Critical Times

By retired Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins (former head of Military Intelligence under INTERFET), who presented this speech to the “ANZAC EVE (Denis Kevans Memorial) PEACE FESTIVAL” – LEICHHARDT TOWN HALL, Sydney.

I have deployed on two overseas military operations. The first was a brief deployment to Kuwait in February 1998, a precautionary defence against Saddam Hussein during the weapons inspection crisis. It was an anti-climactical prelude to what has been dubbed the ‘war of Monica Lewinsky’s skirt’ – the bombing of Iraq from December 1998 – February 1999, as President Bill Clinton faced impeachment over a sex scandal (1). My second overseas operation was the INTERFET intervention in East Timor.

‘Lest we forget’ are the words voiced at hundreds of Anzac and Temperance Day services across Australia. It is an entirely appropriate reminder of those who fell defending this nation, and their comrades who braved danger and appalling privations to prevail. In a wider sense, the phrase remembers the victims of war, increasingly non-combatants.

So – Lest We Forget. What should be remembered? It is said that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. What might Anzac Day look like thirty, fifty or a hundred years from now, if we do not learn the lessons of history?

2009 is a year of anniversaries. Ninety four years since the defeat at Gallipoli gave rise to the legend. Forty years since the Indonesian military coerced Act of Free Choice in Papua. Forty years since Australian government officials illegally detained two Papuans to prevent them warning the UN of unfolding events in Papua. Ten years since the bullying to his suicide – by Australian Foreign Affairs and Defence officials – of Merv Jenkins, an Australian intelligence liaison officer in Washington. Ten years since popular outraged in Australia defeated Canberra’s plan to ensure East Timor remained occupied by the Indonesian military.

Increasingly popular, Anzac Day is marked by sombre politicians and senior miliary officers speaking of duty and sacrifice, invoking images of bronzed Anzacs facing impossible odds against tyrannical forces. Then there are the marching veterans, the bands and the flag waving.

Things go on behind the scenes. In 2003 Prime Minister Howard rushed through the completion of an Australian war memorial in London. While in London on Remembrance Day 2003, he aimed a few barbs, for Australian domestic consumption, at the French security services over the Willie Brigitte affair. Within weeks the hitherto courteously silent French gave an on-camera briefing to an Australian television journalist, Sarah Ferguson, about the true state of affairs, where Australian security had failed to act on French warnings (2). The London memorial itself, we read in the papers, is to be closed for major renovations consequent on the rush to finish the job in time for a political media moment on Remembrance Day 2003 (3). Then there was the fracas last October over easier-access road building in Gallipoli disturbing soldiers’ remains.

Looking through Australia’s wars, it seems few enough concerned our national survival. While still dispersing Aborigines, we lent a hand in New Zealand to dispossess the Maoris. We travelled to Africa where we fought Sudanese, burned Boer farms and mustered up Boer women and children in the business interests of the British Empire. Australians also formed part of the international force committed to China to suppress the Boxer Rebellion – Chinese fighting to end foreign occupation of their country.

In 1914 young Australians were exhorted to ‘the last man and the last shilling’ to support Britain. Wavering Turkey was stampeded into the German camp by the British refusal to hand over battleships they had built for the Turks, followed by the botched pursuit of two German warships to Istanbul. Britain war aims sought Turkey’s relinquishment of the last of its ‘occupied territory’, that is Arab lands, which happened to sit on a great deal of the world’s oil reserves. A substantial part of Britain’s war effort was diverted from the defence of France to the Middle East. On the day Australian horsemen charged the Turkish garrison of Beersheba, the British Cabinet voted to give the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. The resulting Balfour Declaration, issued two days later, was aimed at gaining international Jewish support for the war against the Central Powers led by Germany. Australia’s emblematic light horsemen were pawns in a much larger and more cynical game.

On the Middle East, I do recommend Robert Fisk’s book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

In contrast to Australia’s earlier imperial expeditions, The Second World War is held as our geo-strategic coming of age. This time we fought for our own survival and helped stem the tide of fascism, the threat from which was evident through the thirties, when we continued to sell scrap iron to Japan – including, I was told by an contemporary artilleryman – modern field guns with the sights still on.

