Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  A former nurse, Mary Ryan, a friend of Chifley’s, was appointed to the Housing Commission in 1943, and slaved for two years allocating and improving housing. She knew whereof she spoke. Her own home in Portland, New South Wales, lacked electrical appliances, had a coal-fired stove and no internal water. Throughout the Depression, her husband had been an unemployed billiard-marker. Her vision was to improve housing and other benefits so that women who—due to social or biological pressures—had to choose the home would live there in some dignity.

  The truth is that both women, though their struggle was noble, did not acknowledge in the majority of women any hunger for a career outside the house. Both these women were criticised by women’s organisations as being members of the ‘women’s place is in the home’ camp.

  But Ryan’s influence, like Best’s, was substantial, and could be argued as being at least a stage along the way to an imagined enlargement of women’s lives. Ryan was assertive in other ways as well. Though a practising Catholic, she was an early critic of conservative Catholicism and priestly bullying, even though her second son entered the priesthood.

  AUSTRALIA WILL BE THERE?

  In July 1944, MacArthur blithely told Blamey that he intended that an Australian division should be used in a landing at Leyte in the Philippines and in another one at Lingayen Gulf. They would each fight in an American corps. This was a problem Blamey’s World War II commanders had experienced with the British in World War I—the question of independence. Blamey wrote to MacArthur, ‘There is no adequate reason why the Australian corps should not be employed [in the Philippines] as a corps under its own commander.’

  But MacArthur’s plans for Australians seemed vague, and the government began to worry that their place in post-war negotiations would be undermined if they did not continue to assault the enemy. Curtin had said in 1943 that Australia’s ‘military effort should be on a scale to guarantee her an effective voice in the peace settlement’. Australian shipyards meritoriously turned out a huge number of destroyers, frigates and corvettes, and on top of that the provision of labour for the Americans was one of the major factors which meant that Australia was the only Allied country to end the war with a credit balance in its Lend Lease account, the system by which the United States supplied military materials to its allies. As well as specifically Australian RAF units, there were plenty of Australians flying in Bomber Command, in squadrons throughout the Pacific and even on aircraft carriers associated with American fleets. Surely that counted for something.

  On St Patrick’s Day 1944, MacArthur had been in Australia for two years and Curtin hosted a dinner at the Lodge to celebrate the fact. After the dinner, MacArthur, Curtin and Sir Frederick Shedden met privately, and MacArthur told Curtin that the invasion on the Philippines would be spearheaded by three Australian infantry divisions and one of American paratroopers. But just nine days before, General Sutherland, MacArthur’s aide, had presented the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a proposed order of battle for the Leyte operation. No Australian unit was mentioned. General Berryman, Blamey’s Chief of Staff, wrote that it was obvious ‘that General MacArthur hopes to get into the war against Japan proper and leave us over 250,000 Nips to look after . . . a secondary role’.

  Curtin knew that to be heard he must take up the persistent invitations from Roosevelt and Churchill and visit them. As ever, his health was not good. Earlier in the year he had been unwell and recuperating in Cottesloe. He received birthday greetings on 8 January, in which we can see others’ awareness both of his exertions and of his underlying and chronic illness. A belated telegram from the conservative Lord and Lady Gowrie a few days later read, ‘May your successful achievements as national leader mitigate some of the personal sacrifice which we know only too well is involved. All good luck, salutations and long life.’ The personal sacrifices were shaping up to kill him within fifteen months. MacArthur, prey neither to doubt nor pain, sent a similar birthday telegram: ‘It is a day for which all Australians should rejoice and give thanks. From your American comrades there is a heartfelt desire to tell you of their admiration, their confidence and their affections. I personally pray that God’s blessing may continue to surround you and your great and imperishable country.’

  And in the same spirit as Curtin harboured, beyond the anguish and the aching, Dame Mary Gilmore sent him a potential anthem for Australia.

  Strong be thy walls, and mighty be thy gates,

  Deep be thy loves, and terrible thy hates!

