Larrikins in Khaki Read online

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  Copyright © Tim Bowden 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76052 854 6

  eISBN 978 1 76087 160 4

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover designer: Julia Eim

  Cover photographer: Australia War Memorial image number 013857 and Getty Images (Michael F. Bodin/EyeEm)

  For Hank Nelson and Peter Stanley

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Military units

  1 Joining up

  2 Very basic training

  3 Sailing to war

  4 Desert Diggers prepare for war

  5 High jinks in Egypt

  6 Fighting in the desert

  7 Ill-fated Greek adventure

  8 Out of the frying pan into the fire

  9 The Allied invasion of Lebanon and Syria

  10 The tide turns

  11 Return to Australia

  12 Prisoners of war of the Japanese

  13 The railway of death

  14 Service at home

  15 The saga of the flying footsloggers

  16 The Kokoda Track and the bloody beachheads

  17 The battle for New Guinea

  18 An unnecessary campaign

  19 Savagery in Bougainville

  20 Bloody Borneo—Tarakan and Balikpapan

  21 The lost years and damaged lives

  22 Retain all prisoners of war indefinitely

  23 Final thoughts

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  There is a possibly apocryphal story told of two Aussie Diggers’ experience in the trenches of World War I. General William Birdwood, an Englishman, commanded the ANZAC Corps, and by mid 1916 the Anzacs were in action on the Somme. You can imagine the trenches, churned mud, duckboards and shell-holed no-man’s land. Two Diggers are leaning against the side of a trench, smoking and holding their .303 rifles in one hand. They watch a senior British officer followed by a gaggle of attendant junior officers pick their way briskly along a front-line trench. The Diggers don’t take their eyes off the officers, but they don’t shift to allow a wider passage and they don’t salute. After the senior officer has passed, a junior officer spins around and comes back. He says, ‘Don’t you know who that was?’ The Diggers consider the question. One answers: ‘Nope. You ever met him Barney?’ ‘Nah, not me.’ Junior officer: ‘That was General Birdwood!’ The first Digger says, ‘Well he didn’t have feathers on his arse like any other bird would.’

  General Birdwood was one of the better English generals. At least he was in the trenches seeing for himself what was going on.

  While the Diggers’ fighting abilities were respected, the British found the Australian soldiers hard to take. Their relaxed attitude to military discipline and niceties like saluting officers was not appreciated. It has been ever thus, continuing on to World War II.

  My late friend, historian Professor Hank Nelson, who collaborated with me in a major oral history radio series, Prisoners of War: Australians Under Nippon first broadcast on the ABC in 1984, delighted in collecting self-published books by Australian Diggers. These often larrikin accounts contained vivid descriptions of the fighting they shared in the Middle East, South-east Asia, New Guinea and the Pacific Islands, but also equally colourful descriptions of the rackets, skulduggery, drunken escapades in brothels, hatred and loathing of military police as well as less than flattering portraits of the officers they did not respect in and out of combat.

  I shared this interest and also started a modest collection of similar frank and forthright narratives. We had discussed the possibility of collaborating on a book based on these accounts. Shortly before Hank’s untimely death in February 2012, I was in Canberra for what we both realised was almost certainly our last meeting. He made a point of handing over to me the self-published books he had in his library. I have now had to fly solo.

  This is not in any sense a military history of the Australian army’s involvement in World War II. While many of the major theatres are featured—Palestine, North Africa, Greece and Crete, Malaya, Java, Thailand and Burma, Borneo, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands occupied by the Japanese, there is no mention of Australian involvement in Timor, Ambon, Hainan or the infamous Death Marches in Borneo, for example. This is because the Australian Diggers who feature in this book control the narrative, depending on where they were and what happened to them. Here are their highly individual stories—warts and all.

  Tim Bowden

  MILITARY UNITS

  Section (about 10 men)

  Platoon (about 30)

  Company (150–200)

  Battalion (up to 1000)

  Brigade (3 battalions)

  Division (3 brigades)

  Chapter 1

  JOINING UP

  Australia’s longest-serving prime minister Robert Menzies once famously opined that Australians were ‘British to the boot-straps’. How many Australians wore boot-straps or even knew what they were is unclear, but it was a graphic illustration of Australia’s dependence on the ‘Mother Country’ particularly when the British Empire’s interests were threatened by war. Until well into the twentieth century, it was the only foreign policy Australia had. However, the Commonwealth government had strongly supported the British government’s policy of appeasing Hitler when, in September 1938, he incorporated the Sudetenland province of western Czechoslovakia into the Reich. But Australia was equally ready to reverse that policy when Britain changed tack, and in March and April 1939 guaranteed support for Poland, Greece and Romania in the event of German or Italian aggression.

  Australia’s loyalty became strongly affirmed on 3 September 1939 when Prime Minister Menzies’ sonorous tones were heard on the radio, saying: ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.’

