Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In September 1940, as the Italian invasion began, the troops of the Australian 6th Division were still enjoying the bars of Cairo and being greeted in the Rue des Soeurs in Alexandria by women calling, ‘Come in, George’, and ‘All the same Queen Victoria, all pink inside’. Now they were mustered, marched and convoyed out westwards to the Egyptian–Libyan border to take up the fight against the Italians. They passed through the coast port Sidi Barrani, where they found the Italians had already been repulsed by the British, and saw their first war dead. The desert weather was turning cold, and as the season wore on, newsreels of Australians advancing in overcoats would confuse Australian citizens watching in picture palaces at home, their ideas of North Africa being derived from the flicks, in which the desert was always sweltering.

  The footage of the first Australian attack against the Italian fortress of Bardia (Bardiya) in Libya was taken by the young Australian cinematographer Damien Parer. Parer, a Melbourne boy and devout Catholic, had been appointed official cinematographer on the basis of his work with film director Charles Chauvel on the classic Australian Light Horse film Forty Thousand Horsemen, shot in the Cronulla sand dunes. He intended to get as close to the combat as possible, and came up with the idea of filming from the front of advancing troops, a practice that many would come to think foredoomed him.

  Late in December 1940, the 6th Division, under the much-admired (compared to his World War I namesake) General Iven Mackay, former headmaster of Cranbrook School in Sydney and called ‘Mr Chips’ by the troops, positioned themselves at the western end of the fortifications that ringed the town and the harbour of Bardia. Around Bardia the Australians got used to the khamsin, the dry, hot wind that blew grit into their stew, Libya itself becoming part of their diet. The town lay beneath a steep headland that then dropped off to the Mediterranean. The Italian defensive strongpoints that encircled the town and its harbour for 30 kilometres were of complicated design and armed with 47-millimetre guns and machine guns able to be fired from concrete emplacements connected to deep bunkers. From the high points, and running into the port itself, was a huge wadi or creek bed, usually dry. Above the west side of this, facing the Australians, the Italians had erected one of their strongest of strongpoints, Post 11. Six battalions of the 6th Division were allocated to attack posts 3 to 11.

  On 3 January 1941, after a number of patrols, the Australians went forward, supported by machine gunners of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. The subsequent victory would be depicted by Australian propaganda as a walkover, and in some ways it was. Though better armed and supplied, the Italians were not willing to perish for Mussolini. As a sort of military plebiscite on Il Duce, the nos far outnumbered the yeses. The Australians suffered 130 casualties and captured some thousands of prisoners, and were delighted with the Italian equipment they found abandoned, so much more sophisticated than the gear with which they had been equipped.

  Except for those killed or badly wounded, nearly everyone was jubilant. Private Joe Gullett was wounded in the face but would recover to the extent that at the aid post he used the bullet hole through his cheek for a party trick: ‘He amused us by dragging on a cigarette,’ remembered Charlie Robinson, a member of the Field Ambulance, ‘and puffing out smoke through the wound.’ The behaviour of the Italian prisoners and wounded was a matter of cultural mystification. They were not given to stoicism but to exuberant lament. ‘They produced photographs of their families or holy pictures from their wallets which they kissed fervently,’ said Robinson. ‘As we dressed their wounds they would attempt to kiss our hands. Language presented difficulties, as when given water they would take their fill and then say “Basta” [Enough]. We thought they were calling us “bastards” and were getting very irate until an Italian who spoke English explained.’

  Walking the town after the capture, the Australians particularly liked the Italian officers’ quarters—‘silk sheets, pomades, perfumes, gaudy dress uniforms and colourfully lined capes.’ They also found cheese, canned delicacies, pasta and coffee, together with a supply of wine and cognac.

