Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Handsome Russell Braddon, who was then at university in Sydney and who would ultimately write a famous memoir of his years as a prisoner of the Japanese, enlisted within days and for the traditional reasons. ‘I joined the Army because the King was in danger and the Empire was in danger and the Nazis were unspeakably wicked and I wanted to go and kill Germans—it’s as simple as that. Very schoolboyish.’ He was a tough young man and was sure that he could defend himself if his homosexuality ever became a subject of derision. A young man named Alan Lowe wrote, ‘My mother had gone through the First World War with two young children while my father was away for four years, and he’d been hospitalised and wounded and she had a vivid memory of this . . . and she wasn’t happy at all about me going in.’ But even with their fathers to warn them off, men still enlisted. The horrors of 1914–18 could not be conveyed verbally. Young men were doomed to want to taste of those bloody springs for themselves.

  GIRDING LOINS

  On 13 November 1939, Menzies announced the appointment of Australia’s first Minister for Air and Civil Aviation, James Valentine Fairbairn, a grazier from the western district of Victoria who had served in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I and had spent the last fourteen months of the war as a prisoner of the Germans, undergoing treatment in a German hospital for an arm injury whose effects would remain for the rest of his life. On his station, Mount Elephant, near Derrinallum, he built an airstrip at some time in the 1920s. He would be one of the initiators of the Empire Air Training Scheme, under which air crews were given their basic training in Australia and then sent to Canada to be trained en masse with flyers from all over the Commonwealth. By Menzies’ consent, and without any complaint from Curtin, the Australians sent to defend Britain would come under the general aegis of the RAF, though still wearing their own national shoulder patches. Eventually some would find themselves flying in all-Australian squadrons, but many Australians also flew in mixed British, Polish, New Zealand, Canadian and South African squadrons. From the very start, RAAF flyers already in England on exchange or for training were incorporated in the RAF. But 10 Australian Squadron, already in England at the start of the war to take delivery of nine Sunderland flying boats, immediately prepared to go into the air as an Australian squadron.

  Since Fairbairn was still in Canada working on the scheme when he was appointed, he took his oath of office before the Governor-General of Canada, the novelist John Buchan of Thirty-Nine Steps fame. Menzies was accused of displaying his Empire-first bent and his Anglocentrism by appointing an Englishman, Lieutenant-General E.K. Squires, first to review the Australian army pre-war and then to stay on as Chief of the General Staff. (Due to ill-health, Squires would soon be replaced by the Australian Vernon Sturdee.) It would be unfair to depict Squires as a Colonel Blimp, however—the Australian generals liked him for his tact and good sense. Before the war, he had of course been inspecting the framework of an army, an on-paper command that would be filled in time of war with the bodies of young Australians. For Chief of the Air Staff, Fairbairn wanted the Australian veteran, Richard ‘Dicky’ Williams, a long-serving officer from Moonta in South Australia, and fought Menzies over it. The result was that the Englishman Air Marshal Sir Charles Burnett was appointed. Burnett was insistent—against the wishes of those Australian officers who remembered serving in specifically Australian squadrons in the Great War—that the RAAF should be fed via the Empire Air Training Scheme into a general RAF force, without which, he claimed, the Luftwaffe, Germany’s air force, could not be beaten. The Australian officer corps knew that this would diminish Australian chances of promotion and that Australians would be lost in the mass. The later emergence of specific Australian fighter squadrons and similar squadrons in Bomber Command would only partly soothe their concerns. Meanwhile, the serving chief of the Royal Australian Navy was the British admiral Sir Ragnar Colvin, diplomatic, approachable and a man of intelligence and wit. The ships were already at sea, guarding the proximate sea routes off the New South Wales coast. Many had been out there since daylight on 3 September, when the war news was still indefinite. The Canberra, commanding a squadron of destroyers, patrolled the east coast. Vampire and Hobart kept station between Gabo Island and Cape Otway. Vampire was searching for the Italian steamer Otranto, because it was not certain whether Italy might enter a new war or not and it had been decided that the ship should be shadowed until that was determined. Australia was still sat in dock, but off the Western Australian coast, Sydney cruised.

