Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

  By August 1945, the pilots simply wanted to come home and, for the larger part, become civilians again, and persuaded the government not to commit them to the occupation forces deployed in Germany.

  THE WAR OVER WOMEN

  Back in Australian cities, which seemed to teem with American soldiers, airmen and sailors, the struggle was for the repute and moral uprightness of Australian women.

  A twenty-year-old teachers’ college student, Patricia Jones, wrote in her diary in 1942: ‘I expressed a desire to silly Jack P. for a Yank boyfriend (Melb. and in fact all Austr. are swarming with them since Christmas) and I felt I’d missed life not having met one—Else and I spoke to some one night in the dark of Swanston Street but didn’t pick them up as most girls do now.’ Two weeks later she was able to write, ‘Anyway, I can tell my Grandchildren at least that during momentous days when Austr. was rapidly accumulating thousands upon thousands of Yanks . . . and every girl discussed her “pickups” I too had a little experience.’

  It was obvious, since Patricia intended to boast of this event to her grandchildren, that ‘pick-up’ had a more innocent meaning than it would later come to possess. She is frank about her pleasure at being young and dreads ‘the blind complacency of middle age’ which will come further on her path. She hopes that her life as narrated in her diary will be a ‘nice romantic story’, the phrase itself betraying both naïveté and aspiration. Patricia records her outings to skating rinks, the pictures, the ballet, the beach, as well as her first real kiss and falling in love with a succession of boyfriends, one of whom said ‘The Words’. She hoped to have an innocent-enough association with a Yank, but worried about being forestalled by a friend, ‘an attractive little piece with all the necessary backchat.’ Patricia’s friends Delma and Arlette were true ‘Yank hunters’, she said.

  Advertising in the 1920s had promoted feminine daintiness and ‘grace and refinement’. By the late 1930s, in time for the war, the idea of ‘sex appeal’ came to dominate advertising. By the 1940s, femininity was expressed not in breeding power but in sexual attractiveness, and a number of writers, including Freud and Havelock Ellis, whom most of these young women had never read, had nonetheless influenced popular culture as well.

  The films to which young Australians and Americans flocked in Sydney and Melbourne were Jane Eyre, Fantasia, Irene, Rebecca, Sandy Is a Lady, The Woman in the Window and The Valley of Decision. Roughly one million American soldiers would pass through Australia in their pressed uniforms, seeming to have stepped straight out of the movies themselves, and displaying in many cases a more polished and polite approach to women and even their parents than most Australian soldiers could deploy. The sexual freedom suggested by films and advertising seemed to offer itself in the persons of these alien and yet somehow familiar troops potentially doomed in battle.

  But there was confusion in the community. Australian women and American men had to conduct their courtships in public places, where they faced curfews, assaults by gangs of Australian soldiers, and even civilian ‘sex patrols’. On the one hand, the Vice Squad tried to break up US–Australian couples in parks, and the girls were condemned from pulpits (the much-needed Allies themselves were never lambasted). Melbourne artist Albert Tucker, husband of that other fine painter Joy Hester, painted Victory Girls and Images of Modern Evil, condemnatory works showing Australian women offering themselves cheaply to what he saw in part as the occupier. The Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Irishman James Duhig, declared that decency had largely vanished due to the disgusting public conduct of girls and servicemen. And then, on the other hand, girls were told to serve as virginal ‘Victory Belles’, dancing with Yanks at public dance halls where strict rules applied. But the sharp uniforms and the smooth manners enchanted many an Australian girl. Would the Victory Belles slip from their plinths and become Victory Girls?

  As well as the young Americans’ charm and gleam, early in the war in particular they were seen as liberators. Private Ron Berry, a Rat of Tobruk, arriving back in Fremantle on 20 March to save Australia’s bacon, found that none of it was available to him. ‘The town is overrun with Yank soldiers, who swank around the streets, telling us that they had to come over here to win the war for us.’ An Australian woman declared, ‘Americans have the gift of making the girls they escort feel like the finest ladies in the land. Americans did not seem ill at ease with women as Australian men did and seemed genuinely to like them.’ As for the Yanks, a Newcastle girl who ultimately married one gave her own, more Havelock Ellis explanation: ‘They knew how to pleasure women.’