  Clearly an expanded army would have to be recruited—and quickly. One problem flowed from the so-called ‘two-army’ system. There was the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), an elite expeditionary force composed entirely of men who had volunteered to fight anywhere in the world. Then there was the Australian Militia, whose service was limited to Australia and its territories. In October 1939 Cabinet decided to reintroduce conscription, last in existence in 1929. It was hoped to have a part-volunteer, part-conscript Militia of some 75,000, calling up those with trades or skills that were needed. This dual system had some unhappy consequences as the war went on, with the derogatory term ‘Chocos’ (Chocolate Soldiers) for those in the Militia, or conscripts. Many officers in the regular army would have preferred one
army which could have been used wherever the national interest dictated. But opposition to the conscription of men to fight overseas, because of the divisive referenda in the Great War, was too deeply entrenched for this to be politically possible.

  This rivalry manifested itself very early, even in the training period. Ingleburn camp was still being constructed in Sydney, as AIF recruit Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt later wrote:

  On returning by train to Liverpool from Sydney we AIF men always went in a body into Liverpool to catch the bus back to camp. At this time the Militia men who had signed up for home defence duties were paid eight shillings a day, while the men of the AIF who had volunteered for active service abroad were paid the princely sum of five shillings a day. This created quite a deal of ill feeling and there were regular brawls in Liverpool between the two groups. Small numbers of single men were often viciously attacked by gangs of twenty or more, spoiling for a fight. Liverpool was a good place to keep away from in those days.

  Whenever a group of AIF men outnumbered the Chocos, you could bet money on someone chanting a parody on the song ‘The Legion of the Lost’ and shortly afterwards the skin and hair would start to fly.

  The second AIF they call us, the second AIF we are:

  Bread and jam for breakfast and greasy stew for tea.

  Marching all the day in the sun drilling,

  While the mug Militia is up at the pub swilling.

  We do most of the work and do all the killing.

  Scum, scum, the Militia can kiss my bum.

  The life and the canteen is as dry as hell –

  The second AIF are we.

  Young men flocked to join the services, as they had in the Great War. The age limits for joining the AIF were 20 to 35—the upper limit to discourage World War I veterans from signing up again. But this did not work. Young men inflated their ages, and older men dropped theirs. Medical examinations were conducted in noisy halls by overworked doctors, and many keen recruits were able to conceal disabilities that should have failed them. The situation of young Clarrie Thornton, a farm boy from Berrigan in the Riverina who had joined the Light Horse a few years before the outbreak of war, is a classic case.

  Thornton caught the train to the recruitment centre and sailed through the preliminaries of his medical, coughed, peed in a bottle, touched his toes and breathed in and out deeply as ordered. Then came the eye test. He was told to cover his right eye and read the test chart, which he did with no problems. ‘Now, right hand over left eye.’ Clarrie slapped his other hand over his right eye again and read the letters in descending size equally well. He was accepted into the army A1 and fit for overseas service by the end of that day. But he actually had no sight in his right eye. The teenager had been chopping firewood for his mum when a splinter flew up and blinded him in that eye!

  As it happened the army was blessed with a very good soldier. Sergeant Clarrie Thornton of the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment was a key member of a gun crew that destroyed eight Japanese tanks near Muar in Malaya during the Japanese advance on 18 January 1942—even though he had been wounded earlier that day. To sight a gun, you only need one eye.

  ‘Hooker’ Holt was only fifteen, but said he was 21 when he fronted the Marrickville drill hall, Sydney, for his medical:

  The doctor’s inspection was an eye-opener in more ways than one. The potential recruits lined up in the altogether and filed past the Medical Officer. They came in all states of sobriety and in all sorts of shapes and sizes. All eyes were on ‘Bud’ Buderous, as he swaggered to front the doctor, his muscular arms and chest black with tattoos that covered him from waist to neck. But the man next to him stole the show. It was the white-skinned, pigeon-chested ‘Boxer’ Dominey, who had an over-sized whistle slung on his heron-gutted body with ‘FOR A GOOD GIRL’ tattooed along the length of his enormous tool.

  Ken Clift and his fellow recruits were amused to be told in an official letter from the army to report to Victoria Barracks in Sydney with a ‘cunt lunch’. When it came to the urine test, one of Ken’s school mates, ‘Horrible’ Horrie Wilson, had spent several hours quenching his thirst at the Olympic Hotel just over the road. Then came the medical:

  We all stripped while the Medical Officer, a very dapper English captain complete with a silk khaki shirt, tie and jodhpurs, did the unpleasant task of examining us for piles, tonsillitis, heart, teeth and took a sample of our water. Some of the fellows had difficulty supplying such a sample, but not Horrie who obligingly filled the pint beaker to its brim with foaming suds, handed it back to the Medical Officer with the remark, ‘Empty her, sport, and I’ll fill her up again!’ This he very nearly did after our dignified doctor had to reluctantly trot to the basin and get rid of the first generous issue.