  The Australian commander, General Thomas Blamey—sensual, clever but unpopular with troops, a former aide to Monash and also a former Victorian police commissioner—had his headquarters in Gaza in Palestine when Bardia fell on 5 January. His plan was that the AIF and the British 7th Armoured Division, grouped as the I Australian Corps, should launch a new desert offensive in the summer, but General O’Connor, the overall British operational commander, who was headquartered in Egypt, intended to travel at a faster rate than that. Blamey had, in fact, been under pressure from his subordinates, generals John Lavarack and the red-haired Horace ‘Red Robbie’ Robertson, either to become fitter and visit the troops more, or else resign. Even his friend from World War I, Eugene Gorman, in the Middle East working for the Australian Comforts Fund, supplying extra clothing and non-army-issue luxuries to the troops, approached him to make that point. He also warned Blamey that the junior men were after his job and that the time had come ‘to conciliate or exterminate’. Behind every campaign, successful or otherwise, was a jockeying for control of which the soldiers at the front were blessedly ignorant.

  Generals Lavarack and Gordon Bennett each believed that Blamey was appointed to the command instead of himself because Blamey was from Melbourne and part of a Melbourne axis. Menzies had been attorney-general in the Victorian government during the time that Blamey was Victorian police commissioner, and Frederick Shedden, the crucial public servant, was also Victorian. At that time the traditional hostility between Melbourne and Sydney and elsewhere was more than a joke.

  Blamey had resigned as police commissioner in 1936 due to a scandal that concerned the shooting of a police officer, John O’Connell Brophy, Superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Branch. Brophy had taken two women friends along with him to a meeting with a police informant. While they were waiting for the informant they had been approached by armed bandits and Brophy had opened fire and had himself been wounded. In order to cover up the identities of the women involved, Blamey initially issued a press release saying that Brophy had accidentally shot himself. The premier gave Blamey the choice of resigning or being dismissed, and Blamey chose resignation.

  Tobruk (Tubruq), the next Italian fortress along the coast road, was surrounded by 48 kilometres of entanglements and tank traps. Tobruk needed to be captured so that Wavell’s soldiers could be resupplied by way of its port. Its garrison was believed to be twenty-seven thousand in strength. As the Australians came forward in trucks fraternally provided by the New Zealanders, the road itself barely avoided falling away into the wadis running down to the coast from inland. The British divisions were to attack from the west, and a British armoured division also anchored the end of the Australian line to the south. The tanks hoped to exploit places where the anti-tank ditch was not yet finished. Number 3 Squadron RAAF was to give air support, along with British squadrons of bombers and one of fighters. But General Mackay complained that his Australians were behaving as if it were ‘all a picnic . . . civilianisation is about to break out’. Men had adopted pet stray dogs, and were wearing items of Italian uniform, and shooting at desert gazelles with captured weaponry. As patrols went out on those cold January nights and captured Italians in the outposts, there was fraternisation.

  The men lived hard, as they always did on desert campaigns. The dust storms blew grit into their eyes and their food; they lived and slept in holes scraped in the earth; desert sores began to break out on limbs and faces; and three-quarters of a gallon of water a day was provided to each man for all purposes. They cleaned their mess tins with sand.

  Patrolling into and beyond the tank ditch was a nightly affair. The night of 13 January was bright, and helped the Italians pour a fury of fire against the Australians’ patrolling 4th Battalion. On these patrols men ran into Italian booby traps, explosives stuck on low stakes and connected by trip wires. Sapper Kendrick from Albury died of his wounds after setting one off and receiving its
cargo of metal fragments.

  The Australians were to attack Post 57 on the eastern side of the port town and use the wire before it as the point of entry from which they would fan out. They deceived the Italians as to their intentions by setting Bangalore torpedoes to destroy the wire outside every other post but 57. On the night of 17 January, a party under Captain Hassett and Lieutenant Bamford, a baker from Bowral, trying to mark out the start line for the attack, set off the booby traps; Hassett, Bamford and three other men were badly wounded. The following night, Major Campbell, the brigade major of Brigadier General Tubby Allen, who would later taste glory, horror and military injustice in New Guinea, successfully felt out and cut the wires connecting the booby traps and set a starting line for the coming assault, marking it unobtrusively with bits of gun-cleaning flannel tied to the branches of neighbouring shrubs.

