Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

  Ten Australian doctors died in captivity. One of them was Captain John Oakeshott, another medical officer on whom men depended not only for medical care but also for indefinable comfort. Tragically, Oakeshott was killed after the end of the war, along with another doctor, Captain Dominic Picone, under the supervision of a Sergeant-Major Beppu Yoichi, a man who, like his superiors who authorised the killing, criminally knew the war was already over. These two physicians were victims of the Sandakan death marches—the deadly march of prisoners away from the coast of Borneo into the interior. A number of men at inland Ranau, who had survived the march all the way from Sandakan, were similarly executed in another jungle clearing.

  After the sinking of HMAS Perth by a submarine in early 1942, Lieutenant Samuel Stening became the only naval medical officer in Japanese captivity. In one camp, Oeyama in Japan, he was the sole medical officer; in a second he was brutalised by the guards; and in a third he concluded that the sulfa drugs handed out by the Japanese authorities were causing kidney failure in prisoner patients because of their weakened and malnourished condition. Like Dunlop, Akeroyd and Fagan, he would survive the war, and one can wonder whether the dependence of other people upon these surgeons gave the doctor himself a sense of the necessity to get through the purgatory; indeed, a reason to live. After the war, Stening would become a paediatrician.

  One of the reasons for Dunlop’s deserved repute is that after the war he was one of the first to recognise that the Repatriation Commission had made medical and psychological assessments of POWs too soon after liberation. He spearheaded campaigns to allow them to be assessed for their ongoing health problems, and brought attention to the continuing suffering of ex-prisoners of war.

  The captives of these Japanese camps were put in an inhuman situation, and thus the question arises as to whether Australians and others, impelled by a young man’s natural impulse to survival, sometimes betrayed each other. If so, the burden—as it did for Holocaust survivors—remained for life. Those who made the conditions barbarous were the ones to blame. But, as one Holocaust survivor says, ‘This is the greatest injustice: that those who tried to kill us made us feel guilty.’

  When it comes to Australian POWs, it is a question which, out of tribute to the extremity of what they went through, we almost dare not ask. We Australians have much less problem criticising British or Dutch prisoners—indeed, as an historian says, ‘it’s open season on British or Dutch prisoners’. But a recurrent statement amongst former prisoners is that captivity ‘brought out the best and worst in every man’. One ex-prisoner stated that the men in his camp were little better than criminals, and ‘mateship’ was a myth. In captivity, he said, everyone was out for themselves. But subsequently he said how close everyone was, and that the Australians looked after each other.

  It is all beyond commentators and laymen to know.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the balance

  Military success, political dreams

  THE GREAT DESERT BATTLE

  Many Australian troops, the twenty thousand or more men of the 9th Division, were still in the Middle East, on garrison duty in Syria since the campaign against the Vichy French had ended. There was considerable boredom as fortifications were dug and drills were held, as well as concern about the Pacific War and, amongst married and engaged men, that their women were subject to new levels of temptation. One soldier wrote, ‘Some of those bed warming, noble-hearted chaps still at home are carrying on for us . . . hardly any of the original convoy had been safe from this happening.’

  When Les Watkins, an Australian soldier still in Syria, heard on 24 June 1942 that Tobruk, where he had lived and fought for nine months, cheering the Matilda tanks on, was now in German hands as a result of yet another Rommel offensive, he found it hard to digest. And Japan’s entry into the war had given him and others a sense of being forgotten and in limbo. In January 1942, when the 9th Division was garrisoned in the Syrian town of Latakia on the coast north-west of Damascus, leave was granted and two brothels set aside for specific use by the Australians, Lunar Bar and Maison d’Orée. In Damascus, Australian troops enhanced their reputation as wreckers of bars, particularly if bars restricted the service of spirits to officers. There was a sinister side to this, involving in some cases men on leave taking to town a respirator and steel helmet out of which they could construct a swinging bludgeon.

