Anzac's Dirty Dozen (19 page)

One's empathy might be tested, however, by an incident recounted by an Australian soldier in Michael Caulfield's
The Vietnam Years
:

Anyhow, somebody had walked on a mine or whatever … we still think that somebody set it off, he didn't actually walk on a mine and it went boom. Because there was a woman and a couple of kids or a child I think just quite close by. And – anyway, it didn't kill him, it blew his leg off. But things like
that, you didn't trust them … The woman was shot. And it would never have hit the Australian news for obvious reasons. I mean there was an instinct in guys – they didn't take her away and shoot her, not like a firing squad. The guys at the scene just swung around and mowed her down. First reaction. She's standing there and this bloke just got blown up, whether she was guilty or innocent, you know … There was more of that sort of stuff happens than you will ever hear about for obvious reasons … I think the child was shot too of course and imagine the uproar, ‘Australians mowing down innocent civilians – blah blah blah'.
⁵³

It is difficult to reconcile the killing of this woman and child as unavoidable, or that the soldiers' reaction was so instinctive that they could no longer discern their status as civilians. Caulfield alludes to the application of ‘the forgiving haze' to justify such acts, and he points out that despite the appalling nature of such crimes one must still accept that the lot of the soldiers was that of ‘a halfway decent bloke in a very bad place who made a decision he still cannot explain or forget'.
⁵⁴
Overall Caulfield argues that at Nui Dat and Phuoc Tuy Province, the Australians tried to uphold their humanity and that, while ugly incidents occurred, they were not reflective of the general behaviour or attitude of Australian troops.

Aside from the problematic nature of civilian casualties, it is evident that the practice of killing wounded enemy, as had occurred in the World Wars, also happened in Vietnam. Terry Burstall, a veteran of the Battle of Long Tan, recalled the shooting of two wounded Viet Cong soldiers after that battle. He quotes a colleague as describing them, prior to their murder, as ‘just sitting there looking pretty helpless'.
⁵⁵
Burstall revisited the theme of killing prisoners in an article in
The
Age
marking the twentieth
anniversary of the battle: ‘There must have been 20 blokes alive there when we went back through them in the morning. I'd say we killed about 17, murdered them. We murdered those poor bastards and then we started to clean up.'
⁵⁶
Bob Buick took particular exception to Burstall's revelations, claiming it was not true and stating ‘Our commanders and I mean at all levels would not permit such an atrocity'. Buick admitted that the shooting of wounded enemy soldiers did occur, but argued they were mercy killings since the victims were mortally wounded.
⁵⁷
One might counter that it is not the role of soldiers to make that judgement.

Caulfield's observation about the Vietnam experience of Australian soldiers is applicable to diggers who have fought in all wars: that the ‘memories of lives taken wrongly, bad deeds done' was ‘the lot of the men we send to war, the burden we demand they carry but never want to know'.
⁵⁸
Since the Vietnam War, Australia has deployed troops in numerous peace-keeping exercises and in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. These actions have been conducted with much smaller forces than the armies of the World Wars and Vietnam. In that time, the professionalism of the Australian armed forces has increased markedly, as has international scrutiny of soldiers' behaviour in combat, certainly those from Western nations. More recently still, social media has meant that unofficial records of soldiers in action and in war zones have created a broader public arena in which infractions might become known. This may act as a further deterrence for soldiers to act illegally. Modern-day soldiers enter combat well instructed about the rules of engagement and are even provided with rules of engagement cards. However, no amount of training will ever overcome the fraying effects that combat can have on soldiers. They are under immense psychological stress and one cannot say with any certainty that atrocities will not be committed in the future by Australian service personnel. We can say that the vast
majority of Australian soldiers have not committed atrocities. We can also say that the chances of such incidences occurring are much reduced through better training and scrutiny. It can only be hoped that the blatant killing of prisoners and wounded men that was tacitly approved by higher commanders in the World Wars, and overtly so in the war in the Pacific, will not be practised by Australia's military forces of the future.

Further reading

D. Blair,
No Quarter: Unlawful Killing and Surrender in the Australian War
Experience 1915–1918
, Ginninderra Press, Canberra, 2005.

