On 4 November this Big Sky Publishing in Australia is publishing In The Fight, a new book examining the various connections between Australia and the Burma Campaign between 1942 and 1945. With contributions from a wide array of historical talent, the book has been edited by Andrew Kilsby and Daryl Moran. In addition to the editors the contributors are Karl James, Peter Holmes, Meghan Adams, Tom Lewis, Anthea Gunn, Alexandra Torrens, Ian Wilkinson, David Mitchelhill-Green, Jacqueline Dinan and Kama MacLean.
It’s a great book, and exposes for the first time, in a single volume, a wide array of Australian military experience in Burma, India and Sri Lanka thathas long been forgotten, if its been known at all. The fight against the Japanese in the Far East, often simply referred to as the Burma campaign, was a truly allied effort. Of the 1.3 million men and women in Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command by 1945, 58 per cent were from India, 21 percent America, eight per cent the United Kingdom, seven percent Africa and five per cent China. Lieutenant General Sir William Slim’s 14th Army comprised formations that were American, British, and Indian. Despite what some newspapermen at the time supposed, seeing the ‘Australian’ slouch hat worn in India from 1943, no Australian units were committed to this theatre of war, with the honourable exception of several destroyers assigned to the British Eastern Fleet in early 1942 to support naval operations in the Bay of Bengal. There was enough for Australia to do at the time as part of the extended Pacific Theatre operations in New Guinea and elsewhere. But as this ground-breaking volume asserts, this doesn’t mean that Australians were absent from the fight in Burma. In fact, right across the spectrum of operations on land, at sea and in the air – together with a plethora of other activities – Australians were associated with the Burma campaign in a myriad of fascinating ways.
Karl James starts us off by describing the varied role of Australian men and women in special operations across the region, beginning with ambitious plans to prepare and nurture stay-behind parties in Malaya and elsewhere in the event of a Japanese invasion. After the outbreak of war with Japan in December 1941 the Special Operations Executive (SOE) carried on this work in a multitude of ways. At least five Australian women worked as signals intelligence operators in SOE, receiving messages from operators in the field across South East Asia. Sadly, the Official Secrets Act appear to have resulted in most agents having taken their secrets to the grave, but enough remains to be able to trace the histories of several adventurous individuals who fought behind enemy lines in Burma and Malaya, and a number who flew aircraft in support of special operations from Burma to Indo-China.
Then, as Peter Holmes explains in Chapter 2, news of the war was brought to the world by a range of intrepid war correspondents, many of them being Australians, like William Burchett, Thomas Healey, William Munday, Roderick Macdonald, Douglas Wilkie, Harry Standish, Ian Fitchett, Ronald McKie and Frank Clune. They had a reputation for travelling to remote parts of the battlefield, overcoming the extreme challenges that the geography and climate of this part of the world placed in their way. They were considered, as historian Philip Woods notes in Managing the Media in the India-Burma War, ‘some of the best in the business’.
A wide range of Australians who fought in Burma, either in the Indian Army or the British Army are described by Andrew Kilsby in Chapter 3. Often it was dependent on where they were living when war broke out. Some, such as Major Walter Gamble, had served in the Indian Army during the inter-war years and rejoined with the advent of hostilities. There were others who remained members of the Australian Army who served in India on secondment. Some of this came about because the Indian Army, as it rebuilt itself during 1943, looked closely at the Australian experience of combat in New Guinea. New Delhi recognised that it was the Australians who first broke the Japanese Army’s spell of invincibility, and they did much to guide and advise the Indian Army when it was most in need. Between July and October 1943, two experienced company commanders – Major W. Parry-Okeden of the 2/9th Australian Infantry Battalion and Major A.A. Buckley from the 2/2nd Australian Infantry Battalion – toured India Command, giving lectures on minor tactics from their experience of fighting on the Kokoda Trail and at Buna–Gona–Sanananda. Simultaneously, Military Mission 220 under Major General John ‘Tubby’ Lethbridge, who was to become Slim’s Chief of Staff in 1944, toured Australia between October and December, looking at best practice in terms of fighting organisations, equipment, and tactics. After less than a month in Australia, Lethbridge reported to London:
The Australians have seen more fighting against the Japanese than anybody else and are morally absolutely on top. They are confident, man for man, they can beat the Japanese anywhere, and at any time. Their ideas on training are eminently sound, and they have all facilities for training large numbers. I am convinced that very serious consideration should be given to using existing Australian experiences and facilities for training British instructors for British troops in jungle warfare.
Brigadier John Lloyd had successfully commanded the Australian 16th Brigade on the Kokoda Trail and at Buna in 1942 and 1943 before becoming chief instructor at the Land Headquarters Tactical School. In December 1943 he began a seven-month posting to India Command to provide up-to- date jungle warfare experience and advice to the Director Army Training. In June 1944 General Auchinleck, Commander-in- Chief of the India Army attempted to have 600 experienced Australian officers transferred to India Command, not for combat, but for training purposes. As Kilsby explains, he got 168. It was enough.
In Chapter 4 Meghan Adams’ describes the role of the contribution inter alia of women of the Australian Red Cross, operating principally in Ceylon which, she reminds us, played a critical role in the war effort. From early 1942 it was transformed into a key military hub, hosting several British, Australian and Indian Brigades along with the 2/12th Australian General Hospital and much of the British Eastern Fleet. Adam’s chapter gives voice to the experiences of a range of Australian women who were ‘proud to do their part’, serving in organisations such as the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), the Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS), the Australian Comforts Fund (ACF) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).
