Kokoda (18 page)

‘The Anzac breed will trade punches with the Japanese, until we rock the enemy back on his heels,’ he said in his typically passionate tones. And no matter which way the battle turned, ‘there will still be Australians fighting on Australian soil until the turning point be reached, and we will advance over blackened ruins through blasted and fire-swept cities, across scorched plains, until we drive the enemy into the sea…’

But, and this was the whole point, American assistance was paramount.

‘Australia is the last bastion between the west coast of America and the Japanese,’ he said with great emphasis. ‘If Australia goes, the Americas are wide open…’
⁶³

Though some might claim that the prime minister’s sense of geography placed the continent of Australia somewhere in the region of Hawaii, his point was not missed, either by the Americans or his fellow Australians.

Right up until the bombing of Darwin, most Australians still viewed the war as a distant problem. Sure, the population had had to suffer things like petrol rationing and enforced blackouts, and quite a few people had taken the possibilities of bombing seriously enough to dig slit trenches in their backyards, yet to this point there had been no universal view that the Japs were coming.

But now things had changed. With the fall of Singapore, bombing of Darwin and the Japanese landing in New Guinea, there came the real possibility that Australia would soon be a country under occupation, just as France was under the occupation of Germany. Things were grim. Vance Palmer, writer and social commentator of the time, reflected the mood.

‘The next few months,’ he wrote, ‘may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we
deserve
to survive. As yet none of our achievements prove it, at any rate in the sight of the outer world. We have no monuments to speak of, no dreams in stone, no
Guernica
, no sacred places. We could vanish and leave singularly few signs that, for some generations, there had lived a people who had made a homeland of this Australian earth.’
⁶⁴

Dawn. Darwin ahead, and beyond it, stretched mile after endless mile of Australia. At the first sighting of the great southern continent, 62-year-old General Douglas MacArthur who was by his own estimation, ‘the best General that the United States possesses,’
⁶⁵
had moved up into the cockpit of the B-17 Flying Fortress.

Two days earlier MacArthur had left the Philippines and the mass of his troops to their common fate under the command of Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright. Accompanied by his wife, Jeannie, infant son Arthur and thirteen of his most senior and loyal staff, MacArthur had arrived in Australia to take up his new post as Supreme Commander of all the Allied troops in the Southwest Pacific. Starting with a fast torpedo boat to get him off Corregidor, and then transferring to a series of planes flying through enemy territory, it had been a hairy trip.

Before leaving, MacArthur sent a message to his troops that while he was going,
they
must hold on as reinforcements were on their way and would shortly relieve them. Many subsequent historians have been at a loss to understand why MacArthur said this, because there was no such thing, and it seemed cruel at best to promise his besieged American troops that the cavalry was coming when he knew that not to be true. As it happened, the total dominance of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Southwestern Pacific—after it had invaded and secured all American bases on islands between the Philippines and Hawaii—meant that it was impossible to get American troops through to Bataan and Corregidor from the direction of the west coast of America, and the only hope was to use Australia as their launching pad.

The four B-17s landed at Batchelor Airfield, some forty miles south of Darwin, and right in the middle of…

Nowhere. There was nothing there, and no sign of anything in the horizons shimmering all around them. A few tents, a lot of flies, some 44-gallon drums of aviation fuel, and that was pretty much it, not counting the limitless sand and scrub that surrounded them. The impression that they were right at the very back of beyond— and maybe even further back than that—was strengthened when MacArthur inspected the American honour guard that had been called out to greet him. A single rag-tag platoon of American GIs from the 102nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion was all that could be managed.
⁶⁶

MacArthur was appalled, but consoled himself with the knowledge that they were, after all, right up in the northern reaches of Australia, in a very isolated spot. At the conclusion of the inspection MacArthur took aside the Commanding Officer of the 102nd and asked him precisely where in Australia the American troops were based. The officer looked back with some confusion.

‘So far as I know, Sir,’ he replied, ‘there are few troops here…’

How could this be? US Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had cabled MacArthur back in January, and he understood that there were no fewer than forty thousand troops waiting for him to command, even as ‘every available vessel’ was steaming towards Australia. How could it be?

He would have to wrestle with it some time soon, but the most pressing thing was to get to civilisation. His good wife Jeannie refused to fly
one more mile
, and MacArthur wasn’t too unhappy to hear it. Still, advised by the bemused Australians that the nearest train was to be found at Alice Springs, some seven hundred miles south, MacArthur reluctantly agreed to get back on the plane, but only as far as the Alice, where he expected a train to be provided forthwith.

Sure enough, a train was dispatched from Adelaide to go and pick him up, and on 18 March, MacArthur and his entourage boarded it: one engine, one passenger car and two freight cars.

There is something in even the slight lurch of a train when it slows from
clickety-clack-clickety-clack-clickety-clack
to
clickety… clack… clickety… clack
which tends to wake passengers and so it proved on this occasion. Somewhere in that vast ocean of nowhere, MacArthur’s train slowed for seemingly no reason, waking him, and he was shortly told that they were being flagged down by a group of sheep ranchers who knew he was on the train. Not unnaturally MacArthur presumed the ranchers were there to greet him or see him or somesuch, and he quickly rehearsed a few magnificent, magnanimous phrases. Alas, they simply wanted to see MacArthur’s doctor as one of them had a steel splinter in his eye. Once that doctor had removed the sliver, the train rumbled on, albeit with one now slightly deflated American general.
⁶⁷

Not that MacArthur let too much of that disappointment show when he shortly afterwards performed for the press, who had gathered at Terowie Station, north of Adelaide, to greet him. It was time to be frank with them and tell them exactly how heroic and crucial he was going to be to the outcome of the war.

