The Conquering Tide (39 page)

Even the differences were familiar. The Yanks recognized and approved of the Australian obsession with sports, even if they privately found the antipodal versions of baseball and football incomprehensible and plainly inferior. The racetracks looked much the same as those in America, except the horses ran clockwise and the punters muttered darkly about the murder of someone called “Phar Lap.” Beer was cheap and plentiful even if the pubs shuttered at the unreasonable hour of six. The locals relished their steaming caffeinated doses even if the cup was filled with tea instead of coffee. Mutton was not a great hit with the Yanks, but they couldn't get enough of the Australian meat pies and “styke and aigs.” The currency was almost farcically esoteric. The pound note was simple enough, but the coinage was a ludicrous mob of copper and silver pieces, engraved with the images of
kangaroos and emus, divisible by two, three, four, twelve, or twenty—the shilling, the florin, the sixpence, the penny, the halfpenny, and the threepenny, but one also heard mention of the bob, the copper, the thrippence, the zac, the deener, the traybit, the quid, and the guinea. (Regarding the last of these,
Instructions for Servicemen
recommended, “Don't bother about it.”) With rare exceptions, however, the Australians did not exploit the Americans' ignorance to cheat or shortchange them.

Inevitably, as the novelty faded and the “friendly invasion” swelled to near a million American servicemen, the limits of Australian hospitality were put to the test. With the cities overrun by sweet-talking, free-spending Yanks, the local economy boomed but the locals were pinched. Pubs sold bottles out the back door at inflated prices, and then announced to the regular clientele that the shelves were empty. Some thoughtless Yanks offered insult when none was intended, remarking that they had arrived to “save Australia,” or referring to the country as a “colony,” or comparing cricket unfavorably to baseball, or disparaging the taste of mutton. A spate of deadly road accidents was blamed on boozed-up Yanks driving on the right (wrong) side of the road. A serial killer terrorized Melbourne in the spring of 1942: three women were strangled and left with their genitals exposed. The perpetrator was a U.S. Army private named Edward Joseph Leonski, who was arrested, convicted, and hanged. To some Australian commentators, the ghastly crimes seemed emblematic of the Yanks' predatory sexual depravity.

Girls no older than fifteen or sixteen commandeered boats and rowed out to American naval vessels anchored in Sydney Harbour. Some learned semaphore so that they could get ahead of the competition by signaling incoming ships. Wives whose husbands were fighting overseas were seen in the company of Yanks; couples grappled openly in the parks and on the beaches; epidemics of syphilis and gonorrhea swept through the urban populations. Untold hundreds of women died after botched back-alley abortions. Fathers were appalled to hear their daughters bicker among themselves: “I saw him first, and anyway Vera is engaged.”
⁷
Bishops, editors, and politicians rushed to man the barricades of morality. Sir Frank Beaurepaire, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, urged parents to exert “stricter control over their young daughters” and to “control the older girls who claim the right to do as they like.”
⁸
Newspapers joined the campaign to police female sexuality, publishing censorious editorials under headlines such as “Behaviour of Girls Causes Concern,” “Street Scenes Problem,” and “Girl's Yearning for
Yanks.”
⁹
W. J. Tomlinson, a Methodist minister in Queensland, wrote to the
Courier-Mail
to lament that Brisbane had sunk deeper into wickedness than Sodom and Gomorrah.
¹⁰
A Japanese leaflet dropped on New Guinea depicted an American soldier embracing a woman. “Take your sweet time at the front, Aussie,” says the smarmy Yank, whose slick-backed hair is parted down the middle. “I've got my hands full right now with your sweet tootsie at home.”
¹¹
Every propagandist knows that the most potent appeal is founded on a modicum of truth.

In Brisbane, Queensland's state capital, heavy concentrations of both American and Australian troops overwhelmed the city's public services, housing, and retail and trade establishments. The population doubled in less than a year, to about 600,000. There was not enough of anything to go around, but the highly paid Yanks usually contrived to obtain superior service in the shops, pubs, and restaurants. The diggers were barred from shopping in the American PXs, which offered subsidized prices for hard-to-get goods such as cigarettes, razor blades, food, candy, liquor, and nylon stockings (highly prized as gifts). The Australians understandably resented being relegated to second-class citizens in their own country, and their grievances inevitably boiled over, especially when fueled by alcohol.

