Book Review - The Markham and Ramu Valleys 1943-1944 (Australians in the Pacific War)

 The Markham and Ramu Valleys 1943-1944 (Australians in the Pacific War)

Researched and written by Dr. Mark Johnston, Text and photo editing by Courtney Page-Allen

Canberra: Department of Veteran's Affairs, 2005       ISBN 9781920720490

This little book is part of a wonderful series printed by the Australian Department of Veteran's Affairs on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War Two. They consist of a short section of text and a carefully curated collection of photographs which illustrate a particular piece of Australian activity in the Pacific War. The books were distributed freely to libraries and schools to help to keep memory alive.

This particular volume describes the actions that led to the taking of Lae and the campaign up the Markham Valley through Nadzab, Kaiapit, and on to Shaggy Ridge, a name that rings through the history of Australia in World War Two. Battalions of the Seventh Division fought their way up into the Finisterre Ranges and along the ridge (which was often only wide enough for one man to walk along), fighting hand-to-hand battles to take features such as Johnson's Knoll and the famous Pimple.

The text, while very brief is crisp and accurate, and is wonderfully complemented by the photographs, which show the difficulty and danger of this campaign which lasted from September 1943 through to February 1944. The photos are especially poignant for me, as one of my Great Uncles with whom I used to spend my Summer holidays, fought in that campaign.

We will remember them.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - War at the end of the World by James P. Duffy

 War at the end of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight for New Guinea, 1942-1945

by James P. Duffy

New York: NAL Caliber, 2016                                                                          ISBN 9780451418302

This is a well-written and well-balanced account of the New Guinea campaign of World War II. James Duffy has not broken any new ground with this book, but what he has done is tell - side-by-side - the American, Australian and Japanese stories of this arduous campaign, in a simple narrative of the battles and decision making involved in winning (and losing) them.

The New Guinea campaign lasted from almost the beginning of the Pacific War to almost the end, and traversed the entire island from East to West. From early 1942 to late 1944 the Allied forces, through a strategy of targeted battles and bypassing large enemy bases, comprehensively defeated the Japanese forces. One stark statistic - in New Guinea the American forces lost 7,000 men, and the Australians a similar number. The Japanese lost over 200,000 men killed in the campaign.

The stark difference in deaths can be sheeted home to a few reasons: the overwhelming technological and materiel advantage of the Allies, the flawed battle tactics of the Japanese, and the inability of Japan to supply its troops with enough materiel (particularly food and medicine). As Duffy points out, MacArthur was also frugal with his troops, reluctant to attack large Japanese bases if he could avoid it. 

Rabaul was the first instance of where this tactic was used. Initially, from necessity owing to lack of troops, MacArthur constantly tried to avoid set-piece battles with large Japanese forces. What MacArthur wanted was hard ground for airfields. Although he was an Army man, MacArthur fully understood the crucial nature of air power, especially in a war that was fought over water and islands.

So, MacArthur's first thought when looking at the next Japanese conglomeration was "does it have an airfield suitable for my bombers, and is that airfield in the right strategic spot?" If the answer was no, the Allies moved on to the next area. Sometimes, if the Japanese force around a suitable airfield was too large, MacArthur sometimes found a suitable place where the Japanese weren't, and built his own airfields. In some cases an airfield could be up and running a couple of days after construction started. The construction companies, both the Australian and the American Seabees, were the unsung heroes in this forgotten war.

I imagine some Australian readers might quibble about the phrase "forgotten war" being applied to the New Guinea campaign, but I think that Duffy's term is apt. Certainly Australians generally know about the Kokoda campaign, and maybe Buna and Gona, but how many of us know much about the early campaigns in New Britain and New Ireland, the Markham Valley, Kalopit, Finschhafen, Manus Island and Los Negros, Hollandia and Aitape, Biak and Morotai?  

War at the end of the World is a great resource to understand these lesser-known battles, and at the same time to understand the Japanese viewpoint, which quite often gets lost in histories such as these. That the Japanese high command let so many troops wither on the vine is hard to understand, even with the difficulties that they had in moving troops as the war tipped in favour of the Allies. So many times Duffy writes of Japanese formations that were frittered away in piecemeal attacks, or suicidal defences of areas of little strategic value.

What I liked about this book was Duffy's even-handedness in describing the Australian and American contributions to victory. While we Australians might think we did it all, the reality is that the Americans did most of the heavy lifting. Duffy gets the balance right in my opinion - clearly pointing out the holding operations of the Australians at Kokoda, and how their preponderance of skill and battle experience led the way through the early battles at Buna and Gona, and then giving way to the greater numbers of Americans as they arrived in the theatre. 

As the subtitle of this book suggests, Duffy also has a focus on MacArthur throughout this book. He makes us aware that his one aim was to get back to the Philippines, and writes well on his constant battle with the Navy and Chiefs of Staff to get the men and material he required to prosecute the war. Duffy alludes to the politics surrounding his command, and how astute MacArthur was in managing the men around him, above him and below him as well.

With one caveat, I can recommend this book as a very good and detailed overview of what in many ways has become a forgotten part of the Pacific War.

The caveat is that the maps are appalling - too few, too lacking in detail, and too poorly printed to be of any use. This is inexcusable in a book describing a campaign that covers one of the World's largest islands. The blame for this can't be laid at the feet of the author, but it really lets the book down. The bibliography and index are serviceable.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked this book up, but found it a readable and relatively comprehensive narrative of this long and complex campaign.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Passchendaele: the Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917 by Philip Warner

 Passchendaele: the Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917 by Philip Warner

London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988 (first published 1987)    ISBN 0283997451

This book, for me, was like the curate's egg - good in parts. As a blow-by-blow account of the campaign to take the Passchedaele ridge near Ypres, the book is serviceable. As an insight into broader strategy it is patchy. As a definitive story of one of the bloodiest episodes of World War One it is definitely not the final word.

For those after a brief rundown of the battles that together become what we know as Passchendaele, the Wikipedia article is excellent. This book adds colour to  something like that article, but not much more meat from a historical perspective. Which is not to sell Warner's work short - He describes the actions that led to many of the Victoria Crosses won during the campaign, and his judicious use of letters and diaries adds an important element of verity to the book. I found his selections particularly interesting, as many of them were not the usual writings of soldiers or officers, but from medical staff and those at GHQ. 

So, we have a book that does a reasonable job of describing the progress of the battles, and effectively uses commentary of the time to tell us what it was like to be a part of the fighting and how soldiers survived the horror. It is when Warner moves to broader themes that I think this book struggles. 

Warner can't bring himself to decide whether Haig was a dunce, or just one among many other like-minded generals. What Warner fails to enunciate is just how Haig (or anyone else) would go about the battles of World War One differently. We can look back and pick holes in what happened, but with the knowledge and technology of the time, were there actually any alternatives to the type of mass attack that was normal during this campaign? Warner provides no conclusions, and does not, I think, emphasise that British tactics were indeed changing, and by the end of the battle they   had hit upon methods against which the Germans could not defend.

