War

Secrecy in human affairs seems to me as useful in grappling with problems as flat-earth dogma is in navigation. I have the belief that the most dazzlingly effective stroke the U.S. Pentagon could make toward dissipating nuclear nightmare would be to throw open the whole spectrum of its weapons experimentation and innovation to anyone who wanted to walk in and look it over. My further belief is that the sheer weight, variety and thrust of all that would be revealed would be such a horizon-expander to, say, Soviet scientists that those scientists would be too caught up in the sheer challenges to the understanding of it all to constrict themselves into any scramble to winnow out immediate military advantage – and indeed that the very process of assimilation of and adaptation to the revealed data would very likely have so many sorts of extraordinary and mutually beneficial (that is, both to the U.S. and the non-U.S. world) effects that the very reasons for nuclear confrontation would vanish from sheer irrelevance and inanity.

The yellow peril has finally made it to Australia in John Hooker’s new novel The Bush Soldiers. The Japanese have invaded. The year is 1943. A trail of devastation in their wake, the Australian population, so it seems, has fled to the West, leaving a scattered but dedicated resistance force (the Volunteer Defence Corps) “to delay and deny” anything left of value to the enemy. An Australian veteran of the Great War, Geoffrey Sawtell, with his offsider, an Irish Catholic drifter, join forces at Bourke with two British veterans – a major and a padre – and a young Jackaroo from the outback. Their mission: to sabotage a mine at the Japanese held Broken Hill. Mission accomplished, they are forced to retreat into central Australia, into the desolate, uncompromising landscape, their trek re-creating the myth making trail of Burke and Wills. Pursued by an unseen enemy they move relentlessly forward until they too are destroyed – not by the enemy but by the country itself.

These books have little in common though they are both concerned with men at war. Balfe’s book is chatty, idiosyncratic, episodic and without any academic intent. Often using the words of three pilots involved, he tells the story of the futile and costly air fighting which followed the highly successful Japanese attacks against Malaya, Sumatra and the Netherlands East Indies. Australian aircrew were forced to fight the Japanese with Hudsons and Buffaloes. Given that the enemy had overwhelming superiority in numbers; that the Buffalo was one of the worst fighters produced, and that the Hudson was no match for virtually any Japanese aircraft, the Australian squadrons after the initial contacts were almost completely destroyed. The causes of this disaster and the eventual outcome of it are well known.

Anyone still worried about the military-industrial complex unveiled by Eisenhower at the end of his presidency can have their Angst updated with this disturbing book.

The present Republican commander-in-chief, with only the tinsel medals of Hollywood for his proud chest and a set role to play, is unlikely, even as a parting gesture, to use up prime time to let us in on how the robust infant of Eisenhower’s day has come of age and mutated with the times to become the fully-integrated military-industrial-academic-bureaucratic complex it is today.

Frank Barnaby, professor of peace studies at the Free University of Amsterdam and former head of the Swedish peace research centre, SIPRI, in the opening paper in this collection, ‘Will There Be A Nuclear War?, shows how powerful and well-entrenched this complex has become. Vast bureaucracies have grown up in the great powers to deal with military matters, and about 500,000 scientists, around 25 per cent of all scientists employed on research, work exclusively on military research.

The memoirs of Australian war leaders have not enjoyed the commercial success gained by American and British commanders. Monash’s The Australian Victories in France in 1918 is possibly the only book of its sort which has ever had any real success. In the last few years the Australian Trenchard, Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, could not attract a commercial publisher for his autobiography, though it covered the entire creation of the RAAF. Public interest apart, the fact is that Australian generals, admirals and air marshals do not tend to be literary. We just cannot imagine an Australian Slim. The only classic works produced by any Australian connected with the armed forces and aviation in general have been P.G. (Sir Gordon) Taylor’s finely wrought books.

Crank back on roller, belt left front ...’ So begins the sequence. Stuart’s novel, the fifth in a series of six called The Conjuror’s Years, depicts Colin of Drought Foal and Wedgetail View following the instructions for preparing his Vickers gun to fire against the Vichy French in the 1941 AIF invasion of Syria.

This is a most interesting, readable and, in a larger context, valuable book. It deals with written recollections collected from some 215 living veterans from the First A.I.F. (some have since died) – a list of their names is included as an Appendix – detailing how they felt about the War as it approached and when it commenced, and also what led them to enlist at the time. Each informant is allowed to speak for himself, with his own peculiar spelling, punctuation end style of writing; in effect, the outcome provides a broad picture of the social origins and nature of this cross-section of soldiers.