Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Here was a miserable place for the 14th Battalion’s years of warriorhood to end, but it would be a grave to nearly three hundred of the attacking force, which was ordered forward at dusk on 29 November. The last three kilometres to their starting point lay through a chest-deep sago swamp, crossing which they had to hold their rifles above their heads. The instant the first soldier moved out of the swamp into the beach area he was shot down. Without having been given the time for a proper reconnaissance, the Australians were being thrown away.

  The Australians withdrew at 11.30 p.m., after much carnage. The next day the mission was bombed to prepare it for assault. Again there had been no proper reconnaissance and no chance to build up a coordinated plan of attack. The attack nonetheless went forward at 9.30 that morning. Twelve fighter planes dropped bombs on the Gona installations, and three heavy fighters called Havocs machine-gunned the beach area. The air attack did not cause as much damage as the Australians, moving forward, expected it to have. The attack by land predictably failed, and yet another one was hurriedly planned.

  Some of the Japanese gun pits they had tried to capture or, as the term has it, ‘reduce’, had been lined with life preservers to absorb bullets. Each pit contained roughly seven men, including at least one machine-gunner. They were in shadow and foliage and the Australians could barely see them. When a 14th man named Mokka Tracy was killed by a sniper, Bren gunners then shot the sniper out of his tree. But many of the slits through which the Japanese machine guns were fired were too small for a grenade to be pushed through.

  Harry Saunders was killed in that morning attack by a bullet through the head. A further attempt was made that afternoon. The next day, patrols began to locate the Japanese positions. A blasting of the gun posts with rifle brigades followed, and a coordinated attack on snipers in the trees. Australian units circled around the beachside and staged a bayonet attack. The Australians now held a kilometre of beach within the Buna–Gona area. But it would take time, and much pain, before the central Japanese fortifications fell.

  When bombs often had little effect on the strangely constructed and well camouflaged Japanese entrenchments, Allied ships brought in a few tracked Australian Bren gun carriers, light vehicles indeed, of which the Bren gun was the armament. Not only did they bog, and ‘belly’ on logs, but around one such vehicle the Japanese set alight the kunai grass and the crew was burned to death trying to escape. Many of the US Stuart tank crews advancing on Buna suffered in the same way.

  To deal with bunkers, the Diggers used an explosive device improvised from a hand grenade secured to a bully beef tin full of high explosive. By mid-December the Japanese blockhouse had been stormed. Defenders and attackers were cut to remnants of flesh, and young men with jungle fevers in their blood fought each other intimately in sweat and slime. The coastal town of Gona on the left flank fell to the Australians. The Australian 18th Brigade was sent to help the 32nd Division capture Buna. In total, there were nearly three thousand Allied soldiers killed and wounded in these attacks, a thousand of them Australians.

  Sanananda held out in the middle. General George C. Kenney of the US Army Air Forces had told MacArthur that there were only a thousand of the enemy there. In fact, Australian and American forces killed more than fifteen hundred, and it is estimated that twelve hundred sick and wounded were taken off by sea at night, while more than a thousand escaped to the west of Gona. Six hundred Australians and three hundred Americans lost their lives taking Sanananda.

  Just under four thousand Australian and American soldiers died in these terrible confrontations, seizing the north coast. In the fighting between Japanese and US forces on Guadalcanal in 1942–43, the casualties were lower—despite impressions to the contrary—than in these three savage coastal battles. But before the battle was over, MacArthur claimed it had been won (he needed an end-of-year announcement) with only some skirmishing left to attend to. Buna was the first great US army victory of the Pacific War, but he did not mention the name of his field commander, US General Eichelberger.

  To the west along the coast, the Japanese still held Lae and Nadzab, at the base of the broad peninsula named the Huon, and Salamaua and Finschhafen (a name left over from the days Germany governed the area) near its tip. Further west still were the coastal towns and ports of Madang, Wewak and Aitape—all of them on the agenda of the Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Their capture would allow Kenney’s bombers and the Australian air force squadrons to move further to the west and closer and closer to certain enemy targets.