  A Digger of Italian background, Frank Perversi, who could speak French, was grateful to be connected with a girl by a local man. The girl had seen Frank in passing and was impressed with him. Together they went to a storeroom, locked the door and lay on a large palliasse. ‘Undressed, her light milk coffee body was graceful and quite beautifully proportioned . . . we united as gently and lovingly as if we had known each other for years . . . this is better than cricket.’

  Over the Mediterranean, there were Australians still stranded on Crete who had evaded capture by the Germans but who understood that if they became associated in any way with any girl or any family there, the Cretans concerned would pay a frightful price. At a village where forty Australians were hiding, four hundred German infantry turned up, laid waste to the village, killed thirty Cretans and took sixty prisoners. Yet men who had escaped from prison compounds were hidden by Greek families despite the peril involved. An Australian was one day captured in a hill village, and Reg Saunders, an Aboriginal soldier from the western district of Victoria, an infantryman on the run, watched the affair from a crag above the town. He was amazed to see the Greeks spitting on the German soldiers even though they knew they would be punished for it. After months at large, Saunders spent Christmas Day 1941 in a cave in the White Mountains; his dinner was black olives soaked in oil with a chunk of dry bread. A Greek secret agent ultimately brought Saunders, and his friends George Burgess and Dodger Vincent, down to a beach, where they found seventy-five other escapees waiting. A fishing trawler called Hedgehog picked them up on 7 May 1942 to take them away to Egypt and a set of altered military priorities. Saunders’ brother Harry and his 14th Battalion had returned to Australia four months earlier with the 7th Division. In August 1942, three months after his escape from Crete, Reg too was returned home.

  Expecting to be sent home and then to the jungle, the 9th Division was moved out of the camp in Palestine where they had been retraining. Instead, as was the result of the crisis of June 1942 when Tobruk was captured and 35,000 Allies taken prisoner along the road from Libya to the Egyptian border, the Australians were rushed south to defend Alexandria. Supervising his men digging in outside the city, Major Chas Daintree wrote, ‘After all, even we believed we’d seen the last of the desert, yet here we were once again.’ In the first week of July the Australians were trucked out to stop the Germans at a small railway village named El Alamein roughly halfway between the Nile Delta and the Libyan border. Here Rommel was halted by British, Indian, South African and New Zealand troops. He was disappointed to be held up here, in a narrow front between El Alamein on the coast and the unnegotiable sand trap to the south known as the Qattara Depression. The British commander, General Auchinleck, called it ‘the El Alamein Box’.

  As soon as the Australians had jumped down from their trucks, General Leslie Morshead, commander of the 9th Australian Division, was arguing with the British almost as vigorously as he had before and during his defence of Tobruk. The British staff had devised a plan that infantry divisions be split up into tactical battle groups and the rest sent to the rear as a reserve. This would fragment his division, but Morshead had other reasons to dislike his corps commander, Major-General William Ramsden. For a start, Morshead had superior rank to him, having become a lieutenant-general, but the British High Command had shown its normal reluctance to promote citizen soldiers from the dominions over full-time British soldiers. To them, Morshead seemed a nuisance, complaining not only about other generals but about the quality of British armour and artillery as well. He forced them to give way on the tactical battle groups idea. Thus he could lead the enti
re 9th Division as a coherent unit.

  When the Australians came up into the line in early July, they faced Rommel on the coastal end of the British line, between the Mediterranean and the railway station of El Alamein itself. It was a season of heat and dust in the desert, but having a purpose had cheered them. During that July, the Australians launched themselves on four operations against Rommel, creating great confusion behind the German lines at ridges along the coast. They captured the summits of various tors, lost them, yet consistently defeated German counter-attacks in the terrain around them. The first of these Australian offensives began on 10 July. Morshead’s 24th Brigade was to attack the German lines on a ridge called Ruweisat, about sixteen kilometres south of the coast. In an assault of middling success on 17 July, over one thousand Italian soldiers were captured and around one hundred Germans.

