The Strength of a Nation: Six Years of Australians Fighting For the Nation and Defending the Homefront in World War II
464
The Strength of a Nation: Six Years of Australians Fighting For the Nation and Defending the Homefront in World War II
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741156966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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The Strength of a Nation
Six years of Australians Fighting for the Nation and Defending the Homefront in World War II
By Michael McKernan
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2006 Michael McKernanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-696-6
CHAPTER 1
LEGACY
In 1923, in Hobart, one of the better leaders of the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF), Major General Sir John Gellibrand, founded what he called the Remembrance Club. It was designed for the mutual support and to foster the business interests of Tasmanian survivors of the First World War. Initially, when the soldiers had come home from France or Palestine, they had wanted to forget all about war, to get away from it, from orders, from discipline, from their own memories. So in the early years after the war, instead of coming together in fellowship and memory, the old soldiers tended to go their own separate ways.
But it did not work for many. Indeed, as many of them found, they definitely needed one another. They discovered that those who had not served in the war simply could not understand them. Many of the returned soldiers were in and out of jobs, unsettled, looking for something, but they did not know what. Even General Gellibrand felt like that, filling top jobs as befitting one of his rank — public service commissioner in Tasmania, police commissioner in Victoria, member of the federal parliament — but never really sticking at one thing during the 1920s.
The Remembrance Club was initially designed to look after the interests of ex-servicemen, to help those who needed the companionship of their mates, who needed help to cope with civilian life, for whom the bonds forged in war were still the strongest bonds of all. It inspired a similar club in Melbourne. But what were they to call it? One of the earliest members, Frank Selleck, wrote: 'We have got to remember that in a way we survivors have received a legacy to see that the ideals our comrades died fighting for are maintained in Australia.' So they named it the Legacy Club.
Perhaps they were right to think that they were the special possessors of this legacy of remembrance, but other Australians could feel, and decidedly did feel, that they were also the inheritors of it.
There are two streams, then, in the legacy that was bequeathed by the men of 1914-18: to the survivors of the war themselves, and to all other Australians.
If the men who had been to war were doing it tough, as many were, how hard was it for the widows and fatherless children of the men who did not return? The survivors, the men of the old AIF, felt a special responsibility for the dependants of their mates. In some senses caring for these dependants was a means for the returned men to cope with the thought that surfaced too often:
I survived while he is gone. 'Why me, why did I survive,' a Second World War veteran asked me in a far-off war cemetery in Borneo in 1995, 50 years after the end of his war, 'while better men than me and men with families, too, died?' It was a question that veterans of both world wars so often asked themselves.
To ease, in part, the pain of what some have called 'survivor guilt' the veterans of the First World War took on a measure of responsibility for the forlorn families of their mates who had been killed. There were war widow pensions paid in Australia, but they were pretty miserable really. In 1926 Melbourne Legacy directed its attention, its reason for being, to the children of the men who had died at war, or had died in Australia afterwards from the effects of war. But Legacy was not just about money, though even a little bit helped, Legacy was a presence in the home, a friend that a woman could turn to for advice, for a steady hand when needed, a source of help for the kids in their schooling, in their life choices, for a bit of a boot up the backside when needed, just as Dad would have done. Legacy Clubs handed on the torch that was their symbol with the slogan: 'They know, after the war comes the battle.'
But the legacy of the 'Great War'— the soldiers' name for the most awful war the world had yet seen — extended way beyond these clubs. The Great War permeated every part of Australian life during what we now term the 'inter-war years'. Let a kaleidoscopic picture try to capture something of that legacy before we settle down to detailed aspects of the Great War experience which would severely impact on Australia in the Second World War, for it is my argument that you simply cannot come to the Second World War without a clear understanding of how much of it is shaped by the war that had ended just 21 years earlier.
George Johnston makes up the first pieces of this picture in his novel set during the inter-war and Second World War years, My Brother Jack. Both Johnston's parents served overseas in World War I: she as a nurse, he as a soldier. Perhaps they came back with their fair share of survivor guilt. In any case, in the novel the nurse- mother continues her work at the Caulfield Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne and her sons, Jack and Davey Meredith, visit the wards every Sunday for the sake of the veterans.
Turn the kaleidoscope ever so slightly to the men in hospital — some for months, some for years, some forever — another legacy of that war. The 'man in the bath', having lost his outer skin cover in France in a gas attack, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life immersed in a bath of some liquid to hold off immediate and fatal infection. 'G'day, digger,' people would greet him as they went about the vast repatriation hospital. 'I nursed him at Concord,' someone said to me when I told this story in public one time. 'He was cheerful enough and died in the late 1940s, I think.' It is shocking, truly shocking, even to think about the life this man lived.
