Read Fighting on all Fronts Online
Authors: Donny Gluckstein
22
Syrny, Marek, K problematike represii voci slovenskym komunistom v rokoch 1939-1943,
Perzekucie na Slovensku v rokoch 1938-1945, Slovenska republika 1939-1945 ocami mladych historikov
VII, (Bratislava, 2008), p57.
23
Poland also took two further villages in northern Slovakia as well as territory from the Czech lands.
24
Vlcko B Peter and Vlcko P Ryan,
The Soviet Union’s Role in the Slovak National Uprising
(2005), pp68-69.
sitemaker.umich.edu/ryanvlcko/files/soviet_role_in_the_slovak_national_uprising__snp_.pdf
25
This is despite the claims of the right wing revisionist historians; see, for example, Martin Lacko,
Slovenske narodne povstanie 1944
(Bratislava, 2008).
26
Micek, Stanislav a kol,
Slovenkse narodne povstanie 1944
(Banksa Bystrica, 2009), pp68-70.
27
Fedorova, Iveta Protifašistické letáky, ich úloha a význam na Slovensku v rokoch 1938-1945,
Slovenska republika 1939-1945 ocami mladych historikov
IV (Bratislava, 2005), pp258-270.
28
Even right wing revisionist historians do not deny this. Martin Lacko writes, “The Communist movement was one of the firmest in terms of organisation.” (Lacko, Martin,
Slovenske narodne povstanie
[Bratislava, 2008]).
29
Syrny, 2008.
30
Syrny, 2008.
31
Syrny, Marek,
Slovenski komunisti v rokoch 1939-1944, nacrt dejin komunistickej strany slovenska v odvoji a v povstani
(Banksa Bystrica, 2013), pp10-11.
32
Fedorova, 2005.
33
Syrny, 2013, pp11-12.
34
Syrny, 2013, p14.
35
Federova, 2005.
36
Micek, 2009, pp. 25-32.
37
The Slovak army had also participated in the invasion of Poland, but the party couldn’t officially agitate against it because of the Soviet Union’s participation.
38
Fedorova, 2005.
39
Rogovyj, Jevgen, Sociálno-ekonomické aspekty procesu slovakizácie v rokoch 1938-1941,
Život v Slovenskej republike Slovenská republika 1939-1945 očami mladých historikov
IX (Bratislava, 2010), pp36-44.
40
Rogovyj et al, 2010, p44.
41
Medvecky, Matej,
Spravodajske eso Slovenskego Statu: Kauza Imrich Sucky
(Bratislava, 2007), p84.
42
Medvecky, 2007, p84.
43
Medvecky, 2007, p84.
44
Príspevok kdejinám obcí v handlovskej kotline
[available online at
www.chrenovec-brusno.sk
]
45
Medvecky, 2007, p84.
46
In Communist Party of Czechoslovakia documents, released in the 1980s for
internal
use, under an entry from 4 November 1940 mentions: “Flyer I of the illegal central leadership of the KSS on the Handlova miners’ strike with a call for unity and solidarity with the strikers, for meeting their demands and lifting the state of emergency and recalling the army from Handlova”. watson.sk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2317:malozn amy-zbornik-dokumentov-egy-kevesse-ismert-dokumentum-gyuejtemeny&catid =37:default)
47
Federova, 2005.
48
Micek, 2009, p193.
49
Micek, 2009, p74.
50
Micek, 2009, p74.
51
Micek, 2009, pp74-75.
52
Micek, 2009, p74.
53
Syrny, Marek,
Slovensky demokrati 44-48, Kapitoly z dejin Demokratickej strany na Slovensku v rokoch 1944-1948
(Banska Bystrica, 2010), p11.
54
Syrny, 2010, p11.
55
Micek, 2009, p75.
56
The “Christmas Agreement” talked of “learning the lessons of the past” and states, “The democratic ideals have to be carried over into the economic and social spheres”. For a scan of the original see Syrny, 2010, p13.
57
Declaration of the Slovak National Council in Banska Bystrica, 1 September, 1944. See Vlcko B Peter and Vlcko P Ryan (2005), pp66-67.
58
Micek, 2009, pp74-76.