A few, perhaps seventy Australians, many with leftist sympathies, actively opposed the emerging threat of fascism and fought for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. By comparison, some three thousand Americans similarly fought in the International Brigades. On return to America, the troops of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were apparently labelled ‘premature anti-fascists’ by the FBI and marginalised in the massive military force of correct-timing anti-fascists created to fight Germany, Japan and Italy. On the other hand, some 50,000 Australians joined the quasi-fascist New Guard in the 1930s. They do not seem to have been penalised in Australia’s World War II forces.

The soldier-novelist, Eric Lambert, in his Twenty Thousand Thieves portrays ordinary Australian soldiers of the 2nd AIF as quite aware of the gravity of the world situation and grimly resigned to the bleak necessity of war rather than the boyish enthusiasm of earlier expeditions. The reasons for defeat before victory – poor strategy, poor generalship, the wrong weapons, faulty tactics, underestimating the enemy – are debated elsewhere. Suffice it to say the men and women who marched away fully deserve our respect and thanks. Their desperate fight provides much of the material for patriotic speeches at this time of year.

In numbers they represented a small proportion of the population. So Australia’s wider Second World War reality warrants a closer examination for its looking glass view of Australia under direct military pressure – lessons from the past and warning for the future perhaps. Max Hastings in his book on the Pacific war, Nemesis, devoted a chapter to Australia at war. After heroic and successful campaigns the Middle East, North Africa and New Guinea, Australian troops were practically excluded from the Pacific War, employed in pointless and sanguinary ‘mopping up’, where at times both individuals and units refused to fight – not without cause given the pointlessness and ferocity of the fighting. Much of the eligible Australian manpower avoided active service by joining the militia, which was supposed to only serve in Australia, but which Prime Minister Curtain was able to have extended to operate in the islands.

Not all our soldiers have been angels. Allied including Australian troops often killed surrendering Japanese or prisoners. Australian military members of the Occupation Force in Japan were involved in the rape of Japanese women, in one case a soldier being found guilty by courts martial. His conviction was quashed back in Australia due to ‘insufficient evidence’ (4).

The Australian military commander in chief has detractors and supporters, but the picture that emerges is not particularly flattering: a corpulent mediocrity – a police chief who associated secretly with right wing groups and made misleading statements to protect a fellow officer – who was dogged by an unenviable reputation for corruption and self-indulgence. It is no small irony that the central square in the Department of Defence Russell Offices is still named after him, Sir Thomas Blamey Square.

In the prison camps, Australians proved amongst the most loyal and tenacious resisters, and amongst the worst of the bullies and thieves, one officer being known as the White Jap for his exploitation of his men. On the home front, Australians impeded the American war effort on the docks and nurtured a flourishing black market as a million transiting US servicemen were ‘delighted with the warmth of their welcome from Australian girls’. Leadership and example were wanting at many levels. Robert Menzies, who resigned his commission and declined overseas service in the First World War (5) and sold scrap iron to Japan before the second, complained about the futility of the later land operations against the Japanese in which Australians were engaged. He then went on as Prime Minister to commit the nation’s conscripted baby-boomers to Vietnam.

Baz Lurhman’s film Australia introduced many to that time when war came to Australia. The author Peter Grose has recently covered the 1942 bombing of Darwin his book An Awkward Truth. That first day was a confusing mix of heroism, compassion, fright and mistakes with preparedness and leadership the critical failures. Grose notes that it came as a profound shock to Australians that Australian refugees from modern air attack were ‘no more heroic or stoic’ than anybody else (6). He notes that Hastings’ review of Australia’s war effort in the Pacific was ‘badly received by some in Australia because it deals, however sympathetically, with the sidelining of Australian land forces towards the end of the Pacific War. Australians would do well to grow up and accept the reality of their history….’

The air raids on Darwin contain a maxim for all ages – the influence of power and ease on an individual. The Administrator of the Northern Territory at the time of the raid was Aubrey Abbott, a man caricatured fleetingly and unsympathetically in Baz Lurhman’s film. After the first raids Abbott had members of the Territory’s small police force load Government House liquor and crockery onto vehicles for the flight south. At a time of danger and chaos, when both civil leadership and policing were needed in Darwin, Administrator Abbott failed. The man was evidently charming and physically impressive. Joining the 1st AIF and commissioned at Gallipoli, Lieutenant Abbott had ridden in the charge at Beersheba. Thus he had once obviously embodied notions of hard work, adventure, leadership, patriotism and courage. Yet he failed in Darwin. How did it happen? After the First World War, Abbott had entered politics, had some association (apparently) with the right wing New Guard and had been appointed as governor, or Administrator, of the Northern Territory by Robert Menzies. Admittedly he was shaken from a near miss in the first raid that morning, but where in his life’s journey did courage dissipate and professional virtue become inconvenient?