Street brawls erupted nightly throughout October and November 1942, climaxing in a major disturbance in the heart of the city on November 26, which would go into the history books as the “Battle of Brisbane.” Beginning in the early afternoon, sporadic battles broke out throughout the downtown area, becoming more sustained and violent as the crowds grew larger and drunker. As night fell, a melee raged outside an American PX on the corner of Creek and Adelaide Streets. Touched off when a group of baton-wielding American MPs harassed an American soldier, on whose behalf a group of diggers generously intervened, the fracas swelled as hundreds of enraged soldiers and civilians poured into the intersection and the Americans retreated into the building. A siege ensued. Bottles and rocks crashed through the windows and the mob tried to batter down the door with a signpost uprooted from the sidewalk. The Americans unwisely broke into the PX's inventory of weapons and brandished shotguns at the angry rabble. One of the weapons discharged as several pairs of hands grappled for it. An Australian soldier was shot dead and several others were injured. Fighting continued and spread through the city. For the rest of the night and into the next day, hundreds of Americans were
beaten badly, especially around the Allied headquarters on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets.

Except for a brief and heavily censored report in the Brisbane
Courier-Mail
, no reference to the incident appeared in the press. This attempt to suppress the news boomeranged, however—too many witnesses had seen the riots. In the absence of official statements or corrections, their stories grew lurid in successive retellings. It was said that American forces had massacred unarmed crowds and that heaps of bodies were piled in the streets of Brisbane. (In truth, there had been many scores of injuries but only one death.) Smaller riots followed in the weeks ahead, both in Brisbane and in other communities, including Townsville, Rockhampton, Melbourne, and Bondi Beach in Sydney.

T
HE
A
USTRALIAN CULTURE OF
“
MATESHIP
” was a conscious rejection of English class hierarchies. Instinctive distrust of authority was paired with a fondness for the underdog. The country was royalist only in the sense that it was faithful to its British heritage. In Australia, a rich man might be better off than his neighbors, but that did not make him better and he had better not forget it. Power, privilege, and individual achievement were tolerable only if conjoined to an attitude of genuine humility. According to a local maxim, the “tall poppy” was the first to be cut down. Probably there was not another society in the world less inclined to elevate an individual to the status of idol or messiah.

Douglas MacArthur was the first and probably the last man in Australian history to put that proposition to the test. In the national emergency of 1942, Australians opened their arms and embraced him as a savior. Enormous crowds gathered each day outside the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, where he and his family lived for four months after their arrival in the country. The day of his arrival was declared “MacArthur Day.” Newspapers serialized one of the many instant hagiographies that had been published in the United States. “Douglas” was one of the most popular names for Australian boys born between 1942 and 1945. Photographs of him appeared in shop windows. They were often autographed, as his headquarters always accommodated requests for signed portraits. The
Truth
, a Brisbane paper, told its readers that “MacArthur is the man to whom the civilized world looks to sweep the Japs back into their slime.”
¹²
When he visited Canberra
in May 1942, the House of Representatives gave him the privileges of its floor. Without delay and apparently without dissent, Prime Minister John Curtin acted to abolish the military board and invest its powers in MacArthur as supreme commander of Australian forces. MacArthur placed his thumb on the scale of Australian politics when he said that Curtin, whose Labour government held a knife's-edge majority in Parliament, was the “heart and soul of Australia.”
¹³

MacArthur did not add a single Australian officer to his personal headquarters staff, and he refused requests from Washington to do so. His staff would be dominated by his chief of staff, the high-handed and mercurial General Richard K. Sutherland, and other members of the “Bataan Gang” who had joined his audacious cover-of-darkness escape from Corregidor by PT boat. The blow was softened a bit by his nomination of an Australian officer, General Sir Thomas Blamey, as commander of Allied land forces in the theater. He and Curtin together lobbied Churchill to send British naval forces to the theater, and were refused.

