Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [231]
American and British officers arriving to serve in Australia were stunned by the industrial anarchy which prevailed, the difficulties of getting ships offloaded or repaired. “Many…laborers refused to work631 in the rain or handle refrigerated food and many other types of cargo,” an American official historian noted with dismay. “They objected, with some success, to the utilization of mechanical equipment.” U.S. Army quartermaster details had to be kept on standby at docksides, lest rain suddenly halt off-loading by civilian labour. Absenteeism among the workforce at Townsville, on the north coast of Queensland, for instance, averaged 18 percent. Some dock labourers reported for work only at weekends, when double or triple pay was available, until such practices drove the U.S. Army to halt weekend supply movements. An Australian docker handled just a quarter of the average daily cargo shifted by an American soldier.
In September 1943, after a succession of outrageous dockside incidents, MacArthur wrote to Curtin, Australia’s Labor prime minister, asserting that the Seamen’s Union “was directly obstructing the war effort632…Fifth column activities may be behind these occurrences.” Following a mutiny on board an American cargo vessel, the union displayed solidarity by refusing to allow another crew to board the vessel until the mutineers were freed from confinement. Australian meatpackers haggled shamelessly about wage rates for producing rations for the U.S. Army, and rejected streamlined working practices proposed by the Americans. Industrial absenteeism reflected what a Sydney polling organisation described to the government as “apathy amongst large sections633 of the people towards the war effort.” The black market, a feature of all wartime societies, achieved special vigour in Australia. Empty whiskey bottles with labels and seals intact were sold for five shillings apiece, to be refilled with adulterated spirit. Buying provisions “on the black” became a way of life.
Almost a million days’ production was lost through strikes in 1942 and the first half of 1943, many of these in the docks and mines. Coal output fell substantially. By November 1943, no Japanese submarine had launched an attack in Australian waters for five months, yet Australian ships’ crews refused to put to sea without naval escort, and downed tools to enforce their point. Americans were increasingly disgusted by what they perceived as Australian pusillanimity. MacArthur said: “I tell you, these Australians won’t fight.” The U.S. minister in Canberra, Nelson Johnson, wrote to the State Department in June 1944: “The Department may be surprised634 to know that the Legation has no record of even so much as a telephone call of congratulations from any official or private Australian following on the news of an American victory.” In September 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald published a dispatch from India, saying that British and American servicemen were asking whether Australia was “pulling right out of the war635.” This report provoked a question in the Senate in Canberra on 13 September, demanding “whether the Australian Army was to take any further part in the war.” In October 1944, the Sydney Daily Telegraph suggested that industrial strife in the country had reached “civil war or very near it636.”
In some degree, Australian behaviour reflected a crisis of national purpose and identity. Beyond this, there was frustration that, while their country’s men were expected to fight, its leaders were denied a significant voice in Allied decision-making. “The Australian government tried637 to force an entrance into the higher councils of war, but had limited success,” in the understated words of an Australian historian. The 1941