  Lae is on the southern base of the Huon Peninsula, Salamaua is down the coast eastwards, and both are reached by the village and airstrips of Wau, inland in the kunai grass plains. The Japanese broke out of Salamaua and fought to the edges of the Australian garrison at Wau before being defeated. As battles, the capture of Lae and the attack on Salamaua were massively removed from the undersupplied and primal struggle on the Kokoda Trail. The military might describe them as a brilliant combination of sea, air and land resources. But they were still bitter affairs. The campaign began in March 1943 and ended a year later with Australian forces advancing along the coast to Madang. Blamey rotated commanders and formations as troops became exhausted from battle, terrain and sickness. But he kept attacking with five divisions, three of whom were militia, trained on the Atherton Tablelands.

  Early in 1943, Damien Parer flew back to Port Moresby while there was a lull in the land fighting. The Japanese attack from Salamaua had been defeated on the fringe of the Wau airstrip, and the Australians were being reinforced there for the final offensive against Salamaua.

  In Port Moresby, Parer attached himself to 30 Squadron RAAF, flying Beaufighters from Port Moresby. The casualty level amongst Beaufighters was high, but that did not give him pause. The Beaufighters were attacking Japanese airstrips and installations from a low level on the far side of New Guinea, and that was filmic, but to get to them they needed to climb over the Owen Stanleys, and there was oxygen enough only for the pilot and the observer.

  Parer stood behind Torchy Uren, the pilot who had volunteered to take him, with his legs braced on either side of the four-feet-by-two-feet (120 by 60 centimetres) well of the plane, his hands gripping the front spar above the pilot’s head; when he wanted to film he leaned with his elbows on the spar, steadying his camera on Uren’s head, and shot through the windshield. Uren thought him odd, doing things he didn’t have to do, and on top of that, passing out for lack of oxygen in the well of the plane as they cleared the mountains. As they strafed a Japanese-held village near Finschhafen, Parer started shooting film. He didn’t realise that when Uren pulled out of the dive, gravity would make the camera weigh five times as much as usual. Parer overbalanced and fell into the well. They repeated the strafing run and the same thing happened.

  Intelligence reported that on 28 February 1943, a large Japanese convoy prepared to sail from Rabaul, eight transports carrying nearly ten thousand reinforcements for Lae and Salamaua, accompanied by eight destroyers and a fighter screen of Zeros. When it was within range of the Beaufighters—an event for which Parer waited for some days with the same impatience as the air crews—a report came through that the convoy was within range. ‘I had a funny feeling,’ Parer said. ‘Today it would be all or nothing. Either the greatest scoop in newsreel history, or Torchy . . . and I would be in the drink.’

  Parer passed out again over the Owen Stanleys and revived by the time the Beaufighters reached their rendezvous point off Cape Ward Hunt. They found themselves circling above a squadron of US attack bombers, and above them were Mitchells, and above that, Flying Fortresses; last of all, on top, was the fighter cover. ‘It was the greatest show I’d ever seen.’

  When the destroyers opened fire on the Allied aircraft and the Zeros descended, there was chaos. Uren swung away from the destroyers to take on the transports, whose decks were crammed with men. Their plane was at mast level for Uren’s first strafing run. Parer filmed Uren’s tracer as it hit the ships. There were Ja
panese soldiers crouching in a lifeboat on one of the ships’ davits, and Parer the sensitive Catholic and Labor man cried, ‘Poor bastards, you poor bastards!’ as the Japanese on the decks and in the water were reaped by machine guns.

  Uren pulled up into the sky, levelled off and made two more runs, both filmed by Parer. Nearby, a Zero shot down an American Flying Fortress. Uren dived down yet again on a burning transport. But Parer did not get the footage he wanted and began to swear and reload. ‘Can you go in over those two burning ships again? I missed ’em.’ And Uren did it, with a flight of Zeros above him. By now most of the ships were sinking or blazing. In this confrontation, which would become known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, the 51st Japanese Division lost almost three thousand men and most of its experienced officers.

