Mark
Johnston’s review of regimental histories and soldiers’ diaries shows how badly
the military treated its rank and file. According
to Private Currie, one sergeant informed a group of recruits that ‘we were
leaving behind our civilian life and name to become just a number in the army’. Regarding
living conditions, Private Holt wrote: ‘The army idea seems to be to make the
soldier live like an animal, and he’ll fight like one’. Soldiers
returning to
Officers
had it far better, and this inequality was another source of grievance. The
higher-ups tended to come from privileged backgrounds. Joan Beaumont’s analysis
of ‘Gull Force’, which documents men’s previous jobs, shows almost 30 per cent
of officers came from professional, managerial or executive-type careers,
compared to 3.6 per cent of privates. A further 59.3 per cent of officers came
from supervisory and other non-manual jobs, compared with 8.6 per cent of
privates. Close to half of privates had been unskilled manual workers. John
Barrett’s survey of veterans likewise shows that nearly two-thirds of the
commissioned officers came from amongst the higher-educated.
This might
have been a tolerable starting point in a meritocracy, but the fact was, if you
were working class, you were usually stuck at the bottom no matter how well you
performed. Even demonstrated leadership under fire didn’t ensure promotion. It
was so hard for the lower ranks to move up that ‘there arose a bizarre
situation where many experienced soldiers were led into action by officers who
had never previously experienced battle.’
Rank
brought privileges. Each officer had a batman (servant) about whom they often
spoke in language ‘condescending and even redolent of the British upper class’.
Private Les Clothier reported on life aboard a ship in
Sexual
policing could be cruel, especially for women. Ann Howard documents how a
pregnant, unmarried AWAS member found herself
called up in front
of everyone and discharged. She had to walk slowly across the large office
floor with all eyes upon her. Typewriters stopped and everyone was silent. She
left the building without one person speaking to her.
Another
was
constantly given all
the menial tasks. Some AWAS complained about her
treatment and were told to mind their own business. It was obvious she was
being punished for her condition. She disappeared one day without notice, no
one knew where.
The
military tried to combat any hint of sexual diversity, For example it confined
battledress for women to defined occasions; and one AWAS
colonel ‘wouldn’t have us in caps…She thought [caps] were masculine…She didn’t
want us to look like men.’ Another discouraged (for females) ‘the sort of
masculinity, you know, where people went around with their hands in their
pockets and stood with their feet wide apart’. Military brass forbade women to
ride motor cycles.
Resistance
to sexual oppression in the military was generally covert, but in wider society
there was sometimes open resistance to the repression handed out by Curtin’s
State Labor colleagues. When
Military
life became a chronic, low-intensity class conflict. Contempt bubbled from
below. A diary from the Middle East relates how ‘the officers give us the usual
baloney and give orders and immediately contradict them…The more one sees of
the officers in charge of us, the more readily comes the explanation of the
Malayan and Singapore disasters.’ The troops cheered Stalin at film screenings,
less from ideology than cheeky rebellion. ‘Nbody was
really interested in Uncle Joe, but it annoyed the officers.’
There were
more serious rebellions, and though only a minority are on the record,
fictional accounts by Eric Lambert and other writers suggest they were widespread.
There was a ‘minor strike’ on HMAS Perth in
Australian
troops in
Dissatisfaction
was rife on the Atherton Tablelands near
reckoned they were
being treated like dogs, so at Retreat they began to bark like dogs. The
idea took on like wildfire…fantly at first, you could hear the yapping and barking from far away
units and then louder, until it reached our camp. We would take up the call and
then it could be heard fading away into the distance.
One
company on the Tablelands ‘refused to carry out its duties ‘ an event veterans
later variously described as a rebellion, strike, riot or incident’ when they
were paraded as part of an investigation into a clash with an officer.
In
There was
plenty more stubborn resistance; as illustrated by one soldier’s experience on
an AIF parade ground:
today we sure
have been fighting for our rights…They started giving us drill this morning. We
were not in a very good mood. So we went as slow as possible…The Lieut tried to march us about but we only moved at a
crawl…so he gave the about turn to head us back from camp again. But this time
we had him in a good place to make a fool of him…Instead of turning round and
going where he wanted us to go, we broke off and headed in all directions.
Given this
rich history, it’s surprising that
Even
keeping a diary was mildly subversive, since the brass forbade them for
security reasons.