59
Micek, 2009, p76.
60
Syrny, 2010, p11.
61
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p12.
62
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p14-15.
63
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p15-16.
64
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p15-16.
65
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p16.
66
For the text of the Catlos memorandum see Peter and Ryan, 2005, pp70-72.
67
Peter and Ryan, 2005, pp18-19.
68
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p19
69
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p22-25.
70
Peter and Ryan, 2005, p51-53.
71
Micek, 2009, pp132.
72
Micek, 2009, pp132-134.
73
Micek, 2009, pp132-134.
Tom O’Lincoln
After Pearl Harbor, Australian prime minister John Curtin declared: “We are at war with Japan…because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed”.
1
But how many Asian nations were free? Many were in fact colonies including, in the region of Australia, Indonesia, the neighbouring Indo-Malay Archipelago, Pacific Islands such as Fiji, and the great island of New Guinea. Australia, the great white bastion in Asia, was a parliamentary democracy but denied democratic rights to many of its indigenous people. Having seized their colonies by force, the Australian authorities determined to hold on to them the same way.
In the earliest days of colonisation Australia had been simply a spearhead for the British Empire. In the 1850s, however, gold rushes led to economic boom, making Melbourne and Sydney centres of capital accumulation in their own right. The accumulated wealth began to seek outlets in the surrounding region, giving rise to an expansion drive. In gold-rich Victoria a wide range of business figures backed the Polynesia Company in Fiji, and that led to other ventures—most famously the Melbourne-based Colonial Sugar Refining, which by 1901 held investments in Fiji worth over £2 million.
Well before Japan launched its first war of aggression against China in 1894, Australian expansionism in the Pacific had escalated. Queensland Premier Thomas McIlwraith sent a party led by a police magistrate to raise the flag in Port Moresby in April 1883, hoping to force Britain to annex New Guinea. While this effort failed, it was followed by a campaign to seize the New Hebrides.
2
And by 1914 the Melbourne
Age
newspaper had decided it was time to take New Guinea from the Germans:
We have long since realised that we have a Pacific Ocean destiny… By virtue of the European war an unexpected path has been opened to the furtherance of our ambition [to lay down] the foundations of a solid Australian sub-empire in the Pacific Ocean…
3
The logic of a white colonial empire fed Australian racism, which in turn meshed readily with anti-Japanese sentiment. Initially racial hostility focused on the Aborigines, but once they were no longer able to resist the white conquest, racism was focused on the “yellow peril” from the north—first the Chinese and later Japan. By the time of the First World War Japan was the main bogey. Racial prejudice was the ideological cement that held the post-1901 federation together. Australia’s right wing prime minister William Morris Hughes exploited these fears to the hilt.
One set of race issues were specific to the Second World War. When black American GIs arrived in 1942, Canberra was taken aback. Many local people got on with them just fine, but the authorities did everything they could to implement segregation, resulting in clashes as the GIs stood up for themselves.
4
The carnage of the First World War is generally recognised as a tragic waste. Hughes, however, made the toll of fallen soldiers into bargaining chips he could cash in at the Paris peace conference. Concerned that the Japanese battlecruiser
HIJMS Ibuki
’s role escorting Australian ships indicated a growing British reliance on Japanese military assistance, he sent as many troops as possible to the European fronts. Reducing British dependence on Tokyo would make Britain less likely to make concessions to Japan in the Pacific. Having invested so many Australian lives, he used them to great effect at the Paris conference, demanding control of all the South Pacific islands taken from Germany. This was about both territory and race. Hughes fought for the creation of a special “C-class” League of Nations mandate to cover what is now Namibia and, more importantly for Australia, certain Pacific islands. Under this mandate the occupying power would be able to impose its own laws, including “White Australia” style immigration controls.
