World War II

In 1978 the French weekly L’Express published an interview that sent a shockwave through the French collective conscience. The subject was Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the wartime Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Having escaped at the end of the war to the safe haven of Franco’s Spain, he was now an octogenarian, enjoying some prestige as the official translator of the Caudillo’s speeches. Darquier had been condemned to death in absentia by the Liberation courts, but never extradited. He was not the only Nazi collaborator to have escaped punishment, but what most profoundly perturbed the readers of L’Express was that his virulent anti-Semitism was still completely intact, as was his refusal to believe that the Shoah was anything other than a Jewish fabrication. In the late 1970s France was at the beginning of the long process of self-examination and self-remembering whereby it would seek to come to terms with one of its history’s darkest periods. For Charles de Gaulle, whose presence had dominated so much of the two decades after World War II, the Vichy government was an illegality, and its leaders traitors. After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 began the slow and painful process of acknowledgment that the experience and behaviour of the French during the Occupation was more complex than the Gaullian vision, and much more shameful.

In Margaret Geddes’s own words, Blood, Sweat and Tears ‘is a book of memories and feelings, not facts and dates’. As a result, she is able to avoid the structural, stylistic and other ramifications of historical and chronological accuracy. Instead, she is interested more in the quality and reverberations of their recollections and their reconstruction of events that are ‘with them still’, and is able to give her various interlocutors full narrative rein to hit upon their own rhythms, pursue their own lines of emphasis and obsession, and often talk at considerable length.

Chester Wilmot was killed when the Comet airliner he was flying to London crashed near Rome on 10 January 1954. The ABC and BBC radio journalist had survived six dangerous years as a war correspondent in World War II only to fall victim to an aircraft design fault. Wilmot’s untimely death was also a great loss for Australian history, as he had recently been commissioned to write the volume of the Australian official history on the vital North African battles of Tobruk and Alamein. His best-selling Tobruk 1941: Capture, Siege, Relief (1944) and The Struggle for Europe (1952) indicate that he would have written a history that was authoritative, incisive and enthralling. Neil McDonald suggests in this new book that Wilmot would also have had quite a bit to say about the senior wartime Australian army commander, General Thomas Blamey.

The Art of War is published ‘to accompany the television series’ produced by Film Australia and to be broadcast on SBS. The television spin-off is an attractive genre for an art book. Writers have to keep to the point. There is a conventional picture-book formula, comprising a potted artist’s biography, a bit of art-historical placement and sometimes too little about what is specific to the work. Lola Wilkins’s Artists in Action: From the Collection of the Australian War Memorial (2003) is a good example. But a television producer knows that the words must concentrate upon the works we are staring at: forget the biography and the art history; just look at the art. Betty Churcher, like Sister Wendy, is very good at looking at works of art. For vivid specificity, take Colin Colahan’s striking Ballet of wind and rain (1945), men suddenly glimpsed leaning into the midwinter elements on a recently liberated airfield. Churcher suggests that it was so titled ‘perhaps because he has danced his brush across the canvas to simulate wild gusts but more likely because the four RAAF airmen duck their heads in unison like the cygnets in the dance from Swan Lake’.

Japanese troops landed and occupied Lae and Salamaua in north-eastern Papua on 8 March 1942. In an elaborate operation scheduled for early May, the Japanese planned a seaborne invasion of Port Moresby to safeguard their positions in New Guinea and in the Rabaul area, to provide a base that would bring northern Australia within range of their warships and bombers, and to secure the flank of their projected advance towards New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa.

Countermoves by the US Navy defeated this attempt. Therefore, in June 1942, Lieutenant-General Harukichi Hyakutake’s XVII Army was ordered to gather its divisions from Davao in the Philippines, from Java and from Rabaul, and to prepare for a revised attack on Port Moresby. In a two-pronged approach, one Japanese group would take Milne Bay (south-eastern Papua) by an assault from the sea and advance on Port Moresby along the coast; the other would attack overland from Buna and Gona (northern Papua) along the Kokoda Trail.

These two unusual books reflect on aspects of the prisoner-of-war experience in Singapore, Thailand and Burma during World War II that have not been much canvassed in Australia. One Fourteenth of an Elephant, Ian Denys Peek’s sometimes irascible ‘memoir of life and death on the Burma-Thailand Railway’, relates the experiences of a member of the Singapore Volunteer Armoured Car Company. Peek was British and had grown up in Shanghai, but was not taken into captivity there as was novelist J.G. Ballard (who recalled the experience in Empire of the Sun). Peek and his brother Ron were at the fall of Singapore. Soon afterwards began their movements between a series of hospital and labour camps along the railway. Peek’s story – his first book, published sixty years after his capture and told in the first person – gives a British perspective on a fate that he shared with thousands of Australians.

Colin McPhedran, the son of a Burmese mother and a Scottish oil company executive father, was living a comfortable middle-class colonial life in Central Burma with his mother, sister and two brothers when the Japanese invaded the country in 1941. He was eleven years old. The invasion spread terror throughout the population, which feared the notorious savagery of the Japanese army. The European and mixed races felt particularly threatened, and Colin’s mother made the fatal decision to flee their comfortable villa and escape to India. The children’s mixed parentage concerned her; she resolved to undertake the journey with her three younger children. She was especially anxious about her fifteen-year-old daughter whose youthful European beauty would, she thought, make her a special target for sexual abuse. Colin’s father did not play any part in this disastrous decision, having escaped to Calcutta when Rangoon fell to the Japanese.

Holocaust denial comes in many guises. One is the comfortable belief that European nationals were ignorant of the slaughter of their fellow Jewish citizens, and would have been appalled had they known. Daniel Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust has been the most controversial challenge to this so far, but it is not alone. Abraham Biderman, survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, whose memoir The World of My Past had difficulty finding a publisher here but went on to win awards, is reluctant to exaggerate about the Poles. Nevertheless he writes, ‘With hindsight, however, it seems to me that the majority of them were happy to see the Jews destroyed.’

I was supercilious towards Italy and Italians before seeing Italian films and reading Curzio Malaparte’s novels. Malaparte foiled the superciliousness while the films’ backgrounds, something as simple as sunlight in the squares, intrigued. Previously France had provided an alternative to Anglo-Saxon culture. An Irish heritage set me askew to Anglo-Saxondom, but it did not give me another language as English had supplanted Gaelic. In any case, Ireland was the past and a somewhat mythic past at that. My parents were attached to Ireland but even their parents had been born in Australia. Indeed there had been no direct contact with Ireland since the mid-nineteenth century; it was the past you could not reach but only romanticise. Being of Irish origin meant being Catholic outside the Anglo-Protestant Pale.

Mr Jackson’s book narrates his experience and that of a friend as prisoners of the Japanese in Thailand during World War II. It is neither a good nor memorable book, but it does raise, however unintentionally, significant issues. In a nation still bereft of a civil religion, that amalgam of myths and tales of heroes which defines a country’s sense of self and values, the experiences described by Mr Jackson should be honoured.