Then there were the amputees, bravely carving out a new life for themselves. There were the men who would die too young with gas in their lungs, living, they knew — even as they struggled to provide for their families — on borrowed time. A wheat farmer in Victoria's Mallee — a soldier-settler granted his patch of land on returning from the war — first arrived in Australia in 1912, aged 20, and enlisted in 1915. Returning decorated with the Military Medal and Bar, he married a local farmer's daughter in 1925 and had five children — four daughters and a son. This man died in 1943, aged 51; the result of gas, they said. At first, in compiling records in the 1920s for the Australian War Memorial's Roll of Honour, which would record the name of every Australian killed by war, they tried to keep track of those who died after returning to Australia, just as much war casualties as those blown up in France. But they soon gave up the effort; there were too many.
But these men had at least come home. Davey Meredith, the central character around whom My Brother Jack revolves, is just a little kid in an early grade at school, walking in a street near the Elsternwick shops in Melbourne, stopping outside a long-abandoned photographer's studio. They'd done well in the years of the Great War, the photographers; every soldier needed a portrait of himself for his mum, and probably for his girlfriend or his wife.
Young Davey is looking at a collection of these portraits in the shopfront window, the portraits curling up a little, fading in the sunlight, dust-covered, but recognisably the faces of men — strong, Australian men. An older boy comes down the street, kicking a tennis ball as boys do. Davey knows him by sight from school. This boy stops to look in at the portraits, too. They both stand there, not saying anything. Eventually the older boy speaks, to no one in particular: 'All of them blokes in there is dead, you know.' Davey runs home, trying not to cry because, as he says, 'I didn't know what it was I wanted to cry about.'
Robert and Isabella Fothergill, though, knew what their tears were for. I first came across them and their surviving children in the 'In Memoriam' columns of the Melbourne Argus. I was writing a history about the Australian War Memorial and I wanted something that would capture, with force, the strength of the grief so many Australian mothers and fathers, wives, brothers and sisters had lived with in all the years since the Great War. I knew of it first hand. My own grandfather had lost two brothers in that war, their deaths a month apart in mid-1918, with the war so very nearly over. Jack Fothergill, second son of Robert and Isabella of Euroa, died much earlier than my great-uncles, on 25 April 1915, the first
Anzac Day. I was looking in the paper at the 'In Memoriam' notices for another Anzac Day, dated some seven years after 1915.
Would the terrible grief still be there, I wondered. I read the Fothergill's prose poem in memory of their son:
... plucked like a flower in bloom, so bright, so young, so loving. It's
sad but true the best are first to die. Darling Jack, if only I could
see your grave I would
die happy.
That was enough for me, I had the quote I needed to describe that widespread, post-war grief: 'if only I could see your grave I would die happy'.
Years later, though, looking for stories that would help explain the cemeteries at Gallipoli and on the Western Front that I visited when I was taking Australians on battlefield tours, I thought of those words. I wondered if there were more. And so I returned to the newspaper. There was an 'In Memoriam' notice in 1916, on the first anniversary of Jack Fothergill's death, from his 'sorrowing parents, brother and sisters', and an eight-line poem. There was nothing in 1917, but in 1918 the notice was inserted by 'R. and I. Fothergill, late of Euroa', and I wondered if they had missed inserting a poem in 1917 in the mess of moving from Euroa to Melbourne. And I wondered, too, if they had moved because the little town of Euroa held too many memories for them of their much- loved son. There was an 'In Memoriam' notice thereafter in the Argus on 25 April each year from 1918 to 1948. For 30 years they had recalled and written about their grief. It never died; it never went away. And each year a freshly minted poem, not recycled, original each year, stood testament to that. Robert Fothergill died on 19 August 1939; Isabella died sometime in 1945-46. 'However long our lives may last', they had written in 1925:
Whatever land we view,
Whatever joys or grief be ours
We will think of you, Jack
And think of how you died, darling
You gave your long life for others
And we are left behind to grieve.
I don't believe every bereaved family in Australia went to such efforts to publicly record their grief, but I do think thousands upon thousands of Australians knew and understood the grief that the Fothergills wrote about. It is the backdrop to the war that comes next in the Australian story.
Turn the kaleidoscope again and see how the Great War is recalled during one part of inter-war Australia. Boys and girls at their desks in their classrooms, learning to read and then strengthening their understanding of the world by reading 'good writing'. In Victoria they did this with the help of the Victorian School Readers series — a book for students each year from years 1 to 8. (The other states had similar aids, too, it is just that I have the Victorian series on my shelves.) Working backwards from the eighth book, which includes: 'The Departure of the Anzacs from Mudros' by John Masefield; 'At Anzac' by Leon Gellert; 'Greater Than We Knew' by Mildred Huxley; 'To the Fallen' by Laurence Binyon; 'The Legacy' by C.E.W. Bean; with pictures of the beach cemetery at Anzac, and maps too. The seventh book: 'The Landing of the Anzacs' by John Masefield; 'Leaving Anzac' by John Masefield; 'Anzac Day' by Capel Boake. Even the fourth book: 'Simpson and His Donkey' (with drawings) —'thus died one of England's noblest sons, and deeply did the Anzacs mourn for him. Though his voice is now silent, he has left us an example that will never die.' Teachers would have turned to these stories and poems in April each year to tell and retell the story of Anzac, and the School Paper, distributed monthly to senior primary school students, would have reinforced the message. As would headmasters, closer to the day, and ministers and priests in church, and civic leaders at the memorials being built in every suburb and town.