  Where challenge threats, and sounds the battle cry,

  Where onset thrusts, and runs the conflict high,

  No alien foot shall tread the sacred sand,

  Ours, in thy Totem, oh Churinga-Land!

  Going to the United States and Britain was not advisable in medical terms, but Curtin believed he must. On 24 March, all the senators and members gathered in the parliamentary dining room to wish him well, Menzies making a warm speech, Billy Hughes swinging his glass of ginger beer back and forth to the tune of ‘Why Was He Born So Beautiful?’

  In early April, Blamey, Shedden, Don Rodgers the press secretary, Curtin and wife Elsie joined the Lurline, a troopship full of American troops being transferred to the American west coast and to other duties. Curtin had asked Elsie to travel with him for emotional support and to sustain him. On 31 March, just before Curtin’s departure, his friend Maurice Blackburn, twice expelled from the Labor Party and opponent of conscription, died in Melbourne. It was Blackburn’s condemnations of Curtin’s conscription policies that had hurt Curtin far more than did the lashing he received in the House from Ward and Calwell.

  Above all, though, Curtin faced continual obstruction from unions. These organisations had been founded after great struggles against the misuse of miners and wharf labourers during the Depression and earlier. Now, maintaining and displaying their power over employers remained a stronger and more enduring matter than were the supposed urgencies of the war. Since 1942, Curtin had been subject to such shocks as when it turned out that the Australian garrison at Milne Bay had no protective clothing because a wharf strike at Townsville had prevented it being loaded in time. The Americans in particular shook their heads over Australian industrial affairs and union slackness. They became enraged when the radar station at Green Island near Cairns was unable to go on air when sixteen US Vultee Vengeance bombers became lost returning from a raid on Rabaul. In the emergency, an Australian, Sergeant H.T. Tolhurst, had opened a box marked ‘radio valves’ to replace the dead ones in its system. He found they were gone, all pilfered. ‘It was possible that we could have guided those doomed aircraft back . . . All the personnel keenly felt the loss of those . . . young lives. Our feelings were not helped by the scorn of the US Air Force personnel.’

  The government took over coal production in February 1944, in part as a means of reducing conflicts. (In his extremes of feeling Curtin described some coal-strike leaders as being gainfully employed otherwise as dog trainers, billiard-room owners, taxi drivers and SP bookies.) But waterside struggles continued. Curtin told one group of striking waterside workers, ‘I am fed up. I can’t satisfy you. I grant you conditions you have been demanding over the years . . . I can’t satisfy you. What will satisfy you? There’s a war on.’

  During the trip to Washington in 1944, Elsie was sick on board the troopship—a reaction to a smallpox injection—and Curtin nursed her. This journey marked a decline in Blamey’s influence as chief military advisor. Previously Curtin had dealt with Blamey only on a professional basis but they were now thrown together socially. Curtin disapproved of Blamey’s raucous parties on board the supposedly ‘dry’ ship, while Shedden commented about him, ‘though good as a commander-in-chief, he is not suitable as a member of a Prime Minister’s party’. Blamey’s arrival in Washington was delayed by his insistence on travelling by train (Curtin was uneasy about flying too, and no journey was easy for him).

  In Washington at last, Curtin was feted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Elsie was en
tertained by Eleanor Roosevelt, then Curtin flew down and visited President Roosevelt in South Carolina, where FDR went for his health (and to spend time with his mistress, Lucy Mercer Rutherford). The president complimented Australia and said it was pulling its weight. Earlier, Roosevelt had suggested they spend time at the White House discussing Australia’s security and role in the Pacific, but then he was briefed about an Anzac Conference held in Canberra between the Australians and New Zealanders in which both countries resolved that the sovereignty of Pacific nations (over such areas as New Guinea) should not be changed without their agreement. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, urged Roosevelt to tell Curtin—whom he said was more reasonable than Foreign Minister Evatt—that the United States was affronted by the Anzac Conference and its implications that America could not quite be trusted. Curtin made peace and returned to the White House, where he had further talks with officials, but then fell ill with neuritis and high blood pressure. He next needed to get to his meeting with Churchill and other dominion prime ministers in London on 1 May. He left Elsie in Washington and with his party caught a flying boat. It flew them to Bermuda and then Ireland, where he took a Dakota to London.