  The next morning, Parer flew over the mountains again in a Boston bomber looking for a Japanese destroyer but it was already sunk by the time the bomber got there. That day, Uren’s aircraft received a Japanese machine-gun round just behind the pilot’s seat where Parer’s head would have been. The next day Parer made two more Beaufighter flights, with the inevitable altitude unconsciousness. He stayed on in the 30 Squadron lines to round out his film. It, too, was considered a documentary masterpiece by everyone except Parer.

  Now Parer joined the Australian assault on Salamaua, and he was delighted to tell Chester Wilmot, ‘I was able to go up with the forward boys of the infantry. Attack is easier for the cameraman, and while the valleys are heavily jungled, there was only light timber on the ridges. I had room to operate . . . [it was] the best film material I’ve come across.’ From June to August 1943, he lived with the troops. Once he lumped shells forward to a three-inch mortar that had run out of ammunition. He also worked as a stretcher-bearer when a commando was shot through the chest and both arms. He handed his camera to the man next to him and joined three others who crawled out under fire to drag the wounded man out of danger. When a Japanese soldier charged a foxhole he was in Parer began frantically focusing on the man, yelling, ‘Don’t shoot the bastard yet!’ The Australian soldier actually held his fire and allowed Parer to film the lethal shot.

  This footage would all go into his film Assault on Salamaua. For the attack on Timbered Knoll, Parer filmed planning and the passing of orders down from the brigade to section leaders. He filmed the mortars and machine guns giving covering fire, then he accompanied a raid led by Lieutenant John Lewin up a narrow steep ridge to the top of the knoll, filming Lewin from a metre away. He was crouched close to Private H.W. Robins when Robins was wounded and two of the commandos applied field dressings and dragged him to cover. His footage follows Private W.H. Dawson dashing towards the Japanese weapon pits, hurling grenades and firing.

  Parer was beside Sergeant Andrew ‘Bonny’ Muir when Muir was killed. And he was with the section that charged the top of Timbered Knoll, where he filmed the dead Japanese in their foxholes. He also filmed the drained faces of the attackers afterwards, the digging of graves, the burials of Sergeant Muir, Corporal Donald Buckingham and Corporal Percival Hooks while men stood with their heads bare in the rain.

  After a stint with commandos on Timor, in August 1943 Parer received an invitation from Paramount News in New York offering him roughly eight times his Australian salary. He resigned from the Department of Information and accepted Paramount’s offer. He was not happy thereafter. He covered the American invasions of Cape Gloucester on New Britain, the Admiralty Islands and Guam. He became a legendary figure to the marines on Guam, following their tanks in their advance from the beach head, filming the infantry from the front as he had in North Africa.

  Other combat cameramen were killed yet he astonishingly remained. Parer’s method with the Americans was to follow close behind the tanks and thus film the most dramatic moments of the marine infantry’s charge almost as if he were in the enemy foxholes. Though he continued to film in this perilous way, he felt that by accepting Paramount’s offer he had sold out.

  Back in Australia from the Admiralties, he met up again with Elizabeth Cotter, a twenty-two-year-old clerk from Sydney whom he had known for eight years, and became engaged to her; the following Thursday, they married. They had a film honeymoon, in that Parer saw every motion picture he could. Elizabeth Parer would later say, ‘I would give the whole of my life for another five minutes with Damien.’

  On 17 September 1944, he was covering the landing of the Americans on Peleliu Island, Palau. A company attack on a set of Japanese bunkers had fallen off and the tanks were called in. Parer followed the left tank into the attack, filming the marines from the front again. He was on a mound of coral behind the tank, filming the advancing marines, when a Japanese machine gun concealed nearby opened up. He was shot in the chest, stomach and thighs and seemed to die at once. The tank wiped out the nest and the marines came on Parer’s body and buried him that morning. In ignorance, someone opened his camera and exposed the film.

