The Second World War

New Guinea 1942–44 is frankly disappointing, not only to me but to those veterans of the campaign who have told me that they have read it. I missed New Guinea, but even so I was shocked by Hall’s account of the cannibalism of the Japanese, and retaliatory brutality by Australians. The pity is that Hall had all the potential for a great history, but fluffed it. Australians at War 1939–45 (also reviewed above) will survive and, perhaps as Robertson intended, will become a standard textbook in teaching the history of World War II. But to me it is an academic’s work for academics, whose names are prominent in the acknowledgements. I could have accepted that, if one could have found a few names also of military, naval and air force people of consequence. But giving credit where it is due, it has some extraordinary information. I am pleased to see that Robertson, as have a number of authors (Alex Fullerton, now a noted novelist in the naval tradition, whose Last Lift from Crete is a gem about the Royal Navy’s sacrifices in that battle), slams Sir Winston Churchill for inept decisions and overriding of decisions taken by senior commanders. And it is illuminating to learn that it was Eisenhower who did all the initial planning for setting up the South-West Pacific defence area, before he went off to mastermind the invasion of Europe. Odd one never read of that before in all the eulogies of MacArthur. On the other hand, Robertson does Blarney an injustice by saying he botched the Greek campaign (and by overlooking the fact that Blarney became, and remains after his death, still the one Field Marshal this land has produced). Those of us who were in Greece cannot forget that Blarney had the nous to comprehend before the ill-fated 6th Australian and 2nd New Zealand Divisions landed (the only time in World War II, incidentally, when there was an Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – ANZAC) that the campaign must result in a German victory. Consequently, Blarney and some of his staff scouted and had evacuation beaches plotted even as we got to blows with the Germans. But for that foresight, all of ANZAC could have been lost. Robertson, discussing the 6th Division, and mentioning other units besides the infantry, omits the pioneers and, in particular, the Australian Army Service Corps. Without the ‘Galloping Grocers’ there could not have been a victory at Bardia, a successful siege of Tobruk, a Greek evacuation or an advance over the Kokoda trail. Many AASC men were killed and wounded under air attack. And how can one omit, for example, the 212nd Pioneer Battalion, fighting as infantry in Syria and, not long after, by a Churchillian blunder, going ashore in Java and straight into prison camps, to die on Japan’s Burma-Thailand railway? For me, the most interesting of these three books is Charlton’s, dedicated appropriately ‘To the Thirty-niners, the first and the finest’. Charlton went to the grass roots for his material. He advertised for Thirty-niners, those who enlisted before December thirty-first, 1939. And he sent questionnaires to those who replied. From that material he wrote his book. He settles issues. The first is that the vast majority of Thirty-niners were not unemployed, which I can vouch is right. For a time at Puckapunyal I was a company clerk, and I know that many who put ‘Unemployed’ on their enlistment forms were bank managers, tradesmen, accountants – you name any trade or profession, and it was represented. The second is that we were ‘five bob a day murderers’, a canard of ‘the phoney war’; dammitall, many men gave up good salaries and wages to enlist, not for adventure but because – although most would have choked on uttering the words – they felt an obligation to finish a job fathers, uncles, elder brothers had had to leave undone in 1914–18. There even were Great War blokes who enlisted again, who lied and lopped years off their ages, who dyed their hair to look ‘thirty-five’. The third is the initial scorn among the AIF veterans of the Middle East for the militia units. In New Guinea this faded as the blooded men saw what the ‘chocos’ had endured until the well-tried units got up there to help. Charlton and Robertson deserve praise for their efforts, even where one finds fault. Both works are painstaking. More than that, they show that each author went to his task with a respect for his subject and the individuals who made up the whole. Of course, there is more still to be told, areas untouched as yet: of heroes still not revealed, of others who served and only waited. Have I been misled, or did we really have a 10th (Armoured) Division, men forced to sit the war out on their arses in the West? Where is the book of the incredible few who stayed behind on Ambon and killed more Japanese than they themselves lost – and who have been given up for lost? What about those escapers and evaders who became guerrillas? Has anyone gone yet to the other side to find out how the Germans and the Japanese, or the Italians, felt about the Australians? As a matter of interest: I live in Canberra and visit the Australian War Memorial from time to time. And I have noticed a remarkable thing – to me, anyway. On almost any day in the Memorial one will find parties of Japanese visitors. Cruel the Japanese might have been by our standards. But those same Japanese respect bravery. I feel those Japanese at the Memorial see it not, as most of us do, as a museum, but as it really is – a shrine. In their fashion, I believe Charlton and Robertson, and Hall perhaps, are helping to focus the attention of present-day Australians on that shrine, by relating how it came about through the blooding of men who, in their day, were young, and each day now grow fewer in number. Next time – if there is a next time – there may not be ‘olds and bolds’ around to enlist again. But I wager the numbers will be there to pick up the tradition, passed down from 1914–18 to 1939–45.

Keith Hooper

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