  Gradually, however, they ceased to be such glamorous and novel presences, and came to be seen as predatory. The women’s magazines began to emphasise loyalty to absent Australian husbands, fiancés and boyfriends. Dating an American could come to seem an act of betrayal. ‘Stick to your digger boyfriend,’ went a headline in Woman. ‘Our boys overseas are doing a job that is made possible only by the knowledge that back home things are flowing smoothly.’

  The question of venereal disease (VD) was one addressed by the US army and Australian civic bodies: the Christian Temperance Union, the Country Women’s Association, the Mothercraft Association, the Queensland Trades and Labour Council, the Father and Son Welfare Movement, the Australian Natives’ Association and various churches, and other groups raised the concern and urged chastity. Sir Raphael Cilento, Director-General of Health and Medical Services in Queensland, and Ned Hanlon, the Labor Secretary for Health and Home Affairs, began to wage a crusade against VD as early as 1942; reasonably enough they were concerned about the drain such diseases constituted on medical services. Dr John Cooper Booth, the Director-General for Health in New South Wales, described women as ‘reservoirs of venereal disease in the community’. There were cries for the consumption of alcohol to be denied to women. Though girls could be depicted as ‘khaki-mad dabbler[s] in sex’ and thus ‘amateur saboteur[s]’, contradictorily the medical corps of both armies provided men with condoms and offered regular testing. Women with VD were locked away in closed wards, and Dr Booth recommended head-shaving for women who required VD treatment more than once.

  In May 1943, Jessie Street, the fifty-four-year-old progressive and the president of the United Associations of Women, wrote to the Daily Telegraph deploring that Sydney was a ‘cesspool of vice’ and regretting that the authorities had opted to make ‘sex indulgence’ safe rather than preventing it, but calling for the punishment of seducers of young girls instead of those seduced. Her belief was that economic independence would free women from their attachment to sex. Female emancipation was economic, she believed, rather than sexual. Therefore, chastity was the necessary precondition for women’s economic advancement in society. But such figures as Street were not listened to by the young women heading for the Friday-night dance.

  The US authorities frankly blamed civilian Australian women for the spread of sexual diseases, ‘stressing the cleanliness and patriotism of American women back home’. The American authorities were worried about the phalanx of what they called ‘amateurs’ as well. There was an imputation they were looking for rewards in kind rather than in cash. Some of these women were teenagers, others had no regular employment, and others were ‘Jekyll and Hydes’, shop and office workers by day and sexual freebooters by night.

  But Australians secretly saw the Americans as the chief tempters and thus the chief problem. Admittedly, the US army had no monopoly on sexually transmitted diseases, but in the popular mind their apparent sophistication and frank appetites seemed to imply they were majority shareholders. Nonetheless, Australian military officials had the same concept of their own countrywomen as the Americans did. Salt, a journal of the Australian army, warned readers to be on their guard against ‘gold-digging’ harpies (a strange description of women who might be dating lower ranks, given the modesty of Australian army pay rates) and ‘lounge Lizzies’, who were just one step from professional prostitution.

  So the possibility of venereal diseas
e was the caveat now laid down to keep girls Victory Belles. The National Health and Medical Research Council, however, declared the idea that a serious proportion of the community carried venereal disease was ‘gravely misleading’. The complete figures for Queensland revealed a decline in the cases of syphilis amongst the civilian population during the war.

  Some twelve thousand young Australian women married American servicemen for love but also, perhaps, in the hope of finding a new and less repressive milieu elsewhere. In the smaller towns and the suburbs of the United States, they would not always manage to discover it.

  REBOUND

  On the advance back across the mountains and to and along the New Guinea north coast beginning in September 1942, the Australians were now healthier and better supplied than their enemy. The common foe was the mosquito, who was able to breed in the millions even in pools caught in indented bootmarks in the jungle mud. But the hungrier you were, the more susceptible you were to malaria. The great preventive was quinine, the world supply of which was held by the Japanese. However, earlier in the century, German chemists had synthesised a drug named Atabrine, and fortunately the American company Winthrop had acquired manufacturing rights to it. By the end of 1942, it was in the hands of the troops in New Guinea, though some of them did not trust it, thinking it some sort of trick drug from a high command they didn’t respect. Atabrine did not infallibly save you from malaria, but what was certain was that it turned your skin yellow.

