Fighting on all Fronts (42 page)

The government soon realised that in a tight labour market it could not keep too severe a clamp on women’s wages given their importance for the war effort. It therefore created the Women’s Employment Board (WEB) in 1942 to determine pay for new jobs or those previously done by men. As a rule the Board granted female employees in these jobs 85 to 90 percent of the male rate. But the WEB pay rate was not easy to get. Unlike some other wartime regulations which they patiently accepted, bosses hated the board. They challenged it in the courts, used delaying tactics in hearings or simply refused to implement WEB decisions.

Employers claimed women needed more supervision or were physically unable to do certain tasks, or they altered job descriptions.
³⁶
Women had to stage strikes just to get the WEB rate. Like the government,
employers referred to conventional beliefs that a woman’s place was in the home, yet in practice they did not oppose women working in low paid jobs. Their real opposition was to women’s entry into new sectors at higher rates of pay. Even this was not just about money. In fact employer representatives said some firms were prepared to face prosecution for refusing to pay WEB rates—even though under a cost-plus system compliance with the WEB would increase profits. What they most feared was female labour becoming rebellious.
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And it did, as a second wave of unrest opened up in the working class. Ironically women’s lack of union traditions meant they listened less to union leaders’ calls for war restraint than did men. At the Small Arms Ammunition Factory in Footscray, Melbourne several thousand workers held a stop work meeting in early 1943 demanding a 90 percent pay rise. Union leaders urged them to return to work for the sake of “the boys in the trenches”, which provoked angry shouts of, “We know all about the boys in the trenches—they’re our husbands and sons”.
³⁸
Another centre of militancy was textiles. In September 1941 mass meetings in Victoria culminated in a 20,000-strong stoppage over pay:

After the strike decision, about fifty men and women rushed the stage and tried to take over the meeting. They were quickly dispersed by the police. Speakers were howled down and counted out… Women screamed at one another, and when the division…was carried by a large majority, calls of “what about the boys overseas fighting for 5/- a day”, “scab” and “Fascist” were heard above the din.
³⁹

The pattern continued at Alexandria Spinning Mills in Sydney in 1943. A thousand women picketed and sent delegations to other factories, where they climbed wire grilles to reach those working inside. Within a week rank and file committees were leading 10,000 workers on strike.
⁴⁰
Union membership rose from 33 percent of the female workforce in 1939 to 52 percent in 1945, and the number of disputes rose from 416 to 945.
⁴¹
Attempts to control female labour were far from successful and this was true of labour generally.

At Dunlop management faced strike action because it had withdrawn employees’ right to showers. No sooner had it settled that dispute than women began industrial action over equal pay, which in turn was followed by a strike over piece rates. Arbitration judge Edmund Drake-Brockman called a compulsory conference and ordered the tyre men back to work. They refused, also ignoring orders from the executive of the Rubber Workers’ Union that they should go back on the old basis.
Week after week the stop-work continued, with more and more government agencies trying to intervene. Only threats of conscription into the army ended the unrest.
⁴²

No such fate awaited printers at the Sydney
Sun
, who in September 1944 demanded a 40-hour week along with four weeks annual leave. Management’s rejection of the claim led to a historic strike. The employers sent articles to the other dailies for incorporation in a “composite” paper, but the other papers’ printers refused to typeset them. The stoppage spread to journalists as well. The strikers produced their own paper, which had a virtual monopoly of sales because transport unions refused to handle the bosses’ composite effort. Each day the union paper sold its print run, and the profits reached £3,000. The strike’s success created something of a vogue for industrial unrest, and within a few months the commercial section of the industry was organising a campaign for a 40-hour week based on direct action.
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A general industrial mobilisation was under way well before the war ended. Indeed as early as 1944:

New South Wales, during the 20 months ending August 31, had 1,432 industrial disputes [depriving] the neutral citizen of meat, bread, laundry, newspapers, tyres, theatrical entertainment, hospital attention, buses and trams, coke for stoves, potatoes, restaurants, hot baths, country and interstate travel and other amenities.
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A remarkable strike took place in 1945 in Sydney’s Balmain dockyards. At Mort’s Dock leftist followers of Leon Trotsky used their influence to resist the more oppressive aspects of the war effort. For this, and for his challenge to the union leadership controlled by the enthusiastically pro-war Communist Party, the Ironworkers’ executive took action against the Trotskyist shop steward Nick Origlass. In February 1945 the federal leadership found a pretext on which to charge Origlass with breaching union rules, and on this basis banned him from serving as a delegate. Union members demanded his reinstatement. By late April nearly 3,000 were on strike over the issue, a stoppage lasting several weeks. The outcome was a new, independent union branch in Balmain and a triumph for the rank and file.

Strike days passed the 2 million mark in 1945 and the unions made plans to campaign for a 40-hour week. The stage was set for a stormy industrial scene after the war. 1946-7 would see a six-month dispute in the Victorian metal trades, followed by major rail and coal strikes towards the end of the decade. So intense was the general ferment that in
September 1946 the Communist paper
Tribune
reported that the Leichhardt Boy Scouts Band in Sydney was on strike and had placed bans on its scout hall.

