Anzac's Dirty Dozen (21 page)

In late November 1944, MacArthur's Advance Headquarters left Hollandia for Leyte. It was about this time, as Berryman was forced to insist his small headquarters be allowed to follow, that Berryman realised that the Americans were losing interest in the Australians. For the rest of the year, Berryman had almost daily battles with MacArthur's headquarters over the future use of the 1st Australian Corps. The hope of its employment in the Philippines was finally dashed on 5 January 1945, when Sutherland told Berryman that ten American divisions were sufficient to recapture Luzon, and Australian forces would instead concentrate on Borneo and the Netherlands East Indies.
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A month later, an end to the major campaign in the Philippines was in sight. There were even plans for a victory parade in Manila. On 4 February 1945, Berryman wrote in his diary that MacArthur was:

now busy staging his triumphant entry and to date no senior Australian officer has been invited to participate – one would think the AMF are not part of SWPA or that we did not do the bulk of the fighting in the critical stages of the campaign when our resources were so limited.

Still smarting a week later, he continued:

MacArthur more than once said he would take [the] AIF to Manila with him but now in his hour [of ] victory he has not even invited one [Australian] representative to be present – a lack of courtesy to say the least … I have not even hinted that we should be represented as our dignity & pride is proof against inclusion in a flamboyant Hollywood spectacle … In his hour [of ] victory his ego allows him to forget his former dependence on the AMF & is in keeping with GHQ policy to minimise the efforts of Australia in SWPA.
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Although the fighting in the Philippines continued until the end of the war, the AIF took no part in what where tough, hardfought ground battles. Australia's contribution to the liberation of the Philippines was limited to the RAAF and the RAN. Australian warships participated in the major naval battles of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 (with the heavy cruiser HMAS
Australia
badly damaged by Japanese kamikazes), and Lingayen Gulf in January 1945. A small number of Australians with the Central Bureau signals intelligence also went to the Philippines. Integrated into the larger air and sea operations, it is difficult to easily recognise the RAAF's and RAN's contribution in this campaign as a distinctly Australian national force. After months of ‘toing and froing', Berryman expressed his frustrations in a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Defence and War Cabinet secretary, Sir Frederick Shedden, in April 1945: ‘I shall feel relieved when I Aust Corps is concentrated in a forward area … I have worked on so many plans within the last few months that nothing will surprise me but it will be a relief when something is decided definitely.'
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Shedden wrote to MacArthur that ‘Australian opinion considered it a point of honour to be associated with operations in the Philippines as an acknowledgement of American assistance to Australia'.
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Shedden's plea fell on deaf ears.

As the saga of the AIF's employment in the SWPA was being played out, the Australian press was wondering about the army's whereabouts. There had been no official reports about its activities since the second half of 1944. MacArthur's headquarters had not released any information concerning the Australian takeover in the Mandated Territories or of offensive operations in New Guinea and Bougainville. There were only vague statements that the AIF would be deployed in the ‘future'. Newspapers, meanwhile, ran stories on the successful D-Day landings in France and the fighting in north-west Europe; the Red Army's staggering advance towards Germany; and the bloody American victories in the Central Pacific and the Philippines. It seemed that, while an eventual Allied victory was in sight, Australia's ‘diggers' had been removed from the picture. In late 1944, the
Sydney Morning Herald
's editor, for example, described the army as a ‘fighting army held in leash'. Australians are a spirited people, the editor continued, and they do not desire their army be ‘relegated to a secondary role or left indefinitely in reserve while the Pacific war marches to its climax'.
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The editor of the
Canberra Times
wrote sarcastically: ‘Will anyone knowing the whereabouts of Australian soldiers in action in the South-West Pacific please communicate at once with the Australian Government'.
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On 9 January 1945, MacArthur's communiques finally mentioned that Australian forces had relieved American forces in New Guinea, the Solomons and New Britain, and that ‘Continuous actions of attrition at all points of contact have been in progress'. With these few sentences, the press was able to publish reports and photographs that had been accumulating for weeks. In Long's opinion, ‘never in the history of modern war had so large a force, although in action, been hidden from public knowledge for so long'.
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Despite this initial flurry of stories, the press's interest quickly waned, and by February 1945 the ongoing campaigns in
the Mandated Territories were already beginning to be described as ‘mopping-up operations'.