  Winning or losing, fevered or clear-headed, New Guinea was still hell. It was, in that old phrase, war to the knife. Tom O’Lincoln, an Australian soldier, heard a pungent joke about it, a joke with a smell of sulphur. A wounded Japanese says to an Australian, ‘You think you’re going to be home for Christmas,’ to which the Digger replies, ‘And you think you’re going to hospital!’ Behind the joke is the fact that in New Guinea men on both sides were unlikely to get quarter in battle. One of the reasons, says the historian Paul Ham, is that the plump and comfortable General Blamey had notoriously accused the 21st Brigade of the 7th Division, drawn up on parade on 9 November 1942 and willing to be sent back into the battle, of ‘running like rabbits’ before the Japanese. ‘Remember it is the rabbit that runs who gets shot, not the man with the gun,’ he counselled. He also mentioned that some of their officers had failed in the field. ‘These are the men who saved Australia despite your mistakes,’ the 16th Battalion’s padre told Blamey. The bitterness on the Port Moresby parade ground that day had been palpable, and Blamey and the Japanese would pay for it. Australian soldier Ken Clift writes that after a victory at Oivi near Kokoda in November 1942, ‘very few of the enemy escaped. Many surrendered and were exterminated.’ Major-General Paul Cullen confirmed in 2001 that Australians had bayoneted Japanese prisoners to death in New Guinea. Peter Medcalf of the 43rd Battalion writes simply of one battle on New Guinea’s north coast: ‘We took no prisoners, or wounded.’ We had no scruples about shooting any wounded who lay about a captured position—that was the only safe way.’ And who could fully tell, unless they were there.

  Yet there might have been other methods. Archival footage shows that Americans, now attacking Buna, ordered Japanese who were surrounded to take off their clothes. By doing this the Japanese showed they had no concealed weapons. But, wrote the war correspondent Osmar White, ‘You can’t fight this war without hate . . . If you don’t hate enough, you’re going to be beaten.’

  Another commentator argued that the Australians knew they were fighting against a ‘truly merciless enemy . . . consequently they matched the Japanese with a savagery equal to their own, and like them would sooner die than surrender’. A perceptive veteran said that fighting the Japanese brought out something Australian commanders had previously found difficult to awaken—‘the killing instinct’. Captain Henry ‘Jo’ Gullett, Oxford- and Sorbonne-educated, son of the war historian and member of Menzies’ Cabinet who had been killed with other government ministers in that devastating air crash at Canberra airport in 1940, explained, ‘We never gave them a chance if we could help it. If an Italian or German were running away, one might let him go, but never a Japanese. You would kill him as you would kill a snake.’

  An AIF soldier accurately described the New Guinea fighting as ‘an exercise in extermination’, and the idea of its being such came from the top, from General Vasey himself, whose directive to troops in Papua read: ‘One does not expect a live tiger to give himself up to capture so we must not expect a Japanese to surrender. He does not. He must be killed . . . truly jungle warfare is a game of kill or be killed.’

  The new brigades chasing the Japanese back towards Kokoda were skilfully managed. The Australians occupied Ioribaiwa, the furthest ridge Horii had taken, and were surprised to reach Myola by 9 October. The Japanese were ghosts now, harrowed, abandoning equipment. Although there were what could be considered healthy garrisons on the north coast at swamp-girt Buna, Sanananda and Gona, and further west at Lae and Salamaua, Horii would lose four out of five of the men who had set out on the track to take Port Moresby. As the Australians pushed along the track, they waged war with rifles and grenades, fighting screens of sick men in slit trenches, ready to resist them to the limit, or more strictly, to the point of obliteration. The Australians were still learning to read the jungle, to see by the disposition of leaves where a lethal enemy might be. They crawled forward over slime impregnated with excreta and decomposing body parts, and fell victim to dysentery as a result.