  Flight Lieutenant Brough of the RAAF, ultimately a squadron leader, was probably the first Australian combatant of the war, and it was propaganda warfare he was engaged in. On 4 September 1939, he flew a bomber in 99 Squadron RAF, dropping leaflets over Germany. Other Australians in heavy bomber squadrons made winter flights from bases in Scotland looking for German ships in the North Atlantic. Flying Officer J.T. Lewis of Artarmon in Sydney was killed on his first sortie, on 18 December 1939, when six bombers from his squadron were intercepted by up to fifty German fighters, who shot down all but one of the planes in the formation. Australians in Fighter Command were impatient for action. One of them, R.B. Lees, was squadron leader of 72 Squadron of the RAF. On 7 December, he was in a group of five Spitfires that flew into the path of five Heinkel bombers over the Firth of Forth in Scotland. The Spitfires shot down two bombers and caused the others to flee.

  Flying Officer L. Clisby of South Australia was flying in 1 Squadron of the RAF. He clung to his old RAAF uniform, which was in disrepair. ‘It will see me out,’ he argued. In it he shot down eight enemy planes in five days. He had the attitudes of a World War I pilot, and on 10 May 1940, having shot down a Heinkel bomber and forced it to land in a French field, he landed, chased a German crew member and tackled him. Four days later he himself was shot out of the sky by five German fighters. It was said over his grave that he had shot down sixteen of the enemy.

  Another Australian ace, Pat Hughes, attacked a Dornier bomber during the Battle of Britain, and when it exploded he lost control of his own Spitfire and died in the crash. A number of Australian regular air-force officers fought in the failed struggle for France and in the air battle for Britain. Flying Officer Charles Gordon Olive flew Spitfire missions during both the evacuation of Dunkirk, when the British were driven out of France in late May and early June 1940, and in the subsequent aerial Battle of Britain. He was a slightly built man but, as one of Australia’s 495 airmen in England when war began, had broken the RAF javelin record in 1939. In September 1940, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, and later, at just twenty-four years, became the leader of 456 Squadron, the RAAF’s only night-fighter squadron.

  It became increasingly axiomatic with air officers from wing commander down that fighter pilots never survived to grow old. Yet Olive escaped harm and went on to higher rank. The schoolboys of Australia were already reading copies of the comic paper, The Champion, featuring the exploits of a Spitfire pilot and boxing champion named Rockfist Rogan. However, in the popular literature of the time, flyers always survived crashes and always escaped the Nazis.

  Amongst all the burned and mangled bodies of the young, a most remarkable escape was accomplished by Keith Chisholm of the plain Sydney suburb of Petersham, an Australian ace of 452 Squadron who was shot down in October 1941 during a raid over Boulogne and picked up by a German air-sea rescue launch. In the prisoner-of-war camp at Lamsdorf (today Łambinowice), a German-named city on the Polish–Czechoslovak border, he met Australian Sergeant A.R. Stuart, and they swapped places with two Allied soldiers working in a railway repair party and escaped. Chisholm was recaptured and sent to Gleiwitz on the Polish–German border (this being in fact the town where Hitler provoked the invasion of Poland by staging the assassination of ethnic Germans by supposed Poles). From Gleiwitz, Chisholm escaped again, entered Poland, and hid on farms around Oświecim work camp (on its way to heinous renown as its German name, Auschwitz), and was then called to Krakow and on to Warsaw by the resistance organisation that protecte
d and hid him there until July 1943. After many abortive attempts, and after throwing a Polish policeman inspecting his forged papers into the Vistula River, he boarded a train to Belgium via Berlin, where, in the enemy capital, he spent time Rockfist Rogan-wise going to the cinema and dining. Chisholm and a Dutch companion reached Brussels, connected with the underground, and Chisholm was guided to Paris on 10 May 1944. Billeted with the family of a French policeman, he then joined the French Forces of the Interior—that is the Maquis or underground—and fought in the streets of Paris during the uprising that preceded the Allied occupation of the city. He returned to England on 30 August 1944, after the fall of Paris to the Allies. He had remained on the loose for the better part of three years.