What Warner does emphasise is the effect of the weather on the progress of the battles, and on the misery suffered by those involved. He points out that the constant artillery barrages destroyed the intricate drainage system that was important in stopping the land becoming waterlogged. This was compounded by the unseasonal amount of rain that fell during most of the campaign. In the end, the mud became almost as much of an enemy as the Germans.

And what of the strategy behind this campaign? Warner is equivocal about Haig's stated reasons for going ahead with such a large campaign. He dismisses the aim of getting to the coast to capture the U-Boat bases as so much hot air, deprecates the idea of a battle of attrition, and grudgingly accepts that the British needed to take the pressure off the French after the mutinies of 1917. However, I think that all three of these strategies made sense at the time. Haig may have been getting a false idea of German capability and morale (Warner is particularly scathing of Charteris in this area), but Warner himself, in a chapter devoted to German reaction to the campaign, shows us that the continued onslaught of the British did almost crack the German lines, and will to resist. The campaign also stopped Ludendorff from moving troops to crush Russia, and from assisting Austria against the Italians. It is easy to criticize Haig, but his options were to work in the situation he was in, and with the information he had.

Passchendaele was a terrible disaster for so many. The casualties were appalling - over half a million casualties from July to November. Those casualties  included my great-grandfather, who was killed on 20 September 1917, in what came to be known as the Battle of Menin Road.  I, and many others like me, read to try and understand. Warner's book is useful in understanding what it may have been like to be in Flanders in 1917, but on the larger themes I would be looking elsewhere for satisfaction.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Great War by Les Carlyon

 The Great War by Les Carlyon

Sydney: Picador, 2007  (First published 2006)           ISBN 9781405037990

It's only after finishing this book that I have realized why I have been feeling melancholy  for the last week. The Great War is a distillation of tragedy and waste: 800 pages of sadness. Les Carlyon used all of his skill to portray the story of the Australian Army on the Western Front, both from the view of the soldier at the front, and the commanders behind the lines, while also including vignettes that explain how the Australian experience fitted into the wider experience of War.

By the time Carlyon came to writing this book, he had already written a book about the Gallipoli Campaign. I do wonder about the choice of title: The Great War to my mind, is somewhat misleading given the subject matter. For this book is strictly a campaign history of the Australian forces from Fromelles - their first foray on the Western front - to the final act of the AIF, the taking of Montbrehain in October 1918. For many people my age Carlyon is better remembered as a journalist who mostly wrote about horse racing. The cognitive dissonance of who I thought Carlyon was and the misleading title of this book took me a little time to overcome. While not a pedant (well maybe a bit), I think the title was poorly chosen, especially as there is no blurb or any other material to alert the reader to the fact that this book is not actually a history of the whole of World War One.

Once I understood the limits of this book, I found it a good read. Carlyon not only writes well about the battles that the Australians fought, but uses his journalistic skill to provide a flavour of what it must have been like, using extracts from diaries and letters to give the reader a sense of the horrors, but also of the personalities of the Australian troops. He has ended most chapters with a view of the battlefields in the present day, contrasting the generally bucolic countryside of the 21st century with the vision of hell that most of it was in 1916-1918.

Like all histories of Australian exploits in the Great War, Carlyon is following in the footsteps of Charles Bean. While Carlyon is not a doe-eyed admirer of the official historian, quite often criticizing his conclusions and his distaste for General Monash, he is influenced as all writers have been by Bean's magnum opus. The Great War is mostly a history from the Battalion level, a narrative of small actions within the wider War.

Carlyon is more readable than Bean, and does try to provide some context for the Australian battles. He intersperses his battlefield descriptions with short essays on the strategic outlook and the political intrigues that swirled around the British forces during the War. He has much to say about Haig, Gough, Plumer, Lloyd George, Nivelle, Foch and Clemenceau. Most of it is not very flattering, and suited to Carlyon's story of the war. This causes him some problems during the book: Plumer is a genius at modern battle, until he isn't, Haig is a tongue-tied nincompoop until he is a rock of determination, and so on. The wish to characterize people simply is something that Carlyon tries to avoid throughout the book, but sometimes he can't help himself and his journalistic desire for a good story overwhelms the more nuanced narrative that may be closer to the truth.

The one character he does map with some complexity is Monash. Carlyon shows us that he was almost certainly the ablest officer in the Australian forces, but also points out clearly that there were others, both British and Colonial, who were his equal. Not only did he lead masterstrokes such as Hamel but there were also times when he pushed his men too far with too little support. What Carlyon shows is that Monash not only had a great tactical mind, he also had the ruthlessness required to sacrifice lives when he felt is was necessary.

While Carlyon describes battles well, there is very little in The Great War about the lives of the troops behind the lines, except when it can add an amusing anecdote to bring out the nature of the troops. Carlyon's descriptions of the AIF tend to follow the template of an army that was short on barrack-room discipline, but good at fighting - the mythical Aussie digger. There is a kernel of truth to all myths, and there is no doubt that the AIF had a more democratic nature than the British army as a whole, but sometimes the good story takes over from the duller reality.

I feel like I'm writing a bad review for this book, which is not my intention. The Great War is a very well written account of the Australian battlefield experience on the Western Front. Carlyon does well to bring out the waste and horror of war, and his trope of ending the chapters with a description of the countryside as it is today, perhaps also describing the cemeteries in which some of the soldiers he writes about lay, evokes the pity of war as well as any book I have read. 

The advantage, if I can call it that, of writing a book from the battalion view is that the writer does not have to linger too much on what it was all for. The final few pages lay out the Australian achievement on the Western Front - considerable territory captured, some vital battles, and an honorable part played in a bigger picture. By the end of the war, the AIF was dangerously low on numbers (Carlyon writes pithily and well on the two conscription campaigns run in Australia during the war, as he also does more generally on the machinations of Billy Hughes as Prime Minister, and Keith Murdoch as stirrer), but as one of the most experienced corps of troops on the front, was in demand as a shock force. By the time of its last battle it was spent - the war ended not a moment too soon for the Australians.

If, as a reader, you would like to know about the battles Australia fought on the Western Front, I can recommend The Great War. It's well-written, and gives just enough context to what was going on so that the uninitiated can understand where the Australians fitted into the bigger picture. The maps included in this paperback edition were at best adequate, but there are endnotes, bibliography and a reasonable index.

The strength of the book is in Carlyon's evocation of the average soldier: he is successful in helping the reader get into - as much as one can - the shoes of those who were there. While Gallipoli has become the overarching military myth of Australia, most Australians who died in World War One did so on the Western Front - even the term "digger" was coined on that front in 1917. The lasting effects of the War trickle down to the present day: my Great-Grandfather was killed at Menin Road, one of his brothers was invalided home to Australia in the same year, another had already been killed at Lone Pine, and his other brother, one of the original ANZACS, and someone who participated in every battle listed in this book except the last, was sent home early, one of only 6,000 left from those men who landed at ANZAC Cove in 1915. Their memory, and the memory of the trauma that they suffered, lingered in the minds of the family they had left, and has been passed down to the present day.

