Drongoes, Gardenias and Hotchkiss Guns

Two curiously unmatching threads seem to run parallel through the whole cloth of Australia’s military history, a paradox revealing deeper truths about what we are as a people and as a nation; some parts of it are not very creditable.

The two discordant threads are, on the one hand, our well-proven valour, dash and resolve as fighting warriors; friends and enemies (especially the latter) will acknowledge our prowess the world over. It was Australia’s great victory at Milne Bay in Papua in 1942 that punctured the myth of Japan’s unstoppable military machine on land. This high distinction was fudged and muffled by US General Douglas MacArthur, chagrined that he had not won it himself. But British Field Marshal William Slim, fighting the Japanese far away in Burma, was loud in his emphasis that Australian arms had been the first to beat the Japanese on land.

The second fact is our feeble level of recognition of the existential truth that there will always be wars, and that a democracy which treasures its national independence will always need its warriors—good ones. Time and again, we expose our shaky grip of this principle: we return from our bloody victories, kick our old kitbag into the basement and breathe a sigh of relief. Home! We have learned no lessons, and fecklessly make no serious plans to prepare ourselves better to handle the next stoush, when inevitably it appears.

Kevin Rudd’s Defence White Paper of 2009 cheered me. All the appropriate areas of concern were covered; there was no shrinking from the need for sophisticated new armaments and capabilities for all three services; no ignoring the immense costs that lay ahead. Could it be that, after two hundred years, Australians had reformed, and were now approaching their own national defence like adults?

Alas, it is now 2012: recently published official progress reports and “posture” papers, and reviews by independent think-tanks agree substantially that nothing has been achieved, though (as usual) billions of dollars have been spent. Under Julia Gillard, Australia faces an aggressor without (and here you must pardon my lapse into the vernacular) without enough military clout to knock a sick girl off a dunny.

Each Anzac Day we celebrate the sacrifice of our dead, the valour of our heroes, and the hard war service of all our troops. It is seemly that we should do this. And it is moving to watch around the nation all the colourful ceremonies, from the dignitary-led great gatherings in the main cities, to the little groups of half-a-dozen citizens standing with their wreaths, bareheaded before the simple memorial raised in the main street of every tiny township.

But an annual gesture of remembrance will never diminish the likelihood of new hostilities, which will in turn preserve the need for fresh memorial services—for ever. Can’t we do something?

An Abbott government will probably build the strongest and shrewdest defence policy open to a modest-to-medium-sized power, situated in our by no means wholly unfavourable strategic and geographical circumstances. That’s the easy bit. The hard part is the grinding slog of follow-through, to make sure that objectives are achieved and don’t just remain pious wishes. Few Australian politicians have shown any deep personal commitment to defence, as a field they will make their own métier, and their career path forward. An Australian Winston Churchill would be a most unlikely creature.

Lacking an enthusiastic champion in cabinet, defence issues slide quickly down the scale of priorities towards the “too hard” basket, and become a new version of “don’t mention the war”. Besides, it all costs a lot of money. What minister, with an eye on his future, wants to become known as the one who always approaches with open hand groping for more taxes, intended to be spent on benefits which may seem obscure, or to lie many years into the future?

On the historical facts, the defence record of the conservative parties has been every whit as dismal as Labor’s: that is to say, very dismal indeed. It could, with grim jocularity, almost be true to say that Australia’s martial effectiveness would have gained if most of our defence ministers, from both sides of politics, had been led out of the cabinet room and humanely shot—not, indeed, a single one of them as a conscious traitor; but their talents ranged from honest triers to strugglers out of their depth, to idlers, drunks, drongoes and assorted no-hopers. (Feel free to slot in the present incumbent, Stephen Smith, wherever you think he fits.) 