  This remarkable tale of escape was not characteristic: death or capture was the norm.

  There were ultimately seventeen exclusively Australian squadrons, numbered 450 to 467. Number 450 Squadron, for which there were innumerable volunteers since so many Australian adolescents wanted to be flyers, came into existence at Williamtown in New South Wales, and its young men began training in April 1941 and would be shipped off to Canada in November that year. They were fretful to get there, those mothers’ sons, most of whom had never flown and many of whom could not drive a car. When 450 Squadron ultimately went into action, flying Kittyhawk fighters in the Western Desert campaign in North Africa, they dubbed themselves the ‘Desert Harassers’ after being described by Lord Haw-Haw—at that stage the Germans’ Irish-raised, English-language broadcaster William Joyce, much listened to by troops—as ‘Australian mercenaries whose harassing tactics were easily beaten off by the Luftwaffe’. Number 451 Squadron was sent into action in the desert in ageing Lysanders and then zippier Hurricanes. It had a high rate of loss from deaths, some of its flyers’ crash-landings ending in capture by the Germans.

  Number 452 Squadron would be the first Australian squadron to become operational in Britain, on 22 May 1941, flying Marine Spitfires. Eamonn Fergus ‘Paddy’ Finucane, an Irishman attached to the Australians, would achieve national glory in Australia, command the Australian squadron and become the youngest wing commander of his day before dying in the Channel at the age of twenty-one after an operation over Étables on the French coast in 1942.

  Australia would suffer a quarter of its war dead in that long air conflict over Europe and Africa. Victoria’s Bluey Truscott became, like Finucane, a national figure—indeed, he already was a name for having played for Melbourne all through the 1939 premiership season. He would return an ace to Australia in 1942 and play with Melbourne while he was at home, mustering further volunteers. Truscott had played for Melbourne in a winning grand final and thus in Australian terms represented the complete warrior. The names Bluey Truscott and Paddy Finucane became so famous in Australia that kids playing dogfights in backyards competed to assume them. These young men (even the Irish Finucane) were doing what they had enlisted for—directly protecting British cities, towns and villages, ‘the Home’ of which people back in Australia spoke, from barbarous assault.

  Truscott later crash-landed while strafing the Japanese at Milne Bay in New Guinea, and survived without substantial injury. He would die flying a training run over the ocean off Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia, doing a practice roll that proved fatal. He was proof—if one were needed—that aircraft were perilous to the health of young men even when no enemy shared the skies with them.

  When seeing his father off from Sydney Central bound for Melbourne and a troopship, the author of this narrative saw a group of very young men clustered together, jubilant, but surrounded by women who were close to keening. ‘They’re fighter pilots,’ my mother said. ‘Their mothers are scared they won’t see them again.’

  By 1941, many of the Australians who had fought as individuals in British squadrons the year before were dead. In a classic British churchyard in Warmwell, Dorset, a gravestone marks the burial place of Wing Commander John Kennedy, a professional pre-war RAAF flyer, who had attacked a German Dornier bomber over Chesil Beach, and had then been descended upon by a number of fighters. His plane shot to ruin, he tried to crash-land, stalled, and was lost.

