BY ROWAN CAHILL
A selective and mythologised account of the past draws young people to Anzac Day celebrations. The chief of the armed forces is the Australian of the Year. Parliament passes a bill enabling the military to be used domestically against protesting civilians, with hardly a critical murmur. Joyous crowds celebrate the centenary of the Australian army, as excited youngsters clamber over the weapons of mass destruction on display.
There's no doubt about it: Australia is becoming increasingly militarist.
It is time to take a look at the dark and sinister side of Australian military history, largely suppressed in mainstream historical accounts. It is a world away from the Anzac legend, and from the "social worker with a gun" image that army spin doctors have woven out of the East Timor intervention.
Terror and profiteering
Australia's military history began with colonisation. The European occupation of the continent did not go unchallenged by the Aborigines. A state of war existed from Governor Phillip's time, right through the nineteenth century, as the invaders met with Aboriginal resistance.
The defenders strategically employed guerilla-type warfare against the superior military might of industrial Britain.
Because this resistance was effective, and the enemy elusive, a bloody and vengeful military campaign was conducted in retaliation. There were punitive raids on camps, and terror was officially used to bring about Aboriginal submission. This protracted warfare resulted in the violent deaths of an estimated 20,000 Aborigines and 2000 Europeans.
For twenty years between 1790 and 1810, Britain was preoccupied with conflict in Europe. The colonial outpost of New South Wales was turned over to a specially created infantry force, the NSW Corps. Recruited from adventurists, opportunists and Britain's military prisons, this outfit had a free hand.
An officer clique used its weapons monopoly to self-advantage. The small non-convict population was cowed into submission, and the clique used thuggish corruption to generate huge personal fortunes, especially in land deals.
Before Federation in 1901, thousands of Australian volunteers participated in three imperialist military ventures: against the New Zealand Maori tribes (the Maori Wars, 1863-72); against the Islamic rebellion in the Sudan (1885-86); and against emerging Chinese nationalism during the Boxer Rebellion (1900-01).
In each case the involvement was presented in adventurous, jingoistic terms, and the enemy portrayed as heathens devoid of human rights. This was a recipe for callous and criminal military behaviour.
The 2600 Australian volunteers in the Maori Wars, who helped the British army subdue the Maori tribes defending their fertile tribal lands, were attracted across the Tasman with the promise of land grants from captured enemy territory.
Australia's emergence as a nation was marked by the involvement of 16,175 troops in the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, on behalf of British gold interests. It was a brutal war in which the British used scorched earth tactics and concentration camps to crush the resistance of the Boers, who were the descendants of Dutch, German, and French immigrants.
In 1902 four Australian lieutenants were court-martialled, and two subsequently executed, by British military authorities following several incidents in which Boer prisoners were killed, and a German missionary murdered. The episode is mythologised in the 1980 film Breaker Morant.
Arguably the officers were frustrated by the Boers' guerilla warfare and resorted to "vigilante justice" in retaliation, in much the same way Australian soldiers would in Vietnam 64 years later.
Mutiny and VD
Twelve years later, Australia was at war again. The Great War (1914-18) realised the dream of those Federationist polemicists who maintained that a nation should be born in the heat of battle and blood sacrifice. Out of the blood-fests of the Western Front, and the impossibilities of Gallipoli, the Anzac myth was crafted, telling of larrikin heroes imbued with mateship and derring-do.
Popular accounts of the war conveniently ignore uncomfortable bits and pieces: like the racism of Australian troops in the Middle East as they cleaned out the Turkish Empire to make way for European petroleum and strategic interests. The locals were referred to as "wogs"; the order to round up Bedouin tribesman, and execute those who resisted in any way or who acted suspiciously, was enthusiastically obeyed.
On the home front, in February 1916 the Liverpool Mutiny took place. Protesting against their harsh treatment in camp, thousands of uniformed troops deserted their base on the outskirts of Sydney, commandeered trains, and took over Sydney for a riotous day of rampage and looting.
