Fighting on all Fronts (41 page)

In the late 1960s former carriers told PNG University’s Ulli Beier that about two thirds of them had tried to escape. Reasons for wanting to abscond included bad food, sore shoulders from carrying, beatings, cold and bombs. But whenever some did escape, the Australians conscripted their sons so that fathers were forced back to face ghastly penalties. “The most terrifying punishments were the so-called drum beatings in Kerema… A fire was lit in a 44-gallon drum and when it was hot the unlucky carriers were put cross the drum and beaten”.
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A song still current among villagers in the 1970s ended:

The white man has brought his war to be fought on this land

His King and Queen have said so

We are forced against our wishes to help him.
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Tom Hungerford’s novel
The Ridge and the River
portrays an Australian musing about local villagers who watched plantation owners, the “little tin gods”, driven out by the Japanese and lucky to escape with their lives. He suspects the planters might get a shock after the war when they attempt to get local labour at the old rates, “and there might be something more ugly”.
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At the time the government identified Papua and New Guinea as Australian territory, but Curtin himself was quite cynical about this in private, telling journalists that New Guinea was not Australia and that calling it so was just “military strategy”.
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At the end of the conflict a man from Wewak in New Guinea told an Australian:

Yes, we have helped you in this war, now we are like cousins, like brothers. We too have won the war. Now whatever knowledge, whatever ideas you have, you can give them to us. Before all the things we did, you gaoled us, and you fined us, all the time. But now. What now?
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Some people in PNG expected whites to compensate them for past plunder, and that was the starting point for many of the social movements known as cargo cults in the post-war period. Instead colonial plunder resumed. People throughout the islands had the bitter experience of whites confiscating gifts from soldiers or money received for carvings on the grounds that it must be stolen. For this Major-General Basil Morris came up with a curious rationalisation. The native mind, he argued, responded most readily to visible marks of distinction, so that money or goods possessed much less value in the eyes of local people
than if one gave them a medal.
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This was consistent with government policy. The pamphlet
You and the Native
, distributed to troops in New Guinea, advised white readers: “Always therefore maintain your position or pose of superiority…always, without overdoing it, be the master”.
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During the campaigns for East Timor’s independence from Indonesia from the 1970s to the 1990s, much was made of the warm relations enjoyed by Australian “Sparrow Force” guerrilla fighters in that country during the Second World War. But there is another much darker account: a story of contention by outside aggressors. It began before the war as Australians and Japanese jockeyed for oil concessions in the late 1930s. Qantas even initiated regular flights to the capital, Dili, which would hardly have been profitable, to increase Australian leverage with the local administrators. The seeds were sown for armed conflict.

Despite endless condemnation of the Axis powers for invading neutral countries, until recently few people knew that Australian and Dutch troops had invaded East Timor in violation of Portuguese neutrality. The Portuguese governor called it unlawful aggression.
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One invading soldier, Archie Campbell, later wrote that it seemed “our single claim to fame and glory is that we shall go down in history as the first troops of Great Britain or Australia to violate another country’s neutrality in the war”. The aggression is clear from Lionel Wigmore’s official war history. Once the invading forces had mobilised, he says, their commanders went to the Portuguese governor and demanded he invite them in. The outraged governor said his orders were to ask for help only after an attack by Japan. He was told that Dutch and Australian troops were already on their way.

Not that we need concern ourselves unduly with the diplomatic rights of the Portuguese colonialists, given they themselves held the colony by force. What matters is that the Japanese, for reasons mainly to do with keeping Portugal out of the war in Europe, were keen to keep East Timor out of the war as well. Neither Macao nor East Timor were on the list of war objectives in the first stage of Japan’s war plans because the general staff feared that taking Portuguese Timor would drive Portugal into the arms of the Allies. So it was the Allies who brought the horrors of war to this colony. Ex-diplomat James Dunn would later write that as a consequence of the Allied invasion of December 1941, East Timor became one of the great catastrophes of the Second World War in terms of relative fatalities.

Did the Timorese support Australia? Only sometimes, and then often cynically. Christopher Wray’s book on the subject quotes an account saying locals were initially suspicious of Sparrow Force, and only when antagonised by Japanese behaviour did they start helping them. In August 1942 the Australians were attacked by a group of people apparently from Dutch Timor and allied with the Japanese. At one point these Timorese indicated they wanted to use captured Australian Corporal Hodgson for “spear practice”.

In August 1942 the Japanese took the offensive. Once that happened the Australians faced increasing hostility from the Timorese. Those in frontier areas were pro-Japanese, or more accurately anti-European. Elsewhere the locals were “no longer as ready to support the Australians as they had been before when the 2/2 Independent Company had the run of Portuguese Timor”. Moreover “screens of pro-Japanese natives made it hard to strike at vital parts of enemy columns” and by 23 August, despite a Japanese retreat, unrest among the Timorese was beginning to seriously concern Sparrow Force.

Sparrow Force led raids on villages that did not support Australian troops. “During the raids a number of villages were burned out, about 150 huts being destroyed”, says Wray, whose book contains a photograph of Australians burning the village of Mindelo. He tells us that some of the local people who helped the Australians did so in the mistaken belief that the Australian forces would eventually help them overthrow the Portuguese.
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But for all the wartime talk of liberation, there was no chance of this. On the contrary, the Australians wanted Portuguese officials to stay in their posts to maintain order. And an unedifying order it was. In late August local people at Maubisse rebelled and killed a Portuguese official. A Portuguese-led reprisal force then attacked Maubisse, “burning villages and crops, carrying off women, children and animals and killing everyone else in their wake”. A diary kept by Australian troops recorded their relaxed attitude to such events:

The private local war, Portuguese versus native, still goes on in its bloodthirsty way, and provides some humour for sub units. One of our patrols near Mape, out hunting the Jap, encountered a Portuguese patrol out hunting some natives, they exchanged compliments and went their various ways.
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Ultimately the position of Sparrow Force became untenable as the Japanese offensive escalated and villagers became unfriendly and even hostile.
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As in so many places around the Asia-Pacific, it appears most
villagers were friendly when the Australians had the upper hand in fighting, but became unfriendly when the Japanese looked like winning. Which makes sense. They would be less likely to make a serious commitment to the Australians when some of them acted like this:

Many times a native would pull into an Aussie camp, proudly produce a surat [letter of IOU used to secure provisions] on which someone had written: “Give the bastard a kick in the arse and send the useless bugger on his way.” It added to the general enjoyment of the hard dull work of the day’s patrolling.