I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Brief Lives by Peter Ryan

 Brief Lives by Peter Ryan

Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004                                             ISBN 0975192140

I've been on a bit of a Peter Ryan kick lately, as small doses of common sense at regular intervals are a good tonic to the craziness imposed on us by COVID. This book (and yes, it is an homage to John Aubrey, as Ryan explains in his introduction) is a grouping of longer and shorter pieces on famous, and not so famous Australians, and one native of New Guinea. Ryan, in his position of publisher at Melbourne University Press, had the fortune to meet many great Australians, but perhaps the most interesting of these pieces come from Ryan's reflections about some of his wartime comrades.

Of particular interest is the essay on Alf Conlon, head of the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs in World War II. Ryan served in the unit, and shines an interesting light on a grouping that has, over time, developed a reputation that far exceeds its importance in the running of the War. Ryan explains that Conlon was a master manipulator, and a "big-picture" man who was hopeless at running an office, let alone a huge department. While Conlon is interesting himself, the roll-call of people who served in DORCA is staggering - John Kerr, James McAuley and Harold Stewart of Ern Malley fame, are just a few of the people that passed through its doors at Victoria Barracks.

As one would expect, Ryan has a couple of essays in Brief Lives on writers: his essay on Cyril Pearl is a reminder of a journalist and author who's Wild Men of Sydney is still well worth reading if one wants to understand a hidden part of Australian history. Ryan lets us into his relationship with Pearl, who was clever, urbane and lots of fun to lunch with. Another wonderful and acerbic dining companion of Ryan's was Alec Hope, who is shown not only to be a great poet and critic, but also a wonderful teacher.

Some of the shorter pieces in this book refer to local doctors or wood-cutters, who epitomized for Ryan some aspect of the Australian character, from dry humor to resilience in the face of adversity. Ryan not only admired "great" Australians, such as Macfarlane Burnet, but those unknowns who had shown great courage in the most difficult conditions such as 'Papa' Singin, from New Guinea, who assisted Ryan when he was working behind the lines in the War.

And what was it in those people that he admired? Courage, loyalty, learning, and love for Australia rank highly; as well as an ability to recite poetry. These are of course qualities that Ryan himself had in abundance, and which come through in his descriptions of this varied group, from former Prime Minister Ben Chifley, to Mitchell Librarian Ida Leeson.

Peter Ryan is well worth reading: not only for his content, but also for the clearness of his style and his ability to cut through the rubbish to get to human truth. Worth picking up.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Crete: the Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor

Crete: the Battle and the Resistance by Antony Beevor

London: John Murray, 2005 (1st published 1991)    ISBN 9780719568312

I found this book - the first in Antony Beevor's justly celebrated histories of various campaigns of World War II - incredibly hard to read. Not because Beevor's writing is flawed - far from it: but because the story of Crete in World War II is a tragic one of flawed tactics, wrong-headedness and missed opportunities on both sides, and an appallingly unnecessary loss of life.

After the debacle of the Greek Campaign, which Beevor briefly touches on, there was little doubt that the Wehrmacht intended to take Crete. In fact the British knew, thanks to their ability to read the German code, not only the German's intentions, but also to a great extent the timing and size of the attack.

One would think that, even with troops still recovering from retreat and defeat on the mainland, this advantage would be decisive, especially considering they outnumbered the German troops by a factor of almost 2:1. The problems stemmed from the top: General Freyberg, whilst undoubtedly brave and caring of his men, was very fixed in his ideas and not gifted tactically. He seems to have almost willfully mis-interpreted the Ultra signals, and fixed his mind on the idea that the main invasion force was to come by sea, with the paratroop drop merely a precursor. This mistaken view was the main reason the Allies lost the island.

And what of the German side? General Student's plan of drops at all airfields on the Northern coast meant that his forces were stretched dangerously thin, with little ability to co-operate if they were hard pressed. The appalling lack of intelligence meant that Student was deceived into thinking the numbers of Allied troops were much less than the actual numbers on the island, and so he thought his paratroops could take the island purely by airborne assault (it is one of the ironies of war that Student was the officer commanding troops at Arnhem, troops the Allies didn't know was there because of an intelligence failure).

Both sides were heinously deficient in radio equipment, vital in a country both mountainous and with poor transport infrastructure. The lack of communication would affect the British very much in the first days of the invasion.

The upshot of all these failings is that most German paratroops dropped into a hail of gunfire, and while their losses were appalling, Freyberg's misjudgment and the lack of communication between his troops meant that one airfield was taken by German troops, and this was enough to allow them to bring in enough re-inforcements to win the battle. Beevor describes this disaster well, describing some very heroic (and some not-so-heroic) actions on both sides.

The second part of this book describes the four years of occupation and resistance to Nazi control over Crete, focusing mainly on the work of the British SOE operatives that were in constant touch with the bands of Cretan resistance forces that based themselves in the mountains and kept pressure on the occupying forces. Beevor covers the politics of the various Cretan forces: republican, nationalist, and communist, as well as the politics of the special forces, with their jealousies and rivalries affecting at different times not only operations in Crete, but across the Balkans.

The heroism of the Cretans, from the armed bands to the village women who risked all to shelter Allied soldiers, is hard to fathom in the modern world, but is as admirable as any other sacrifice made in those much harder times.

While Crete might have only been headline news during the War in the few short weeks when it was the frontline (and after Leigh-Fermor kidnapped General Kriepe, which Beevor covers briskly and well), there was much activity there for a long period. It is hard to think of a book that covers it better than this one.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - No Quarter by Dale Blair

No Quarter: unlawful killing and surrender in the Australian war experience 1915-18
by Dale Blair

Charnwood, ACT: Ginninderra Press, 2005          ISBN 1740272919

This slim book is a very important contribution to Australian military history. Dale Blair has done some valuable preliminary work on the overlooked but important question of unlawful killing committed by Australian troops in World War I, mainly by looking at records that are lying in plain sight in the Official History, various Battalion histories, letters and other documents.

Blair begins his work by looking at the legal situation of unlawful killing in war, which had developed as a concept in the Nineteenth Century, and had been codified in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Blair notes that while enlisted men may not have known much more than the basics of the requirements of these conventions, officers would have had fairly thorough training in what was and wasn't permissible.

Blair then details, through several short chapters, incidents of Australian troops either showing no quarter on the battlefield, or shooting troops in the act of surrendering, or indeed after they had surrendered. Blair is careful to note any extenuating circumstances or provocations, but the picture he paints is one where this sort of behavior was relatively "normalised". He also notes that refusal to undertake such behavior was not punished in any way, so it was not "peer pressure" that led to the widespread nature of these incidents.