The historian of war memorials in Australia, K.S. Inglis, made as complete a survey of these memorials as possible. According to the survey, First World War memorials standing in public places — that is, not in churches, halls, schools, offices or businesses — numbered 1453 — 516 in New South Wales, 360 in Victoria, 239 in South Australia, 197 in Queensland, 80 in Western Australia, 61 in Tasmania and two in the Northern Territory. Each of these had funds raised, largely by public subscription, was designed and built, and was unveiled with significant civic ceremony. For the Fothergills and all the others like them, they were places of deep meaning, not just a feature in the urban landscape. Then there were the church memorials, more common in Anglican and Protestant churches than in Catholic, and the memorial halls and other commemorative devices. Each one would have several stories to tell.
Take one such hall at Briagolong, via Maffra, in Victoria's Gippsland district. The Mechanics Institute there has an honour roll to the men and women from the district who served in the First World War. Most such halls do. Among the names on the roll are those of six boys from the one family — six brothers, who all went away to war. Three of the brothers died overseas, one came home and died quite soon after from the terrible injuries he had received, and the other two survived. Such was the mother's grief that the local people felt that she should not be confronted with the remembrance of her family's sacrifice every time she came into the hall for musical evenings and so on, and so they erected a holland blind above the Roll of Honour, the fittings still clearly evident today, that could be drawn down whenever she might come to the hall. It was a forlorn gesture, but at least other folk were trying.
This is such a personal story, about that community and about that mother and her remaining family. It is a story that tells us about local people, about grief, about the importance of the detail in seeking to make a general case. As historians we see glimpses of the real lives of people only too infrequently, but perhaps we have seen enough here to know that the impact of the First World War was present everywhere in Australia in the late 1930s. In grief and suffering, and in pride, too, they had done their bit, had fought, as they believed it, to make Australia and the world a better place.
But to celebrate a new war now in 1939? Hardly.
What was it that Charles Bean, the official historian of the First World War had written at the conclusion of his monumental history?
The Old Force passed down the road to history. The dust of its march settled.
The sound of its arms died.
Having written that, he must have paused, for a few paragraphs later on he seems to contradict himself: the Australian Imperial Force is not dead. That famous army of generous men marches still down the long lane of its country's history.
Indeed it had been marching, in a sense, as soon as it returned home. The AIF was one of the great constants of the time, a permanent presence in Australia during the inter-war years. It was what Australians were measured by. Its former members were accorded a special place in society. Particularly, the Old Force was important when Australians thought about how they might fight another war, if it ever came. It had been established, had it not, that the Australian soldier plucked from factory or field, trained little enough at home then in Egypt or Britain, was 'good' at war. As D.C. McGrath, a federal Labor parliamentarian, put it in 1920:
If the war proved anything, it proved that young Australians,
many of whom had not previously known one end of a rifle from
another, were, after training for a month or two, equal to, if not
superior to any other troops.
Foolish man, fatal doctrine: 'training for a month or two'. What this parliamentarian was saying was that if war came again the shearer and the brickie, the factory hand, all of them, would simply once more roll up their sleeves, take up their rifles and convert themselves into efficient and deadly soldiers.
Australia, unique among all the nations of the world, held the doctrine that there was no need for a professional army, for money to be spent on training over the years, for an officer class, for a profession of arms. Australians had shown at Gallipoli, at Pozieres, and in the great victories of 1918 that they could endure and would ultimately prevail — it was all too simple. This was, actually, the stuff of myth, but it was a dominant myth. It was a legacy from the Great War, that thinking, and it nearly proved fatal.
If such a view was common in Australia in the 1920s, and there was no reason to think that it was not, what kind of a man would seek to make a career in the army? Despised professions rarely attract the best candidates; they might attract the man for whom there is no clear or better alternative, the time-server, the misfit. Though, to be fair, they might just also attract the man who is farsighted, single-minded and prepared to be at odds with most of his fellow human beings because he can see the importance of the despised profession or job. Such a man was Henry Douglas Wynter, born near Bundaberg in Queensland in 1886.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Strength of a Nation by Michael McKernan. Copyright © 2006 Michael McKernan. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Maps,Acknowledgments,
Prologue,
1 Legacy,
2 Australia is also at war,
3 The air war,
4 At home,
5 Action stations,
6 War in the desert,
7 A forlorn hope,
8 The victor trumper of Australian politics,
9 The grey funnel line,
10 Defending the Middle East to the last Australian standing,
11 A new war,
12 Singapore,
13 Crisis,
14 Their finest hour,
15 To the stars,
16 Desert foxes,
17 All in,
18 The merchant navy,
19 Fighting on regardless,
20 'Too busy for bitterness',
21 'Australia is there for political reasons',
22 'A war casualty if ever there was one',
Epilogue,