Carefree War Page 4
Australia’s five wartime Prime Ministers, Robert Menzies, Arthur Fadden, John Curtin, Frank Forde and Ben Chifley employed censorship and propaganda. They would all have liked to present a grand plan for evacuation, but didn’t have one. Flurries of committees were set up, ministers promising consideration of any scheme.
After a press release revealed details of Japanese naval positions during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Roosevelt ordered censorship in Australia. The Advisory War Council under Curtin granted GHQ censorship authority over the Australian Press. One result was that there was no mention of Australian troops from the middle of 1944 to January 1945.
Wartime governments, straddling Australia with censorship, propaganda and persecuting objectors, were perceived as withholding truth. Australians became deeply distrustful of published information, guessing at deletions. Postcards or letters from servicemen overseas had censor’s thick pencils across them or sections cut out so stories flew about when a wounded man returned.
As Pamela (Smith) Maddrell’s father was a policeman he would have been aware of Manly Council trying to protect its civilians:
Father was the station sergeant at Manly Police Station. He wanted us to go away, so we went to Goulburn from March to December 1942. There were Americans stationed nearby at North Head and he thought Manly might get cut off. There were trenches dug and sirens used to go off. Once we were in the pictures and a siren went off. We all had to get out and go into trenches. He was at the station a lot, sleeping there some nights. I knew a lot of children who were evacuated. We had two aunts and a grandmother living at Goulburn but my mother took me to a boarding house to stay and we visited them. I was 14, doing Intermediate at Goulburn High. We were looked after well at the boarding house where there were army wives and teachers - a nice rest for my mother - and I was happy. We got on with our lives. I studied music with a beautiful nun. We played tennis. I gradually made some friends. There was no phone at the boarding house, father visiting us once and sending letters and money by mail. The day I finished my Intermediate, I went to see Fantasia.
Lynton Bradford clearly saw enemy damage and wondered about the Press:
I was ten and lived in Bronte in 1942. One morning we heard a report that a Japanese submarine off the coast had shelled Bondi and Woollahra but no harm had been done. I rode my bike over to Bondi, amazed to find the whole wall of the back room of a two storey brick house had gone and a large hole in the roadway. I can still see it now, a bed hanging precariously, sheets and curtains hanging over the edge. The hole in the roadway was huge and quite deep. The news report claimed no shell had exploded. How could all that damage result from an unexploded shell? I was then sent to live with my great aunt in Gerringong for a while, then to high school at Bathurst and Griffith until war’s end.
Geoff Potter described his grandmother, worried about her family, deciding to investigate things for herself after the attack:
My gran, who lived in Mortlake on the Parramatta River, sent my uncle, then in his early teens, all the way over to Bondi the day after the attack, to see if other relatives were alright.
As part of the tactic to muzzle the Press, Prime Minister Menzies appointed widely criticised Keith Murdoch as Director General of Information on 8 June, 1940. Smith’s Weekly, the lively broadsheet read around Australia since 1919, condemned the ‘would-be Press and radio dictator’. Smith’s Weekly was a patriotic magazine supporting diggers and aimed at the male market (especially returned servicemen). In contrast to dreary grey columns of newspaper print and smudgy half-tone pictures, Smith’s readers enjoyed brash and funny illustrated cartoons, comic strips and sensational articles. The idea of easy-going individuals with a healthy disrespect for authority was central. One headline ran, ‘A Censored Christmas’, and warned Santa Claus to look out. On the serious side, the magazine supported the rights of returning soldiers and questioned prevailing attitudes towards shell shock. Started by Englishman Sir James Joynton Smith, other founders included Clyde Packer, father of Sir Frank Packer. Smith’s didn’t argue with authorities, it just went to print. Before the Japanese submarine attack in Sydney Harbour it showed a cartoon about a Japanese submarine caught in a fishing net, fishermen joking, ‘It’s undersize. Do you think we ought to throw it back?’
