Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  These six army and seven civilian nurses, together with a plantation owner’s wife, four Methodist women missionaries and an American woman named Etta Jones, who had been captured in the Alaskan Aleutians, witnessed the massacre of orderlies and the wounded, and had had to appeal to a German bishop in Rabaul to save them from night-time molestation by guards. They survived the appalling journey to Japan, where they were first imprisoned in the boarded-up Yokahama Yacht Club sewing bags to be carried by Japanese soldiers. Despite hunger and a nearby cemetery where Japanese dead putrefied in ill-dug graves, and the ferocious winter of 1943–44, the coldest in decades, the nurses and their companions would survive.

  Not so later voyagers. The two Australian priests at the mission would be sent off later, with the Australian garrison, the men of the 22nd Battalion, on board the 7000-ton prison ship Montevideo Maru, ultimately torpedoed on 1 July 1942 by an American submarine and aboard which prisoners locked below suffered unutterable torments as the ship sank.

  The captured young surgeon, Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, former rugby international, would mention in his diary that by Anzac Day 1942 there was a Japanese edict against buying goods outside Changi. Food was scant, but not as scant as it would become later. And morale was helped by the poignant rumours du jour: that Sweden had joined the Allies, and that Timor had been captured by the Australians and Americans. For now there was still a structure to events—the day before, Captain Lancaster had given a lecture on ‘The Tank in Modern War’, and Major Morris on Morse code.

  BRING THEM HOME

  In February 1942, as Curtin’s symptoms improved in St Vincent’s Hospital, he was still plagued by concern for the two Australian divisions, and not only for their safety, but also for the question of which theatre of war Churchill and Roosevelt would try to bluster him into sending them to. On the night of 20 February, after leaving hospital that morning, he sent a cable to Churchill—‘the biggest and most important decision I have had to make since Japan entered the war’, he later told Cabinet—further demanding an even more urgent return to Australia of the two divisions for fear of their being consumed in lost causes such as the fighting in Burma or in Java. His cable was not responded to. In fact, Earle Page told Churchill that he would try to change Curtin’s mind.

  Churchill cabled Roosevelt on 5 March that it was ‘not easy to assign limits to the Japanese aggression. All can be retrieved in 1943 and 1944, but meanwhile there are very hard forfeits to pay’. The question was, was Australia to be one of those forfeits? The discussion on the Australian divisions thus rolled on and on.

  So the 6th and 7th divisions were scattered across the Indian Ocean in poorly protected convoys between Suez and Fremantle while the 9th remained in Palestine, and the 8th was in prison in Malaya and Singapore. The Armoured Division of the AIF was training with their less than a dozen tanks, and despite Washington accepting the strategic responsibility for Australia’s defence, the first US division had still not arrived.

  Page’s arguments on Churchill’s behalf were not as slavish to the British agenda as they first appeared to be. He certainly did not consider himself Churchill’s errand boy. The good surgeon of Grafton and Australian Minister in London, Page had been sent to the United Kingdom by Menzies, on the usual grounds of keeping rivals or enemies offshore. On coming to power, Curtin had not sacked him. Nor had Curtin dispensed with former prime minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner who would ultimately be given an uninfluential place on the British War Cabinet. Bruce himself did not like the high-handedness with which the British government made unilateral decisions. Though despite the emergency of 1942 the Australian government continued to send young flyers to be trained in Canada for Bomber Command operations from Britain, both Page and Bruce felt they must apologise for the Curtin government’s demands. Bruce argued that Anglo–American assistance would be increased by Australia adopting a compliant attitude since there was ‘a vast difference between the help given because of necessity and that afforded out of gratitude and good feeling’. And yet there was little gratitude and good feeling from London’s direction towards Australia. All this was unfortunate, but again it must be noted that Bruce and Page too lived in Britain, and had survived the seventy-one catastrophic air raids on London between late 1940 and mid-1941; they were also aware of the scale of British defeats thus far, and of the perilous year to come when in the northern spring Hitler would unleash a further assault on Russia. These matters weighed hugely on those in Westminster. South-west priorities weighed hugely on Curtin.