J. Bourke,
An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare
, Granta Books, London, 1999.

M. Caulfield,
The Vietnam Years: From the Jungle to the Australian Suburbs
, Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2007.

J. Dower,
War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
, Faber & Faber, London, 1986.

B. Gammage,
The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War
, Penguin, Melbourne, 1975.

D. Grossman,
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
, Little Brown, New York, 1996.

P. Ham,
Kokoda
, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010.

—— ,
Vietnam: The Australian War ~ The Illustrated Edition
, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010.

International Committee of the Red Cross,
International Law Concerning the Conduct of Hostilities: Collection of Hague Conventions and Some Other Treaties
, Geneva, 1989.

M. Johnston,
Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War II
, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2000.

J. Keegan,
The Face of Battle
, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976.

G. Kewley,
Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts
, VCTA, Melbourne, 1994.

R. Trembath,
A Different Sort of War: Australians in Korea 1950–1953
, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2005.

[7]

THE UNNECESSARY WASTE: AUSTRALIANS IN THE LATE PACIFIC CAMPAIGNS

Karl James

Prime Minister John Curtin began in his 1943 Australia Day broadcast with ‘Australia is the bulwark of civilization south of the Equator. It is the rampart of freedom against barbarism.' Speaking to the nation, with additional listeners in Britain and the United States, Curtin set out Australia's ongoing contribution to and the sacrifices already made in World War II. The Royal Australian Navy's (RAN) warships and the airmen of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) were serving all over the world. Australian soldiers had endured bitter retreats in Greece and Crete, but had won glory at Tobruk and had been at the spearhead of Allied troops at El Alamein. In the Pacific, Curtin pledged, those Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese would be ‘revenged thrice over'. In Papua, Australians had fought in some of the worst conditions of the war to wrestle Kokoda, Buna, Gona and Sanananda from the Japanese. American soldiers and airmen fought ‘knee to knee' alongside the Australians. This, Curtin concluded, was ‘Australia's fighting record'.
¹

It was an impressive record. Between 1940 and 1942, Australian forces were prominent in the Mediterranean and North Africa
fighting the Italians and Germans. Closer to home, Australian forces had helped stem Japan's southern-most thrust in desperate battles in Papua during 1942, with the last shots having only been fired days before Curtin's broadcast. In the coming year, Australians and Americans would continue to fight ‘knee to knee', advancing along New Guinea's north-east coast. American forces also conducted a series of amphibious operations in the Solomon Islands and New Britain that, together with the New Guinea offensive, successfully encircled and isolated Rabaul, the main Japanese base in the south Pacific. During 1944, General Douglas MacArthur's ‘island hopping' campaign took Americans into Dutch New Guinea and on to the Philippines. By year's end, Japanese cities were subjected to a terrifying bombing campaign, first from American long-range bombers flying from China and Saipan, in the Central Pacific, and from April 1945 by carrierborne aircraft. Planning was well underway for an American-led invasion of the Japanese home islands when the war came to a devastating end in August 1945. Until that point the war in the Pacific had been expected to continue at least until 1946.

During the later phases of the Pacific War, however, Australia was left far behind. The Australian Army was excluded from operations in the Philippines and beyond. Instead, Australians fought on ‘mopping-up' Japanese troops in Australia's Mandated Territories of New Guinea and Bougainville, and on Borneo. Australian forces were, in fact, more heavily engaged during 1945 than at any other time in the war, but it was at the same time a period of disagreement and disappointment – and has remained so ever since. In early 1945, for example, an Opposition Senator asserted that Australian forces were being ‘whittled away on a more or less “face-saving” task' in New Guinea and Bougainville.
²
Such sentiments were widely echoed in the press, debated in Parliament and discussed by the soldiers themselves. Brigadier
Heathcoat ‘Tack' Hammer, an infantry commander on Bougainville, later commented:

Every man knew, as well as I knew, that the Operations were mopping-up and that they were
not
vital to the winning of the war. So they ignored the Australian papers, their relatives' letters of caution, and got on with the job in hand, fighting & dying as if it was the battle for final victory.
³