Our whole span of Federation has produced but one shining exception to that parade of mediocrity—George Foster Pearce (1870–1952). This carpenter from Perth left school at eleven. He served as a senator for thirty-seven years, and was a cabinet minister—usually in the Defence portfolio—for twenty-five of them. Both sides of politics can claim credit for Pearce, for he abandoned Labor to serve the conservative governments which came in with Billy Hughes. Backed by his own studies, and by his own private sources of information, Pearce ran his department with a strict efficiency and correctness which somehow matched his strict teetotalism; “one of the boys” he was not. We have waited long, and will long go on waiting for his worthy successor. Cicero would have said that “the progeny of mules was numerous by comparison with him”.

By way briefly of comic relief, consider a very different Minister of Defence, F.M. Forde (1890–1983), Labor member for the Queensland seat of Capricornia for twenty-four years, and for much of the Second World War the Minister for Defence (also for the Army). I knew him slightly during this period, and though he was a decent and amiable bloke, I could detect no qualities of intellect. At a truly critical moment in Australia’s history, Minister Forde and his adviser Paul Hasluck were crossing the USA from coast to coast by a slow train. Hasluck had brought a number of departmental briefing papers, specially written in easy words and short sentences; the idea was that the minister’s isolation on the train—the lack of interruption—would assist his absorption of the paperwork. Years later, Hasluck told me that Forde read not one word; he occupied his whole time writing personal postcards to innumerable constituents back in Capricornia. (“Dear Mrs Smith: I am thinking at this moment of how glorious your gardenia bushes must be looking …”)

Yet fairness requires us to grant Forde his undoubted measure of success: the “top job”—Prime Minister of Australia—and a record-breaking one at that—the record for brevity: one week in July 1945, from the 6th to the 12th.

Do not for one moment imagine that the preceding paragraph’s note of cynical banter represents my true sentiment about these political clowns who pretended to have charge of their country’s defences. Black rage and contempt would describe my real feelings better, for while they were holding high public office (and drawing high salaries), they were often playing ducks and drakes with our nation’s territorial integrity. And they were cutting off the very lives of thousands of their fellow Australians, in ill-advised battles for which the troops had been neither armed nor trained.

The evidence for our hopeless unpreparedness for the Second World War in the Pacific lies so thick upon the ground that there is little else to see. That huge sweep of the South Pacific, embracing the Coral Sea, the Bismarck Sea and the Solomon Sea, was left wholly undefended during the twenty-year interval between the wars. Yet those waters extend from the top of our own Cape York, to include the whole of Papua and of Mandated New Guinea, and the great archipelagos and separate islands extending eastward to the Solomon Islands.

The Japanese came ashore at Rabaul and at Kavieng (New Ireland) in the early morning darkness of January 23, 1942. The previous year the Australian government had finally made a hesitant decision to offer at least a token resistance. The 2/22 Battalion Group was rushed to defensive positions, thinly spread over this enormous area. So late were they that when the invaders landed, the defenders were barely past the unpacking stage; so thinly were they spread that some island garrisons numbered only six men.

The army senior command in Melbourne well understood that they were sending young men to certain death for no realistic purpose, and actually referred to them as “penny packets”. What follows is simply one incident chosen to illustrate the sad futility of the operation.

About one month after they landed, the Japanese took 160 surrendered, sick and starving Australians who had gathered at Tol Plantation, south of Rabaul. With their hands bound, they were marched into the surrounding bush, where the enemy leapt into their penchant for a joyous orgy of sword-slashing and bayonet-stabbing. Scarcely one Australian escaped alive.

Lopping the heads off helpless civilian and military prisoners was a not infrequent variation. Such behaviour was an atrocity, and an occasion for deepest Japanese shame. But pause a moment: how much honour attaches to the Australian authorities who sent the 2/22 Battalion to such a fate? Did Tol register with them simply as, “Well, there’s one penny packet less”? 