  It was not as if Page was immune from the stress Curtin himself felt. This was partly from the task of mediating between an acerbic and aggrieved Churchill and a determined Curtin, and straining from within the European milieu to see where Australia’s interests outweighed those of Empire. He would write to Curtin in April, ‘I went through since January the worst period of acute mental distress of my whole life.’ A severe attack of pneumonia would so undermine his health that he would return to Australia in June.

  In any case, in early 1942, Churchill convinced Page that if Burma was lost, China might pull out of the war against the Japanese for lack of supplies. If the two Australian divisions were used to strengthen Burma, it would not only help save India to the west and China to the east, but also show the Americans that Australia was willing to do its part, and so cause America and Britain to do their part for Australia in turn.

  On the night of Saturday, 21 February, Curtin slept soundly, but woke up to be presented with cables from Churchill and Roosevelt arguing that the Australians must go to Burma. Indeed, Churchill persisted with the idea of sending the Australians to Rangoon, the capital, even though the Japanese were only 64 kilometres from the city, and the port facilities needed to unload the two Australian divisions had been blown to scrap iron by the Japanese air force, and all wharf labourers had fled.

  Curtin lacked training in military strategy but was willing to be advised by his own chiefs of staff, all of whom said, ‘Bring the boys home!’ This advice echoed his instincts. General Vernon Sturdee, Chief of General Staff, who had never believed in the Singapore solution in the first place, said he would resign if the government ignored this advice. Curtin left the Lodge at night, often on his own, and wandered the hills, worried about the convoys of men on their way home. The first Australian formations to leave the Middle East at this time had begun to do so on 30 January, and the last was loaded on 12 March. They were not what experts call ‘technically stowed’—men and equipment became separated from each other during the voyage, and so it became strongly believed by the Australians that men and equipment could only be reassembled in Australia, not on some desperate last-stand front in Asia. By the middle of February, 17,800 men of the 6th and 7th divisions were in the port of Bombay and were re-embarked into smaller ships to avoid sending larger, vulnerable liners into the danger zone.

  Lieutenant-General Sir John Lavarack, Commander of the 1st Australian Corps, had rushed from the Middle East to Java and was waiting for the troops to arrive there, but Allied forces in Sumatra were subjected to the same total dominance of the air and mobility on the ground of the Japanese forces and a Java landing was imminent.

  The 3400 Australian veterans of the 7th Division that had landed on Java by 19 February faced capture. The Australian government became aware of this potential entrapment only in late February or early March, and it made Curtin more insistent that all the AIF should be returned to Australia and the men in Java evacuated if possible, even if it was already too late. General Archie Wavell’s deputy, General Henry Pownall, blasted the Australians for their ‘damnable attitude’ in demanding a withdrawal of their recently landed troops from the Netherlands East Indies. He wrote that they had been ‘shown up in their true colours. Not so much the troops and commanders themselves . . . as their government, actuated presumably by a mixture of public opinion in Australia and common funk. Winston had little enough use for them before, especially after the
y demanded to be relieved at Tobruk, to everyone’s great inconvenience. He’ll be madder still now.’ Pownall described Australians as ‘the most egotistical, conceited people imaginable . . . so damn well pleased with themselves all the time and so highly critical of everyone else’.