There had been a perception that a big bronzed Aussie would easily defeat the Japanese, seen as small and inferior, but as war progressed this was questioned.
Mary Moss:
When Curtin became Prime Minister in October 1941 he made Beasley Minister for Supply and Development, (later Minister for Supply and Shipping), a vital portfolio in wartime. Beasley was a friend of my father’s and I went to school with his daughter and he used to sometimes give us a ride in his Commonwealth car. In June 1942, when the Japanese submarines came into the Harbour, we were going across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Beasley’s car, myself and two of his daughters. The air raid siren went off and the driver stopped the car. He walked away from it and looked over the side. He came back and said something quietly to Beasley who said to us in the back, ‘Have you got your rosaries with you? Well you had better send up a prayer.’ Apparently they had seen the periscope of a sub under the bridge and were petrified that we would be blown up.
True to policy control the Daily Telegraph, rather than reporting on page one subs prowling around the Harbour for ninety minutes before being spotted, described Princess Elizabeth at an informal dance, to save embarrassing the government and show up the smugly unprepared navy. This was the last straw for many parents who then sent their children away.
The Australian Government’s Department of Information, one of seventeen departments from WWI, operated from 1939 to 1950 central to the role of government. The National Security Act 1939 gave the government extraordinary powers over new regulations. Functioning in a democracy it was bitterly criticised. They minimised military forces being depleted, ships and planes obsolete, troops untrained and deployed overseas. In March 2015, men and women in the ADF numbered 56,000 with another 25,000 in reserves. They were supported by 20,600 public servants. The DMO had 7,000 military, civilian and contracted staff. The Department sought to calm the populace, cover governmental unpreparedness and understate reliance on the British in order to maintain morale. Propaganda created fear, vilified the enemy, dulled down defeats and emphasised victories, ensuring Australians accepted government proposals for their survival. Interestingly, the government never released a poster in lurid colours of a Japanese soldier advancing with a drawn bayonet. It was considered too confronting.
The Japanese were demonised with slogans: ‘We’ve Always Despised Them - Now We Must Smash Them’ and ‘Every One a Killer’. General Tojo Hideki, wartime leader of Japan’s government who died in 1948, with his close-cropped hair, moustache, and round spectacles, became a commonly caricatured member of the military dictatorship. Shrewd at bureaucratic infighting and fiercely partisan while army minister, he was an indecisive leader.
Australians looking to their government for guidance, understood the enemy was fearsome and barbaric, but were offered censored facts, and no solution to evacuation concerns, only empty reassurances.
An example of censored reporting is the bombing of Darwin, false impressions of which linger. A typical report in the Melbourne Argus, 21 February, 1941: ‘… In two air raids on Darwin yesterday, it is believed that the total casualties were 17 killed and 24 wounded. Nine of the civilian fatalities were members of the Darwin Post Office Staff, including the postmaster, his wife and daughter. Latest information received at RAAF headquarters indicates that in yesterday’s raids no vital damage was done to RAAF installations’. The National Archives currently states 243 people died, with up to 400 casualties. Tokyo radio propaganda reported Darwin as bombed and left in flames. With hindsight, we know the attack on Darwin was not a precursor to an invasion. The Japanese were preparing to invade Timor. An air attack was to hinder Darwin’s potential as an allied base and damage morale. But nobody knew those
details until much later.
Bill Willett realised that civilians were uninformed:
The government shut down information on the Darwin bombing, there were more bombs dropped there than on Pearl Harbour, but most Australians didn’t know.
The Advertiser, Adelaide, 28 February, 1942, carried a description of the journey of 300 evacuees from Darwin. ‘After a trip described as a ‘nightmare’ nearly 300 men, women, and children evacuees, many of them wearing the only clothes they possess, completed a 2,000-mile journey from Darwin. Some who were slightly wounded in the raid carried out by the Japanese were among the arrivals. The more seriously wounded were kept at military hospitals for attention at Alice Springs and other northern centres. Some of the men had no shoes, while others arrived clad in shorts and singlets only. One man said he left Darwin with only a pair of shorts. Good Samaritans had given him a shirt and hat at Katherine’.