What he does point out is that most of these incidents occurred during a particular phase of the War on the Western Front, when the lines were static, and trench raiding was an important part of Australian battle tactics. The war had taken a very brutal turn, and this is perhaps reflected in the behavior of the Australian troops. It's clear in reading about World War I that the Germans both feared and hated the Australians, and Blair's book points to the reason why this may be the case.

A short chapter on the fate of Australians who surrendered shows that the experience of surrender varied, but was often brutal, especially when the troops were identified as Australians. Blair notes that there is much more historical work to be done about the experiences of Australian PoWs in Germany from 1916-18, as there is on the main topic of his book.

With valuable notes and a good bibliography, No Quarter is a great introduction to an often overlooked subject in Australian Military History.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Before the ANZAC Dawn edited by Craig Stockings and John Connor

Before the ANZAC Dawn : a military history of Australia to 1915

Edited by Craig Stockings and John Connor

Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013                                 ISBN 9781742233697

So often here in Australia we think of our military history starting on the shores of ANZAC Cove on the morning of the 25th of April 1915, when actually it began at least one hundred years before, and even further back depending on how the term 'military history' is used.

This book is an interesting collection of essays that look at incidents in and themes that run through Australia's military history before that fateful April morning. The first two essays deal with Aboriginal warfare between tribes, and with the white settlers. Aboriginal societies were warrior societies, and while some of the fighting was ceremonial it was no less real for that. Historians are still peeling back the layers of evidence as to exactly how and why the tribes fought each other. Our developing understanding of the fighting between Aboriginals and the white settlers is well-covered by the second essay in the book. What was openly stated at the time and then repressed for many years is now being spoken of again, with evidence to back it up: namely that many groups of Aboriginals fought the wave of settlers - sometimes with (temporary) success - before finally succumbing to superior numbers and firepower.

The next essays in the book then go on to elaborate a few themes: firstly Britain's desire for Australia to shoulder more of the cost of their own defence, and for Australian defence assets to be at the Empire's disposal when needed. This contrasted with Australia's lack of willingness (and financial ability) to spend on her own defence, with the tangled history of rifle clubs and the cadet movement laying bare the divide between the military requirement of trained and drilled troops, and the average citizen's view that a few crack shots with their own horses would save the day with their "natural" soldierly ability, an idea that was seemingly reinforced by the Australian experience in the Boer War. The idea of citizens doing what was needed when the time came is further expounded upon in the essay dealing with the "invasion literature" that was produced in the late 1800s, spurred by the departure of English troops from the continent, and the seeming unwillingness of the Royal Navy to commit to defending Australia come what may.

Further essays discuss the issues that arose once Australia federated in 1901, which meant that she had to create her own defence forces. The Navy was ahead of the Army in professionalisation, but compulsory military training - which was instituted in 1911 - at least allowed the government to draw on men who had a modicum of training when it was time to gather troops for World War One. This was a big step from Australian's earlier involvement in the New Zealand Wars, the Sudan or even the Boer War, where units were raised by individual colonies without much co-ordination, or it was left to individuals to join up.

The final essay deals with Australia's first military action in World War One; the capture of the German radio station at Rabaul. The previous essay's description of the struggles to get a national defence off the the ground find their apogee here: the German East Asiatic Squadron was too fearful to defend Rabaul owing to the superior firepower of Australia's nascent Navy, and troops were gathered and sent to fight within a month of War being declared.

Overall the essays in this book are interesting and educative: backed with comprehensive notes and useful bibliographies they are each a great starting point for entry into Australia's early military history.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Zombie Myths of Australian Military History

Zombie Myths of Australian Military History edited by Craig Stockings

Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010        ISBN 9781742230795

I hope this book sold well - while it didn't really drop any bombshells on my understanding of the subjects it covered, it is a good corrective to the self-serving pap that is sometimes dished up to readers and called "History". Ranging across two hundred years of Australia and warfare, the essays in this book remind the reader that sometimes the story that gets told is not only not quite the truth, it's not even the truth.

The ten essays in this collection are written by different authors, and as such the quality does vary, but overall they hit their mark very well. Writing as I am in 2019, it is interesting that some of the myths in this book (published in 2010) have in fact been laid to rest in the intervening decade. The first chapter, about the concept of a Frontier War, is a case in point. John Connor points out that not only did Aboriginals fight each other, but they also did quite often fight the settlers and British Army who came onto their land: this fact is now much more accepted today than when this essay was written, and there would be few that would today deny that a state of warfare, however one might define the term, existed on the frontiers of the settled areas of this Continent.

Not all myths do die, and the authors of the next few chapters are fighting an uphill battle to convince the public of the truth. The story of Breaker Morant, which is covered in chapter two, is a fine example of fiction overtaking history, with the successful Bruce Beresford film - which was more fiction than fact - becoming the default story of a man who was by turns conman, drunkard and murderer.

And then there is World War One, where the myth of the Australian Digger was truly born, and where story upon story has been laid down like a geological deposit, and one must sift through the false to get to the real. The reasons for this are varied, with propaganda being a major source of many myths and - especially in the carnage of the Western Front - trying to give sense to the senseless. Rhys Crawley's chapter on the August offensive at Gallipoli smashes quite a few myths, with a very thorough and reasoned argument that the offensive was doomed to fail no matter what the British did at Suvla. This chapter for me underlines how and why the myths develop. My great-great uncle was killed at the Battle of Lone Pine, and another took part in the battle and survived. It's only natural that the loved ones of those who pay the ultimate sacrifice want to know that they died as part of something worthwhile, and that they had a chance of success, and if that success is elusive it's not their fault. On all these feelings myths grow; growing on grief, anger, and belief.

The next couple of chapters are much more specific in their outlook, with Elizabeth Greenhalgh showing that Australians weren't the first to breach the Hindenburg Line, which is correct, but it's also clear that the Australian Corp was an important part of the final offensive, and Craig Stockings, through a detailed look at the Desert Campaign against Italian troops, shows that it is training and logistics which make effective troops, not some mythical idea of the bronzed Aussie being a natural soldier.

The highlight of the book for me was the chapter on the loss of HMAS Sydney II. This chapter shows how advances in technology destroy myths. It has always been clear to those who work with a historical mindset that there was no conspiracy about the loss of the Sydney: it was a tragedy that was possibly avoidable, but Peter Dennis describes very well why Captain Burnett may have gotten too close to the Kormoran, thus sealing Sydney's fate. Of all Australian military events, the loss of the Sydney has been the source of the most ridiculous rumour-mongering and cockamamie theories; partly in reaction to the immense tragedy of losing over 600 men, and partly that the myth of Australian military prowess couldn't allow the Sydney to be destroyed by a mere raider. Dennis scythes through all the theories, and hopes that the recent discovery of the wrecks may help to put them to rest. It has.