  Joe Dawson was under-age, and his parents had expressly forbidden him to enlist. An evening or so later, he found himself drawn to the Footscray drill hall—the headquarters of the 32nd Militia Battalion. Outside Joe met a young fellow and told him the sorry tale about his parents not letting him join up. The fellow said, ‘Look, what you do is join the Militia, get to know a bit about the army, and then transfer to the Australian Imperial Force. They won’t worry about your age then. You can join the Militia at eighteen without your parents’ signature.’ Joe recalled:

  That sounded alright to me, so I went in and spoke to a warrant officer, telling him I wanted to join up. When he asked me my date of birth I answered 3 January 1921, which made me eighteen, a year older than I actually was. He took more personal details and then gave me a form to take to a doctor in Barkly Street. There I was given a thorough medical examination, which was a little embarrassing for me at that age, particularly when it came to the ‘cough, cough’ bit. [It was standard practice for the doctors to grasp a recruit’s testicles in their hands firmly to check for a hernia, revealed by a bulge into the scrotum during coughing.] However I passed the medical without any problems.

  Dawson joined the Militia on 12 September 1939. The warrant officer told him to report back to the drill hall on the following Saturday, when he would be issued with his kit—which included a service jacket, breeches, long puttees, tan boots, felt hat, .303 rifle, bayonet, water bottle, ammunition pouches and pack.

  At first Joe didn’t mention his enlistment to his parents, but decided to wait until Saturday, when he would arrive home with all his gear. As expected, all hell broke loose.

  Dad said something like, ‘We’ll see about this!’ Auntie Nell, who was married to my father’s brother, poked her head over the fence to see what the commotion was about. Her response was, ‘Good on you, it’s good to see someone with a bit of guts around here!’ Surprisingly my father did not say any more on the matter.

  By 1941, when concern was growing whether Japan would enter the war and things were not going well for the Allies in Europe and North Africa, recruitment standards—including the age limit—were eased significantly. Bill Young and his mate John Lecardio were both fifteen years old and stony broke when they fronted up to a recruiting office in Melbourne to enlist in the AIF on 27 July 1941. They were both big lads and looked more mature than their age. Both were orphans, so parental permission could be bypassed. The recruiting officer asked if they had any aunts, and they said they had. Taking the forms away, they made up names of mythical aunts and each forged a signature on the other’s form. The recruiting officer could see their forms were shonky, but didn’t care. The war was going badly. Germany had invaded Russia, London was being bombed, Greece and Crete had fallen in the Middle East, and the Japanese were also showing signs of belligerence.

  The medical examination was high farce. Bill Young later wrote in his self-published book, Return to a Dark Age:

  A tall thin fellow dressed in a long white coat peered across at me through glasses so thick they must’ve been the last resort before a seeing-eye dog, and asked me to read the top line of a chart big enough to lead a May Day procession. Then, counting my eyes, and finding I had two, he passed me as having all the prerequisites fo
r shooting anyone legally suitable.

  I can still remember the smell of whisky coming at me as he belched. ‘Right lad, strip and hop on the scales. Good, turn around and bend over, good. Now turn around and face me. Breathe in, breathe out, mouth wide open. Say ah-ah-ah. Very good.’ Then he grabbed me balls and, weighing one against the other, told me to cough. ‘Now sit down and cross your legs’, and he whacked my knee and almost took a bow for the reaction it achieved. With a final, ‘Good, good, excellent, excellent’, I was allowed to get dressed and that was that. I was passed with flying colours and declared medically A1, fit to be a soldier in the King’s army.

  Chapter 2

  VERY BASIC TRAINING

  Only months before the first AIF troops were sent away overseas, training had to be sandwiched into a short time, with little resources available both in experienced instructors and basics like rifles, machine guns, artillery and ammunition. Gunner Colin Finkemeyer was one of many young recruits who had to do what they could in the face of Australia’s utter lack of preparedness for a war of any kind.

  All they had was youthful enthusiasm and energy, and they surely needed that because their so-called training could be described as high farce.

  In November 1940, when the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment was formed at Puckapunyal, the idea of defending against attacks from enemy tanks was far ahead of the AIF’s ability to provide the guns and everything else needed to get them into action. Undaunted, the gunners resorted to make-believe and soldiered on without their guns, as Finkemeyer described:

  So we went through the drills in the Little Red Military Handbook with the impressive Australian coat of arms embossed in gold and marked confidential—Armed Services only. This hallowed little red handbook contained in minute detail all the steps necessary for a gun crew to get a 2-pound anti-tank gun into action and fire it. We trained under the spreading red gums of Artillery Hill at Puckapunyal, using a couple of knotted and gnarled old tree trunks, one propped up over the other to serve as a gun barrel. The boys, eager to serve the country as best they could, took it all in good spirits. With the innocence of youth as yet unblemished by their army experience, they had blind virginal faith in their army’s top brass.