In short order, the details of MacArthur’s command had been worked out. On 17 April, he was formally appointed the supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area—incorporating all Allied Army, Navy and Air Forces in that geographic area, encompassing the likes of the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, New Guinea and Australia.
Within the now formalised framework, Thomas Blamey became the Commander of the Allied Land Forces. This meant that he would nominally have authority over American forces as well, though effectively all orders of significance to them continued to come via MacArthur himself, or his Bataan Gang. Far more important than the fact that Blamey would have some nominal say over American forces, was that MacArthur had very real authority over Australian soldiers. Given that the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, had so recently asserted the primacy of Australia’s need to defend itself over and above that of its need to defend Britain, it may have seemed a curious move to hand control of Australian forces to an American.
But at this stage Curtin really did feel that there was no choice. His line that ‘Australia looks to America’ was not a ploy.
And MacArthur’s view? He never made any bones about it, and spelt it out to Curtin very clearly. As Australia was a member of the British Commonwealth, the American maintained it was
Britain’s
responsibility to defend Australia. America was there in Australia, yes, and this would add to their defensive capacity. But the USA ‘had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia’ and would only support the ‘Ossies’ insofar as it was in their own interests to do so.
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Happily indeed, this was the present position, as the USA needed Australia as their launching pad to retake the Philippines, but however much Australia might look to America, the overall responsibility for Australia’s defence remained with
Britain
…
In late March 1942, at MacArthur’s Melbourne headquarters, the American general and Thomas Blamey met and talked for the first time. MacArthur, whatever else, certainly looked the part of a great military commander, and it wasn’t just the gleaming black boots, pristine pants and stars. Far more than that, observers noted his impeccable bearing and born-to-rule air, his deep tan, dark glasses and corn-cob pipe, the whole topped by his field marshal cap placed rakishly aslant. If Hollywood had sent to central casting for someone who looked like a great American general, it couldn’t have done better than MacArthur. Just as another famous American military commander, General George S. Patton, had silver pistols as his signature, MacArthur nurtured his own idiosyncratic appearance almost as a statement that because there was no one higher than him on the military food chain, he could wear whatever he damn well pleased, and did so.
Blamey, on the other hand, was as short as he was rotund as he was perpetually rumpled, and even on a good day was no more outlandish in his dress sense than a minor government clerk. As a matter of fact, he took the view that it would be highly improper of him, as the Commanding Officer of the Australian Army, to wear anything other than strict regulation military dress. With this in mind, he had turned up for the meeting with MacArthur dressed in the same Bombay bloomers he had been wearing in the heat of the Middle East. With his wide-brimmed hat, the effect was peculiar in chilly Melbourne, so much so that at first sight, a senior American officer had remarked, ‘What do we have here… the Boy Scouts of Australia?’
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For Blamey it indicated the kind of patronising pomposity he would have to deal with in coming months and years whenever he was around Douglas MacArthur and his senior staff.
As one part of their wide-ranging discussions Blamey and MacArthur covered the situation in New Guinea, where the Japanese had already made two landings on the north coast and established two small bases. The obvious danger was that these landings were a mere prelude to a far greater invasion force, and the choice for MacArthur and Blamey was clear. Either hold back the prime Australian troops to the Australian mainland, or take the battle right to the enemy in New Guinea.
Something of a compromise was reached whereby, for the moment, the militia would provide the key defence of New Guinea, while the best units of the AIF forces that were available—the 7th Division, including the men of the 2/14th, 2/16th and 2/27th battalions who had just returned to Australian shores—would remain based in Southwest Queensland in the area around Nambour and Yandina. The AIF would thus be in place to defend against any invasion of the Australian mainland—at least south of what was later known as the ‘Brisbane Line’, which marked the northernmost point of Australia the AIF considered defensible—and also be available to be deployed in nearby New Guinea should they be needed.