The two chapters that deal with our war against the Japanese show how governments can create myths when they think it's in their interests to do so. That Japan never planned to invade Australia is quite clear. That politicians and soldiers at the time talked about the possibility is understandable. What is less forgivable is the creation of "Battle for Australia" day, which suggests that the invasion was a possibility, and has skewed the history of what actually happened to fit a political agenda. Likewise the idea that Japan was stopped on the Kokoda Trail is dealt with in a logical and documented manner. No-one doubts the bravery of the troops that fought there, but it was the Japanese pulling back from the Trail after the Allied forces threatened their rear bases, rather than any particular battle on the Trail itself, that was the catalyst for them turning back.

Jeffrey Grey's essay on Vietnam shows the reader how some myths can badly affect those that are the subject of mythologising, pointing out that service in Vietnam was no more or less dangerous than other wars, both in the field and in what returned servicemen suffered after they got home. The final essay covers Australia's troubled relationship with East Timor, having invaded in World War Two when they didn't want us there, and in 1999 being very reluctant to save them from the depredations of the Indonesians when they did want us, with governments on both occasions painting us as heroes saving the day.

I'd recommend this book in anyone interested in Australian military history, no matter how much you know. For those that know little, it is an education, and for those that know a lot there is still something of interest to be gained from its pages.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Closed File by Kit Denton

Closed File by Kit Denton

Adelaide: Rigby, 1983           ISBN 072701739X

Kit Denton is most famous for his novel The Breaker, a fictionalized account of the life and trial of Breaker Morant and the atrocities of the Bushveldt Carbineers. When it was made into a popular movie by Bruce Beresford, awareness of the incident was heightened, which allowed Denton to spend more time and money on his researches. A little chastened that his fiction was being taken for fact (The Breaker used much artistic licence to create a good story), he wrote Closed File to try and set the record straight.

Set the record straight it (mostly) does, but that has not stopped many Australians to continue to clamor for a posthumous pardon for Morant, Handcock and the others based, it seems, on the fictional version of events. One wonders if these people have delved deeply into the evidence surrounding the incident.

The story of Morant, Handcock, and the Bushveldt Carbineers is fascinating, and it is easy to see why it makes such great fodder for film and fiction. By the time this unit was formed, the Boer War had entered its final, most brutal, phase. The Boers who were still fighting had retreated to the outer edges of the colony, and were mainly carrying out guerrilla-style attacks on British columns, trains, and collaborating farmers. The British were pushing the Boers further into the country, employing scorched-earth tactics to deprive them of supplies, and moving the population into the first-ever concentration camps.

The war had moved beyond set-piece battles and marching armies: the British had begun to fight fire with fire, forming small units of horse-borne troops, who lived out bush and tried to beat the Boer Commandos at their own game. These units often consisted of a preponderance of Colonials - Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians - owing to these troop's superior bushcraft and horse handling skills. As the Colonial contingent's initial sign-on period drew to a close, those who wanted to stay signed on with these newly-formed units, which soon became filled with those who wished to continue fighting.

The Bushveldt Carbineers was an even more murky unit: formed and funded by businessmen in Pietersburg, its main task was to protect the railway lines in the area. It was not an official unit of the British Army - its members wore no insignia - and, operating in the rough and remote country of the Spelonken, oversight of its activities was limited.

The main actors in this drama centre around Harry Harbord Morant - "The Breaker". The main reason the incident is remembered at all is due to Morant's bush exploits and verse, which had garnered a following in Australia after his repeated publication, especially in The Bulletin. With mysterious origins (about which Denton can only speculate), Morant drank, gambled and versified his way through country Australia from Queensland to South Australia, from where he signed up with the South Australian Mounted Rifles for service in South Africa. It seems that he had a good time while serving with this unit, enjoying many "extra-curricular" activities, but at the end of his enlistment when he took a free passage to England, received a letter of commendation from his Commanding Officer.

Soon enough he was back in South Africa, to join the Bushveldt Carbineers with his good friend Frederick Hunt. It was Hunt's death and mutilation at the hands of a Boer unit that changed Morant's behaviour completely. That he "court-martialled" Visser and had him shot, and that he shot Boer prisoners was never denied. That he organised for Heese and Van Buren to be killed is highly probable - Handcock admitted to Witton that he shot Heese - and so even though it can be said Morant might have been provoked, it's clear that Morant, Handcock, Witton and Picton were guilty of heinous crimes.

Their defence at the trials - that they were following orders, and that other units had done similar things - was as spurious then as it would be now. In fact, members of the Bushveldt Carbineers refused to take part in such atrocities at the time. It is also hard to sustain the claims of British conspiracy and cover-up. The claim has been made that these men were scapegoats for all British atrocities, in a bid to try and improve relations with Germany, which was outraged especially by Heese's death (Heese was a German national). Denton points out that Morant and Handcock were acquitted of that charge. Denton shows that, as far as can be known, the trials were conducted properly, and the fact that the case files are no longer extant is down to the record-keeping protocols of the time, not some dastardly plot by the British. The discrepancies that are harder to fathom are the discrepancies in sentences, with Captain Taylor escaping punishment.

There was a controversy at the time in Australia, but it was not about the question of guilt or innocence, but that the newly-minted Australian Government was not consulted about the trial of its nationals. Australia had become a nation during the war, and it's clear that the British military leaders failed to take this political fact into account.

It remains to state that all war is hell, and that all lives lost in war are tragic losses. If we believe in the concept of just action in war, it's clear that fighters on both sides in South Africa were guilty of atrocities: the fact that others didn't face justice for their crimes does not mean that the sentence handed out in the Bushveldt Carbineers incident was in any way unjust.

For a clear-headed and informative guide to this incident, Closed File is worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Retribution by Max Hastings

Retribution : the Battle for Japan 1944-45 by Max Hastings

New York: Vintage Books, 2007                  ISBN 9780307275363

Max Hastings and Antony Beevor have become the doyens of World War II history in the early Twenty-First Century. Retribution is an interesting concept; an overall look at the final twelve months of the entire Eastern War. How to tackle such an immense task is a valid question, which Hastings has answered by looking at topics in turn. He begins with the summit held at Hawaii in July 1944 between Nimitz, MacArthur and Roosevelt, where the future of US strategy for the war was confirmed. Hastings sets the scene in this chapter, briefly covering the flow of the War to this stage, and laying out for the reader the tensions that existed between the Allies, and within the US itself.

His chapters then range from Burma, the Philippines, the Island Campaigns (focusing on Iwo Jima), the Nationalist Chinese, Prisoners of War, the Communist Chinese, the bombing offensive, and finally the atomic bomb and Russian offensive in Manchuria. While he writes well and at times eloquently about specific incidents, he also develops some themes throughout the book that are worth discussing.

The first theme is that of logistics, supply and technology. Early in the book, Hastings repeats the astonishing statistic that for every four tons of supplies shipped by the US to its armed forces, Japan shipped two pounds to theirs. While America realised the importance of supply, Japan didn't, and Hastings points out that the Japanese never came to grips with the idea that supply was just as important as the fighting quality of their troops.