  In Britain, Curtin avoided cosy meetings with the British Labour Party, believing his main task was to make peace with Churchill, which he tried to do at events at Downing Street, Buckingham Palace and elsewhere. He proposed a reduction in what was now an Australian army of nearly half a million, to free men for the production of food and other goods, and Churchill agreed it was a good idea.

  Perhaps unexpectedly, Curtin proposed greater imperial cooperation. His motives at the time were much surmised at. Did he really dream of real and renewed defence connections between the United Kingdom and Australia instead of the sham ones of 1941–42? It was summery in London and no bombs fell while he was there. With Blamey in tow he proposed an invasion of the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) and Malaya involving the AIF divisions and British troops. Would MacArthur go along with these ideas? In any case, Curtin’s journey bespoke uncertainty about Australia in an Empire under challenge and in a renewing world. Indeed, he was at the Ritz Carlton in New York on his way home when the D-Day invasion fleets left southern England for Normandy.

  Back from London, Blamey grew even more enamoured of a separate British–Australian offensive into the Netherlands East Indies, an offensive he hoped to command. He therefore directed much of his planning staff ’s work into preparations for the new British command. He also told MacArthur that the assault divisions he intended to use in Java—but which MacArthur wanted to take over from his own men in New Guinea, Bougainville and elsewhere—would not be ready for some time. MacArthur, who wished to have his divisions freed from New Guinea to invade the Philippines, was angry and had his pretext to approach Curtin. Blamey, he said, was plotting to change the present command arrangements in the South-West Pacific area. And if Australian assault divisions would not be ready in time, MacArthur added, then they could not be used in the invasion of the Philippines.

  Curtin pleaded with MacArthur to make one last attempt to include the Australians in the Philippine campaign, and in due course MacArthur produced a plan, but one highly unacceptable to Blamey. It involved splitting the 1st Australian Corps and equipping the Australian divisions with American arms and equipment. The Blamey idea was never realised. It appeared that he miscalculated severely in pressing for the use of British forces, because at the Allied conference in Quebec in September 1944 it was decided that the British contribution to the Pacific would be the British Pacific Fleet of the Royal Navy, not troops.

  And the complete takeover of the New Guinea, Rabaul and Bougainville fronts by Australia occurred as MacArthur had planned. There were two divisions of Americans at Aitape in New Guinea, two on New Britain, and two at Torokina on Bougainville, each with a small defensive perimeter. On 18 October 1944, the Australians took these over; Blamey’s instructions to General Sturdee, Chief of the General Staff, required that 1st Army should destroy enemy resistance without committing major forces.

  There were three main concentrations of Japanese left by October 1944—the remnants of three divisions on the north coast of New Guinea, thirty-five thousand strong, concentrated in particular at Wewak and led by General Hatazo Adachi, who would survive the war but then be tried and commit suicide with a paring knife. By now Adachi’s losses made those of Horii seem small—by the end, 110,000 of his men would have died. There were also thirty thousand enemy soldiers on Bougainville in addition to twenty thousand Japanese naval personnel; and at Rabaul on New Britain, Japan’s 8th Area Army consisted of more than ninety thousand soldiers, sailors and marines.

  The 6th Australian Division was sent to Aitape to face the remnants of Adachi’s men at Wewak, while militia divisions were deployed elsewhere in New Guinea and on Bougainville. Some call this the ‘backyard war’, but Adachi had been ordered to hold the Americans by any means. There, two Australian divisions remained on the Atherton Tablelands, and MacArthur wanted them for amphibious landings in Borneo and Java.