  The Air minister Fairbairn would himself by now be an aeronautic victim. Fairbairn, dubious about so many pilots and aircrew leaving Australia, had shown great energy flying from airbase to airbase in Australia in his own Dragonfly aircraft to confer and advise. In August 1940, he travelled up from Melbourne in a bomber with his Cabinet colleagues Gullett, Menzies’ polished and cultured Minister for Scientific Development; Geoffrey Street, Minister for the Army and Rehabilitation, a man of few political ambitions, an Australian citizen-politician who was genuinely interested, within the limits of Cabinet policy, in the defence of the near north of Australia; and with admirable General Brudenell White, who had run the AIF under the often titular leadership of General Birdwood in World War I. The aircraft crashed and exploded on its approach to Canberra. For Menzies it was a frightful loss of talented and calm advisors, and for Australia it meant the death of men who might have seen more clearly through the artful Churchill’s sleight of hand and the proposition that went: Send your young men to protect British interests in Europe and the Middle East and then, should Japan strike, we will send forces to protect you and to hold Singapore.

  CHAPTER 4

  In classic lands

  Success and tragedy in the shadow of the ancient

  ACROSS CYRENAICA

  The training of the first units of the new 2nd AIF into a division that would be named the 6th was proceeding according to the traditions and cultural habits that had given the 1st AIF such a bad name with British generals and senior officers. A restaurant in Melbourne put up a sign reading ‘Officers Only’, but Australian other ranks entered the premises and played two-up there until, as one of them, Charlie Robinson, put it later, the ‘apartheid’ ended. By June 1940 it was considered that the 6th was ready for the war front. The convoy set out without as much concern as had marked the first convoy of 1914. There were German raiders operating, but not on the scale of the threat posed by the German Pacific flotilla in the old days. It became known that the 6th were being sent, like the first of the 1st AIF, to Egypt, but one of its brigades found itself for a time in England, which feared invasion. It would soon be replaced by a new draft and sent to North Africa with the others.

  When the 6th Division first arrived in Egypt, and travelled up by truck to the military camp in Beit Jirja in Palestine, General Archibald Wavell, the British commander, addressed them in severe tones. He was not a bad fellow, Archie Wavell, a published poet and, according to later research, a homosexual. It was as well the homophobic AIF did not know that. In any case, he told them that he had found Australian troops undisciplined in World War I, and hoped that in this war they would be better behaved on leave and in their relationship with the local population. The sons of the ‘undisciplined’ Australians of the past certainly showed a sometimes loutish sense of entitlement in their behaviour towards Arabs. But so did the average Tommy. It might have been that, above all, the Australians lacked the parade-ground crispness of the British, and did not go to great pains to acquire it. As well as that a Department of Defence book of advice for Australian servicemen in the Middle East, a copy of which the author recently found in the effects of his late father, hopefully stated, ‘It is not true that Australian soldiers do not salute officers’, a sure confession that it was true, particularly where British officers were concerned. And then ‘Officers Only’ bars were a welcome challenge to Australians and provoked a gleeful and loud intrusion, again to the disapproval of professionals such as Wavell. Questions of liquor and sustenance had the capacity to bring out the egalitarian and the democrat in Australian private soldiers, and they were unjustly considered bad soldiers because of this.

  From Palestine, the Australians moved down to Egypt to the scenes they had heard of from uncles or fathers. To the west, in Libya, lay Mussolini’s Italians. In the 1930s, Libya, made up of Cyrenaica and
Tripolitania, was touted as the new America for Italian immigrants and in 1934 it had been incorporated and united as a colony of Italy. By then good roads had been built and attempts at irrigation made. Sophisticated concrete fortifications for the Italian army were thrown up. There were over a hundred thousand Italian immigrants in Libya by the time World War II began, and many of them, having faith in the huge Italian military presence, were still in place at the time Italy decided to advance into Egypt in late 1940 to capture the Suez Canal and deprive the Empire of its great artery of trade. In that move across the Egyptian border, Italian generals drew parallels with ancient times, when Rome controlled the Lower Kingdom of Egypt. Such hopes as existed in the breasts of Mussolini and his generals would never quite be matched again as they were when the Italian infantry and mechanised units advanced along the coastal plain.