Kokoda (6 page)

‘Good on you,’ she said to Joe, ‘it’s good to see someone with a bit of
guts
around here!’

It might have been the way she said ‘
guts’
, or maybe just that Auntie Nell was the kind of woman you didn’t cross, but one way or another all the wind indeed went out of Joe’s dad and that was the end of it. Joe stayed in the militia, and that was fair dinkum
that
.

One breezy summer’s night, in early 1940, Max Dupain turned the corner off Bondi’s Campbell Parade when he saw coming towards him someone he thought he knew, but dressed like he had never seen him before. It was his recently departed employee and still great friend, Damien Parer, dressed from top to toe in the uniform of a war correspondent.

‘What do you know, Maxie!’ Damien greeted him, ‘I’m off to the bloody war!’
⁹

And he was that. In 1939, Damien had gone for an interview with the Cinema Branch of the Department of Commerce, which at the outbreak of war had been subsumed by the newly created Department of Information. At the interview they had asked Damien what his goal would be if he were to become a war correspondent and he had replied with characteristic honesty, quoting from his catechism: ‘To know God, love and serve Him here on earth and to enjoy Him forever in Heaven.’
¹⁰

It wasn’t quite what they were expecting, but in any case he’d got the job, and now, a new uniform and kitbag later, he was suddenly on his way to cover the first actions of the Australian forces in the Middle East.

True, it would be a great wrench to leave the side of the young woman he had been getting so close to—her name was Marie Cotter, she worked at the David Jones beauty salon on the corner of Market and Castlereagh in Sydney, and maybe it was true that he hadn’t fallen in love with her until he’d taken her photo and saw her beauty peering back at him from the bottom of the developing tray—but it had to be done. The war, and enthralling documentary possibilities beckoned. Within a week of running into Max, Damien was on a troopship called the
Empress of Japan
—an unlikely name for a ship taking the first Australian troops to action in what would shortly become known as World War II—heading to Palestine.

On the ship he wrote a letter to Max and Olive Dupain, setting out his views on his new role.

I think I have told you before what I reckon I should aim at in this job—that aim has not been achieved yet.

To build a true picture of the Australian soldier in movie and stills.

To make good movie single reelers showing cause and effect. Something after March of Time idea of why we are here and what we are doing in the long range perspective as it affects us in Australia.

To keep newspapers and newsreels supplied with really hot spectacular news.
¹¹

Butch Bisset was gone. Not long after brother Stan had returned to Australia with the Wallabies, Butch had joined up, farewelling his partly tearful, partly proud parents and officially becoming a soldier of the 2/14th Battalion, 7th Division of the 2nd AIF. (The First Australian Imperial Force which had been formed up for World War I had consisted of five divisions—with each division numbering fifteen thousand men—and the Second Australian Imperial Force had continued the numerical series, with the first division formed for World War II becoming the 6th Division and so on.)

Against the magnetic pull of his own beloved brother already having joined up, Stan held out for as long as he could. If there was one thing that finally prompted him, it was news of Dunkirk…

In late May 1940 more than 300 000 Allied troops were pinned on the northwestern beaches around the French town of Dunkirk, as seemingly the entire German army and Luftwaffe bore down upon them. On the edge of complete catastrophe, a flotilla of tiny English boats, ferries, large ships and just about anything that could float, made its way across the English Channel and, due to the extraordinary courage of the captains and crew, successfully plucked the troops to safety. In some ways the exercise was a massive defeat for the British, in that their forces had been so clearly routed in the face of the German Blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France. But, on the other hand, the fact that the evacuation had been successful, and that such a massive number of troops had escaped to fight another day, was inspirational to the Allied cause. What
was
clear was that Britain was going to need help, and it was for the sons and daughters of the English-speaking world to answer the call.

An editorial in the
New York Times
immediately afterwards reflected the overwhelming joy with which the success of the amazing operation was greeted and the hope it generated.

So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence. For in that harbor, in such a hell as never blazed on earth before, the rags and blemishes that have hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered in shining splendour, she faced the enemy. They sent away the wounded first; men died that others might escape. It was not so simple a thing as courage, which the Nazis had in plenty. It was not so simple a thing as discipline, which can be hammered into men by a drill sergeant. It was not the result of careful planning, for there could have been little. It was the common man of the free countries rising in all his glory from mill, office, mine, factory and shop and applying to war the lessons learned when he went down the mine to release trapped comrades; when he hurled the lifeboat through the surf; when he endured hard work and poverty for his children’s sake. This shining thing in the souls of men Hitler cannot attain nor command nor conquer. He has crushed it where he could from German hearts.

This is the great tradition of democracy. This is the future. This is victory.
¹²

And this was Stan, making the decision of his life just a few months after arriving home. It was obvious Britain urgently needed assistance against the rampaging Germans and—put together with the fact that Butch had already joined up—Stan knew there was only one thing to do. In rugby if ever there had been a ‘blue’ on, his place had always been standing shoulder to shoulder with Butch and, given that this was a blue that all of Australia was in, there was no doubt his place was in Australia’s armed forces… right beside Butch. Stan reached this conclusion on a Friday night while having a few beers with friends; on the spot he headed off to the nearest recruitment office at the Melbourne Town Hall. By the Monday morning Private Stanley Young Bisset was reporting for duty at the Puckapunyal training camp.

Consisting of many wooden barracks, each housing twenty-two men, and acres of sweat-drenched red clay on which to parade and perform military manoeuvres, Puckapunyal was to be their home for the next few months as they prepared for war. Both Stan and Butch were soon part of the 2/14th Battalion, which was the sole battalion raised from Victoria as part of the 21st Brigade, which was in turn one of the three brigades which made up Australia’s 7th Division. Those who had joined up immediately war was declared had gone into the 6th Division—and were promptly committed by Prime Minister Menzies to fight beside Britain in the Middle East— and this promptitude had earned the men of the 6th the right to refer mock-derisorily to those in the 7th as ‘the deep thinkers’. But for many it just wasn’t possible to walk away from all their commitments in civilian life and join the armed forces. But for all the problems of extrication, many like Butch and Stan had simply not been able to resist the call to duty and, within six months of war being declared, Australia had raised no fewer than a hundred thousand volunteers, meaning that one in six able-bodied Australian men was under arms. Which, in a way, was as well, because things were definitely stirring, and not just in Europe, where Hitler had already laid waste to Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg Czechoslovakia, Holland and France.

Even more pertinently from Australia’s point of view, in July 1940 the Japanese government had effectively been taken over by its military and, just one month later, Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yôsuke announced his grand idea in very plain language. From this point on, he said, Japan would devote itself in its area of the world to establishing a New Order called the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’—essentially an autonomous bloc of Asian nations which would trade with each other, entirely exclusive of Western powers. As he put it in a speech to the Diet: ‘We have thus maintained an attitude to surmount all obstacles for the purpose of establishing a sphere of co-prosperity throughout greater East Asia with Japan, Manchukuo and China as its pivotal point.’ What Matsuoka and his Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, were essentially proposing was a ‘United States of Asia’, with Japan as its pivotal point.

Both the Japanese prime minister and the foreign minister made it clear that Japan would not endure the American and European powers dividing up the Asian nations between them. It was time for Asia to be ‘liberated from Western Imperialist powers’, albeit under strong Japanese leadership. Still heavily engaged in their war with China, Japan’s industry desperately needed the raw materials that Europe and America had been trying to deny it for the previous two decades. Specifically, in the last few years, the United States had imposed an embargo against selling Japan oil or steel. Concerned at being denied full access to such crucial products as oil from the Dutch East Indies and rubber from Indochina, Japan’s government felt that that the Co-Prosperity Sphere was the answer, and the tone of Foreign Minister Yôsuke’s speech made it clear that Japan would consider using military force to simply take what it needed.

After all, back in 1905 Japan had been the first Asian nation to engage in a war with a western power and win, when it had trounced Russia in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05. If it came to it, Japan had little doubt it could do it again. A similar disdain for any quibbles that other nations might have about the whole notion of the ‘Co-Prosperity Sphere’ was apparent when Japan began to flex its military muscles in Asia and install puppet regimes who— wouldn’t you know it?—thought sending Japan raw materials was the highest priority of all. Those Asian countrymen who protested, risked torture and execution, and many others were herded into forced labour at the point of a bayonet.

The Japanese move into French Indochina at the invitation of the pro-Nazi Vichy Government in September 1940, was Japan’s first foothold in Southeast Asia, but there were many more worrying things to come. Just a few days after this invasion, the news broke that Japan had formed a ‘mutual defense’ alliance with Germany and Italy, known as the Tripartite Pact, meaning that Japan was now sitting squarely on the side of Hitler, whom the Allies were struggling to contain. (The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, gave the definitive Allied response to the Pact when he described it as the ‘joining of the bandit nations’.)

Apart from freezing all Japanese assets in the United States, the Roosevelt administration now widened its previous sanctions against Japan, making it illegal to export
any
oil or rubber to that country, and the American lead was followed by Britain and the Commonwealth of Nations, as well as the Dutch Government in exile—the last, particularly significant, because it denied Japan the resources of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. All up, the land of the Rising Sun now felt isolated and alone, up against what became known as the ‘ABCD Powers’, as in America, Britain, China and the Dutch.

The bottom line was that within a month of Japan’s incursion into Indochina, the country was effectively being starved of all but twenty per cent of its previous supply of oil, and most of the raw resources (including rubber) that it needed to fuel its aggression. And while against this possibility Japan had previously amassed a certain stockpile of necessities, clearly it would not be enough. Japan would either have to back down, withdraw and renounce its aggression, or it would have to increase its hostilities to the point where it could simply take what was being denied it by market trade.

Despite those clear aggressions, the alarm bell was not ringing shrilly everywhere. As a matter of fact, on 3 March 1941, a full nine months after Japan had declared its establishment of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies—who was in England on a sixteen-week visit—addressed an international audience of movers and shakers from the worlds of business, media and diplomacy, and made Australia’s position on Japan clear. Not only did Australia have no emerging problem in the Pacific, he said, but in fact it wanted to ‘draw closer to Japan and appreciate its problems’.

As it turned out, of course, it wouldn’t be long before Japan— which had by that time built up the strength of its army to fifty-one infantry divisions—was the one who was drawing closer to Australia, and other countries besides…

The news came through. The 2/14th had been called up. Together with the 2/27th Battalion from South Australia and the 2/16th Battalion from Western Australia, the 2/14th would make up the 21st Brigade, and would be going to the Middle East to sort out the Germans and Italians, who had been rampaging through much of North Africa. They needed to be sent back whence they came, and the men of the 2/14th—including the newly installed Sergeant Major of B Company, Butch Bisset, and his brother Stan, the Corporal of Section 9 of 12 Platoon—felt they were the men for the job. As did most of their comrades. They were young, strong, well trained and off to war to do their bit for King and country. A great mood of euphoria swept through the troops at the news that they were off to battle.