America not only won the supply battle, but also the technology battle, and Hastings shows that more than in previous wars, improvements in technology, often gained at great expense, sometimes drove policy. Having spent a fortune on developing the B29, the US felt they had to find a way to use it. Enter Curtis LeMay, who changed the precision bombing tactics favoured by the USAAF up until 1944 to area incendiary bombing, the success of which meant some post-fact justification, given the previously espoused aversion to bombing civilian areas. Hastings' chapter on the atomic bomb is also instructive in this respect, with the political leaders not really grasping the World-changing nature of the device before it was used, but with the amount of money and effort required to create it part of the decision-making process. Hastings is also aware of the politics behind the decision to use the atomic bomb, with the US desire to win the war before the intervention of the Soviets certainly playing a part.

The friction between the Allies is a fascinating story, well-portrayed in this book. The US were very reluctant for the Colonial Powers to take up their former territories after the War, to the extent that they refused to help the French in Indo-China, while Britain and Australia for differing reasons were critical of the US efforts to sideline their input to Japan's defeat. The games played by the Nationalists in China eventually saw them lose the whole-hearted backing of the US, as the latter country began to fully realise the corruption and ineffectiveness of Chiang's regime.

The conflict within the US armed forces and government is also well-covered by Hastings. MacArthur was in many ways a loose cannon: his narcissism led to many a failure, but his popularity back home meant he couldn't be relieved of command. Hastings paints the re-taking of the Philippines as more wasteful than it should have been, with the destruction of Manila essentially a by-product of MacArthur's vanity. Hastings has little time for MacArthur as a battle commander, and no time for his publicity-seeking or politicking. He also deprecates Halsey for his error in pursuing the Japanese carrier decoy at Leyte Gulf, which Hastings puts down to Halsey wanting to one-up Spruance. There is no love lost either for Mountbatten, whom Hastings sees as out of his depth. In fact the only Allied commander whom Hastings admires is Slim, all the while acknowledging that Burma was in many respects a sideshow of the War.

And what of the Japanese commanders and government? It was clear to many if not most, that the War was lost in 1944, so why did they fight on? Honour and "Face" were certainly part of the equation, but also the mistaken belief that if they inflicted massive losses on the Allies, Japan might be able to reach a negotiated truce. Their lack of understanding of Allied feelings and indeed self-knowledge of their own actions in the War led them to believe - even as late as July 1945 - that they could reach an armistice that would allow them to keep Manchuria, Formosa and Korea and not be occupied. The combined blows of the atomic attacks and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria gave the Emperor a way of forcing a surrender onto his government while maintaining some sort of "Face", and a way to "endure the unendurable". The devastation that such wrong-headedness unleashed on their own people and country almost beggars belief, but as the title of this book suggests, perhaps it was a just punishment for what the Japanese perpetrated across most of Asia.

This book is certainly a must-read for anyone interested in the history of World War II: there is much more within its pages than this review has covered, all of it interesting and well-written.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka

Hidden Horrors : Japanese War Crimes in World War II by Yuki Tanaka, with a foreword by John W. Dower

Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1996                 ISBN 0813327180


This is an interesting book with much food for thought, which endeavours to map out a new path for academic study of Japanese war crimes. Tanaka looks at some specific war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and sailors, and tries to show how such things could have occurred through looking at the structure, training and beliefs of Japanese society and the Armed Forces in particular.

The first crime he examines in detail is the Sandakan Death Marches, where he notes how the Japanese mostly used Koreans and Formosans (Taiwanese) as guards for Prisoners of War. The brutal treatment handed out to these guards by their Japanese masters, they passed on to the Prisoners under their control. Tanaka also looks at the way Japan did and did not abide by the Geneva Convention, using prisoners for war work, and progressively starving them as Japan's position in the War became more perilous. While not excusing individual acts by Japanese soldiers and sailors, Tanaka shows the reader how the culture of the Japanese Armed Forces and the pressure of war led to such outcomes. It is interesting to note that in the first of the Sandakan Marches many Japanese also died. The horrific logic of war crimes came into play at Sandakan as well, with earlier outrages driving the Japanese to ensure that they left no witnesses alive.

Tanaka then moves on to the topic of rape and "Comfort Women" (a topic he has written on at some length subsequent to this book). He draws parallels here with both the Russians in Germany and the Allied occupation of Japan. The treatment of women in war is often horrific and Tanaka has some ideas on the transgressive nature of women in uniform, and how male bonding in war can lead to such outrages; ideas that others have written on in more detail.

Tanaka's next subject is Japanese cannibalism, on many levels perhaps the most troubling crime. This practice was quite widespread, and was not always the result of hunger. Sometimes dead Japanese were eaten, and sometimes even shot for food. Tanaka can give no real reason for the cannibalism that makes sense, except where is was obviously driven by hunger... certainly it was something that the Japanese wanted to hide when they could, with Allied discoveries of this practice usually occurring after they surprised groups of Japanese, or made sudden advances on the battlefield. The Allied attitude to reports and evidence of these crimes is interesting as well. While the Americans thought that such things should be publicised in aid of the war effort, the Australians were against the idea because of the distress it may have caused on the home front. That there were so few prosecutions for the crime after the war is put down by Tanaka to the reason that it would have caused distress to families of the victims, and the problem of providing evidence that would stand up in a court-room (i.e. of eye-witnesses to the consumption of the flesh, rather than evidence of cooking etc.).

The next chapter, on Unit 731, investigates the concept of "doubling": how doctors could experiment on live people, and how they justify it. Tanaka also here begins to look at Japanese acknowledgement that what they were doing was wrong, at least to the extent that they wanted to avoid punishment. The members of Unit 731 captured by the US were given immunity from prosecution on the basis that they handed over their research, after the US were assured that no Prisoners were used in experiments. The Soviets later showed that these assurances were lies.

Which brings the reader to the last crime that Tanaka looks at, the massacre of civilians at Kavieng. Tanka uses this incident to look at several things: how the Japanese concept of Gyokusai ("glorious self-annihilation") led to the "strategic necessity" of eliminating civilians, and how the soldiers involved knew they were doing something wrong, as they were ordered not to speak of the killings and rehearsed a cover story to explain the deaths away. What is also interesting in this example is that senior officers ensured the massacre happened in such a way that they could avoid blame. The readiness of such officers to blame conveniently dead colleagues for crimes was also much in evidence after the War.

In his conclusion, Tanaka shows how the Japanese Military moved from being a force that was compassionate to its prisoners and its own members who had been taken prisoner (in the early 20th century), to one where it was better to die than be taken prisoner. This certainly had an effect on how the Japanese treated Allied captives. The Japanese belief in themselves as the chosen race, and in their Emperor as a god, had a malignant effect on their treatment of conquered peoples. Tanaka calls in this book for a new historiography of Japanese war crimes, whereby Japanese - in a similar manner to the Germans - look at the whole of the wartime era, and how as a country they could have come to a point where such horrors were allowed to happen. This new historiography has yet to happen in Japan in any major way, although this book is now over 20 years old.

