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By Root 2591 0

MacArthur’s urgent appeals for reinforcements as well as family messages from members of MacArthur’s personal staff which he passed on to the New York station for delivery. He accompanied MacArthur to Australia when he established his headquarters there in March 1942, and provided Menzies with a steady stream of reports on the position as viewed by MacArthur and his staff. When in September 1942 the Director of Military Intelligence pressed for ‘information from the SW Pacific area’, Menzies noted that ‘apart from my endeavours to penetrate Japanese occupied territory by an organisation based on Australia, I consider that my representative attached to General MacArthur is as well placed as anyone to obtain American information on the subject’.4 Wilkinson admired MacArthur as a commander but was less impressed with his character. While he was ‘shrewd, selfish, proud, remote, highly-strung and vastly vain’, and had ‘imagination, self-confidence, physical courage and charm’, he had ‘no humour about himself, no regard for truth’ and was ‘unaware of these defects’. He mistook ‘his emotions and ambitions for principles’.5 MacArthur later sent Wilkinson as his personal representative to report to both General Wavell (the British Commander-in-Chief in India) and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Wilkinson’s career also illustrates some of the personal costs of service during the Second World War, as his wife and two daughters were interned by the Japanese in the Philippines. After the war Wilkinson was publicly accused by MacArthur’s acerbic intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, of leaving his family ‘to fend for themselves’, but he vigorously rebutted the accusation and secured a full retraction.6

Regrouping in India

During January 1942, Drage, Green, their staff and some agents withdrew from Singapore to Calcutta where Denham took general charge of SIS operations in the region. With the move to Calcutta, SIS’s intelligence priorities shifted from the Pacific rim to the more immediate Japanese military challenge threatening north-east India through Burma and Australia from the East Indies. But Denham was concerned about the infrastructure of the SIS organisation in the Far East and gloomy about the overall situation in India. With the fall of Singapore clearly in mind, he wrote to London in March: ‘everything seems to me to be chaotic, and there is very little preparedness for dealing with a state of war; nor in fact is there to my mind among the civilian population any realisation of what may happen’. Denham’s morale cannot have been improved by the in-fighting within the Service in Calcutta, where Green accused Drage of indulging in intrigue and regarded Denham as unprofessional and too apt to sacrifice SIS’s core interests for the sake of temporary political advantage with the military establishment. On the other hand, unlike Green, who was an intelligence case-officer, Denham was a bureaucrat and an adept political operator attempting to create an environment within which SIS might have some chance of surviving in India. He had, in fact, strong views about the military’s fundamental misconceptions concerning the role and functions of SIS and the way in which it recruited, controlled and protected its agents. He told Menzies in March 1942 that the Director of Military Intelligence in India ‘harbours a somewhat childish resentment against our organization because it is not under Military control’. He thought that none of the Military Intelligence people in India had ‘any real field experience’, and it was ‘very easy’ for them ‘to shout for information when sitting at the seat of custom, [and] if information is not forthcoming then someone, to their mind, must necessarily be to blame’ (and that ‘someone’ was usually SIS). Warming to his theme, and echoing widely held SIS opinions about Military Intelligence officers, Denham declared that they were ‘usually grossly ignorant regarding the difficulty in obtaining the information, and what steps have to be taken in building up an organization of our nature