In time, many Australians would come to resent MacArthur's aversion to crediting Australian troops in his portentous press communiqués, and they could not have overlooked the fact that the general was broadly unpopular among the hundreds of thousands of American servicemen pouring into the country. According to the anti-MacArthur chatter heard among American servicemen of all branches, he was “Dugout Doug,” an arrogant potentate who had remained cosseted with his wife and young son in an opulent Corregidor bunker while his army starved on Bataan; who had fled the scene with suitcases of clothing, furniture, and valuables, leaving sick nurses behind to be defiled by the Japanese; who had run all the way down to Melbourne, as far from the enemy as he could go without continuing south to Tasmania or Antarctica; and who insisted on monopolizing all glory and honor while denying it to the men actually doing the fighting and the dying. When American servicemen in Australia tired of eating so much mutton, a rumor circulated that MacArthur owned a sheep ranch and was being enriched at their expense.

Most of these charges were false, and some were perverse. Whatever MacArthur was, he was no coward. His service in the Great War had left no doubt of his exceptional personal courage, but he proved it again on Corregidor, where he stood erect and unflinching at an observation post while Japanese planes flew low overhead, bombs burst nearby, and his staff
dived for cover. He left Corregidor with his family and a core of his staff only after FDR ordered him to do so. He and his party took one suitcase each. MacArthur was a deeply flawed man whose Olympian ego and garish vanity warped his perceptions and even stained his personal integrity. As a commander of armies, he would have been more at home in the eighteenth century. But he was also an officer of rare and brilliant ability, who combined an expansive perspective with an exceptional memory and a quick grasp of detail.

More than any other Allied military leader, MacArthur instinctively perceived the larger context of the Pacific War. The Japanese had vowed to drive the Western interloper from Asia, and Asian peoples must inevitably be enticed by that proposition. It was not enough to reverse Japanese conquests. Japan's imperial pan-Asian ideology had to be smashed and replaced with something better. MacArthur's greatness—and his greatness is indisputable—would
not be fully revealed until after the war, when he would rule as a latter-day
shogun
over the reconstruction of a democratic Japan.

In July 1942, MacArthur moved his family and his headquarters north to Brisbane, to be closer to the combat theater. His headquarters staff moved into the abandoned offices of the AMP Society, an insurance company that had evacuated to the south. For his personal office, MacArthur claimed a grand boardroom on the ninth floor. Here he had a secure telephone that connected directly with the War Department in Washington. The MacArthur family lodged in three adjoining suites on the top floor of the graceful Lennons Hotel on George Street. Crowds gathered outside each morning, hoping for a glimpse of the supreme commander as he walked from the lobby to his black Wolseley limousine with the license plate “USA-1.” At eleven each morning, a phalanx of policemen cleared the street, and the four-year-old Arthur, accompanied by his Filipina Chinese governess, crossed to the state's Parliament House. The tall wrought-iron gate was solemnly unlocked, the boy and his nurse entered, the gate was locked behind them, and the police stood by while the boy played in the grounds.

MacArthur liked to work while on his feet. He paced his office tirelessly, and would not talk to an officer on the telephone if he could walk to the man's office and lean on his desk. His standard opener was, “Take a note.” General George C. Kenney, who relieved George Brett as commander of Allied Air Forces in the theater in August 1942, resolved to confront MacArthur's despotic chief of staff, General Sutherland, directly early in
his tenure. When Sutherland began issuing orders to the air groups, infringing on what Kenney believed to be his rightful purview, he drew a dot on a blank sheet of paper and told Sutherland, “The dot represents what you know about air operations, the entire rest of the paper what I know.”
¹⁴
Kenney demanded that they ask MacArthur to clarify their respective spheres of authority. Sutherland, according to Kenney, capitulated and gave him no more trouble.

Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, who replaced Arthur S. Carpender as commander of Allied Naval Forces, Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) in November 1943, likewise contrived to circumvent Sutherland. MacArthur was not as isolated and remote as his reputation suggested. Senior officers whom he respected felt free to walk into his office whenever they wanted a word with him. In Kinkaid's telling, he would often walk in and say, “General, I just came up to smoke a cigarette.”