Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  In one unusually revealing article published in a Sydney newspaper shortly before he returned to Japan, Russo explained why he was returning when other foreigners were leaving. Perhaps he was going back because of fear itself, he said, but he hoped it wasn’t that. Since he had been for so long identified in Japan with Australia and Australian education it would be ‘a deplorable anti-climax and a loss of face if he were to run out on his job when trouble loomed’. He then laid the blame for Japan’s aggression in China squarely at the feet of the Europeans for cramping Japanese aspirations for territory and resources: ‘The history of the Japanese shows that they are essentially a peace-loving people. If then, we go to war with Japan, we shall be facing, like Frankenstein’s creator, what we have helped to establish.’

  In December 1940, Russo found Japan markedly changed, with shortages of food, petrol, medicine and accommodation. But the most remarkable changes were in public attitudes. He reported in his Far Eastern newsletter for the ABC that the Japanese ‘point at Japan’s critical state, and blame it on their Western-style politicians who have neglected the Imperial Way and tried only to ape the ungodly methods of the West’. Russo said with literary grace that the atmosphere was ‘charged with that clammy lull that comes before earthquakes and typhoons’, and foreigners kept leaving. By March 1941 he was the only Australian left in Tokyo. He was already making arrangements for his own departure, however.

  For months his university colleagues had urged him to leave, and a friend and mentor, Professor Yeda, even threatened to recommend Russo be dismissed from his post as a way of saving him. But he resisted the advice until he received a telegram from Sir Keith Murdoch, offering him a position as a commentator with the Melbourne Herald. The offer enabled Russo to leave without losing face, a consideration that had become as important to him as it would have been for a Japanese. The KBS chairman accepted Russo’s letter of resignation with regret but acknowledged that his services were urgently needed in Australia.

  When Russo boarded his ship at Yokohama he was ‘still half convinced that I was tossing in my hand prematurely’. He arrived in Sydney on the Tokyo Maru on 16 April 1941 and immediately adopted a defensive stance. Japan had reached a stage of desperation at which any miscalculation or incident could set the ball rolling, he said. For some months into the Pacific War he was still attempting to explain rather than condemn Japan’s actions. He was not interned, and his expertise in Asian affairs was sought both during the war and afterwards, especially when Cold War hostilities demanded the style of analysis that rose above popular hysteria.

  JUMPY ABOUT INVASION

  On 1 December 1941 in Canberra, the House adjourned for what was expected to be a period of three and a half months, but Curtin’s War Cabinet, the ministers whose portfolios directly related to defence and, as the phrase went, ‘putting Australia on a war footing’, were to hold an emergency meeting in Melbourne on 3 December with the Chiefs of Staff. Curtin intended to return to Canberra for Elsie’s sake, given that she felt lost in the Lodge. Because of the pace at which the scene in the Pacific was developing, however, he stayed the weekend in Melbourne. Japanese convoys had by now been sighted leaving Indochina, present-day Vietnam, for destinations that could merely be guessed at.

  In those days prime ministers led lives that were much closer to those of the people who elected them. The Bruce family, whom Curtin had met years before in the Victorian Socialist Party, were friends he enjoyed visiting in Melbourne, and he had great affection for the Bruce daughters, Yatala, Jennie and Beryl. Over that last weekend of peace in the Pacific he decided to visit the Bruce women at Beryl’s house in Simpson Street, East Melbourne. Yatala’s son, John Bruce Ovenden, who was sixteen, saw the prime minister turn up, ‘restless and terribly disturbed’. Normally Curtin walked to the Bruces’, or caught a tram from the Victoria Palace Hotel. But this time he was driven in his official car, a black Buick, because he did not know how soon he would be summoned back. He kept sending his driver off to the Federal Members’ Rooms in the city to see what was happening. The Bruce kids and their friends enjoyed rare rides across Melbourne in the prime ministerial limousine on Australia’s last day of security, as the driver picked up on the latest intelligence and brought it back to Curtin. At last Curtin told the Bruce sisters, ‘I’ve got to go back. Big things are happening. I’ll know within an hour or so.’

  On Monday, 8 December, Don Rodgers, Curtin’s intimate and pressman, woke him up with the news that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been picked up by the Australian government’s shortwave radio monitoring service. ‘Well, it has come,’ sighed Curtin. It was a characteristic statement, seeming to fall light as a leaf. His powers of resignation, however, were not as great as the vulnerability of his spirit.

  The same day, but on the Australian side of the dateline, General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Army began landing in Malaya. A War Cabinet meeting was held that morning. The farcical state of Australian defences seemed all the more obvious now: there were only sufficient machine guns and anti-tank guns to equip half the militia. Vickers machine guns were being manufactured in Australia at a rate of two hundred per month, but most were exported to other fronts under contract with the British and only twenty of these kept for Australian purposes. There were a few tanks available for training purposes. The fighters and heavy bombers were few in number and obsolescent. Despite the hysteria about Japan that reigned in Australia from the mid-1890s, Australia found itself on the morning of 8 December 1941 utterly naked to an aggression that it believed, with a perhaps egocentric but understandable certainty, was aimed at the South-West as well as the Northern Pacific.

