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By Root 1197 0

could not get casualties back and weren’t prepared to get any anyway.” Matthews told the officer he must make his men obey their orders. “He said he knew they wouldn’t, but would give it a go.” Shortly afterwards the company second-in-command rang to report that the officer had broken down in tears. He was relieved and sent to the rear. Next day, another of Matthews’s companies wilfully broke off contact with the enemy. A platoon commander reported that his men were “frightened.” A third company commander told Matthews that his men lacked all confidence in him, the CO. The feeling was mutual. A month later Matthews wrote contemptuously about another battalion’s similar experiences, observing laconically that they “must be no better than some of my companies.”

If these episodes seem astonishing, they were by no means uncommon during the unhappy travails of Australia’s forces in the south-west Pacific in the last phase of the war. From October 1944 to July 1945, Australian soldiers participated in a series of island campaigns. The evident futility of these embittered many men, drove some to the edge of mutiny and beyond. The last year of the war proved the most inglorious of Australia’s history as a fighting nation. In the Mediterranean during 1941–42, Australian troops forged a reputation second to none. In 1943, many of the same soldiers fought a harsh, vital campaign in New Guinea, while America gathered its forces in the south-west Pacific. Australian soldiers performed as splendidly at Milne Bay and on the Kokoda Trail as they had done at Tobruk. Thereafter, however, the Australian Army seemed to disappear from the conflict. A trauma overtook the nation which divided its people, demoralised its forces and cast a lasting shadow over its memory of the Second World War.

The country had suffered deeply in the thirties’ Depression, and greeted the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 without enthusiasm. Military conscription was introduced for home service only. Two divisions of volunteers were sent to the Middle East, and a third was lost at Singapore in 1942; Australian aircrew served with distinction in every theatre, and the Australian navy made a valuable contribution. But most Australian soldiers chose to stay at home, languishing idly in the ranks of militia units. The country was racked with labour disputes, many fomented by Communist-dominated trades unions. The Communist Party was banned in Australia until Russia entered the war. The leaders of its 20,000 membership, thereafter legitimised once more, professed to support the war effort. But strikes persisted, above all in the dock labour force.

Remoteness had made Australia a parochial society, but this is an inadequate explanation for the behaviour of some of its people. The refusal to adapt to participation in a war of national survival, when Japan aspired to make them subjects of its empire, was extraordinary. Public alarm about home defence prompted the Australian government in 1942 to insist on the return of all its soldiers from the Middle East. Churchill with difficulty retained the famous 9th Australian Division in Montgomery’s Eighth Army until El Alamein in November, but this provoked anger in Canberra. When the Middle East formations returned home, they were committed to action in Papua New Guinea. There, through late 1942 and 1943, Australian troops under MacArthur’s command fought some of the fiercest actions of the war against the Japanese.

With every month of the campaign, bitterness mounted among those volunteers for overseas service towards the host of their fellow citizens who refused to leave home. Their own country, they said, had become “a bludgers’ paradise.” “Bludger” is a word denoting a parasite, loafer or scrounger. The country seemed burdened with a depressing number of all three, many in uniform. The government responded to the unpopularity of military service by cutting the army’s size by 22 percent in the last two years of the war, but its bloated officer corps meanwhile grew by 14 percent. War Minister F. W. Forde reported to Prime Minister