Sergeant S. E. Benson, of the 42nd Battalion, was more blunt, writing bitterly that it had been ‘a purely political decision' to fight an aggressive campaign on Bougainville in what was obviously a ‘strategic backwater'.
⁴

From 1945 to the present, veterans, journalists and writers have repeated this notion, almost as a mantra, of Australia's final campaigns in the Pacific as an ‘unnecessary war' – where men's lives were wasted needlessly for political rather than strategic reasons. Others, most notably journalist Peter Charlton, have argued that the campaigns were fought for the self-aggrandisement of old generals. War correspondent-cum-historian Max Hastings has even more recently alleged that Australian forces were ‘bludging' in the islands rather than fighting elsewhere in the Pacific.
⁵
Such orthodoxy, such a consistent stream of complaint over time, however, does not make it true. The idea of an ‘unnecessary waste' in the late Pacific campaigns is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.

The main villain in the myth of wasted Australian lives is usually General Sir Thomas Blamey. He is an easy target. Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, Blamey served with distinction during World War I to become Lieutenant General Sir John Monash's chief of staff in 1918. Blamey soldiered on during the interwar period, but his time as Victorian police commissioner
during the 1930s attracted scandal. When war was declared in 1939, Blamey was appointed to command the newly formed 6th Division when the second Australian Imperial Force was raised, and he subsequently commanded the 1st Australian Corps in the Middle East. Short and rotund, Blamey was a skilled staff officer with a cutting intellect and forceful personality. He was also tactless and attracted controversy. But as Curtin once told a group of newspapermen, in 1939 the government ‘was seeking a military leader not a Sunday school teacher'.
⁶
Blamey returned to Australia on 26 March 1942 with the 1st Australian Corps where he received the news that he had been appointed Commander-in-Chief, Australian Military Forces. There was no fanfare.

Nine days before Blamey's appointment, on 17 March, General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia with his family after escaping from the disastrous campaign in the Philippines. ‘I have come through', MacArthur pledged famously, ‘I shall return'. Tall and slim, a West Point graduate, highly decorated, a former US Army Chief of Staff, and a Republican, MacArthur cut an imposing figure. When he arrived in Australia, he was publicly celebrated as a hero. Only a month earlier, Singapore had fallen to the Japanese in the worst defeat in British military history and Darwin had been bombed. Many Australians feared a Japanese invasion. MacArthur's arrival and the accompanying promise of military support from the United States meant that Australia would not have to face its darkest hour alone.

As men, Curtin and MacArthur could not be more different, but they formed a firm bond nonetheless. When the two first met, MacArthur told Curtin: ‘We two, you and I, will see this thing through together … You take care of the rear and I will handle the front.'
⁷
This approach suited both men well and played to their strengths. Unlike other Allied leaders, such as Churchill and Stalin, Curtin did not pretend to be militarily minded, and he
was content to leave the fighting to MacArthur and his generals. Curtin, who was also the Minister for Defence, had been a journalist, trade union leader, a prominent anti-conscription campaigner and a former alcoholic. He had been prime minister for less than six months after the Australian Labor Party came to power in October 1941. Curtin supported MacArthur's appointment as Supreme Commander, South West Pacific Area (SWPA) and essentially assigned Australia's forces to MacArthur's command. Blamey was appointed Commander, Allied Land Forces, but he had little practical control over American troops.

MacArthur's area of responsibility was vast. The SWPA included Australia, New Guinea, New Britain and Bougainville – the territories mandated to Australia from Germany by the League of Nations after World War I – as well as the Netherlands East Indies (modern Indonesia) and the Philippines. The directive that established SWPA provided that the Combined Chiefs of Staff from the United States and Britain would determine grand strategy, including the allocation of forces. MacArthur received his orders from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Australia had no real say, therefore, in deciding Allied strategy. Curtin's inexperienced government has been criticised for surrendering Australian sovereignty to the United States in this regard, but it is difficult to imagine what else it might have done.
⁸
Yet the Australian government had an escape clause. The directive establishing the SWPA included the rider that each nation retained the right to ‘refuse the use of its forces for any project which it considers inadvisable'.
⁹