  Already, as things got worse in February, Lavarack had doubted that in their ‘unstowed’ condition the further Australians would be able to maintain their lines in Sumatra and Java and feared that they would suffer unaffordable casualties as well. There was a small benefit from the coming Java disaster. When it came, the Japanese landed on both the east and west coasts of Java. A force of some units of the 7th Division men, Blackforce, landed on 19 February and led by Brigadier Arthur Blackburn, a lawyer and Victoria Cross winner from World War I, defended the Tjianten River crossings in Java, near Batavia (Djakata), the capital. When the Dutch on their flanks capitulated as a result of the Dutch signing a surrender in Bandung in West Java on 12 March, the senior British, Australian and American officers were forced to sign a formal surrender. (A number of Dutch flyers escaped and formed ultimately four Dutch squadrons in the RAAF, the first being called 18 (NEI) Squadron.) Blackburn’s three thousand Australians became prisoners of war. Many RAF and RAAF men had gathered at the unhealthy port of Tjilatjap (Cilacap) on the south coast of Java for evacuation, but Japanese bombers sank all the ships in the harbour, and a plan to evacuate Australians by flying boat fell through. On 7 March 1942, RAF Wing Commander J.R. Jeudwine took a ship’s lifeboat with a maximum capacity of twelve, and in piled RAF and RAAF men more than twice that number. They hoped they would reach Australia in sixteen days, but it took them forty-four. There was just enough continuing supply of rainwater to keep everyone alive. For morale’s sake games were played and debates held. On 18 April their lifeboat landed on Fraser Island off north-west Australia, where they were rescued by a flying boat.

  Sixteen Australians were picked up from Merauke, on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea, in a vessel coming from the Netherlands East Indies, and it sailed on to Currumbin in Queensland in four days. Other Australians pooled at Merauke were collected by a navy ship and brought to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait.

  Churchill had assured Curtin when MacArthur arrived that this did not mean that Britain no longer felt any responsibility. ‘We shall do our utmost to divert British troops and British ships rounding the Cape, or already in the Indian Ocean, to your succour, albeit at the expense of India and the Middle East.’ Curtin had heard that tune before. It proposed what could be called the ‘indirect policy’—of Australia helping Britain out in North Africa and being rewarded in turn with immediate help should Singapore fall—and was a plan that had failed catastrophically. Amidst his fears, his struggles with morbidity of soul, manifold doubt and chronic ill health, Curtin was determined not to fall for it all again. When Roosevelt offered an untrained division of American troops to allow the Australians to go to Burma, Curtin sent a polite refusal. In the meantime, Churchill had already, on his own assumed authority, told the Australian convoy to veer towards Burma to defend ‘the only white man’s territory south of the equator’. In fact, Burma was north of the equator.

  Evatt had drafted an urgent reply to Churchill but when it was time for the public servant Shedden to take it to Curtin for approval, Curtin had wandered off on one of his long walks around Canberra, during which he might visit men as diverse as drovers on Red Hill or the Reverend Hector Harrison. As hours passed, messages were put on the screens of Canberra theatres asking audiences had they seen him. He was in fact on a sanity-enhancing walk around Mount Ainslie, east of Canberra.

  Curtin eventually returned to his office at Parliament House about midnight, and worked on the draft reply. It stated heatedly the conviction he had so firmly reached: to send the troops to Burma, he said, would be to repeat the follies of the Greek and Malaya debacles and bring the troops within range of sea and air attack by the Japanese. Churchill replied that the ships were actually steaming away from Australia and no longer had sufficient fuel to reach home without stopping at Ceylon. That reality would give the Australian government, said Churchill, another three or four days to reconsider its decision. But there would be no reconsideration. Curtin was outraged at Churchill for diverting the convoy in the first place.

  It was at this stage that the commander of the Home Forces, General Iven Mackay, urged on the Australian government what would become known as the ‘Brisbane Line’—that the rest of Australia should be abandoned if necessary and the battle against the Japanese be waged by a concentration of Australian and other troops in the south-east corner of the continent. Just after the Great War, a committee was set up consisting of Generals Monash, Chauvel and Brudenell White to create a plan for the defence of Australia against future enemies—and it was Japan they had in mind. Since Australia had the longest coastline of any nation on earth and so many beaches, it seemed impossible to defend it all, particularly given the sparse population the further north one got. The three generals assumed that the invaders’ main objective would be ‘some compact vulnerable area, the resources of which are necessary to the economic life of Australia’. Thus Mackay, former headmaster of Cranbrook School in Sydney, had merely drawn on a plan devised years before. Hard-hitting Labor minister Eddie Ward would, however, in the 1943 elections, lash the plan as something dreamed up and condoned by Menzies, and made much of the turpitude of abandoning any part of Australia. Queenslanders would take generations to forgive the concept.