This was a period of intense frustration for Blamey, who was becoming increasingly concerned with a ‘feeling that we are being side-tracked' that was ‘growing strong throughout the country'.
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The government shared this sentiment. After meeting with Curtin, who had himself been sidelined through illness for two months, on 13 February 1945 Blamey sent the prime minister a draft letter reminding him that elements of the 1st Australian Corps had been back in Australia for periods of up to 18 months and had taken no part in the war since 1943. He argued it was ‘not desirable to retain so many Australian troops in an ineffective role'. Two days later Curtin sent an expanded version of Blamey's draft to MacArthur, stressing that the government considered it a ‘matter of vital importance to the future of Australia and her status at the peace table in regard to the Pacific that her military effort should … be on a scale to guarantee her an effective voice'.
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The 1st Australian Corps, meanwhile, continued to languish on the Atherton Tablelands. Things were getting boring, wrote Sergeant Les Clothier in his diary. ‘Everyone, including the officers, is well and truly fed up.'
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Many other Australian soldiers recalled this as a dreary and monotonous period. Trooper Ossie Osborne remembered it as:

the worst period of my time in the army … It was totally boring. There we were, we were well trained, well experienced, fit as fiddles. There was a war going on all over the Pacific and here we were spending our time running around on the Tablelands playing soldiers or playing cricket or football and getting into trouble.
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By early 1945 MacArthur was at last willing to give the AIF a definite role as his eye turned to liberating Borneo and the Netherlands East Indies. ‘My purpose', MacArthur told Curtin in March, ‘is to restore the Netherlands East Indies authorities to the seat of government as has been done within Australian and United States territory'.
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MacArthur continued that this would be his final task before reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he had accomplished his purpose in SWPA. The exiled Dutch authorities in Washington had long been urging the Americans to expel the Japanese from their territory.
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MacArthur similarly felt that re-establishing the Dutch colonial government in Batavia would enhance America's status in the region. Not to do so, he told General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, ‘would represent a failure on the part of the United States to keep the faith'.
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MacArthur also noted that he had made a commitment to the Australian government to make use of their troops, who were becoming restless.

Most recently, historian Peter Dean has pointed out that the strategic justifications put forward by MacArthur and others for the Borneo operations (codenamed ‘OBOE') were ‘tenuous'. By early 1945, the US Navy's blockade of the Japanese home islands was already preventing them from receiving oil from Borneo, while the oilfields and refineries were so badly damaged that even if the Allies captured Borneo they would take months if not years to be repaired. The final claim, pushed by the US Navy's Admiral Ernest King – that Brunei Bay in British North Borneo was needed as a base for the British Pacific Fleet – was dismissed when the Admiralty rejected its usefulness.
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Marshall himself noted that the Borneo ‘would have little immediate effect on the war against Japan'.
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It is difficult in such context to avoid the impression that the OBOE operations were motivated as much by MacArthur's ambition to see himself in his final act as the
liberator of SWPA as by his sense of obligation to the Dutch. This was also an opportunity to silence Australia's growing agitation by allocating the AIF something of a consolation prize after being excluded from the Philippines.

The OBOE operation was to have been a series of six amphibious operations with the 6th, 7th and 9th Divisions landings down Borneo's east coast and moving on into Java, where MacArthur hoped the Japanese would be crushed by early August 1945.
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Curtin, however, supporting Blamey's recommendation, refused to release the 6th Division prematurely from its campaign in New Guinea.
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Ultimately, only three of the six proposed OBOE operations went ahead. During April 1945, the first units from the 1st Australian Corps began moving from Australia to Morotai, in the Halmahera islands group, north of Ambon. Morotai became the staging area for an invasion of Borneo. Also based on Morotai was the RAAF's 1st Tactical Air Force, whose fighter and bomber aircraft had become responsible for air operations south of the Philippines.