From the dizzy heights of ministers and generals, descend to the lower depths of the other ranks and the private soldiers. I enlisted just after my eighteenth birthday in September 1941, and was swiftly in a recruit training camp at Maribyrnong, Victoria. Basic competence on a light machine gun being required for almost all troops, we were taken in small groups once or twice to the nearby Williamstown Rifle Range, to enjoy the slightly unnerving thrill of spraying around the range a few live rounds from a light machine gun. It did not build confidence, even in ignorant teenagers, to learn that we were being trained for war in the 1940s on the Hotchkiss gun, a weapon favoured for mounted troops in South Africa in the Boer Wars (1880–1902). In our tents after lights-out, we debated whether one of us should slip out of camp next morning and make the tram ride to town, visit Victoria Barracks and check whether one of the generals happened to be awake. None of us ever fired—or even saw—a Hotchkiss again for the rest of our lives.

Battle dress of light-coloured khaki drill was no doubt suitable for troops fighting in the sandy landscapes of the Middle East. Against the dense green foliage of the New Guinea jungle, such attire defined a target most clearly and helpfully for Japanese marksmen. Yet we continued to be issued with light khaki. Desperate remedies were sought by individual units, and by the troops themselves. I was told of one group struggling their way up an early stage of the Kokoda Track. They were ordered to halt beside several ordinary domestic laundry coppers, set up on some stones beside the track, bubbling away in the open full of green dye. The order was given for each man to take off his shirt and pants and dunk them thoroughly in the dye; then, as soon as they had cooled a little, to put them on again, dripping wet, and resume the upward trek.

Later, sent out by myself on a “delicate” reconnaissance mission behind the enemy lines near Lae, I was still clothed in light khaki. Three times, from very long range, I drew fire from Japanese snipers who would never have spotted me in “jungle greens”. “Were the Australians all mad?” the enemy must have asked themselves.

Commander Rupert (“Cocky”) Long was our brilliant “lone wolf” Director of Naval Intelligence. He was concerned not only by the undefended state of the seas to our north but by the equally appalling fact that we did not even know what was happening there; some bays and islands were so large and so remote that a Japanese force could even be maintaining itself on Australian territory.

His plan was to establish “watchers” at critical points on the coasts and islands. They would be Australian civilians of high repute and wide New Guinea experience; in the (probably forlorn) hope that it might deter the Japanese from shooting them out of hand as spies, they were given status in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve. Appointees typically might be lighthouse keepers, managers of remote plantations, district officers, gold prospectors, missionaries. By radio they would report suspicious shipping or submarine movements, foreign visitors, landings. Very early, Long appointed Eric Feldt, a vastly experienced and respected senior administration officer, to direct and co-ordinate the Coast Watchers’ work. Their reports went first to Feldt, from the lonely posts in the bush. Having assessed them, Feldt passed them to Intelligence headquarters in Australia.

All this Long had done off his own bat, and at negligible cost to Australia. It was a brilliantly successful achievement—almost a war-winning stroke in itself. The Coast Watchers drew unstinted praise from Admiral “Bull” Halsey, US commanding admiral in the South Pacific. Their valour and daring, in the help they gave the embattled US Marines on Guadalcanal, said Halsey, “saved the Pacific”.

So is this, then, a brighter tale of Australian wartime achievement? Long, as Director of Naval Intelligence, had a private interview, very early in his prime ministership, with Robert Menzies, seeking top-level approval for the establishment and expansion of the Coast Watchers. Menzies’s reply was, in effect, that any war with Japan was improbable, and anyhow, the government had no money. So the Coast Watchers, mostly individual Australians, covered themselves in glory. The Australian government covered itself in something else.

At the moment—I happen to be writing this on Anzac Day 2012—Tony Abbott seems to be looking increasingly “prime ministerial”. He could, in my opinion, climb the extra rung to “statesmanlike” by articulating a wise and well-explained defence policy, based squarely on the doctrine of ancient Rome: Salus Populi Suprema Est Lex (The People’s Safety is the Supreme Law).

That would, of course, still leave the hard part—getting it all actually done. Pray for the resurrection of George Foster Pearce!