Beyond defending Australia, MacArthur had many other things to keep him busy, including trying to run the ongoing defence of the Philippines all the way from comfy Melbourne. The Japanese had now lifted their offensive on the Bataan Peninsula and were bombing with greater force every day and shooting the survivors— nearly all of whom hadn’t eaten properly for three months. Surrender seemed the only way to ensure survival for the masses of American troops and their officers, but MacArthur would have none of it.
‘I am utterly opposed,’ his message to General Wainwright went, ‘under any circumstances or conditions to the ultimate capitulation of this command [the Philippines]. If food fails, you will prepare and execute an attack upon the enemy.’
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This message was ignored and, on 9 April, the troops on the Bataan Peninsula surrendered, leaving the fortress island of Corregidor as the only remaining point of effective resistance. Once more, MacArthur was disgusted.
Just north of Brisbane, the men of the 21st Brigade, now returned from home leave and getting back into it, were leading a far more comfortable existence, though they were still very busy in a multitude of tasks. In short order they would be making their way to Queensland, where they had a dual role.
The first role was to strengthen the defensive lines to the north of Australia’s principal industrial centres, against the day that the Japanese might land somewhere on Australia’s northeast coast, which was always a fear. Just to their south, the small city of Brisbane was filling with both ‘For Sale’ signs and American troops, as remaining residents dug slit trenches in their backyards and shops were sandbagged. At night, there was a ‘brown-out’ with no outside lighting allowed for fear of bombing, and the certainty grew that the end was nigh.
Under those circumstances, the decision to place the 2/14th, 2/16th and 2/27th just to Brisbane’s north was a politically popular move for the Australian Government, the more so because the troops would also put a lot of time and energy into digging trenches and building roads and barricades on the beach, and familiarising themselves with the landscape and the likeliest lines of enemy attack.
The second focus of the AIF troops was to keep in top condition— with their fighting capacity honed to a sharp edge—by engaging in a variety of battalion and brigade exercises against each other. A lot of the exercises were conducted at night, where they often simulated guerilla ambushes in the jungle, which frequently involved a lot of climbing rough tracks around the Blackall Ranges, just inland from a tiny beachside village by the name of Noosa. As well, they would go out one platoon at a time to try their hand at living off the land for as long as five days, shooting kangaroos and birds, milking a few stray cows, making it up as they went along, but learning how to
survive
.
It was not certain yet where they would fight their next campaign, but with the Japanese running amok in the South Pacific, it was a fair bet that when it began it would involve battling the brutes in the jungle somewhere, and that is what the Australians began to prepare for. (At least the best they could without a jungle to train in.) As it happened the AIF men had only the foggiest idea of just how the campaign was faring in New Guinea, but at least they knew that fighting was taking place there and it was their most likely next destination.
Under the guidance of the Commander of the 7th Division, Major General Tubby Allen—himself a distinguished veteran of Gallipoli— senior officers studied the lessons that had been learnt from combating the Japanese in Malaya.
The fact that America had now entered the war meant that for those in Moresby resources began to flow, and at last US Army Air Force bombers turned up, together with a few fighters, as well as some army engineers and two units of American ‘Negro’ labour units, whose job was to establish aerodrome construction. (For nearly all of the Australians, this was the first time they had ever seen a black American.)
With them, more Australians arrived too, most of them from AIF anti-aircraft units who had been seconded to the militia battalions as reinforcements. Typically, many of the AIF men bitterly resented serving beside the ‘chocolate soldiers’—so much so that they outright refused to wear the 39th Battalion’s Mud Over Blood patch, instead secreting their own true AIF patch of grey safe inside their hatbands. Yes, they might nominally be among the militia, but they were not
of
them.
Meantime, however, the aerial attacks on Port Moresby continued. A particularly notable raid occurred on Tuesday 28 April. On that day eight Japanese bombers escorted by fifteen fighters swooped in and unleashed their usual cargo of catastrophe aimed at destroying the runway, planes and hangars. When the bombers had finally gone and the clean-up crews were moving in to assess the damage and get the runways back into shape as quickly as possible, they noticed that something odd had been left behind. There were three bulky packages wrapped in brown paper, sitting on a grassy verge near one of the runways, and well away from where the other bombs had hit.