So
aggressive indiscipline was relatively rare, but it was still common enough to
make an impression. The Provost Marshall reported in November 1942 that only 89
assaults had been made on MPs in the course of 33,000 arrests between April and
September. But this still shows military authorities made many thousands of arrests,
and MPs experienced 89 assaults in just six months.
Much of
the conflict between Australian and American servicemen turns out, on closer
examination, to have originated in a common discontent about the authorities.
On one occasion, Australians picketed MacArthur’s headquarters until he agreed
to give them access to American PX stores. A report to Blamey about the
notorious clashes in
The class
system which angered soldiers in the field was just as irksome in the POW camps. MacDougal’s Farm, Eric Lambert’s account
based closely on real life experiences, mentions many officers in Changi who ‘never came near their men but spent their time
parleying with the Japs to make their own
imprisonment as comfortable as possible.’ Lambert adds later ‘To this
day, you can encounter former POWs of the Japs who
bitterly blame their officers for the horrors inflicted on them’ Later still he
says: ‘Never has the absurd snobbery and class distinction of the army been so
clearly demonstrated’ as on the Burma-Thailand Railway.
In
There were many men who were against
the government … I’m not going to f-ing well do what
he tells me. He is no longer my officer. The Japanese run this b-y camp’ were
remarks which I heard often.
Stan Arneil’s One Mans War tells us the officers in his
camp had far better conditions and rations than the ranks. ‘Surely these
officers do not expect to be respected when they finally discard the uniform.’
Gavin McCormack says of one group of POWs sent to the
Burma-Thailand railway:
The 44 per
cent death rate in ‘F’ Force as a whole sank to less than 1 per cent for
Australian officers and between 2 and 2.5 per cent for British officers. The
assumption must be that this was due to the officers’ exemption from work, even
though some officers were on occasion made to work and some also chose to work,
to relieve the burden on sick men by helping fill the quotas.
McCormack’s
final point is important. It isn’t that all the officers were individually
rotten, rather that a class system rendered an already miserable situation
worse. Another reason why a digger’s lot was not a happy one.
The Communists
Up to
4,000 Communists in the armed forces tried to balance supporting the war drive
with challenging power structures. Their theory said they could combine the
two. A 1943 party congress resolution insisted that ‘every
activity leading to more democracy in the army is in line with the character of
the war…the right to democratically set up soldiers’ committees and other
service committees ought to exist in an anti-fascist army’. But in practice the
war effort put sharp limits on the partys agitation:
The aim was not to undermine
military discipline or to interfere with officers’ authority but to avoid ‘unnecessary
discontent, unexplained driving of the troops, and loss of morale.
The party
had to operate in clandestine fashion in the military, but the Communists were
ready for that after their experience of illegality during the Stalin-Hitler
pact. The military authorities weren’t happy about this unofficial presence,
but usually they put up with Communist organisation because it contributed to
the war effort. CPA members operated through both
the unofficial journal Troppo Tribune and the official military paper
Salt. In 1944 Troppo Tribune reported that in one unit, after
a hard struggle in the early stages
to win the confidence of the men and the cooperation of the administration [the
unit welfare committee] has become a force out of which have developed better
conditions, improved amenities and morale, and greater efficiency.
Here we
see clearly the ambiguities of the party’s work. Improved amenities were
certainly an achievement, but greater efficiency in the military was a strange
objective for Communists to focus on. They had set out to re-shape the war
effort, but were also being re-shaped themselves.
They built
a sizeable organization among the troops, with an extensive network of branches
and co-ordinating structures. These existed both in Papua New Guinea -- with a
district committee based on Port Moresby and local groups holding Marxist
economics classes -- and in Australia. On the Atherton Tablelands the party
held a major conference assembling some 50 branch delegates. The CPA initiated a petition for a ‘battle bonus’ which gathered
250,000 signatures, 50,000 of them from within the military.
Communists
led the rank and file in battles with the brass. As Ted Bacon recalled:
Successful strikes without victimization
of leaders were far more common than might be imagined by those who may believe
a military bureaucracy is practically unbeatable. Refusals to parade until food
or conditions were improved occurred in almost all training camps. The Communist
concept that, for real anti-fascist success, the army must be transformed into
a people’s army became so widely accepted that even the most anti-democratic
commanders were compelled to move cautiously in their dealings with the rank
and file.
This passage shows the
level of unrest generally and the important role played by Communists, but also
the modest content they now invested in the term ‘people’s army’. At the end of
the war, when troops gathered on