5
When Japan raised an anti-racist motion at the peace conference, Hughes opposed it more belligerently than any other delegate. The Japanese delegation resented this so bitterly that US President Woodrow Wilson feared the tensions might damage his League of Nations project. To mollify the Japanese and prevent a row over racism at the plenary session, Wilson made concessions to Tokyo over territories in China,
allowing Japanese control of German concessions at places such as the Shantung Peninsula. Thus Australian racism helped open the door for Japan’s expansion. Hughes’s belligerence at the peace conference also helped Japan’s militarist faction build popular support for war. Australian intelligence analyst Edmund Piesse complained after the conference: “I withdraw all my optimism about our future relations with Japan…we have been perhaps the chief factor in consolidating the whole Japanese nation behind the imperialists.” Academic James Murdoch, visiting Japan around the same time, expressed similar sentiments, adding: “If we are out for a scrap this is just the way to get into one.”
In the course of the Second World War Canberra sought to project power throughout the Asia-Pacific. Critics have asked whether Australian commander-in-chief Thomas Blamey’s final offensives in the islands were necessary since they cost lives without hastening Japan’s surrender. This is to mistake much of their purpose. In addition to restoring colonial rule, they were important for Canberra’s strategic position. Blamey told the government:
Were we to wait until Japan was finally crushed, it would be said that the Americans, who had previously liberated the Philippines, were responsible for the final liberation of the natives in Australian territories, with the inevitable result that our prestige both abroad and in the eyes of the natives would suffer much harm.
6
The “natives” had already seen what white rule was like. Under the Native Regulations and Ordinances in Papua, according to former district commissioner David Marsh:
A native wasn’t allowed to drink [alcohol]. He couldn’t go into a picture show with Europeans. When walking along the footpath the native was expected to move aside. We had the White Women’s Protection Ordinance which more or less said that if you smiled at a white woman it was rape… They also had a Native Women’s Protection Ordinance which seemed to say something quite different, and didn’t mean much anyway.
7
In 1929, only 12 years before the war for “freedom” began, black workers in Rabaul struck for higher pay. Astonished to find themselves without breakfast, white
mastas
were outraged. “My coon’s not here,” complained one. Another grumbled that there was “no response from the slave…the government…is disgustingly lenient with the natives…why, the only thing a native understands is a beating.” White police put the strike leaders on trial and a white magistrate jailed them.
8
There was resistance during the war too. Historian Ian Powell quotes a man called Emboge, near Popondetta in New Guinea, who tried collaborating with the Japanese but then moved to attempting to build an independent struggle:
The
kiawa
[whites] treated us badly before the war and they deserted the people when the Japanese landed at Buna. We tried the Japanese but we did not like them at all. So all we could do was organise ourselves and settle our own differences before we could hope to fight the external enemies.
9
In other cases local people simply lined up with whoever seemed to be winning in their area or whoever conscripted them. As an inhabitant of the Huon Peninsula told Australians: “We thought the Japanese could beat you when you left these places, so we went their way. Afterwards when you bombed and bombed we were doubtful so we made up our mind to sit in the middle, but when you hunt them from these places we will know you are the stronger”.
10
The patchwork of regional allegiances was very complex. Not only did New Guineans sometimes fight New Guineans, but Fijians fought Bougainvilleans and Pohnpei people fought New Guineans serving with the Australians. Ninety six men and one woman suspected of collaboration with the Australians were massacred at the village of Timbunke by people from other Sepik villages acting under Japanese orders.
11
In return if they believed local Papua New Guinea (PNG) people had helped the Japanese, the Australians served out rough justice. A veteran recalled that Australian troops who had been ordered to massacre entire villages shot the people one by one for collaborating, not aiming to kill immediately, but shooting in the legs so that they could return later and bayonet them to death.
12
Papuan carriers, later dubbed “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”, were virtually conscripted by Australians as forced labour to carry the wounded over high mountain trails (Kokoda). No one told them what the war was really about, but they soon learned how cruel it was. Many were paid nothing. According to writer Peter Ryan, recruitment in some villages was 100 percent of fit adult males. The villages suffered without men to clear gardens, hunt and maintain houses and canoes. Diet was poor so diseases increased, with some places facing near-starvation and very high infant mortality.
13
Doctor Geoffrey Vernon recalled that during fighting on the trail, many carriers had no blankets, rice was almost the only food much of the time, meat was not available for two or three weeks at a stretch and tobacco was scarce. Rules mandating reduction of loads to
40 lbs were frequently ignored, and excessive loads and distances inflicted on the carriers.
14