  The Friday before, Hilary Hughes, a young infantryman at Wallgrove Camp in western Sydney, said that he and other soldiers became rebellious when their weekend leave passes were cancelled. They did not know it would be the last weekend of peace in the Pacific. Hughes’ brigade went on strike, and on the afternoon of 6 December marched to Parramatta Station, commandeered trains and took them to wherever home was. They were all back on Sunday afternoon and were charged with two days’ AWL (absent without leave). By Monday morning, when the news of Pearl Harbor came through, they knew why their leave had been countermanded.

  In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya, Curtin said that he did not intend to bring back the three AIF divisions from the Middle East yet, but he wondered aloud whether air-force trainees should continue to be sent to Britain. Above all, what was not known that morning of 8 December was that there existed an agreement between the United States and Britain that Anglo–American forces would concentrate on defeating Germany first. It was Shedden the public servant, even though he was as strong an Empire man as any, who suggested to Curtin that Britain could not be depended on in the Pacific and Indian oceans. He had not believed the promises Churchill had made to Menzies, and he urged Curtin to declare the war against Japan to be a ‘new war’ rather than a mere increment in hostilities. The government issued its own formal declaration of war against Japan, but not as an automatic reaction to British intentions, as had been the case with Menzies at the beginning of war in Europe.

  That night Curtin broadcast to the nation from the ABC studios in Sydney. The country itself was now ‘the stake in this conflict’, he said. This was Australia’s ‘darkest hour’. The Australians must ‘hold this country, and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race and as a place where civilisation will persist’. The ordinary Australian listened to him with tolerance and trust, though some conservatives still considered him a dangerous socialist.

  Curtin’s wife Elsie was going back to Western Australia by train to spend Christmas with her mother, and when ambushed by a journalist while changing trains in Adelaide, she said percipiently and shyly that the Japanese sinking of the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya on 10 December had vindicated her husband’s belief in ‘bombers before battleships’.

  The two battleships had been sent
to honour Churchill’s promise to fortify Singapore. On the afternoon of 8 December 1941, they sailed with four destroyers, including HMAS Vampire, from Singapore to take on the Japanese invasion fleet off Kota Bharu on the Malayan east coast. With no air cover to protect them, they were attacked shortly after 11 a.m. on 10 December by two Japanese air flotillas. Both of the British ships were sunk by torpedo planes in mercilessly swift order, with the loss of over eight hundred men, and there were no longer any British capital ships in the region capable of taking on the Japanese. The next day, Curtin declared, ‘For years I have insisted that a maximum air defence was imperative to the efficiency of land and sea forces—however strong they might be. Now we are faced with the reality.’ He did not, however, cancel the transfer of air personnel through the Empire training scheme in Canada to British airfields. He was still a son of the Empire. But the War Cabinet approved a call-up of 114,000 men for the army and the sending of Australian troops to Darwin, Port Moresby and Timor.

  Parliament was called back into session on 16 December. In the meantime, General Iven Mackay, ‘Mr Chips’, now Commander of the Home Forces, urged rather grimly that the public be warned that the Japanese were likely to enjoy early success in invading Australia, and that the population were to all stay level-headed, for they might well come out on top in the end. Curtin also heard from the urbane Vivian Bowden in Singapore, Australia’s representative on the War Council, that it was a matter of weeks before Singapore would fall. Bowden had been a good advisor from the start, a polished fellow who had worked many years in Shanghai and represented Australia’s trade interests there. He was a novelist, too, who had found time to publish two books, in 1929 and 1930. Bowden had moved to Singapore at the Australian government’s request when Australia closed its trade office in Shanghai in 1940. To read his cables and reports is to be convinced he was the clearest-headed official in Singapore. His voice shines with clarity amongst all the prevarications of generals and statesmen.

  As the Japanese advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, facing only a rare and minor loss and delay, Curtin feared that the troops in Singapore would be victims of the same sort of fiasco as those in Greece and Crete. In the midst of these fears, the Melbourne Herald asked Curtin to provide a New Year message for the Australian people, and it was published on 27 December.

  Curtin began by quoting Bernard O’Dowd:

  That reddish veil which o’er the face

  Of night-hag East is drawn . . .

  Flames new disaster for the race?

  Or can it be the dawn?

  ‘I see 1942 as the year in which we shall know the answer,’ he said, and the Australians would need to provide it. Australia was now ‘within the fighting lines’. But amongst other things, Curtin hoped that Russia might take on Japan from the direction of Siberia, and attack her flank so that her southward drive might be distracted and thwarted. After all, said Curtin, innocent of knowledge of what Roosevelt and Churchill had already decided, no one front was any more important than another.

  Churchill abominated Curtin’s suggestion about Russia taking on the Japanese. He wanted the entirety of the Russian army concentrated upon the Germans. But the sentence Churchill found particularly ‘insulting’ in Curtin’s broadcast was the sentiment: ‘Without any inhibition of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

  Churchill sent a message of chastisement, which declared that Britain and the United States would have a primary role in deciding Pacific strategy—not, as Curtin had said, Australia and the United States. A number of Australian conservatives shared Churchill’s fury. They had eaten their Christmas dinners still absolutely convinced that in Malaya—or at least Singapore—the ‘racially inferior’ Japanese would be defeated, and that Singapore would remain an unassailable rock. Even Curtin himself might have felt a little sheepish after the broadcast, to the extent that Don Rodgers, his press secretary, volunteered that he rather than Curtin had drafted the message, and that Curtin had made very little change to the draft apart from adding the Bernard O’Dowd lines.

  The explosive feelings on both sides, Japan and Australia, had a long time fuse. There had been a balance arranged between Australia and Japan in the 1920 Peace Treaty: the Japanese should have mandates over islands in the North Pacific, while Australia held mandates over islands in the South Pacific. Hughes had used the Australian dead as a claim on Britain to try to persuade it to distance itself from its then friend and World War I ally Japan. Australian intelligence analyst Edmund Piesse had complained about this tactic after the Paris conference: ‘I withdraw all my optimism about our future relations with Japan . . . we have been perhaps the chief factor in consolidating the whole Japanese nation behind the Imperialists.’ British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald would call the White Australia Policy ‘a menace to civilisation’.

  Curtin also declared that Australia went to war with Japan ‘because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed’. But many people in the Pacific were not, in fact, free. There was Dutch repression in Indonesia and British overlordship in Malaya. In Indochina, rebellion brought severe repression from the French rulers, particularly in 1930 when the people tried to create Xo-viets (Soviets), committees of peasants and workers. The French hit back with air and ground attacks that caused ten thousand casualties.

  Australia’s own record in Papua and New Guinea before the war did not bespeak equality. The Native Regulations and Ordinances for Papua, according to former district commissioner David Marsh, decreed that ‘a native wasn’t allowed to drink’. He couldn’t go into a picture show with Europeans. When walking along a footpath the native was expected to move aside for whites. ‘We had a White Women’s Protection Ordinance which more or less said that if you smiled at a white woman it was rape . . . they also had a Native Women’s Protection Ordinance which . . . didn’t mean much anyway.’

  Curtin certainly described himself and his fellow countrymen as trying to secure ‘the future of the white man in the Pacific’ (emphasis added). He invoked White Australia as part of Australia’s war aims. The drink-sodden General Blamey helped by calling the Japanese soldier ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’. General Clowes, ultimately the commander at the historic battle of Milne Bay, said that defeating the enemy was ‘a most effective way of demonstrating the superiority of the white race’.

  FIFTH COLUMN

  William Cooper, secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, declared on the verge of war that ‘the Aborigine has no status, no rights, no land . . . he has no country and nothing to fight for but the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by a white race without compensation or even kindness’. But in fact Aboriginal troops were not particularly welcomed into the armed forces.

  In 1939, some in the establishment had been terrified that the Aborigines might become a fifth column, with sinister Lutheran missionaries turning them into a pro-German force. Army intelligence took control of the Beagle Bay mission in Western Australia and, in turn, of missionaries of German descent. The member for the Northern Territory accused Patrol Officer Strehlow, son of a pastor and known for his pro-Aboriginal sentiments, of being a Nazi and the sort of man who could influence Aborigines in the Third Reich’s favour. In 1941, Western Australia amended its Native Administration Act to stop Aborigines moving south of the 20th parallel while at Katanning, one of many places where blacks had found themselves earning more money due to wartime construction projects. The local government confined them to shopping on one day of the week to prevent them being exposed to left-wing ideas.

  In 1940, the Melbourne Sun noted the protest of Pastor Doug Nicholls: ‘Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?’ But similar hysterias to those of which Nicholls
complained would emerge with the advance of the new enemy. In August 1942, the manager of a station at Lake Tyers, Victoria, where black soldiers had enlisted but had then been discharged out of the army, mentioned ‘the generally expressed opinion of the youth of the Station . . . that they would get a “better spin” under Japanese rule’. The 4th Independent Company operating in the Northern Territory reported that ‘several natives on questioning favour the Japanese . . . they further state that the white men have not given them anything and on a number of occasions have molested them and their lubras [women]’. These sentiments were based not on a firm idea about what the Japanese state philosophy was towards such people as them, but on a longing for some other regime than the one they were under. One pastoralist warned anxiously that blacks were frequenting the part of Cairns called Malay Town, the headquarters of Japanese fishing crews. But that was not remarkable, since they were forbidden to enter other parts of town.

  Patrol Officer Bob Darkin recalled that in the Cairns area ‘what we had to do was raid their camps piccaninny daylight, just before dawn’, for the purposes of moving disaffected Aborigines further inland where they could not act as a fifth column for the Japanese enemy. In Western Australia, a special force rounded up all unemployed Aborigines from the hinterland and interned them in the Moore River camp as ‘possible potential enemies’. All Australian Aborigines over the age of fourteen were issued with a military permit listing where they lived, worked and travelled. The permits were written in either red or black ink; red meant that the holder was subversive.