Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [233]
Japanese garrisons on the disputed islands still numbered some tens of thousands, but possessed no power to injure the Allied cause. They were cut off from home, woefully understrength, racked by starvation and disease. Any rational strategic judgement would have left them to their own devices, screened by token Allied forces until their nation’s defeat enforced their surrender. The notion that Australian soldiers should risk their lives merely to achieve a body count of impotent yet dangerous Japanese disgusted their commanders—and soon, also, soldiers on the ground.
After much debate, however, in October 1944 three Australian divisions were committed to Bougainville, in the Solomons; New Britain; and New Guinea. There they passed the last eight months of the war in frustration and discomfort, sometimes misery and fear. There was special dismay that while the Americans in these areas had pursued a passive strategy towards the surviving Japanese, Blamey decided that instead the Australians should actively pursue the enemy. He believed that offensive action would enhance morale. The Australian government also wished its troops to be seen to liberate territories under Australian colonial guardianship. This was a policy which might win some headlines, but was certain also to cost lives.
As commander-in-chief of the Australian Army, Gen. Thomas Blamey inspired little confidence within his own society, and less outside it. Argument persists in Australia today about whether Blamey bears responsibility for some of the army’s worst wartime misfortunes, or merely faced difficulties which reflected the schisms besetting his nation. He was a conceited, corpulent, devious autocrat, sixty in 1944. Like most of those who served under him, he was a citizen soldier. He started life as a teacher and lay preacher, then found his way into the First World War through service in cadet and militia units. With the dramatic wartime expansion of the Australian Army, by 1918 he was a thirty-four-year-old brigadier, chief of staff to a corps commander. Between the wars he served as commissioner of the Victoria Police. In this role he earned an ugly reputation for corruption and politicking, which prompted his sacking in 1936. In a small world, however, this small man secured the appointment of army commander-in-chief in 1939, and kept it to the end. The legendary Australian war correspondent and historian Chester Wilmot wrote of the troops’ attitude: “Knowing that Blamey had the reputation of being a crook, they did not serve happily under him.”
Blamey’s reputation was further diminished as deputy to Wavell during the 1941 débâcle in Greece. Not only was he himself accused of cowardice—a charge levelled by his own chief of staff—but he earned bitter enmity by securing the safety of his son, a staff officer, who was flown to Egypt from the stricken battlefield while a host of other men were left behind to the Germans. Sir Arthur Tedder, then senior British air commander in the theatre, described Blamey as “a rather unpleasant641 political soldier…a tubby little man with a snub nose and expensive complexion, high blood pressure and a scrubby little white moustache. He has a certain amount of common sense and 20 years ago may have been fairly useful, but—!” Likewise Auchinleck, writing from the desert: “He wasn’t a general I should have chosen to command an operation.” Sir Alan Brooke found him “not an impressive642 specimen. He looks entirely drink sodden and somewhat repulsive.” Yet Blamey kept his job, returning to Australia as C-in-C, and riding stubbornly on the waves of controversy