Other towns bombed included Townsville, Wyndham, Derby, Broome, Port Hedland and Katherine. Australians were mostly unaware of these bombings. Farmers watched as nine ‘Betty’ bombers from the Japanese Navy’s Tokao Kokutai, 23rd Koku Sentai circled over Katherine at 12.20 pm, disappeared and returned to drop about ninety-one, 60 kg bombs. Eighty-four of these bombs were anti-personnel ‘Daisy Cutters’, falling on the almost deserted Katherine airfield. Some aboriginal people were unfortunately killed. Outside the loss of life damage was minimal. With The Advisory War Council controlling Press statements, Australians failed to grasp the gravity of attacks, either minimising them in comparison with the London Blitz, or unaware of what had really happened.
Allied naval and merchant ships were sunk off Australia’s coast by Japanese submarines and mine laying German surface raiders, one being the auxiliary cruiser Pinquin and another, the Kormoran which sank HMAS Sydney. Many losses were hushed up but the HMAS Sydney was a high profile loss. A fund was started immediately and a new ship commissioned with the same name. The following poem from the Western Mail, 10 December, 1942 is from David Beeves, aged 13:
HMAS Sydney
Out roar the bombers, but oh! too late
To save our ship from her wicked fate
So home they go - the commanders to tell
What fate the two ships befell?
But that ship that has long swept the sea,
Will never die down in history.
So every penny we can, we must save,
To replace that cruiser that sank to her grave.
Journalists complained about censorship. The Department of Information issued an average of eight instructions daily on top of General Macarthur’s communiqués. In a later article in Time Magazine 1951, these communiqués were called ‘a total farce’ and ‘Alice-in-Wonderland information, handed out at high level’. Newspapers, 60% of their pre-war size, indicated to readers the extent of deletions with blank spaces, as journalists struggled to write stories. This breached the National Security Regulations so police stopped distribution. But the government could not stop people talking.
Cassie Thornley worked for some years on the archives at Sydney Hospital:
Injured sailors from the Harbour were brought there after the sub raids. Within hours of their arrival all the staff would have known what had happened, and within a couple of days so would all their families and the whole street etc. It really was foolish of the government to think it was ‘keeping things quiet - imagine how the story would have grown by the end of the street!
Australia’s defence strategy of merged British and Australian navies retaining control of her seas had crumpled. With inaction for civilian safety came heavy censorship with ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ and ‘Stay Put and Sit Tight’ the order of the day.
Civilians and groups like The Teacher’s Federation pressed the government for civilian strategies. The federal government first stated in February 1942, at a meeting of the War Council and Premiers, ‘… large scale evacuation of the civilian population would be detrimental to the morale of the people and should be strongly discouraged, both in the interests of the public and of production, but it was realised that limited evacuation of areas contiguous to possible targets and the removal of young children from certain congested city areas might be considered necessary’. It would impose on state and federal governments a tremendous burden and ‘…in other countries when families were broken up by evacuation, the efficiency of the worker who remained behind was considerably impaired’. Councils, which had been delegated responsibilities agreed wholeheartedly. When people quietly started moving their children away from perceived danger government gave a sigh of relief and offered free train travel to accompanying adults.
Donald Dunkley quoted in Peter Grose’s A Very Rude Awakening: ‘A lot of families were ready to go to relatives up in the country. If an invasion actually did take place, we had some relatives living in Harden, the Riverina part of New South Wales. We were advised to contact relatives in the country and see if they were willing to take us if we had to evacuate. They said yes, by all means, we’re happy to take you. So, had there been an invasion, I don’t know how on earth we would have got there, but we did have this place earmarked that we could have gone to. I think a lot of other families around the place had relatives in the country, and they were all ready to go if necessary’.