  But even if all its forces reached home safely and were concentrated in this south-east sector, Australia had just five divisions in the Brisbane–Adelaide–Melbourne triangle, and their equipment was massively inferior to that of the Japanese, and their aircraft outmoded.

  At a strategy meeting on 15 March 1942, at which the General Staffs of both the Japanese army and the Japanese navy were represented, an invasion of Australia had indeed been proposed. It was acknowledged it would require ten divisions or more. The army was nonetheless keener than the navy. Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, wrote: ‘With even Sydney and Brisbane in my hands, it would have been comparatively simple to subdue Australia . . . although the Japanese general staff felt my supply lines would have been too long, so would the Australian or British lines. We could have been safe there forever.’ Even Admiral Yamamoto, who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor, wanted to establish a substantial naval base on the east coast of Australia. He believed five divisions of troops stationed around the Sydney–Newcastle area would be sufficient.

  But the Japanese naval staff thought their fleet would be too stretched in protecting the lines of communication with a Japanese army in south-east Australia. Instead, a scheme to take Port Moresby and isolate Australia and New Zealand by occupying Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia was adopted. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s priority became an invasion of Port Moresby and the subjugation of New Guinea. Port Moresby could serve as a base from which Japanese planes could intercept the land and sea routes between Australia and the United States. The Allies knew the Japanese plans beforehand since they could crack their codes. But having the forces make use of the knowledge . . . that was the limitation.

  Yamamoto turned his attention to Midway Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean, where he would land seven thousand Japanese soldiers once the combined fleet had destroyed the US aircraft base there. It was in this phase that Yamamoto decided to use diversionary tactics, ranging from the Japanese invasion of the Aleutian island chain in Alaska down to a midget submarine attack on Sydney Harbour, and another on Madagascar.

  Significantly, Curtin agreed now, as the Australian convoys turned their back on Burma and made for Ceylon, that two brigades of the 6th Division, whose ships were behind those of the 7th Division, could stay in Ceylon as a temporary garrison for four to six weeks. This was much better than their going to Burma—indeed, Rangoon would fall to the Japanese on 8 March. But Curtin’s implied conditions were that the 7th Division, the third brigade of the 6th Division
and the remaining fifty thousand Australian troops in the Middle East should all be returned to Australia as soon as possible. The Ceylon concession was a relatively small tribute paid to relentless determination and insistence from Churchill and others, but it does not figure in the popular legend of Curtin. The 6th Division men in Ceylon would be as exposed as their brethren had been in Singapore and in Greece and Crete. They would be without adequate air or naval support, since the Japanese controlled the Indian Ocean too and kept the British Pacific fleet hovering timidly around the east coast of Africa. The two brigades would not in fact arrive back in Australia until August 1942.

  In return for his gesture, Curtin felt he had a clear understanding with Churchill that the 9th Division would be promptly returned to Australia. Churchill would not honour that implied agreement, and the British government had control over the shipping necessary to take the 9th home. From a British point of view, the 9th Division was still needed in North Africa, and would indeed be crucial to the British success at El Alamein later in the year, the battle that ended German hopes of ever taking the Suez Canal.

  This was the time of Curtin’s nervous night rambles. But he did not always sleep at the Lodge. He used a pull-down iron bed in his office and on it barely got two hours’ sleep a night. The populace were partly aware of the strain on him, and were somehow comforted by the nervous energy he clearly expended. He was something like the national worrier, and took some of the burden off them. Gladys Joyce, working as his personal secretary from 1941 onwards, said that each day he would lie on the couch in his office, staring ‘up at the ceiling with his cigarette holder jutting out from between his teeth, smoking . . . and thinking through his problems’.