  As well as being remarkable in his willingness to argue with superiors, reminding the overall commander, Auchinleck, on one occasion that their job involved minimising casualties as well as incommoding Rommel, Morshead was also remarkable for going forward and visiting his troops. And his complaints about the British tank support were reiterated as a result of attacks on the night of 26–27 July, when the 28th Battalion of Western Australians, moving out from the north-east against Ruin Ridge, was to work in coordination with British forces attacking from the south. The collaboration was jeopardised by the late start, since Morshead delayed to argue that his men did not have sufficient tanks in support. Then the Australians advanced while, around them, Bren gun carriers and support trucks carrying ammunition and supplies were blown up by the German and Italian gunners. The wireless truck exploded and burned, and Colonel Lew McCarter had no radio contact. The Western Australians captured the ridge but McCarter was able to make contact with headquarters only at dawn. By then German and Italian infantry had surrounded them. ‘We are in trouble,’ he transmitted. ‘We need help—now. Are there any of our tanks helping us?’ In fact there were German tanks all around the ridge. The British tanks had been thwarted by minefields, and on the south of the ridge the British infantry thrust had been decimated. ‘We have got to give in,’ McCarter signalled at ten in the morning, and rose from his weapons pit with his hands up. Sixty-five of his men were dead and 450, wounded and unwounded, were captured. The battles of July cost the 9th Division 2500 casualties in three weeks, but Morshead and his division earned the distinction of being mocked on German radio as ‘Ali Baba Morshead and his twenty thousand thieves’.

  The July raids and attacks, named the First Battle of El Alamein, put paid to Rommel’s hopes of advancing into Egypt in the near future—and, as it turned out, forever. During these operations, Morshead had been given the task of shepherding the newly arrived 51st Highland Division into desert fighting, and its commander, General Douglas Wimberley, said of him, ‘He gave me a higher feeling of morale than anyone else I had met so far.’ But Morshead also warned him in graphic idiom: ‘The staff here are mad on breaking up divisions. They’ll stuff you about for a dead cert.’

  Rommel made an attempt in August to split this line near a ridge named Alam Halfa, east of Ruweisat and Ruin ridges. He had early success but then the British drove him away. An Australian attack at the coastal end of the line relieved some of the pressure on the British. By then, Auchinleck had been replaced as both theatre commander and commander of the 8th Army. General William ‘Strafer’ Gott was now to command the 8th Army but was almost at once killed when his aircraft was shot down. A commander named Bernard Montgomery was appointed in his place. Montgomery was a man to suit Morshead, an inscrutable character who believed absolutely in attack. Ironically, his father had been Bishop of Tasmania for twelve years from 1889, and had harboured a dream of recruiting Aboriginal ministers of religion on a large scale. After General Montgomery’s accession, the divisions at the front were gradually and adequately equipped. The build-up lasted till autumn, and it was decided the attack would begin on 23 October. In the interim there were many artillery exchanges. A German shell exploded in a unit kitchen and sent a sliver of metal through the shoulder and into the lung of a twenty-two-year-old shipping clerk named Jeff Moncrieff, who died of the wound.

  On the eve of the battle, a new commander of the 30th Corps, to which the 9th Division was allocated, proposed that the men begin the advance from the start line at 9.30 p.m., but Morshead pointed out that the troops would have had to lie down in their slit trenches all day waiting. As well as that, said Morshead, they would have been ‘ungettatable’ during daylight hours for final instructions by the officers with whom they would be fighting. ‘I cannot conceive anything psychologically worse than such a solitary confinement in a tight-fitting, grave-like pit.’ When darkness fell, he argued, the men must have time for a relaxed dinner. ‘They do not want to be rushed off as soon as they have eaten.’

  The Australians were to attack on the northern, Mediterranean side of the line while the 51st Highlanders attacked to the south. The men would march three kilometres to the start line and then go in behind a screen of tanks in the flat area known as the Saucer. There the 30th Corps, it was planned, particularly the 9th Australian and the 51st Highland divisions, would make an advance of nearly fifteen kilometres against the German 164th Division and the 15th Panzers. Did many of them understand that this was to be one of those battles fought in desert places whose results would reverberate massively throughout more temperate zones?