‘The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines,’ he announced in his magnificently commanding tones, while they scribbled furiously, ‘and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organising the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.’

Yes, yes, yes, MacArthur was certainly here to defend Australia, and the people needn’t worry, but within America’s framework, the defence of Australia was not an end in itself, so much as a platform from which the Philippines could be re-taken.

Of the grandiloquent ‘I shall return’ line, a later biography,
General MacArthur and President Truman
by Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger summed it up rather pointedly, noting that his ‘Caesaresque words… left rather an ashen taste in the mouths of the men who knew they would be called on to return somewhat in advance of him.’
⁶⁸

Quite.

As to his ‘breaking through Japanese lines’, there too MacArthur had an amazing story about what a close-run thing it had been. MacArthur’s claim was that on the way into Australia their planes had been buzzed by Japanese fighters. Oddly though there was no record of Japanese fighters in the area on that day, but that would have been a detail overlooked in the excitement of the great man arriving. (And for the record, the wireless operator on MacArthur’s flight, Master Sergeant Dick Graf, went on the record after the war to say that there had been no Japanese planes
at all
, and the flight had been purely routine.)

Never mind. MacArthur continued south. By the time he was getting close to Adelaide, although he had confirmed that he had been appointed Commander of all American forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, he was appalled to find that it didn’t actually mean much. Such American forces as there were in Australia were mostly engineers and airmen. From Perth to Parramatta, from the Great Australian Bight to Birdsville, there was not one American infantryman with a rifle that the great commander could command, nor was there any artillery. As to Australian forces, their four divisions remained overseas, on duty in North Africa, while their home forces of militia might have boasted 170 000, but only one-third of these were on duty at any given time as they still held down their regular jobs, and even then they were reportedly of very poor quality indeed.

As the train continued to clatter through the South Australian night, MacArthur paced up and down the corridor, muttering, ‘God have mercy on us!’
⁶⁹
It was something that he simply didn’t understand. The Japanese had brought America into the war and had attacked him in the Philippines, but President Roosevelt had quickly come to an agreement with Winston Churchill that eighty per cent of America’s manpower and resources would go to the European theatre of operations, and only twenty per cent towards stopping the Japanese.

The strange thing, Joe Dawson sometimes reflected, was how quickly you got close to blokes…

Just a few months ago, he had never even met Ray Phillips and Wally Gratz, but now they were his best mates. He could identify the deep voice of Ray or the easy laugh of Wally among a hundred other babbling voices on the parade ground, just as he could pick the silhouette of Ray’s jutting jawline or Wally’s nose on sentry duty fifty yards away in the sudden gloom of dusk. As a matter of fact he could do the same for most of the fellas in B Company. It just came from being around the same blokes, hour after hour, day after day, month after month. And you got to know, of course, not just their physical form and the timbre of their voices, but what kind of men they were inside. You saw them under pressure and letting loose—when they were up, when they were down, when they got a good letter from home and when they were told that their mum had been a bit poorly lately—just as they saw you in all the same situations. It made for very strong bonds, and Joe had none stronger than those he had with Ray and Wally, who very quickly became like brothers to him. For whatever reason, they just formed a natural trio, looking out for each other, looking after each other, sharing things they might not necessarily share with others.

Ray and Wally, for example, were the only two Joe really opened up to about his girlfriend Elaine, what she was like, what she did, how much he missed her and how he had decided he wanted to marry her. Wally in turn confided his love for his girlfriend in Maidstone. Other blokes were already starting to get what were called ‘Dear John’ letters from their girlfriends telling them they’d found someone else and had decided they didn’t want to go on with it, but both Joe and Wally just knew that wouldn’t happen to them, and quietly told each other as much.

All over the battalion, there were similar duos and trios which had formed up, and small bunches of friends. It just felt better to know that if anything ever did happen there’d be a couple of mates you could count on to cover you, just as you would cover them.

Sometimes, very rarely, Joe and Ray and Wally could get away for an all-too-rare drink at a Moresby pub. Local legend had it that the Australian-born Hollywood star Errol Flynn had been passing through just before the war started, and got involved in a fight with another bloke that had started at the bar and continued all the way down to the wharf about 150 yards away. The fight was not surprising, in one way. For the way they heard it, Flynn was a mongrel who left town without paying his debts.

But moving right along. Most often the conversation would inevitably turn to the Japs. It didn’t really sound like they were going to be
too
much of a problem. The way the Australians heard it, they were mostly small, bucktoothed, shortsighted little coots without too much grunt about them…

There is no hold so tight as that of a loving mother embracing a beloved son who has just returned safely from a war, and for what seemed like ten minutes, Olive Bisset, weeping, held both strapping sons to her, refusing to let them go. Her many prayers had been answered, and her boys were now home safe.

There, there, Mum, we’re here now, and we’ll be here for the next few days. Still, this good woman held on as the pressure of holding her agonised emotions in check for the previous eighteen months was now released and she could let it all go. Their father George was more restrained in his own expressed emotions, giving both his boys very firm handshakes and quick, manly embraces; but for all that it seemed he just couldn’t take his eyes off these two fine men, his sons, now Australian Army
officers
, who had returned safely to home and hearth. Yes, they were back only for a few days, but it was something all right.

Back in New Guinea, the war in Europe seemed far, far away. Private ‘Smoky’ Howson of the 39th Battalion’s C Company was just finishing a fairly unpleasant stint as cook’s offsider—which essentially meant doing an enormous amount of washing up in a huge vat— when an idea came to him. Why waste all that hot water? He was a man in desperate need of a relaxing soak and here was a vat of hot water. A bit greasy and scungy, sure, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.