When the Aid Russia Committee circulated a booklet called
Democratic Army of a Democratic People
, they expressed a common aspiration. To this day many believe the Australian military at the time of the Second World War did have particularly democratic qualities. And indeed it was reasonable to hope that with Labor in government and claiming to be the party of the workers and in a war presented as a crusade for democracy, Australia might have expected some sort of democratisation of the military. But in
At the Front Line
Mark Johnston puts all such notions in perspective. The casual Australian style may have found some expression in the services, Johnston writes, but the army was still modelled on its British equivalent, a structure which had an inescapable logic: “the structure of the Australian army provided plenty of evidence for those who regarded everyone as either a privileged leader or an underprivileged follower”.
⁴⁵

Joan Beaumont’s analysis of the battalion group known as Gull Force, which documents members’ previous jobs, shows almost 30 percent of officers came from professional, managerial or executive-type careers, compared to 3.6 percent of privates. A further 59.3 percent of officers came from supervisory and other non-manual jobs, compared with 8.6 percent of privates. Close to half of privates had been unskilled manual workers.
⁴⁶
John Barrett’s survey of veterans likewise shows that nearly two thirds of the commissioned officers came from among the higher-educated.
⁴⁷
This might have been a tolerable starting point in a meritocracy, but the fact was that if you were working class you were often stuck at the bottom no matter how well you performed. Even demonstrated leadership under fire often did not bring promotion. It was so hard for the lower ranks to move up that in the final year of the war situations arose where seasoned soldiers were led into action by officers with no previous experience of battle.
⁴⁸
Yet rank brought privileges; for example, each officer had a batman (a servant).

Elite status also bred contemptuous attitudes. Officers spoke about their batmen in language that was “condescending and even redolent of the British upper class”.
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Private Les Clothier reported on life aboard a ship in Cairns Harbour: “We had a sloppy stew for breakfast and sat on a dirty floor to eat it. As usual, the officers are in cabins and eat like civilised
beings”.
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Soldiers returning to South Australia on leave were delighted when billeted with civilians who “gave us beds with sheets,
even though the army officers told them to leave all the furniture out and leave the room bare
for us. We felt like human beings again”.
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(Emphasis added.) It would be wrong, however, to think the oppressive side of military life stemmed primarily from the arrogance of individual officers. It was systemic. According to one private, a sergeant informed a group of recruits that “we were leaving behind our civilian life and name to become just a number in the army”.
⁵²
Some thought the army’s plan seemed to be to make soldiers live like animals so they would fight like animals.

Where oppression is systemic rebellion is on the cards. It began early in the navy. There was a minor strike on HMAS Perth in New York in August 1939 and a sit-down strike the following July on HMAS
Voyager
. In late 1941 the captain of the
Westralia
ordered machine guns trained on rebellious seamen, and a further upheaval occurred on HMAS
Pirie
in June 1943. Grievances commonly concerned the behaviour of officers and the quality of food. On the
Westralia
seamen received rice and prunes to eat for three weeks, and finally rebelled when given the same for Christmas dinner.

Everyday military life was full of implicit conflict, with contempt bubbling from below as well as trickling from above. 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”.
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The troops cheered when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s image appeared at film screenings, as much from ideology as from cheeky rebellion. Not everyone cared that much about Uncle Joe but they knew it annoyed the officers.
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There were also other ways to annoy them. A soldier reported his 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.
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Unrest continued in the Pacific War even during the 1942 invasion scare. A rebellion took place in the Northern Territory among military
transport companies. Crackdowns on a two-up school and on minor misuse of official property were the immediate causes, though denial of leave was apparently the underlying issue. Dissatisfaction led to a march, which in turn led to a riot. The crowd toppled a petrol bowser, overturned vehicles and ransacked the mess.
⁵⁶
Dissatisfaction was also rife on the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns, where the army brought large numbers of troops together for training exercises. 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 ordered to parade less than fully dressed, as part of an investigation into a clash with an officer.
⁵⁷
At another time, according to Bob “Hooker” Holt’s reminiscences, some of the men:

reckoned they were being treated like dogs, so at Retreat they began to bark like dogs. The idea took on like wildfire… Faintly 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.
⁵⁸

In Western Australia in early 1942 there were strikes against “brass-hatted stupidity” and curtailment of leave. At one army camp soldiers held a sit-down strike for a day and a half, at another up to 3,000 troops held mass meetings and boycotted parades, and a strike took place at a third camp. After the war ended troops held mass protests on Morotai and elsewhere at the lack of ships to bring them home. Anecdotally there was even talk of attempting armed seizures of ships.
⁵⁹

Some of the well known conflicts between Australian and American servicemen turn out, on closer examination, to have originated in a common discontent with the authorities. A report to General Blamey about the notorious clashes in Brisbane referred to “brawls between groups of American and Australian troops or less frequently between Americans and Australians together against the Military Police, whether American or Australian”. The report cited one upheaval involving hundreds of men after Australian soldiers objected to the arrest of an American enlisted man.
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Despite the history of conflict, Johnston plays down the scale of insubordination. The soldier’s most common state, he reminds us, was fatalistic submission rather than enthusiasm or insubordination. This was partly because repression was so harsh in a military setting that “the basic foundation was fear of punishment”.
⁶¹
Soldiers described the typical commander, only half in jest, as “held in respect by majors, awe by
captains, fear by lieutenants, and fear and trembling by other ranks… After the war they usually become members of exclusive clubs and are attacked by gout”.
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Even keeping a diary was mildly subversive, since the brass preferred to forbid them for security reasons.