  After the troops assembled at the start line on the night of 23 October, the advance began from 10 p.m. onwards (and in some sectors and for support troops somewhat late), the artillery roaring in positions behind the infantry. It was a fierce business, young men killing each other in the vast night for control of Axis strongpoints. The minds of the mass of German citizens were on Russia; the minds of the mass of Australians on New Guinea and the Solomons, and the young Australians killed in darkness at El Alamein were not solely a loss of life but also a loss to Australia’s defence. Morshead again complained that lack of armoured support was holding up his men to the west. Because of what happened then, Morshead and the Australian 9th Division could be argued to have had a disproportionate part in the battle since, when they stalled in their direct westwards assault, Montgomery ordered them to wheel around and advance northwards towards the railway station and the coast beyond it. The German and Italian forces felt ownership of their line and resisted ferociously, and there followed sanguinary days and nights of attack on mounds and strongpoints around the railway line and the road. The ruthless Australian advance saw Rommel rushing exceptional numbers of reinforcements into the area. Meanwhile, the Australian losses, dead and casualties, would reach six thousand. By the third night of the battle, two Australian battalions, the 24th and the 48th, had barely one company of 150 men left between them. At 1.05 a.m. on 2 November, when Operation Supercharge was launched, the last phase of El Alamein began. The 9th Division had, in military terms, ‘rolled up’ the German front after penetrating Tel el Eisa, far beyond the mountain to the west. The British to the south now burst through a line weakened by the rushing of German units north to deal with Australian incursions. By the night of 2 November, the Axis troops had to retreat to new ground, though it would be two days before the retreat began.

  Throughout the battle, Morshead visited the field ambulance stations and spoke to the too-plenteous wounded. German counter-attacks were regular, since it was clear that if the Australians were dislodged from the coast the whole line would be. But by 4 November, Rommel knew he had failed, and began to withdraw. With him went so many German hopes of a link-up between Germans driving into Iran and by way of the Caucasus into Russia and territories beyond. On the Allied side, congratulations poured in, to Morshead in particular, for what could justly be called a crucial part of the entire scheme. Though it is normal for Australians to overexaggerate their impact in certain campaigns, there was no exaggeration in the case of the 9th Division. They had changed world history. They were too exhausted, however, and
had suffered too many casualties, to take part in the pursuit of the Afrika Korps that now began. Even so, Morshead kept up drills, knowing that the 9th were going on to other battles, in the Pacific.

  On 22 December, he held a parade of the 9th Division, still twelve thousand in strength, on the airfield at Gaza in Palestine. A month later, the division, less those in hospital in Egypt, embarked for Australia.

  FLYERS

  The Empire Air Training Scheme through which so many Australian airmen passed was established at the end of November 1939 by representatives of Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand at Ottawa. Nearly ten thousand Australians, after basic training in Australia, did their advanced training in Canada, often after crossing the United States by train, a stimulating experience for late adolescents from Murwillumbah, Quorn or Mandurah. Meanwhile, on home soil, the RAAF’s flight-training schools, located throughout the bush, continued until March 1943, by which time they had trained nearly forty thousand air crew.

  Seventeen entirely Australian squadrons served within the overarching structure of the RAF during the war, and in Bomber Command, the Australians were found in squadrons 460 to 467. There were also Australians scattered in other multinational crews throughout the air force. The first of the Australian squadrons, 455, was formed at Swinderby, Lincolnshire, on 6 June 1941 and was not a Bomber Command but a Coastal Command squadron. It did not receive its first narrow-tailed Hampden bomber or adequate ground crew until 10 July. But young Australians looked at this vulnerable aircraft with the wonder and excitement of young men observing a miraculous—not an infernal—machine. They would escort a convoy to Russia, hand over their Hampdens to the Russian air force, return to England and be re-equipped with Beaufighters. A newer Australian squadron, 458, flew the plumper-bodied Wellington bombers. At a time when Churchill was damning Australians, especially Curtin, for their bloody-mindedness, 458 Squadron men took targets such as Berlin, Cologne, Mannheim, Essen, Dusseldorf and Hanover and were then stationed in the Mediterranean in a number of bases, including in Malta and Tunisia.