have predominated to the detriment of Australian interests. This impression is not accurate, but a broader study, assessing Australian national interests and how the Navy has supported them, is another important area of investigation which has never been studied consistently, let alone comprehensively.
Furthermore, the location of naval operations has tended to diminish public knowledge and awareness of them, as they usually occur out of sight, often far from Australia. The Japanese submarine attacks in Sydney Harbour, for example, are an exception not the rule. Those parts of naval operations that do
occur where they can be observed, such as harbour defences and minesweeping, are performed by small, slow and outwardly unimpressive vessels, while the conduct of the operations themselves is painstaking and focused below the water. As a consequence, these tend not to be parts of naval history that capture much attention from naval historians, let alone the broader public.
A second aspect of the location of maritime operations that tends to militate against broad public engagement is the ephemeral nature of the naval battlefield. It is possible to visit many terrestrial battlefields, and the topography and features of those battlefields are often still visible, can be photographed and disseminated broadly. An interested person can start to appreciate what the battle might have been like. The naval battlefield by contrast is much more difficult to visit. Even to a trained eye, one patch of ocean is much like another and the battle is defined by the presence of the warships, most of which have moved on after the battle and left few traces behind. Even the warship crews present at such battles have greatly differing perspectives, each of which are equally valid, but incomplete. The majority would have served below decks and may have heard a great deal, but not seen anything beyond the next bulkhead, let alone their enemy. Even those on the upper decks may have seen little. The resulting fragmentary stories are not easy to collect and piece together, making it difficult for historians to construct engaging, broadly appealing narratives.
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