  Parer was thirty-two years old.

  With regard to the campaigns at Wewak and on Bougainville during late 1944 and 1945, Blamey has been criticised for employing an offensive policy when, it was agreed, it might have been better to protect the Allied bases by patrolling and waiting for the war to finish. Blamey declared to the Advisory War Council in 1944 that the troops’ morale and health would deteriorate if they were not involved in an offensive. If he eliminated the Japanese divisions, he said, the army could be reduced from six to three divisions, one of which could be made available to MacArthur. He also argued that Australia had a duty to liberate the natives from Japanese domination.

  MacArthur now had three American divisions under his command, but only two regimental combat teams were battle ready. The snappily uniformed and worldly Yanks (a term applied to them by Australians, in ignorance of the basic facts of the American Civil War, whether they came from Maine or Mississippi) were visible in every urban venue in Australia, as long as they were white. Occasionally a coloured GI would make an appearance in a city pub or café and amaze, appal and fascinate the citizens of White Australia.

  The 1st Cavalry Division, not yet trained for jungle warfare, arrived in Australia in early 1943. The same was true of the 24th US Infantry Division. MacArthur also had under his command the 1st US Marine Division, which had fought at Guadalcanal and needed to be built up with reinforcements. They would not be ready for battle until the end of 1943. So, if MacArthur wanted Lae and Finschhafen, he would have to depend upon the Australians again.

  The 7th Australian Division was ready again for battle by mid-1943, despite its heavy casualties in 1942. One brigade of the 6th Division was also available after having taken part in the defeat of the Japanese at Milne Bay. The 9th Division was freshly arrived home from the Middle East. Trained on the Atherton Tablelands, the 9th Division troops about to be sent against Lae and Salamaua were, however, of a different order from the eighteen-year-old conscripts who had fought and held on the Kokoda Trail the year before.

  Iven Mackay had the overall command in New Guinea now and estimated the Japanese had eleven thousand men at Wewak, to the west of Madang, six to eight thousand at Madang itself, and five to six thousand in the Lae–Salamaua area. The 5th US Air Force using Mitchell bombers bombed both the Japanese positions and the ships that supplied them, as did the Australian Beaufighters.

  A force of landing craft brought an American combat team into the coast, but they were landed in the wrong place and many of the landing craft were destroyed when, withdrawing through the surf, they broached and were swamped. The combat team was led inland by Australian guides, but it was understandably nervous and fired at sounds in the jungle, inflicting many casualties on itself, including killing eighteen of its men.

  But in the end in August and September 1943 a combined force of Australians and Americans exerted such pressure on Salamaua that Japanese forces were drawn away from Lae to reinforce them. In the meantime, the 7th Division advanced inland against Nadzab, at the base of the Huon Peninsula, and an amphi
bious landing by Major-General Morshead’s 9th Division led to an advance on the Japanese forces in Lae from the west. Four destroyers had shelled the beach to make way for Morshead’s men, and by midday there were over seven thousand troops and more than fifteen hundred tons of stores landed. There was no Japanese opposition and the Australians formed up and moved towards Nadzab.

  On 4 September, 302 fighter, bomber and transport planes took off from airfields in Moresby and elsewhere to carry paratroopers of the American 503rd Parachute Regiment to the Nadzab airstrip, which had not previously been able to sustain a landing by so many planes. Another three carried 25-pounder field guns and their Australian and American crews, all of whom were about to make their first parachute jump. General MacArthur travelled in one of the transport planes, covered by fighters and B17s. On 16 September, patrols from the 7th Division entered the abandoned town of Lae and drove through to the seashore. Salamaua fell shortly afterwards. The 7th Division had suffered thirty-eight men killed and 104 wounded. The 9th Division lost seventy-seven men killed, and seventy-three were missing (a troubling statistic given that neither side was showing much mercy), while four hundred men were wounded. More than six thousand Japanese had escaped from the area to rejoin forces on the north coast of the Peninsula around Finschhafen.