It is a lesson in humility for us all, none more so than those who chose to stand close to political power.

As Bill Clinton famously wrote, ‘power was the narcotic of choice in Washington’. From political power comes policy. The East Timor example was one of reluctance to surrender old ideology, confusion, duplicity, delay, cover up and retribution. The secret and inalienable rights of policy makers were defended vehemently and often by Howard Government appointees and apologists during the intelligence fracas surrounding the leaking of the 2003 Report of Captain Martin Toohey, RANR. If it had not been for Toohey, the cut-off of intelligence links to Cosgrove’s intelligence staff in East Timor – the day before the Tour of Duty Concert featuring John Farnham, Kylie Minogue, Roy and HG and the others – by bureaucrats in Canberra, would have been sucessfully covered-up. For his fidelity to duty, Captain Toohey was savaged and abandoned by the Department of Defence.

Before Timor, Australian forces participated in a minor way in the US recovery of Kuwait in 1991. In that war thousands of Iraqi dead were buried in mass graves without any attempt at identification or notification of the Red Cross, in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. In the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, the belligerent Coalition, including Australia, failed to adequately protect and care for the civilian population, again in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. Such things happen in our name.
Who are these great men that fiddle with the lives of others – these will-of-the-wisp policy makers that cook up strategic witches brews and diplomatic black magic? Who advises whether young Australians should be expended in the interests of policy, or what they do in our name? Whose interests to they really serve and why are they so unaccountable?

The Department of Defence is formally responsible to the Government for the lives of young Australians in War. The Department and the forces contain many able and committed people, but their efforts are filtered through a chain of command. People flit in and out, to think tanks, the Department of Foreign Affairs and universities. But Defence is a department constantly involved in controversy. Senior officials and military officers mislead the parliament, the courts and the press. Minister after minister has been publicly humiliated – and still they take it. Recently we have seen stories of a secret Defence investigation into its Minister’s association with a Chinese businesswoman. Now it seems the Secretary, Nick Warner and the Chief of the Defence Force, Houston, do not like the intelligence on China (7). This is the same Angus Houston who stated that he was ‘very, very happy with the advice that was provided [by DIO on Iraq].’ What has changed? The intelligence on China, as with most intelligence, seems to have an uncanny resemblance to the political line. As William Danforth (8) remarked: Lines of least resistance make crooked rivers and crooked men. Would you trust this Department with your house keys or your kids? I would not buy a used horse from them.

All the horror of all the wars before 1830, occurred when less than a billion people clamoured for resources. When the Japanese warred on us, world population was about two and a half billion. It is now six billion and despite the rate of growth tapering off, is expected to reach nine billion by 2050. This, combined with climate chaos and technological change has profound implications for defence. Australia needs to get the future right. We simply cannot afford to waste the heroism of the past by masking the blundering that has gone before.

If one central thing can be drawn from reflecting on Anzac Day, it is this: in war, the best offer their own lives, the worst offer the lives of others. Anzac Day would, in my view, be more important, more meaningful and ultimately more valuable if Australians take the opportunity to scratch beneath the legends to where courage was matched by cowardice and fortitude by folly.
I think the Vietnam veterans have said it best: Honour the Dead, fight like hell for the living.

Notes
1. Fisk, Robert, The Great War for Civilisation, Harper Perennial, London, 2006, p. 889
2. Channel Nine, Sunday, The French Connection, Feb 2004. The French official was DST deputy director Jean-Francois Clair.
3. War memorial to be closed, The Age, 18 Apr 09, p. 3.
4. See Wikipedia, Allied War Crimes during World War II, downloaded 22 Apr 09
5. ‘Menzies himself had served compulsorily from 1912 until 1921 in the militia, including membership of the Melbourne University Rifles (1915-19). While at university he vigorously supported conscription for overseas service in the First World War.’ Pam Maclean, An almost universal scheme of national service in Australia in the 1950s, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, Online, 1 Sep 06.
6. Grose, P. An Awkward Truth, Allan and Unwin, Sydney, 2009, p. 200.
7. Cameron Stewart and Patrick Walters, Defence chiefs spurned by US on China risk, The Australian, April 15, 2009
8. Retired US physician and former Chancellor of Washington University, St Louis.