As on land, also in the air. In Chapter 5 Daryl Moran and Andrew Kilsby detail the large numbers of Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) aircrew flying in Royal Air Force (and with the Royal Indian Air Force) squadrons across the Burma theatre. From very small numbers in 1942 the numbers of Australian aircrew in the theatre had reached hundreds in 1943 to well over 1,000 aircrew by the end of 1943. Men flew and supported a vast array of British and American aircraft on operations. These ranged from airlift over ‘the Hump’ to China to fighter ground attack over crucial battlefields like Imphal and Kohima to B-24 Liberator bombers operating out of Ceylon and India in long attack runs over the Bay of Bengal. These individual stories add a fascinating aspect to the story of the Burma campaign that is otherwise obscured by the fact that no RAAF squadrons served in this theatre.
Tom Lewis describes the significant contribution of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in Chapter 6. Australia had a deep, vested interest in this theatre of war because of its sea lanes of communications between Great Britain, India, Ceylon, Malaya and Singapore. Lewis describes the transition from the dark year of 1942, which saw the loss for example of HMAS Vampire off Ceylon in April 1942, to that in which, by late 1943, Allied navies once more dominated these waves. The RAN was continuously at war in the waters of the Indian Ocean conducting vital convoy escort, anti-submarine patrols and, through much of 1945, supporting successful South East Asia Command amphibious operations off the coast of Burma with naval gunfire.
This excellent volume includes some pleasant surprises. Indeed its eclecticism offers something of a cornucopia, for few of the stories in this volume have ever enjoyed a public airing before. In Chapter 7 Anthea Gunn and Alexandra Torrens describe the contribution made by the three Australian Official War Artists, Frank Norton, Roy Hodgkinson and William Dargie. The excellent research by the AWM art curators has highlighted the conditions under which the artists worked, the different briefs they were given, and the artistic results achieved as well as why this campaign received less emphasis for Official Art than other theatres.
In the following chapter, Ian Wilkinson introduces us to tales of Australian cricketers and footballers in wartime India and Burma, not least the discovery by Australians that Indians had an almost fanatical adherence to the game as they had. An Australian services team played three matches in 1945 against Indian teams, and thus was a precursor of the subsequent history of competition between Australia and the countries of the sub-continent. Then, in Chapter 9 David Mitchelhill- Green presents the remarkable story behind Qantas’ Indian Ocean lifeline, in which a hazardous, secret, non-stop mail and passenger service was maintained between Perth and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from mid-1943, first in Catalina flying boats and then also with Liberators. The term ‘double-sunrise’ flights lends insight into the fact that this was long distance flying at the extremity of aircraft (and human) capability and is a story as exciting as one will ever read in the annals of the war against Japan.
Jacqueline Dinan presents a fascinating chapter describing the women of the Woman’s Auxiliary Service (Burma), or ‘Wasbies’. Initially recruited exclusively from the wives and daughters of British expatriates and servicemen in the region, recruitment was later opened to eligible women living in Australia, and a recruitment drive successfully secured the services of many women from Australia willing to support the fighting troops. Their task, supporting soldiers of the 14th Army in forward units between Assam and Burma with everything from tea to soap, was arduous and uncomfortable. As Dinan demonstrates, these women were tough, a helpful characteristic when it came to assisting with the recovery of thousands of Allied POWs when the fighting ceased.
In Chapter 11 Daryl Moran tells the story of the 16 unfortunate Australians who found themselves prisoners of war (POW) in Japanese captivity in Burma. The brutal travails of Allied, including thousands of Australian, POW forced to build the notorious Thailand-Burma Railway, is a well-known history. However, this chapter has revealed the lesser-known captivity – with equally brutal treatment as elsewhere – of the POWs held in the old Rangoon Jail during the war. The Australians included airmen on operations who had baled out or crash landed. There were also some Australian Army men who had escaped from Malaya in 1942 only to be captured in Burma, and even an Australian commando. Remarkably, as Rangoon was deserted by the Japanese in May 1945, one Australian officer found himself acting as the ‘Governor of Rangoon’ for about four days before Allied troops arrived.
The volume concludes with the remarkable story, written by Kama Maclean, of Richard G. Casey, Governor of West Bengal at war’s end. This chapter is fascinating in its analysis of the terrible Bengal famine and the role of administrative governance in the management of a tragedy which resonates across the Commonwealth today. Casey was a remarkable and talented Australian – a decorated World War One veteran, a seasoned diplomat who had served in Churchill’s war cabinet as well as, Ambassador to Washington – and a statesman who managed to maintain an equilibrium in sectarian Bengal politics in the midst of an appalling famine during wartime.
All in all, while unrepresented by major air or ground units or formations (with the honourable exception of RAN fleet units), several thousand individual men and women represented Australia in the fight against the Japanese in the Burma theatre of war. This volume demonstrates that war is not always about the big battalions but is the story of individual men and women and their personal contribution to victory. The Australian contribution to being ‘in the fight’ in the Far East, and to eventual Allied victory, was substantial, even if it was largely unknown then and forgotten thereafter. Thanks to the contributors to this fine volume, it is no longer.
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