There were whole streets where nobody moved for various reasons, but elsewhere convoys of women got together taking away busloads of children. If there had been an unplanned evacuation, imagine the chaos of choked roads and violence at railway stations, wharves, and airports. Cinemas had shown nightmare processions of dispossessed families in Europe with possessions heaped on anything with wheels, lost children, dogs straggling miserably behind, getting strafed and bombed. But of course it couldn’t happen here!
Voluntary evacuation happened from Burnie, Tasmania to Bourke NSW, but north of the so-called Brisbane Line was enforced by state governments. During early 1942, Northern Queensland schools and mission stations were officially evacuated with the SS Ormiston used for compulsory evacuation of civilians from Thursday, Horn and Hammond Islands in the Torres Strait. European, Chinese and Islander women and children were sent to Cairns, Townsville and Brisbane. (Other coastal vessels used in the evacuation of North Queensland civilians included the SS Katoomba, Taroona and Wandana).
In Cairns, 4,000 women and children moved to safer places in the country assisted by the State Government voluntary evacuation scheme. A request was made to the State Government to upgrade the road from Cardwell to Kirrama in February 1942.
NSW Bureaucrats tried to take over the evacuation movement generated from ground level. On 17 January, 1942 Mr Heffron, Minister for National Emergency Services: ‘Public schools reopen at 9 am on the following Thursday in Sydney, Wollongong, Port Kembla area for parents to register their children for voluntary evacuation on supplied forms’. There was an issue with striking teachers. The Teacher’s Federation said that the issuing of the forms did not mean teachers should take it as an instruction that they were to return to duty that day…
Following the issue of forms, there was criticism about government plans. Parents asked what financial obligation were they under to pay for their children’s evacuation? Was it intended to move children in school units? Would children in the same family be kept together? Could their mothers accompany them? How will the mothers be accommodated? What kind of accommodation would there be? How much notice would families be given? What clothing and equipment would they need to take? So many questions.
Under-Secretary for Labour and Industry, Mr Bellemore assured mothers unable voluntarily to send their children into the country that a plan was being developed: ‘If such an emergency occurs it is hoped to evacuate people in family units and adopt the escort system for those children, who would travel to safer areas unaccompanied by their parents. The Education Department should build up educational facilities in those country districts’.
In January 1942 all NSW state schools opened but only 12% of parents re
gistered for voluntary evacuation. Newtown Council called for compulsory registration for evacuation, food control in an emergency, household registration for NES and manpower.
Whilst the NSW government waffled and dithered, making empty promises and denying there was a possible disaster about to happen, strict regulations were issued from Canberra about safeguarding the wellbeing of refugee British children. The Commonwealth Minister for the Interior became the guardian of every overseas child upon arrival in Australia until the child reached 21 years-of-age, left Australia or the regulation ceased to apply. Custodians of the children were prevented from in any way demanding remuneration from the parents. The duties and responsibilities were monitored. State authorities had to keep a register of both custodians and children allotted to them with all the relevant particulars. Custodians were required to notify the authorities of change of address and were forbidden to leave the State without permission from the authorities. If a child absconded, became ill, had an accident or died, the authorities had to be informed. A custodian had to satisfy authorities that they were suitable persons and this approval could be revoked at any time. These regulations only applied to the children placed under an agreement between the Commonwealth and British governments. The Australian children who were evacuated were outside any regulation. Parents, usually mothers, made individual decisions and were helped by having subsidised train fares but there was no monitoring of their situation. Luckily, evacuees seem to have come through the experience unscathed.
Positive propaganda was practised by all sides. On the Australian home front, everything was war related, so housewives shopping, children collecting waste materials, older people making camouflage nets and young boys drilling all felt included, useful and productive in the war effort. Bruce Whitefield remembers:
Men too old for the army used to practice throwing hand-grenades at the football ground - although no actual grenades were thrown just short lengths of water pipes.