Meanwhile, criticism and discontent in Parliament and the press continued to grow. Blamey's enemies – and there were many – attacked his leadership and credibility, and called for him to resign. The ‘general public has very little faith in him as the Commander-in-Chief ', claimed Senator Hattil Foll, while the army was ‘seething with dissatisfaction'.
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The Opposition used this as an opportunity to attack the government's handling of the war effort, criticising the quality and quantity of the army's equipment. Although his health was failing, Curtin staunchly defended Blamey, but after a particularly heated debate in Parliament he sent Senator James Fraser, the Acting Minister for the Army, on a 12-day inspection of New Guinea, Bougainville and New Britain to investigate the quality of the army's equipment. Privately though, Curtin's doubts about Blamey's ongoing conduct of the
war were growing. He admitted, for example, that it had been his ‘assumption' that the operations being carried out in the islands were in accordance with MacArthur's earlier July 1944 directive, and that they had met with MacArthur's approval.
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Senator Fraser's inspection was a whirlwind and carefully choreographed tour. For example, when on 9 April 1945 his entourage arrived at Torokina, the main Australian base on Bougainville, it only stayed two days. The Australian commander, Lieutenant General Stan Savige, a loyal friend and supporter of Blamey, arranged for a demonstration of infantry weapons and live ammunition under jungle conditions before taking Fraser to a battalion in a forward area for a brief visit. As Fraser left, he told Savige that he was leaving with confidence in both their efforts and equipment.
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Curtin tabled Fraser's report in late April, telling parliament that the government accepted ‘full responsibility' for the operations being carried out. The campaigns were being conducted successfully and with few casualties. The prime minister also pointed out that the Americans were conducting similar operations in the Philippines. Fraser thought that while some equipment had been delayed for the 6th Division, Savige and the commander on New Britain were happy with the quality of the engineering and fighting equipment available.
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Curtin, however, was not a well man. At the end of month he was hospitalised as his health failed again. After several weeks in a hospital, Curtin insisted on returning to the Lodge. ‘I'm not worth two bob', he told his driver on the way back to his residence.
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Blamey's time came in May 1945 when Treasurer and Acting Prime Minister Ben Chifley requested his attendance at the War Cabinet to explain his policy in the Mandated Territories.
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Blamey offered the Cabinet a clear and well-reasoned appreciation of his strategy on 22 May 1945. His policy, he explained, had been adopted to destroy the enemy where this could be done
with relatively light casualties, thus freeing Australian territory and liberating the ‘native population', and thereby progressively reducing the military's commitments and freeing up personnel for release from the army. This was the approach that had been implemented in New Guinea and on Bougainville. On New Britain, where the Japanese at Rabaul were known to be well entrenched and to outnumber the Australians, Blamey's directive was to contain the Japanese on the Gazelle Peninsula and not go on the offensive. He went on to point out that the American policy of letting the Japanese ‘wither on the vine' was not working: it tied down large forces in passive roles and was ‘a colossal waste of manpower, material and money'. ‘We are well into the second year of this policy', Blamey argued, and ‘the enemy remains a strong, well organised fighting force' (the Japanese had become largely self-sufficient with gardens cultivated by New Guineans and Bougainvilleans). Blamey pointed out that once the Americans reached the Philippines, MacArthur himself had changed his by-passing strategy and sought the complete destruction of the Japanese. Blamey hoped that by the end of 1945, the twelve brigades in the area could be reduced to five; with a division of two brigades on New Britain, one brigade in the Aitape–Wewak area in New Guinea, and one brigade on Bougainville – leaving a brigade in reserve. In these last two areas, he intended for the Papuan and the New Guinea Infantry Battalions and small guerrilla groups to finish destroying the remaining Japanese.
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