  These ‘backyard’ battles were disproportionate in casualties. Wewak was captured after the 6th Division relieved the Americans at Aitape and advanced. Ten thousand Japanese were killed in its defence, and by war’s end there were only 13,500 Japanese troops left in New Guinea. By contrast, the Australians had suffered the deaths of 442 men and a little over a thousand wounded. For these young men and their families these figures were a disaster, but on the Japanese side, a crisis in supply and military conviction meant that these men, far from home yet still responsible for holding the line, had lost all expectation of success and gained an expectation of unavoidable death.

  On their approach to Japan and in the Philippines, the Americans had to deploy massively and fight hard, but their ultimate death casualties, though fourteen thousand, would be less than 5 per cent of those suffered by the Japanese in the same conflicts. The 5th Australian Division (earlier divisional numbering methods having been abandoned now that the military forces were, in real terms, merged) took over in Jacquinot Bay on the south coast of New Britain, and it fanned out to exclude the Japanese from all of the island except the Gazelle Peninsula, the extreme eastern end of the island on which the fortress of Rabaul stood. Here the Australians were able to hold a line, one division against five. Air cover and total control of the waters around Rabaul helped the equation. Rabaul became in effect a vast POW camp. The 5th Division would lose fifty-three men killed and 150 wounded in the campaign. That obscene term ‘light casualties’ flickers at the lip; if you are one of them, nothing is ‘light’.

  In early 1945, the 3rd Australian Division began a campaign to clear Bougainville of the Japanese. Here the total Australian casualties were over two thousand, but an extraordinary 23,500 Japanese surrendered, an indication that in the last months of the war, surrender no longer carried quite the burden of guilt and dishonour it had.

  No Australian achievement in Bougainville or elsewhere appeared in the American press—it was filtered out by MacArthur’s publicity screen. The Australians waited another five months before they received their orders for the Borneo campaign.

  In mid-November 1945, Blamey would be pushed aside as the government’s chief military advisor, such was the depth of feeling he had aroused in Labor ranks, and Vernon Sturdee replaced him. Shedden wanted to establish the primacy of the Department of Defence and Blamey had intruded on that ambition.

  What to make of Blamey? For some he was a narcissist general pursuing his own interests at every turn, and thus a reflection of MacArthur. To others he was Australia’s wisest and most gifted general in terms of administration and politics. Like Monash, his chief in the past, he certainly fought strenuously to maintain Australian independence in military matters. He is said to have worried about the welfare of his troops, even if so many of them and the public didn’t believe it.

  THE LAST CAMPAIGN

  The Japanese had invaded Borneo in 1941, and before the close
of January 1942 they had reached the south coast and taken the Dutch oilfields of Tarakan and Balikpapan.

  In 1945, the task of retaking from the Japanese the former British Borneo territories of Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo (Sabah) was assigned to the Australian military forces. Borneo did not really figure high on MacArthur’s plans. He meant to commit no US troops there. He had the Philippines to attend to. And in any case, the American navy was cutting off Japanese sea lanes between the home islands and the bases in the Pacific from which Borneo’s oil could be shipped. Over past months Allied bombing raids had been continually carried out on oilfields and other strategic areas of Borneo from Australia, and that could have been continued. Many senior Australian staff and field commanders had doubts about the need for and wisdom of the operation.

  But other reasons moved MacArthur too. He certainly did not wish to share Philippine glory with the Australians. He had brokered a deal with the Dutch government in exile that to facilitate his reconquest of the Philippines he would have ‘complete authority in the East Indies during any military operation’; in return, he promised to restore Dutch authority over their colonies as rapidly as possible after recapture. Dutch imperialism, it seemed, could help justify and balance American. It was for that reason that retaking Borneo became part of MacArthur’s plans. The seizure of Borneo would also offer bases from which to launch an offensive against Java. And the Borneo oilfields would be able to be used by the Allies.

  To prepare for the invasion in May 1945, members of the Australian Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD) were dropped off ashore in Sarawak and at Labuk Bay in North Borneo. Their job was to gather intelligence, survey the terrain and organise local resistance.