What the hell was this? Some kind of booby-trap, surely. Making that all the more likely was a note attached to one of the packages which said, in impeccable English and copperplate handwriting: ‘Any person who has received this package is cordially requested to send it over to Army Headquarters in Port Moresby.’
There was discussion for a good hour about just what to do with the bundles until finally a courageous engineer decided to take matters into his own hands and, after the packages were carefully moved to a dry creekbed, he gingerly… slowly… slowly… took his penknife to them. Out tumbled hundreds of envelopes—letters for home from the many Australian soldiers and civilians who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in Rabaul. Here were the Japs trying to bomb them out of existence on a daily basis, and yet somewhere in the soldierly soul of Nippon there was still enough humanity to think of organising and doing something like that! Who would have thought it?
Across Australia, then, shortly afterwards, joyous news came in their letterboxes. Not only were their loved ones still alive, but there was an actual letter from them! In the absence of having them safe back home, or out of the clutches of the Japanese, it was close to the next best thing and gladdened many a heart.
The course of battle was not going well for the last American defenders on the island fortress of Corregidor, in the Philippines. Once the Bataan Peninsula had been abandoned by the Americans, the Japanese had been free to concentrate their attentions on that tiny patch of ground and, from that point on, were nothing if not energetic. Around twelve thousand shells a day were falling upon Corregidor—more than one for every American defender. It was so comprehensive that for most of the men the only way to survive was to remain in the tunnels well beneath the surface. So, when one thousand Japanese soldiers landed to establish a beachhead on the afternoon of 5 May, followed up by tanks, there was little resistance from the starved soldiers. In just under a day, all resistance ceased, and General Wainwright gave the command for the American flag to be lowered as a sign of their surrender. Bar for a tiny fragment of that flag, which General Wainwright wanted preserved as a commemoration of his men’s heroic defence, the rest of the flag was burned.
From Melbourne, General MacArthur was
triply
disgusted at the news, the more so as he had explicitly sent an order countermanding Wainwright’s command to his troops to surrender, and still the soldiers did not again take up arms. What was
wrong
with them?
The fall of the Philippines clearly had repercussions across the rest of the Southwest Pacific theatre, as all those Japanese troops that had been focused on its defeat were now free to fight elsewhere, and among other tasks they would now reinforce the base at Rabaul. As well, just two days earlier, the Japanese had notched up a new conquest when, against the claims of a small British–Australian garrison, they seized Tulagi in the southern Solomons. With its superb harbour, Tulagi perfectly provided for a Japanese naval base, and its strategic value was all the greater for being just seventeen miles away from the plains of the island of Guadalcanal, which would be perfect for building an airbase. In the South Pacific, the Japanese presence was just getting stronger.
And hell, in one way or another, so were Smoky Howson and the boys. In this man’s army, where everything was undersupplied except flies and mosquitoes, the only way to get by, Smoky had decided, was to carefully pilfer what you needed and share it with the blokes in your platoon. Listen, as a bloke who was raised as one of nineteen kids with never enough to go round, Smoky knew there wasn’t a lot you could teach him about pilfering, okay? No worries, he had soon organised a few of the lads unloading at the docks to be on the lookout for stuff heading to the Officers’ Mess and the like. This was so the common soldiers, too, could get some grog and goodies such as there were. It only seemed fair, after all.
This habit of making do with what you could get your hands on wasn’t limited to just alcohol and food though. For Smoky and some of the boys soon realised that while they were desperate for more arms and ammo, which just never came, many of the wrecks of the aircraft that littered Seven Mile Airfield had
just
the guns they were looking for. It was sad that each of those wrecks mostly represented a pilot and crew that had been killed, including Squadron Leader Jackson who, though valiant, hadn’t lasted long. But you couldn’t think like that. You had to concentrate on getting what you needed, come what may.