  The casualties from illness were phenomenal. The 25th Brigade lost sixty-eight men killed and a further 135 wounded but nearly eight hundred felled by illness. The Papuan bearers collapsed on the track, sick, and some deserted, escaping that muscle-splitting, breath-sapping and health-depleting track. The 25th pushed the enemy back to Eora Creek, scene of desperate military options during the earlier retreat. Japanese mountain artillery and mortars poured in fire, and the Australian supply line suffered as bearers continued to collapse with fever and hunger.

  Brigadier General Potts was called back to Port Moresby to report first-hand on 22 October, and was immediately told he would be replaced, unjustly, having fought one of the most meritorious—and perhaps the most remarkable—battles. He was philosophical, and told his wife he had known there had to be some sackings and it was just bad luck.

  Now it was the 7th Division’s Tubby Allen whom MacArthur and Blamey accused of dallying. MacArthur complained that the enemy seemed to be allowed to delay the Australians ‘at will’, and on 27 October, when the Japanese were pulling out of Eora Creek, General Allen paid the price, as had Rowell and Potts. Allen was told half-diplomatically by Blamey, ‘Consider that you have had sufficiently prolonged tour of duty in forward area.’

  When on 22 November the 25th Brigade took Kokoda, transport planes were able to supply the men, and the Battle of Kokoda was at a close. The new general, Vasey, assembled the now resting native porters, thanked them for their efforts and awarded medals to a number of them. On 11 November, two of Vasey’s battalions surrounded the Japanese main force at Oivi-Gorari near the Kumusi River and a few got away to Buna. Horii did not. While he and four of his officers were crossing the river near the bridge the Papua New Guineans called Wairopi (wire rope), a name which also attached to the location, their raft struck a tree. Horii and others took to a canoe, which was swept to the estuary of the river and overturned in the surf, where Horii, drained of strength, let go. The man who had sought to dominate Australia from Port Moresby drowned.

  Roughly parallel and to the east of the Australians, Americans were crossing the mountains by the Jaure Trail on their way to attack Buna. Other American regiments were flown over the mountains for that purpose. The Australians from Milne Bay were also flown in, ready to attack the Japanese on the coast.

  From the bottom of the mountains stretched soggy kunai grass plains ending in jungle and palm groves along the north coast. The men of the 2/14th Battalion, veterans of the desert and Syria, retrained and rested, boarded plan
es on 25 November 1942 at the Seven Mile drome near Port Moresby to fly over the mountains to Popondetta, 32 kilometres from Gona on the coast. The unit consisted of just 341 men now, one of them Harry ‘Jarmbe’ Saunders, a young Aboriginal man from Lake Condah, near Portland, Victoria, brother of the soldier Reg Saunders, who had by now escaped from Crete.

  Australians and the American 32nd Division were in action against the Japanese at Buna, but Harry Saunders’ unit was sent forward to assault Gona, further west along the coast. Sanananda sat between them, another stronghold. The Japanese entrenchments at Buna, Sanananda and Gona were located on solid ground between the ocean and inland swamps. Blamey understood the peril of the situation and asked MacArthur for naval support to shell these strongholds. Any of the heavy cruisers deployed in the Solomons would have suited Blamey’s needs. But MacArthur believed the Allies would quickly overrun the Japanese positions, even without much artillery to back them up.

  On being landed, the men of the 14th Battalion marched thirteen kilometres on the Sanananda track towards Gona, through kunai grass, which gave way then to coastal swamps and, bunkered beyond them, between the wetland and the beach, the Japanese garrisons. Close to the coast and its black volcanic sand beach, the gun pits they came up against were reinforced with logs and covered with dirt that even mortars could not penetrate. Snipers sat in the coconut palms around the gun pits. The remnants of one of the 25th Brigade’s other battalions were just pulling back. More than three out of four of them were casualties one way or another, from illness or the resistance of the enemy. A sergeant of the 25th claimed that everyone had a temperature of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), but did not report as sick until they reached 105 degrees (40.5 degrees). They had been fighting alongside a further battalion of their own 7th Division and two remaining ones of their 25th Brigade.