One for the serious students of the Pacific War, this book is worth reading, although in lacking a bibliography it leaves limited options for further study.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Green Armour by Osmar White

Green Armour by Osmar White

Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1945

Osmar White was a journalist for the Herald & Weekly Times during World War Two, and was sent by that paper to cover the war in New Guinea. Green Armour is his collection of thoughts about what he saw during that time, and written before the War had finished, but written when he knew the War was won.

This provided the author with an interesting perspective - he had the liberty to write about the events he had seen at Wau, Salamaua, and Kokoda with more truthfulness than he could at the time, and his recovery from wounds he received at Rendova Island gave him time to think strategically about how those early efforts by Australian and US forces had paved the way for the later, successful use of such forces in the island hopping campaign waged by MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the Pacific.

The first section of the book deals with the beginning of the campaign in New Guinea, and focuses on just how woefully unprepared the Australian troops were for any serious invasion. White explains how, if Japan had been bold enough to attack Moresby in March 1942, they would have succeeded, as both land, sea and air power from the Allied side were virtually non-existent at that time. White graphically describes how the lone squadron of Kittyhawks were just enough to stave off disaster in that crucial period.

White then recounts his journey, with two other legendary correspondents in Chester Wilmot and Damien Parer, through the jungle to Wau to see at first hand the activities of Kanga Force. White's description of the cruel nature of the terrain, and the virtual impossibility of supply through the jungle, is masterful journalism. The title of the book "Green Armour" refers to the New Guinea mountain jungle, which protected Australian forces when they were on the defensive, and, as White shows, helped the Japanese when they became the hunted.

White was present during the worst of the fighting along the Kokoda Track, before the Australians had learned to use the jungle to their advantage, and when, frankly, they were routed by the Japanese. He describes the confusion, panic and fear that comes with not knowing where the enemy is at any moment. He also describes the effect of the country and lack of supplies and equipment, with underfed and poorly looked-after men suffering as much from disease and sickness as from the depredations of the enemy.

The third section of the book deals with the preparation and early phases of the New Georgia campaign. The landings on and around New Georgia were the first trial of the concept of amphibious landings and island fighting that was to dominate the rest of the Pacific War. White demonstrates in his description how the jungle made attack difficult, how the planning of this early campaign did not take into account the difficulty of the terrain, or the tenaciousness of the Japanese in defence. However, White does demonstrate how the overwhelming material advantage held by the United States was slowly being brought to bear on the fighting, and how this capacity was changing the thinking of the Commanders of those forces, and also the Commanders of the Japanese Forces.

This book has the status of a classic of the genre, and one can see why - as a description of the early fighting in the South Pacific, this is hard to beat. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead

Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead

London: Aurum, 2007 (first published 1956)           ISBN 9781845132392

It's appropriate on this day of all days that this is the book I'm reviewing. One hundred and two years ago, at dawn on 25 April 1915, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula as part of an Entente amphibious landing designed to take Turkey out of the War. The venture was a disaster for the Entente, as well as for the Ottoman Empire.

Moorehead's narrative of the campaign is still - sixty years after it was written - the ideal entree to the story for someone who knows little of what went on, or perhaps has a too Australian-centric view of what occurred in the eight months Entente troops were invested on the Peninsula.

While the landings in April and the battles thereafter were the blooding of the ANZACs, the preponderance of the landing forces were British and French troops, including many Indian and African regiments.

Moorehead's over-arching theme is one of missed opportunities on sea and land, and of poor decision making. It was British and French diplomatic bungling that brought Turkey into the war on the side of Germany rather than the Entente powers. Once this had occurred the Navy decided that if it could force the Narrows, Turkey would capitulate. They were not far from the truth in this - Moorehead paints a scene of a fractured and fragile Turkish government run by the Young Turks, and how the sight of a British battlefleet in the Istanbul Roads probably would have brought an armistice.

To achieve this outcome the ships needed to get through the Bosphorus. They so nearly succeeded. Just at the moment the Turks could no longer defend the straits with guns or mines, the British - shaken by their losses - decided that they needed an army to take the Peninsula by land, as they couldn't take it by sea alone. The respite allowed the Turks to recover somewhat while the British planned the landing.

The fact that the British did this planning in three weeks explains in part its eventual failure, although to get so many men ashore at all - it was until that time the largest amphibious operation ever - was a kind of success. The overall commander of the force, Hamilton, had a part in the failure as well. A man of poetic temperament and undoubted bravery, he was a leader who let his subordinates run their battles: a good trait, but Hamilton's lack of clear tactical objectives and orders led to much confusion on the battleground.

Despite the rushed planning and Hamilton's quirks, strategic victory on the first day was a near-run thing. Even though the ANZACs landed in the wrong place, and were faced with a maze of gullies and cliffs rather than the more easily sloping land they expected, some few managed to scale the heights before being thwarted at the last moment by Mustafa Kemal, whose ruthlessness and drive during the Campaign started him on the path to becoming Ataturk.

Although the beachhead was precarious, it held: the Entente forces were not strong enough to dislodge the Turks, and neither could the Turks repulse the invaders. The appalling loss of life that occurred during both the Entente and Turk attacks is chronicled well by Moorehead. The battles that have become the staple of Australian and New Zealand military history, such as Lone Pine, The Nek and others that have become bywords for bravery and sacrifice, are put into perspective by Moorehead by showing the greater moves that were going on around them. The landing at Suvla, which Lone Pine and The Nek supported, which was doomed to fail as Moorehead so clearly shows, was the last throw of the dice by the Entente; and after the failure recriminations began.

Both Hamilton and Churchill (who was the initial supporter of the Naval plan) paid the price of failure with their careers and for many other commanders Gallipoli was their last battlefront posting. For many more though it was a schooling ground of great importance, not the least of these "students" being Monash, Blamey and Morshead.

When the decision to evacuate was made it was done so with a heavy heart, and with the expectation that evacuating might cost anything up to forty thousand casualties. The fact that the entire Peninsula was evacuated with only a couple of dozen deaths was a triumph of careful planning: a terrible irony, as careful planning before the campaign began may have led to victory. As it was, the Entente gained nothing and lost tremendously both in men and material.

The Turks won a great victory, but still lost their Empire.

Moorehead tells this story exceedingly well: as a seasoned war correspondent he can portray battle with a skill that made his byline famous in World War Two, and as an Australian he brings much feeling to the description of ANZAC in particular. His ability to sum up a person or a stiuation in a few well-chosen phrases is remarkable and goes a long way to making his books compulsive reading. His choice of primary material is always apt and to the point, and while reading this book it occurred to me that Antony Beevor owes much to Moorehead.

If you want to know more about this episode of the Great War, this book is the perfect place to start.

