Anzac's Dirty Dozen (23 page)

There is a ‘negative' version of this type of discussion: that some aspect of history is over-represented. The most common recent iteration of this argument is that Australian military history occupies a predominant position in the national psyche and that this is undesirable, if only because it excludes other aspects of the national heritage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is most commonly
observed in the lead up to Anzac Day. This ‘beggar thy neighbour' approach is unproductive at best: watching historians fight is, with only one exception this author can think of, very unlikely to generate a broader interest in any aspect of the subject.
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The only productive way to achieve balance, if indeed an imbalance exists, is for historians and devotees of a particular subject to do the research, give the lectures, and write the books that meet the demands of varying audiences. In so doing they expand the contribution of history to Australia's heritage and public discourse, as well as advancing the subjects and causes that they care about. This is a much more positive method of contribution.

In any case, the fact is that the public does not have a very good understanding of Australian naval history. Certainly there are well-known battles, such as the first HMAS
Sydney
's sinking of the German cruiser
Emden
in November 1914, or the second
Sydney
's sinking of the Italian cruiser
Bartolomeo Colleoni
in July 1940. Some other well-known episodes in Australian naval history focus on the sinking of ships and other more difficult issues: the loss of the second HMAS
Sydney
in November 1941 (when all 645 crew died), of her sister ship HMAS
Perth
in February 1942 (353 crew died, over half the ship's company), and that of HMAS
Canberra
at Savo Island in August 1942 are cases in point during the World Wars. A little later, the sinking of HMAS
Voyager
in 1964 and USS
Frank E Evans
in 1969 in collisions with the carrier HMAS
Melbourne
– and the subsequent Royal Commissions – managed to capture public attention for a time. In more recent times, the treatment of servicewomen in the Navy in general, and in ships at sea in particular, has generated a great deal of print.

The history of the Australian Navy and its contribution to Australia, however, is much more than these discrete and often painful events. From escorting and carrying troops in wartime
to surveying the harbours and sea routes that support much of Australia's economic prosperity; from conducting rescues at sea in the most difficult of circumstances to contributing to Allied intelligence breakthroughs, the Royal Australian Navy has a broad and rich history that is worthy of better understanding. The problem is that it has been a history that has never been well publicised, or well received by the wider community.

Even for those events that are well known, what is often lacking from the public discourse is the context for these events and the conduct of the naval personnel. It is not that naval history should only deal with its positive aspects, but that the successes and the disasters, the defining events and the broader context, the ships and the people, should all be understood in something approaching equal measure. The sinking of many Australian ships in war, for example, often occurred in the course of transporting or escorting troops, so although there may be controversial aspects to each individual event, the ships and their crews were contributing to a worthwhile objective in a risky environment. In this context Piers Macksey's criticism of histories covering British leadership in the American War of Independence is also appropriate to an assessment of the operational history of the Royal Australian Navy:

The men who conduct a war are more intemperately and uncharitably criticised than those who run an administrative machine in peacetime. Statesmen and commanders are equally victims; for in war the results are swift, harsh and measurable, and censure readily precedes understanding … To understand the war, one must view it with sympathy for ministers in their difficulties, and not with the arrogant assumption that because they were defeated they were incompetent, and that all their actions proceeded from folly.
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This is not an argument for the idealisation of the Navy as an institution. In addition to the public discussion of naval history, including an understanding of the objectives and risks of naval operations, the Navy also needs to understand where and how its people and procedures have succeeded and where they have been found wanting. In many ways, people within the Navy have made strides to address this, particularly in the last twenty or thirty years, but it is questionable whether the Navy has truly institutionalised a commitment to its own history as a guide to its future. There is much to be learnt not only from operational history, but in the study of the organisation, the people within it, and its relationships with other institutions in Australia. The history of women in the Navy, for instance, and the extent to which that experience has mirrored Australian society, certainly deserves further study: it is also likely that the contemporary Navy would learn much of use from such work. Simply to know whether contemporary problems are enduring themes or exceptional events in naval history would be valuable information. To know to what degree the Navy's problems were its own or part of larger issue in Australian society would be even more important. Similar arguments can be advanced for understanding Navy's relationship with other institutions, particularly its industrial suppliers and its political leadership.

There are two main reasons why public knowledge of Australian naval history is patchy: the dominance of the army in the Anzac tradition; and the lack of long-term interest by the Navy in its own history. The starting point to understanding the dominance of army history is that size matters. While the writings of Charles Bean and the widespread resonance of the Anzac tradition with the public are inextricably linked with army history, they are in some ways simple reflections of the numbers involved. Although the RAN Bridging Train served throughout
the Gallipoli campaign, for example, it was numerically a much smaller organisation than the army units. During World War I, almost 417 000 men – over half of the eligible white male population – enlisted in the Australian armed forces, the overwhelming majority in the army.
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The Navy had 3800 personnel at the start of this war, and over 5000 at the end. Of the 55 306 Australians who died in the conflict of 1914–1918, only 108 served in the RAN.
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This theme of relative size is consistent throughout the twentieth century: in World War II the Navy was much larger, peaking at about 40 413 personnel in June 1945, but the peak size of the army was around 542 000 in August 1943 and the Royal Australian Air Force's reached close to 182 000 people in August 1944.
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As a result, through the last century of Australian history the pool of people with direct experience of the Navy is relatively small and this has mattered as far as historical attention is concerned.