  While waiting to make the final attack, the 17th Australian Brigade was allowed to go down to the coast east of Tobruk for a swim. On the night of 21 January, the attack went in from a taped line Campbell had made with his earlier gun-flannelled shrubs for guidance. On the right of the line soldiers blundered into the wire nonetheless. ‘In the flash,’ one soldier said, ‘you could see twenty or more men peeling back like a flower opening.’ Three men were killed. The picnic was over.

  The Italians resisted and one of the posts fell only after every Italian had been killed. Australian brigades fanned out within the wire, and post after post fell to them. They were supported from behind by Australian guns and the Royal Horse Artillery, and a machine-gun regiment of the Cheshires. Italian tanks captured at Bardia and now sporting a kangaroo on their sides and crewed by the 6th Australian Cavalry Regiment took part in the assault against the inner fortress called Fort Pilistrano. Sergeant Burgess, who had worked in a flour mill in Melbourne, was killed while attacking a defending Italian tank with a grenade. Bypassed Italian outposts joined the fight too. But by 2 p.m. some troops had advanced across the escarpment so far that they could see down into Tobruk harbour. Another fort, Fort Solaro, had fallen easily, with six hundred prisoners taken. Forty-nine Australians died, however, and there was, given the pace of the advance, a problem getting the wounded back to the hospitals.

  By the morning of 22 January, the town was theirs though some Italian batteries still fired from outposts. The Australians found Tobruk pleasant and full of delicacies, but the British, to the north-west, were still dealing with a determined stand by the Italians. Eight thousand prisoners at various posts had been taken. Dumps burned around the harbour. The following morning, the remaining outposts cracked and General della Mura, the Italian commander, surrendered to Australian Lieutenant Phelan and two of his men. All along the front the Italian outposts were also surrendering, so that there was no final bloodbath for possession of the harbour itself, as scattered Italian troops hiding in the wadis were rounded up. Major Eather, in a troop carrier, found three thousand Italians drawn up as if on parade, their officers’ luggage packed and ready for movement. He accepted their surrender. At naval headquarters, Admiral Massimiliano Vietina and fifteen hundred officers and men surrendered. It was made clear to Vietina by the Australian brigade commander Robertson that if a single Australian soldier died of booby traps in the town, there would be unspecified but serious punishment.

  Damien Parer dressed appallingly and was once barked at by a colonel, ‘Tuck your shirt in, man, you look like a wog.’ He had begun by filming the attack on Bardia and then raced to catch up with the advancing Australians with Frank Hurley, veteran cinematographer of Shackleton’s endurance expedition to the Antarctic. Chester Wilmot, the broadcaster, found that when he arrived at the outskirts of Tobruk early one morning in this advance, Parer was already there, filming the breakthrough of the 7th Battalion near Post 65.

  Parer and Hurley got many effective shots of shell fire, Italian prisoners, and burning oil installations around the harbour. Parer was there to film an Australian private hauling down the Italian flag over Tobruk and hoisting his own hat to the masthead. He shot his first material of advancing with infantry when he went along with the 11th Battalion in their attack on the airport at Derna. He blamed himself for missing the best footage by ducking whenever a shell came over. The men around him, however, yelled, ‘Get down, you bloody fool!’

  Parer always argued that his job was not to film the ‘pretty-pretty stuff ’—triumphant marches into a town already captured, troops’ football matches, the cleaning of guns when the battle was over. He wanted to ‘convey the moment of truth when a soldier charges, to kill or be killed’. Cameraman Ron Williams declared, ‘There was no doubt that from then on Parer was doomed.’

  It became nearly impossible to provide proper medical care and blankets to the compounds of the nearly thirty thousand who had surrendered. Only five of the twelve proud Italian divisions stationed in Libya were now left. In late January, at Derna, a further coast fortress, a rearguard of Italian Bersaglieri were near-surrounded and pulled back towards the stronghold of Benghazi, the capital of Cyrenaica. Fifty-five Australians were buried here after the Italians simply abandoned it. The Axis’s grand strategy had been reduced to debacle.