[In respectful memory of Privates S.B. McGregor M.M. 2nd Field Ambulance, who landed at ANZAC Cove on 25 April 1915, and his brother James, 3rd Battalion, killed at Lone Pine in August 1915]

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The wells of Beersheba by Frank Dalby Davison

The wells of Beersheba : an epic of the Australian Light Horse 1914-1918
by Frank Dalby Davison, illustrated by Will Mahony

Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1947

The charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade at the Battle of Beersheba is widely thought of in Australia as the last succesful cavalry charge to ever have taken place (which can be disputed on a number of levels - the Light Horse were not cavalry, and several charges are recorded in World War 2). The charge was certainly a great feat of arms, and was crucial to the success of the campaign to take Damascus.

The wells of Beersheba was a commissioned work, and self consciously written as a paen to the troops. Styled as a prose-poem, the book is broken into a few sections, describing the origins of the horses the troops rode, the harshness and boredom of travel in the desert, and the shock and terror of the battle itself.

The book is fiction, but based on real events, and the description of the charge is, as far as can be known, quite accurate. There are no main "characters" in the work (the only people named are Chauvel and Allenby); instead Davison creates a character from the Unit itself, where the mass of men becomes one in their united pain and triumph.

This short book has become something of a minor classic in the Australian milieu of military writing, and was the inspiration for the film 40,000 horsemen, which is a minor classic of Australian cinema.

Well worth reading on a sunny afternoon.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The path of infinite sorrow by Craig Collie & Hajime Marutani

The path of infinite sorrow : the Japanese on the Kokoda Track by Craig Collie & Hajime Marutani

Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009            ISBN 9781741758399

The campaign along the Kokoda Track (or Trail, as my Father’s generation would have it), is an icon of Australian military achievement. Pushed back over the Owen Stanleys by a superior Japanese force, the militia forces of Australia eventually halted the attack at Ioribaiwa and Imita Ridge, and then with the help of AIF forces returned from North Africa, they pushed the Japanese back to the Northern coast of New Guinea and destroyed them in the battles around Buna, Gona and Sanananda. There have been many Australian treatments of the campaign, with Peter Brune’s Those ragged bloody heroes one of the best, along with the Official History.

The path of infinite sorrow is that altogether rarer thing, a history of the Kokoda campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. Collie and Marutani have written the Japanese side of the story using, as a base, interviews conducted in the early 2000s with some Japanese survivors of the campaign. The result is an interesting and enlightening book.

Many Australian accounts of the campaign emphasise the terrible conditions and the fear of an unseen enemy, portraying the Japanese as supermen, with the jungle being their natural habitat. It is enlightening to read that the Japanese struggled just as much with the conditions, and saw the Australians as dangerous enemies, who were rarely seen owing to their natural ability to fight in the jungle – and brave beyond compare because they wore hats rather than helmets in battle!

The authors give a good account of the leadup to Kokoda, describing Japanese attempts to reach Port Moresby by ship failing after the Battle of the Coral Sea. When a force was landed on the coast, its task was not to reach Moresby, but merely to reconnoitre the track leading to Kokoda to see if it was suitable for an army to campaign along. Instilled with martial spirit, the over-enthusiastic officers of the South Seas Detachment turned their reconnoitring mission into a full-scale assault, and soon overwhelmed the Australian force holding Kokoda.

As the Australians dropped back, the problem of supplying an attacking force over a precipitous walking track became more acute, and by the time the Japanese reached Ioribaiwa they were at the end of their tether logistically and physically. The troops could see the lights of Moresby at night, but neither had the strength or the numbers to take the next ridge, let alone face the Allied troops that would have awaited them closer to the town. Supply was not only a problem along the Track itself, but also to the rear bases at Buna and Gona, as the combination of Allied air attacks and the prioritising by the Japanese of the assault on Guadalcanal meant that few supplies were getting onshore in New Guinea.

The Japanese withdrawal back to the Northern coast became a rout, with troops falling out of line with disease or hunger, to be left to die or make a futile final stand when the Australians came down the track. When the retreat had been completed, the coastal beach-heads were defended by a force that consisted of some infantry, engineering and other non-combatant forces, and those ill or wounded troops that could hold a rifle.

Despite an ingenious and deadly system of interlocking bunkers, it was only a matter of time before the Allied troops (the U.S. Army had now joined the fray) over-ran the Japanese defences, leaving only a few able to escape death or imprisonment. It was a complete defeat for the South Seas Detachment

.

This book is a well-written account, easy to follow for those unfamiliar with the battles of the campaign and - by using interviews as the basis for the narrative – brings the reader right into the misery and pain of soldiering in New Guinea in 1942. There is some discussion of grander strategy, but as this book is focusing on the soldier’s experience, it is always in the background.

 While there is an acknowledgement in the text of the brutality and cannibalism of the Japanese soldiers during the campaign, it is rather lightly brushed over, perhaps in deference to the feelings of the Japanese who were interviewed. While there can be some argument that the instances of cannibalism were driven by the extreme circumstances of the Japanese troops, who were literally dying of hunger by the end of the campaign, to excuse the bayoneting of bound prisoners in cold blood with the lines “This is not inconsistent with Japanese military training….Military training is not for the squeamish; he who hesitates in hand-to-hand fighting is lost.” is a very cheap way out of looking at the issue. It’s clear in the book that the Australians were just as proficient in hand-to-hand fighting as the Japanese, and yet their superiors didn’t find it necessary to make them kill defenceless people. A greater insight into why the Japanese felt the need to kill like this would have been a welcome addition to the book. Not many prisoners were taken by the Australians, as most of the Japanese fought to the death, and after a few instances of Australians being killed by wounded Japanese, they “took no chances.” The New Guinea Campaign was war at its cruelest, of that there is little doubt.

While there is no doubt of the courage of the soldiers on both sides of this campaign, we can question the strategic and tactical nous of the officers on both sides. That the Japanese could have ever thought they could attack Moresby in any sensible way via the track was wrong thinking, and each step beyond Kokoda made the idea more absurd – they were just wasting men and material for no good purpose. The Allied tactics of island fighting had yet to be perfected, and the continued frontal assaults of the bunkers at Buna and Gona without adequate artillery or tank support were for the most part futile and wasteful as well.

In the end it was the overwhelming technological and numerical advantage of Allied ‘planes, artillery and tanks that ensured not only the end of the New Guinea campaigns, but the defeat of the Japanese Empire. After the war, veterans of Kokoda from both sides struggled to make sense of their experiences: those few Japanese veterans who made it back to Japan mostly did not want to relive what had been a terrifyingly traumatic experience. My great-uncles who fought with the AIF in the campaign also suffered for the rest of their lives, but at least they were on the winning side.

Given this is an Australian trade publication, the apparatus of the book is good – useful maps and notes, and a reasonable bibliography and index. For the student of the Pacific War, especially of the New Guinea Campaigns, The path of infinite sorrow is required reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell