Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  MacArthur was a conservative who did not get on with his own president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in turn believed that MacArthur would consider it appropriate in the right circumstances to overthrow the United States government and become a Caesar. Yet Curtin liked him more than he did General Blamey. As his assistant spokesman on war policy, Curtin nominated not Blamey but defence secretary Frederick Shedden. From the time MacArthur arrived, Curtin and the public servant Shedden treated him as the redeemer and showed no doubt about his talent. Shedden even applauded MacArthur for his brilliant defence of the Philippines—a little ridiculous, but slightly more credible than any praise for Percival’s performance in Singapore. But it was important that MacArthur keep the Australians such as Shedden innocent of the truth that his campaign in the Philippines had been deplorable.

  An anonymous Digger wrote of the tendency to depict MacArthur as the supposed saviour:

  For should we fail to get the mail, if prisoners won’t talk,

  If radios are indisposed and carrier pigeons walk,

  We have no fear, because we hear tomorrow’s news today

  And see our operations plan in Doug’s Communiqué.

  Blamey was commander of Allied Land Forces in the South West Pacific area, but he retained wide responsibility for the Australian forces. He deployed the 1st Army, made up chiefly of militia conscripts, in April 1942 to defend the east coast of Australia. The 2nd Army was based initially in Melbourne. One division, the 4th, was sent to Western Australia, where the 3rd Corps was to be formed. US anti-aircraft and engineering troops were also sent to Darwin, and a squadron of heavy bombers to Perth.

  MacArthur was horrified to find on his arrival in Australia that Washington had so failed him that there were fewer than 26,000 American servicemen in the country, mostly air force personnel and rear-echelon men, and not a single infantryman. There were 104,000 members of the AIF, and nearly twice as many militia. They did not provide as much comfort to MacArthur as they did to Curtin. Curtin wanted to save Australia. MacArthur wanted to reconquer the Philippines, and he had other ambitions too, political ones. To get as many American troops as possible, he would badmouth the quality of the Australians, doing so with such consistency that the Australians acquired a second general to hate.

  As early as 25 April 1942, Australian intelligence in Melbourne had predicted a Japanese task force would sail across the Coral Sea towards Port Moresby both to win its own naval battle against the Americans and to shepherd eleven transports and naval vessels across the ocean and enable them to seize Port Moresby. The Japanese descended from the direction of the Solomons and Rabaul and were intercepted from the south and east by three Allied task forces, one of them partly made up of the Australian cruisers Hobart and Australia, which made a screen protecting Port Moresby. Australia was attacked by torpedo bombers from Rabaul but avoided damage by a weaving movement.

  The battle was fought on seas east of Cape York. Reading the maps in the newspapers, Australians would be amazed at how close to home the Japanese fleet were. The Japanese withdrew after four days of aerial attack, shocked that their aircraft carrier Shoho was sunk so quickly, although that loss was of very little significance compared to the damage done to the aircraft carriers Lexington and Yorktown. However, the Japanese troop transports also withdrew to Rabaul, carrying with them the five thousand men of the invasion force. It was the first Japanese setback. The author remembers being told by his relieved mother about this phenomenal battle and the extent to which it made us all safer. Indeed, in Australia, the Coral Sea was looked upon as a thorough victory, even though the Americans now had only two undamaged aircraft carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise. But it would prove to be the case that no Japanese naval force again attempted to cross the Coral Sea and take Port Moresby.

  Until the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May 1942, the Australian army was on the defensive. The Australian official historian noted that so hesitant had Blamey and MacArthur been to send reinforcements to New Guinea where they might be gobbled up that on 10 May, the day the Japanese planned to land around Port Moresby, the defending garrison was not materially stronger than the one General Sturdee had established early in January. This was an arrangement that would very nearly lead to the loss of the entirety of New Guinea, including Port Moresby.

  After the Battle of the Coral Sea, Blamey reinforced Port Moresby with a militia brigade instead of an AIF brigade. He sent a militia brigade to Milne Bay, too. There was an expectation that the Japanese, thwarted in the Coral Sea, would now attack Port Moresby overland. Only militia units held that port; the 7th Division AIF was kept for training for overseas operations to occur later. General Rowell later said that the decision not to send the AIF made his ‘headquarters weep at the time’, and veteran war correspondent Gavin Long wrote in his diary that ‘the decision to keep the best troops till last was criminal’.

  On Friday, 29 May, five large Japanese submarines lay 56 kilometres off the New South Wales coast. At least one of these had a hatch large enough to contain a reconnaissance plane, which flew over Sydney at 3 a.m. on Saturday and confirmed that the harbour was full of warships, including the heavy cruiser USS Chicago, veteran of the Battle of the Coral Sea. The flotilla moved now to within eleven kilometres of Sydney Harbour. At 4.30 p.m., after appropriate ceremonies to honour the men willing to undertake such a hopeless task, three midget submarines set out to penetrate the harbour. The first midget entangled itself in the huge anti-submarine net laid across the north-facing entry to Sydney Harbour, and before HMAS Yarroma, a patrol boat, could attack it, its crew of two men destroyed their craft and themselves with demolition charges. Towards 10 p.m., the second submarine penetrated the net and sailed up harbour. The alarms had sounded all over the city and people were advised to take shelter, if necessary under tables with mattresses laid on them. The portents were uncertain. Some American machine-gun emplacements near Garden Island had begun firing up harbour. Two hundred metres offshore, the second submarine was sighted by the Chicago crew, who opened fire. It released two torpedoes. Had the Chicago been hit, the myth of Japanese omnipotence would have been restored, and its capacity to strike at will would have been confirmed in a manner that would certainly have demoralised the Allies. The first torpedo ran aground at Garden Island, however, and the other ran under a Dutch submarine, K9, and hit the harbour bed beneath the depot ship HMAS Kuttabul, a converted ferry boat, killing nineteen Australian naval ratings and two from the Royal Navy. This second Japanese submarine was able to escape the harbour and its fate became a matter of speculation.

  The third submarine was sighted by HMAS Yandra at the harbour entrance and depth-charged, but after withdrawing, it returned and was attacked by a number of vessels. Both members of its crew committed suicide. The two submarines were recovered and displayed, reasonably enough, as captured marine beasts of prey. The weekend that had begun with such omens of threat had now been dealt with and the threat neutralised.

  PARER AGAIN

  The north coast of New Guinea, on which the Japanese now intended to concentrate a considerable force, was sparsely populated by Europeans. One Australian who witnessed and then fled the Japanese landings there was Ashley Chapman, an oil depot manager on Huon Peninsula, over which the Australians and Japanese would later engage in ferocious battle. After a cross-country trek he led a party of other civilians safely to Port Moresby and then by ship to Sydney. Chapman, who had migrated to Australia from London in his teens, had gone to New Guinea to work for Burns Philp, the Pacific trading and shipping company that had general agents, massive plantations and commercial interests in New Guinea. Living conditions on the Huon Gulf on the north shore of New Guinea were primitive, and Chapman worked at the Burns Philp store at Salamaua, which was also an agency for Shell fuel. He lived with his wife Sadie, whom he had married in 1938, in a little residential area known as Kila.

  The nearby district on the Huon Gulf had a community of about forty whites, mostly Australians and E
nglish in their early twenties. Gold had been discovered in the interior a few years earlier and so a village named Morobe had become an administrative centre. In Morobe throughout the 1930s a district officer named Taylor administered about half a dozen patrol officers and their staff based there. These patrol officers gradually penetrated the interior and made contact with the natives and set up what Taylor called ‘civilised administration’. One of the benefits of Australian occupation for local people, said Chapman, was that no one could buy native land. It could only be leased. Besides that, natives could not be employed without an official contract for more than two years at a time and without the administration’s permission. The contract, however, may not have favoured the native as much as it did the administration.

  Salamaua had about four kilometres of road, all unpaved. There was a Burns Philp supply ship from Australia every three weeks and a petroleum supply ship from Balikpapan in Borneo. Business activity continued at Salamaua after Singapore fell, and aircraft still came and went. Chapman got used to RAAF Hudsons and Wirraways on the nearby strip, and a machine-gun detachment of Australian soldiers was billeted there. Most of the locals joined the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles.

  Salamaua was first raided by air on 9 January 1942; the sudden arrival of aircraft found Chapman surrounded by great stacks of high-octane aviation fuel barrels: ‘One incendiary bullet and we would have evaporated in the explosion.’ But the Japanese wanted to preserve the fuel stock for their own use, and after damaging some buildings in the town of Salamaua, as well as demolishing Chapman’s own house, the planes turned away to bomb Lae. A civilian pilot, New Guinea aviation pioneer Kevin Parer, cousin to Damien the cinematographer, was just landing his Dragon Rapide when he was attacked from above by Japanese aircraft and killed. Bomb holes made the runway unusable, and hangars and repair shops were destroyed along with some fourteen civil aircraft.

  The New Guinea Volunteer Rifles were now inducted for full-time duty, and fit men under forty were conscripted. The women, unfit men and those over forty were to be evacuated by sea in the Neptuna, soon to be attacked in the bombing of Darwin. Chapman was the last civilian to leave Salamaua on 25 January 1942, the day after the RAAF pulled out. He escaped the Japanese with his small party of men on mountain trails just wide enough to take one person at a time. It took three and a half days to make the 80 kilometres to Wau.

  In about mid-February, a party assembled at Wau to walk to Port Moresby. They would have all the problems the infantry later faced. Six weeks after leaving Salamaua, seeing Japanese bombers fly above them on their way to Port Moresby, they took to canoes and reached the south coast, the Papuan side, in the swamplands at the bottom of the mountains. They made outriggers and were sailing for Port Moresby when they were strafed by Japanese aircraft. All survived, and they were picked up by a coastal boat requisitioned by the Australian army, and taken to Port Moresby.

  In support of their operations in the Solomons, the Japanese army and navy occupied Lae and Salamaua the week MacArthur arrived in Australia. The Japanese had not landed in sufficient strength to pose a threat to Port Moresby, however, and the likelihood of their marching overland to Port Moresby seemed preposterous. The peaks of the Owen Stanley Range, dividing the south coast of New Guinea from the north coast, rose to heights above 4000 metres. But if their troops on the north coast of New Guinea were reinforced, the Japanese might then consider it. The other places where Japanese could land to build up their forces were to the east, on the beaches at Buna or Gona. These names, with those of Lae and Salamaua, would come to be lodged in the memory of people who lived through those days, for they would all become venues of sacrifice.

  The Japanese considered that their troops on the north coast might one day be sent with reinforcements over the mountains to attempt to occupy Port Moresby. By June 1942, after the Battle of the Coral Sea had balked its capture by the Japanese navy, this possibility became more likely. Damien Parer, filled with more urgency than the Australian command, found his way from Townsville to a Port Moresby weakly garrisoned by semi-trained and often unruly militia battalions. Towards the end of 1941 he had tried to accompany a British military convoy to Tehran and so cross into Russia and film the Eastern Front. But he did not achieve it before the war with Japan began, and so returned to Australia with some of the 7th Division on the troopship Sophocles, arriving back in Melbourne in March 1942.

  Once in Port Moresby, Parer established a camera position on a hill above the port. When Japanese bombers destroyed the new supply ship Macdhui, Parer was on this height only two hundred metres away, taking spectacular footage of a full-scale bomber attack on a port, film he would incorporate in his 1942 film Moresby Under the Blitz.