  And by now the 7th Division had arrived in Egypt. The 6th was withdrawn to pursue other, as yet undisclosed purposes.

  A POET TO THE FRONT

  Ken Slessor was both a practical working journalist and a major poet, born in the year of Federation in Orange, New South Wales, as Kenneth Adolf Slessor, son of a civil engineer of German descent, who had changed his name at the outbreak of World War I. In 1920, Slessor became a journalist, first for the Sydney tabloid The Sun, and then he jointly edited Vision, a literary magazine. In 1924, he published his first book of verse. His early poetry was illustrated by his mentor Norman Lindsay, but somehow Lindsay was more hidebound a man, and Slessor’s poetry pushed its way out into a brilliant, modern eloquence that was all his own. Three years later, in 1927, he joined the staff of Smith’s Weekly, where he would remain for the next thirteen years, until the outbreak of World War II. He considered Smith’s Weekly the Diggers’ paper—it had fought for the rights of Diggers throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Slessor would later eloquently write, when appointed as official war correspondent, that soldiers were endangered by more than wounds. Their experience was chaotic in battle, ‘their acceptance into civil life hazardous, their rehabilitation as breadwinners problematical’. He combined being editor-in-chief of this hard-hitting, populist and irreverent magazine with the sophistication of his 1939 poem ‘Five Bells’, and all without becoming a man split asunder by his two tasks, but instead remaining a companionable and genial fellow.

  Slessor seemed to find his own entirely modern voice, one not totally neglectful of Lindsay’s goddess Aphrodite but also finding its fascinations in the loss of friends, the deeps of the harbour, the mysteries of country towns and the strange contours of the Australian landscape. He was a devout city boy, and had written of William Street, Sydney, as a place of glorious squalors.

  Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish

  and puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,

  of grease that blesses onions with a hiss;

  You find it ugly, I find it lovely.

  The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze

  (death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)

  Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;

  You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

  His classic was the elegy ‘Five Bells’, the most eloquent, mourning evocation of a Sydney Harbour at that stage still full of moored ships and the clang of their bells.

  Deep and dissolving verticals of light

  Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells

  Coldly rung out in a machine’s voice. Night and water

  Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats

  In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water.

  His ultimate view of Blamey, whose appointment as Australian commander Smith’s We
ekly had attacked, and whom Slessor despised, was perhaps reflected in his ‘An Inscription for Dog River’. He describes troops as:

  Having bestowed on him all we had to give

  In battles few can recollect,

  Our strength, obedience and endurance,

  Our wits, our bodies, our existence,

  Even our descendants’ right to live—

  Having given him everything, in fact,

  Except respect.

  Slessor was thirty-nine when appointed Australia’s official war correspondent. The Sydney Morning Herald had always thought it had a mortgage on the official position, and Slessor would become very discontented with the way it and other dailies would butcher and rewrite his copy. Slessor was in England from July 1940, waiting for the troops he was to accompany to move off to the Middle East after training at Salisbury. Although at Salisbury he was a little removed from London, he saw something of the Blitz. His wife Noela, a Sydney girl of Catholic background who had married Slessor in the Methodist parsonage in Ashfield in 1922, also arrived in Britain. Their relationship was volatile.

  In London, Slessor visited the eccentric journalist Eric Baume of the Sydney Truth, who lived in splendour in Cadogan Place and with whom he attended a spiritualist séance. But he was shocked by English social and military stuffiness. The old complaint of Australians when visiting ‘Home’ was uttered by him when he said that English newspapers mentioned Australia ‘about as frequently as Tierra del Fuego’. He met many Cabinet members, from Churchill to bluff Ernest Bevin, Labour leader, whom Slessor instinctively liked for speaking unapologetically about ‘the Ome Hoffice’, and Duff Cooper, writer and politician, who would later be a less than galvanising British Cabinet representative in Singapore before its fall.