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By Root 838 0

–42 British débâcle in Malaya and Burma prompted a major political and cultural swing in Australian allegiances. “I make it quite plain,” said Prime Minister Curtin on 27 December 1941, “that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” Australians’ theatre of war was overwhelmingly dominated by, and dependent upon, the United States. Their historic British mentor and protector had been found wanting in the hour of need. With notable abruptness, they embraced the United States. In the case of their womenfolk, this was not merely figurative. American servicemen, of whom a million staged through Australia, were delighted by the warmth of their welcome from Australian girls, to whom the war granted a new sexual freedom. U.S. Navy crews were amazed to perceive crowds of teenagers—“pogey-bait”—waving in frenzied welcome as their ships approached Sydney harbour.

Yet, as the war advanced, grateful as were the Allies for Australia’s huge contribution towards feeding their soldiers, there was sourness about the limited combat contribution being made by this country of seven million people. In January 1943, Curtin with difficulty steered through the Australian Parliament a militia bill, which made all Australian troops liable for overseas service—but only in the south-west Pacific, the theatre in which the nation’s interests were directly threatened. This was the best that a weak government could do, with political and social stresses racking the nation. “The mainspring of Curtin’s leadership638…was a conception of the welfare of the Australian people which was limited to their life at home,” wrote an Australian official historian.

In the course of the entire war, some 691,400 men were conscripted into the Australian Army. In 1944, however, almost all of these languished in barracks at home—bored, fractious, in an almost intractable condition of indiscipline. It is hard to overstate the contrast between the superb performance of 9th Australian Division in the Western Desert in 1941–42 and the shameful condition to which the national army was reduced two years later, absent from any significant land battlefield. The question of where Australian troops might be deployed was bitterly contested. MacArthur, who had become a national hero in 1942, never reciprocated Australian warmth. Australian forces were under his command, but he had lost faith in them. He had no desire to make his major thrust in the Philippines with any save American soldiers. Australian militia units—the “Chockos,” or “chocolate soldiers,” as they were known—were plainly unreliable. MacArthur’s solution was to employ Australian troops to replace American units “mopping up” surviving Japanese garrisons where these still held out, on Bougainville, New Britain and parts of Papua New Guinea.

“Mopping up” was immediately identified as a thankless task, similar to that delegated by Eisenhower to Free French units in 1944–45, besieging German garrisons isolated in the French ports. On 18 October, Gen. Vernon Sturdee, commanding the Australian First Army in New Guinea, wrote to his commander-in-chief: “The Jap garrisons are at present virtually in POW camps but feed themselves, so why incur a large number of Australian casualties in the process of eliminating them?” Why, indeed? As early as August 1944, MacArthur had asserted: “The enemy garrisons which639 have been bypassed in the Solomons and New Guinea represent no menace…The actual time of their destruction is of little or no importance and their influence as a contributing factor to the war is already negligible.” If this was so, if it was deemed unnecessary for American soldiers to engage these impotent but savage remnants, why now should it be desirable for Australians to do so, when the enemy had grown six months hungrier and more desperate?

The Melbourne Herald wrote in January 1945: “American public opinion640, which is inclined to write off Australia as a fighting force for the remainder of the Pacific War, now sees the Digger in the humblest