  Osmar White, a journalist for the Melbourne newspaper publishers Herald and Weekly Times and a spirited young man like Parer, wanted to accompany native bearers as they crossed the mountains to Wau to deliver supplies to a malaria-racked force of four hundred Australians, Kanga Force. Kanga’s duties were to keep watch on the four thousand Japanese who had already landed, and to make guerrilla attacks on them. White’s proposed journey would involve a round trip of more than a thousand kilometres, mostly on foot, regarding which trip White found it impossible to get accurate information from the army in Moresby. Nonetheless, Parer wanted to go with him, and to observe the Japanese who were massing on the north coast and who would try to cross the intervening mountains.

  Parer and White somehow managed it by travelling along the coast in a launch and then setting off inland. They started overland from a position called Bulldog, along with ninety-three natives who were transporting more than a ton of ammunition, mail and supplies. Parer worked as unofficial medical officer to the group, nursing a bearer dying from pneumonia. He also amputated an infected toe. As the trail grew steeper, six more carriers were sent back suffering from pneumonia or exhaustion. ‘These native carriers,’ he wrote, ‘with their heavy loads and extremely difficult walking conditions, would cause any of us to blush with shame when their war effort is compared to our own.’ He noted that there were nine cases of pneumonia and that one carrier died of a ruptured spleen on the track. Mould and moisture began to affect Parer’s cameras.

  The group at last ran into Kanga Force, who had recently, in a party of nineteen under Captain Norm Winning, attacked Japanese-held Salamaua at 3 a.m. one morning. Parer filmed the bearers and a line of wounded members of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles trying to make their way back over the Owen Stanleys to safety. They had not had a delivery of anything by plane for two months, they said. Amongst their problems were badly infected tick bites. White and Parer found a manned telephone post that connected to the Commandos’ headquarters in Wau, and when they got there were asked if they had any tobacco, sugar or mail.

  Not satisfied with filming the base, Parer went forward to the advance scouts of Kanga Force. Some of the raids he filmed accompanying Kanga Force produced footage that has been used in nearly every documentary on the Pacific War ever since. He observed that Allied planes bombed not only Lae and Salamaua but also as-yet-unoccupied Gona, which signified, he thought, an expectation of a Japanese landing there. For nine days, Parer lived with three Kanga Force scouts manning the Salamaua lookout, a tall tree high on the hillside from which the port township and aerodrome could be observed. He was not entirely welcome as far as they were concerned, and they had sent out their New Guinean assistants, treading on twigs and leaves, to erase every boot mark he’d left getting there.

  Parer took the time to film this characteristic procedure. He filmed the arrival and departure of enemy fighters and seaplanes, and a burning Japanese troopship drifting onto a reef. The Japanese he filmed were digging in and camouflaging their weapon pits. ‘No good tripod rest possible,’ he wrote of his work, ‘and tree with slight sway—these shots may be spoiled. Also visibility on most days was bad and it rained a hell of a lot.’

  He returned ultimately with film of superb quality. But he could only find that out
once he had marched over the mountains again to Moresby. By now White was stricken by fever. When the two of them left Wau on a July morning in 1942, Parer was about to begin a year of unrivalled camera work.

  MANPOWER, PRISONER POWER

  The Manpower Directorate was established during the invasion crisis of early 1942 and operated as a powerful section of the Department of Labour and National Service. Women, including some mothers of young children, were conscripted into national service in the form of compulsory and directed labour. Anglo–Australian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were being conscripted into the Australian military forces and there was a desperate lack of farm labour.

  At the very time that the vast majority of Italians from the sugar belt in north-east Queensland were being interned, ironically now in greater numbers than had been the case at the outbreak of the European war, public policy redirections allowed those who were not Nazis, Fascists or of Japanese origin to be considered for work release under stringent restrictions and curfews. In early 1942, the Civil Alien Corps was established as a section of the Allied Works Council. Under this arrangement, Italians from strategically sensitive areas like the mining districts of Kalgoorlie and the sugar belt of Queensland were not permitted to return to work in those regions, but were allocated work elsewhere.