The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (49 page)

For a while he filled his time commanding a militia division. Then he found work as a radio commentator, where he warned that Australia's future was menaced by an aggressive Japan and National Socialist Germany. He toyed with the idea of a political career but was rejected as a candidate. He had little money, and apparently no future. But in 1938, his rehabilitation began. He was appointed chairman of a national manpower committee to prepare for the possibility of war; in 1939 he was appointed commander of the 6th Division of the Australian Imperial Force; by 1940 he was commanding officer of the 1st Australian Corps. He and his fellow Australians were sent to the Middle East.

As a commander, his goal was to raise and maintain an Australian army that would remain under Australian command and not be parceled out as replacement units for the British. As a strategist, he believed—especially after the Hitler-Stalin pact—that American intervention was necessary for the Allies to win. As a soldier, he impressed his staff officers as tough, demanding, unyielding to physical pain, deeply and widely read, interested in the cultures of the areas to which he was posted (while serving in the Middle East he taught himself basic Arabic), appreciative of the arts (he commissioned war artists for the Australian army), and stubbornly loyal.
Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell gave Blamey extraordinarily high praise, calling him “probably the best soldier we had in the Middle East. Not an easy man to deal with, but a very satisfactory man to deal with. His military knowledge was unexampled, and he was a positive, firm, and very satisfactory commander.”
⁵

Blamey's military knowledge was good enough to tell him that the decision to send Australian troops to Greece in 1941 was a bad one. He quietly spent much of his time in Greece reconnoitering the beaches for an inevitable evacuation from a doomed campaign. Helping to direct the eventual retreat, he was ordered to Cairo where he was appointed Deputy Commander in Chief, Middle East.

Everything changed for Blamey, however, after Australia declared war on Japan, one hour after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. As the Australians prepared for a fight closer to home, Blamey was appointed Commander in Chief, Australian Military Forces.

On 19 February 1942, Australia came under direct, sustained attack for the first time in its history with the massive bombing of Darwin, along with the towns of Broome and Wyndham. It was the first of what would be nearly one hundred Japanese air strikes on Australia. Blamey had to organize a new army quickly—an army prepared not only to defend the Australian mainland but take the battle to the enemy in the jungles of the South Pacific. He was made Commander of Allied Land Forces
under the Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur, whom he—mostly—admired, saying, “The best and the worst things you hear about him are both true.”
⁶

Blamey had been appalled by Australian complacency on the home front before the Japanese raid on Darwin. Now he found himself the voice of calm amidst the fall of Singapore and the advance of Japanese troops to New Guinea. He was not, however, any more diplomatic. On 9 November 1942, Blamey delivered a speech to Australian troops who had driven back the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail Campaign. Blamey was in a dour mood because MacArthur had expected a speedier victory, and in his speech Blamey invoked a garbled metaphor about running rabbits, which the men took as an accusation of cowardice (an imputation Blamey later said he didn't mean to imply). The speech made him bitterly resented. Stung, Blamey belatedly stood up for his Aussies against the criticisms of MacArthur and his staff. He demanded he be given Australian troops in the battle for Buna “because he knew they would fight.”
⁷
The belittling of each other's troops—the Americans dubious about the slouch hats, the slouch hats carping about the Yanks—became a running sideshow in the New Guinea campaign.

Another sideshow was Blamey's imperial interest in developing New Guinea with tea, coffee, and quinine plantations (he was a self-taught expert on preventing malaria). He even wondered about importing elephants to help work the land. While most of his troops considered New Guinea a green, steaming, miasmic hell, Blamey liked it, and liked sleeping out under
the jungle stars, dreaming of how Australia could fulfill its colonial mission to the Papua New Guineans after the war.

They put him in much better mind than the Japanese, whom he despised. When he accepted the Japanese surrender at Morotai, Indonesia, one week after the general Japanese surrender to Douglas MacArthur aboard the USS
Missouri
, he said,
If the Allies—and his fellow Australians—found Blamey a hard man, the Japanese found him no softer.

On 14 November 1945, after working hard to return temporary wartime soldiers to Civvy Street, he was dismissed as commander in chief. Angered that the Labour government of Australia, as a matter of policy, would not nominate senior officers he recommended for knighthoods, Blamey spurned any talk of rewards for himself, saying, “I don't want anything. All I want to do after I leave the barracks is attack your Government. I'll do it at every opportunity,”
⁹
which he did as a conservative newspaper columnist. His
final reward for his wartime service was his old Buick staff car; Blamey had wanted to buy it, but the government insisted, over his protests, that he accept it as a gift. He retired from the army on 31 January 1946, though he was reappointed after the conservative Liberal Party defeated Labour in the 1949 elections. Prime Minister Robert Menzies wanted to promote him to field marshal, a rank that required approval of the British War Office and the Crown, and which could only be granted if Blamey was on the active service list. He became a field marshal in the King's Birthday Honours list for 1950.

Blamey's end followed swiftly. Previously in robust good health, he was bedridden when he received his field marshal's baton. He was a determined patient, convinced he would recover, and fought to that end longer than his doctors thought possible, before dying of a stroke on 27 May 1951.

Blamey was an imperial servant, patriotically and jealously devoted to his native land of Australia, but equally loyal to the British Empire and the king. Even if his experience of field command was slight, he was a gifted strategist, and a polymath with a curiosity and knowledge that was catholic in its scope. Regarded as a cold-hearted administrator, he did what he thought politically and militarily necessary, and those who knew him well sometimes saw the tears that cracked the severe visage. He felt deeply the losses his men incurred, and was utterly devoted to helping wartime veterans. Only in the British Empire could a drover's son from dusty Wagga Wagga rise to become a general jousting with the likes of Wavell and Auchinleck and MacArthur—not to mention the enemy—and win a field marshal's baton from the king.

“He looked rather like Charles II . . . fairly short, wiry, and he had a little penciled moustache . . . and the moment he talked his eyes lit up. . . . You felt the whole time you were under his gaze.... He was one of those leaders who attracted younger officers who later most of them became generals in turn.... You gave him all you could, partly out of loyalty to him. He was a very, very great man. . . . He was legendary.”

 

S
ir Gerald Templer was a tough, terse soldier—the least likely person, some might think, to argue for defeating the Communist insurgency in Malaya by winning over “hearts and minds.” But it was indeed Templer, a veteran of two world wars won by overwhelming military force, who gave us that phrase and a model of successful counterinsurgency warfare.