This issue of relative size is given further emphasis if the Navy's history is narrowly cast on operational subjects, because it leaves out so many parts of the service's history. For example, navies are capital- and technology-intensive organisations and their operational effectiveness is directly related to the efficiency and appropriateness of their industrial support base. But the understanding of the impact of industrial and dockyard activities on the effectiveness of the Australian Navy has never been systematically studied. Another example is the extent to which the Navy has mirrored Australian national priorities: ships are discrete units and their location and employment quickly and directly reflect the priorities of the government. The Australian Navy is no different to other navies in this respect but – in an echo of the ‘other people's wars' myth discussed by Craig Stockings in
Chapter 4
– the prevailing impression is that the Royal Navy and British associations have predominated to the detriment of Australian interests. This
impression is not accurate, but a broader study, assessing Australian national interests and how the Navy has supported them, is another important area of investigation which has never been studied consistently, let alone comprehensively.

Furthermore, the location of naval operations has tended to diminish public knowledge and awareness of them, as they usually occur out of sight, often far from Australia. The Japanese submarine attacks in Sydney Harbour, for example, are an exception not the rule. Those parts of naval operations that do occur where they can be observed, such as harbour defences and minesweeping, are performed by small, slow and outwardly unimpressive vessels, while the conduct of the operations themselves is painstaking and focused below the water. As a consequence, these tend not to be parts of naval history that capture much attention from naval historians, let alone the broader public.

A second aspect of the location of maritime operations that tends to militate against broad public engagement is the ephemeral nature of the naval battlefield. It is possible to visit many terrestrial battlefields, and the topography and features of those battlefields are often still visible, can be photographed and disseminated broadly. An interested person can start to appreciate what the battle might have been like. The naval battlefield by contrast is much more difficult to visit. Even to a trained eye, one patch of ocean is much like another and the battle is defined by the presence of the warships, most of which have moved on after the battle and left few traces behind. Even the warship crews present at such battles have greatly differing perspectives, each of which are equally valid, but incomplete. The majority would have served below decks and may have heard a great deal, but not seen anything beyond the next bulkhead, let alone their enemy. Even those on the upper decks may have seen little. The resulting fragmentary stories are not easy to collect and piece together, making
it difficult for historians to construct engaging, broadly appealing narratives.

How naval ships operate also contributes to the relative paucity of naval history and its understanding. Simply put, not many people know what goes on in the different parts of ships and how each contributes to the effectiveness of the vessel over-all; and very few of those who do have recorded their experiences. While it is self-evident that naval, army and air force units are quite different, these differences have a real impact on the ease of transmission of history. Aircraft and air bases are quite similar to their commercial counterparts and are relatively accessible; army units, battlefields and bases are to varying degrees readily accessible and can be observed by both contemporary and later visitors. In combination with the twentieth-century Australian Navy's relatively parsimonious approach to the award of medals, the simple difficulty for a naval officer to observe bravery by a sailor in a different part of a ship goes a long way to explaining the relative lack of official acknowledgement and publicity regarding meritorious service by many naval personnel. Indeed, the Commanding Officer of HMAS
Murchison
during the Korean War (a subject to which this chapter will return) observed in later years that he wished he had pushed harder for greater recognition of bravery for his crew.
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It is not unreasonable that the broader public does not seek to know more about actions that the Navy itself has hardly acknowledged.

How navies view the relationship between a ship and the vessel's commanding officer is another factor that reinforces the relative invisibility of the remainder of the crew. While the ‘great men' of the Navy are undoubtedly worth studying, it is not possible to fully appreciate their accomplishments, decisions and failings, without also understanding the roles of those who served under them. The World War II losses of the cruisers
Sydney
and
Perth
, and the
Voyager
–
Melbourne
collisions are all examples where the responsibility for the loss of the ship, which resides with the commanding officer, can be confused with explaining and understanding how and why these ships were lost. In all three cases, to understand the reason for the loss it is necessary (although not always sufficient) to understand the operation of the ships' bridge watchkeeping teams. The actions of the German ship
Kormoran
probably deceived not only Captain J. Burnett, but some or all of the other officers and sailors on
Sydney
's bridge before that engagement began. While the decision-making process in this case will never be known with certainty, it is possible to construct hypotheses about how it occurred by understanding how the ship operated.
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But this is seldom done. How many know, for instance, who else was on the bridge with Burnett?

The fact that ships are discrete units also tends to act against a well-rounded understanding of events when they are lost, as the unit records are often destroyed or lost with the sinking of the vessel. As a result, significant parts of an account of a vessel's final hours, days and weeks are based on incomplete, circumstantial and inferred evidence. In the absence of specific information it is easy for others to assume the worst, whether justified or not.

Importantly, while understanding of Australian naval history is patchy, it is not always for a lack of source material. A quick examination of the number of records available to anyone who is interested shows that Navy source material is voluminous and increasingly easily available, even online. The number of records available is in roughly equal proportion to the relative size of each of the armed services. In the National Archives of Australia in January 2011, there were about 19 151 records brought up by a search for ‘navy'; 19 692 for ‘air force' and almost 400 000 for ‘army', the last figure reflecting the number and method of storage of individual service records. A similar broad catalogue search
at the Australian War Memorial returned 12 987 ‘navy' records, 41 908 ‘army' records and 22 558 ‘air force' records: numbers that are broadly consistent with the sizes of each service referred to earlier. Similar proportional search results are returned from sources such as Wikipedia (5587 from ‘Australian naval history', 8281 ‘Australian air force history', and 11 330 ‘Australian army history').
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