Some had very sobering memories of the East Timor campaign. Australian soldier Jim Landman remembers that Sparrow Force, like so many military interlopers in history, killed recalcitrant local people and treated women as commodities. Alfredo Pires, son of a Portuguese official and a Timorese mother, remembered a common saying that when it came to punishment the Japanese were very cruel, but in matters of justice the Australians were worse. The Japanese might torture to extract information, but they might let you live. But if the Australians suspected you, you were dead.
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Another sort of cruelty was to follow. Archie Campbell and his comrades were haunted by the likely fate awaiting their remaining Timorese allies when the Australians pulled out:

we are now their only source of protection. If only we could take them with us when we go, but Australian HQ has vetoed the idea… Our poor Timor
criados
look so bewildered…our hearts are weighed down by a persistent and terrible ache.
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Further east, Australian troops restored Dutch control. Not all of the soldiers liked doing this. George Bliss of the 7th Division recalled:

About six weeks after the war ended we were told we were going into the Celebes [Sulawesi] “to supervise the rounding up of the Japanese”. We realised later that it was to prevent the locals organising against the return of the Dutch. We went by ship to Makassar. The feeling among the troops was mostly against the Dutch. On arrival we were lined up on the wharf, fully equipped in battle order, and marched through the town out to the Dutch barracks about three miles out. That was the first act of intimidation.

Later in Pare Pare, Bliss found the independence movement was stronger. “All along the road the Indonesian flag was flying and people wore the red and white colours of the flag. The top brass gave orders forbidding fraternisation. Most ignored that order”.
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Gavin Long’s official history reports that in Balikpapan on 14 November up to 8,000 Indonesians gathered and raised banners, and ten to 15 Australian soldiers were present “inciting” the Indonesians.
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Such public appearances weren’t the norm, but anti-colonial sentiment was widespread in the ranks, which is why on Tarakan Brigadier David Whitehead organised special lectures to combat pro-Indonesian sentiment.
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Much of the impetus for this came from the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which had mobilised in support of the Indonesian Communists (PKI). PKI leaders, transferred to Australia as prisoners from the Dutch prison camp at Tanah Merah, built an Australia-wide movement with CPA support, culminating in rebellions by Indonesian seafarers and Australian union bans on Dutch ships. They managed this despite repression by Dutch representatives, who the Labor government allowed to arrest and even deport activists.
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The Indonesian people, who often displayed hostility to the Australian military, were enthusiastic about solidarity from Australian trade unionists. News bulletins posted in some cities referred to Australian waterside workers’ support for Indonesian strikers, the key passages prominently outlined in red.

But Australian leaders were determined to complete their colonial mission. In Sumbawa after clashes between Indonesian nationalists and Japanese forces, the latter were told to instruct the Sultan that attacks must stop and that the Australian army had ordered the Japanese to shoot to kill.
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And so whatever their personal sentiments, the Australian troops helped entrench Dutch power with terrible consequences. Their intervention in Sulawesi paved the way for Dutch captain Paul Westerling, who developed ferocious new tactics in counter-insurgency. He punished whole villages for Republican actions in their areas, lining people up and executing them one by one until an informant spoke out. Westerling’s reign of terror is reliably estimated to have cost as many lives as the battle of Surabaya. Emboldened by the success these methods brought, the Dutch increased the use of such repressive tactics in Java.
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Meanwhile preparations were under way to assemble Australian troops on the island of Morotai (Moluccas). The Australian force responsible for the occupation and military administration of eastern Indonesia was headquartered at Morotai until April 1946, when the Dutch colonial government was re-established. This was one place where rank and file
troops proved able to shrug off wartime hostilities, which to a degree alarmed the brass. Officers told the rank and file that they had seen too many cases of fraternisation, extending as far as gifts of food and cigarettes. This would not be tolerated. In response to Japanese prisoners’ salutes, Australians were to stare them “fiercely and fixedly in the eye”.
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The Second World War broke out at the conjuncture of two periods of working class unrest. The mood in the working class was savage at the start of the 1940s, reflecting bitter experiences of the Depression and the First World War. Anti-war agitation during the first war had been colossal, culminating in two working class campaigns which defeated attempts to introduce conscription. Later in 1940 coal miners and dock workers—traditionally militant groups of unionists—moved aggressively to restore their pre-Depression bargaining position. But the mood extended far wider. The director-general of health, reporting on a survey of 1,400 women, highlighted this response:

I believe you desire the reasons of mothers for only having a limited family. Well, one of them is this: What do we owe to Australia? It starved us and our children after the last war and it will do the same after this,
If We Let It
. Therefore, we have decided that there won’t be so many of us to starve this time… If we find out any birth control hint, we pass it on. I myself know of an easy, safe method of abortion. I know of hundreds of ideas that have been passed on to me by desperate and despairing mothers of hungry children. Things will have to be mightily attractive in the New World before we consider the inconvenience of big families.
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