Civilian and military authorities quelled the mutineers with rifle fire. One soldier was killed, many were wounded, eight seriously, and many others placed under arrest.
Venereal disease was a major problem amongst Australian troops during World War I. In the four months before the 1915 Gallipoli landing, 2000 of the proposed landing force were incapacitated by, and 3% constantly sick from, venereal infection.
Prior to leaving Egypt for Gallipoli, the troops went to the Cairo brothel area they believed was the source of infection and burned the brothels; some of the buildings were eight storeys high. Prostitutes were injured and their personal belongings destroyed in retribution.
Overall more than 10% of Australia's World War I diggers contracted VD, one of the highest infection rates experienced by the warring nations.
After the end of World War 1, Australian troops fought against the Red Army during 1919. They were part of the anti-Bolshevik North Russian Relief Force. Australians won two Victoria Crosses in this bloody and useless British initiative. The campaign aimed at advancing British interests in the Baltic region and in Persia.
The force was withdrawn after British capitalists decided it would be better to develop trade links with the infant Soviet Russia.
Reactionary violence appealed to some Australian ex-servicemen. They were conspicuous amongst those who volunteered for the notoriously brutal, internationally reviled "Black and Tans", the special British force used during the Irish war of independence in the early 1920s.
This set an unacknowledged precedent, and ever since, Australian ex-service personnel have been conspicuous amongst the ranks of adventurist, reactionary mercenary outfits worldwide.
Desertion and treason
And so to World War II. In February 1942, Japanese aircraft attacked Darwin for the first time: eight ships were sunk, 243 people killed, and some 400 wounded.
Early warnings were either misinterpreted or ignored; the RAAF had no operational aircraft in the area at the time. Australian troops defending the town panicked and fled; some engaged in looting. The shameful episode was the subject of a Royal Commission.
When Japanese troops entered Singapore in 1942, Australian troops, facing defeat and capture, resorted to riotous behaviour. They looted, and fought for places on civilian evacuation craft.
When asked what should be done to stop this behaviour, their commander, Major-General Bennett, said "Shoot them!" He then hightailed it out of Singapore with two staff officers and escaped to Australia. Two courts of inquiry subsequently found his desertion "unwise". Denied further significant leadership roles, Bennett resigned from the army in 1944.
In New Guinea the indigenous people were pressed into service by Australian troops to carry war supplies across rugged jungle terrain in the war against Japan. Nicknamed "fuzzy wuzzies", the locals were driven relentlessly.
Legendary war photographer Damien Parer recorded that pneumonia and ruptured spleens were common amongst the porters, and that reluctance and exhaustion were treated with ruthless kicks to the ribs. The popular military version is that it was all a matter of selfless and willing cooperation by the locals.
After 1943, Adolf Hitler put together the British Free Corps, a brigade recruited from fascist-sympathising prisoners of war. It was mainly composed of troops from Canada, South Africa, and Australia. The outfit had its own distinct uniform, but saw little front-line action. After the war some of its prominent members were executed or imprisoned for treason by Allied authorities.
The tragedy of Vietnam
Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was drenched in racism. The nationalist enemy was characterised as "noggies" and "slant eyes". A 1968 survey of Australian, British, and US press reports of the war revealed that Australian troops shot wounded prisoners, razed villages, and destroyed food stocks. Of the hundreds of prisoners captured to 1967, only 27 could actually be accounted for.
One Australian tactic was to turn prisoners over to either South Vietnamese or Korean allies. The Koreans had a reputation for barbaric treatment of Viet Cong prisoners; decapitation and genital mutilation were specialities.
The commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Charlesworth, was quoted in 1967 saying, "The Koreans know just how to handle the Vietnamese ... we are tolerant to a sometimes absurd extent. These people are Asians". And he went on to explain how you don't get respect using "kid-glove techniques".
In 1968 the Australian public was shocked to hear how modern-day Anzacs went about business in Vietnam. One Australian officer was exposed as having used water torture against a female prisoner. This tactic was a form of torture by drowning; information was extracted by forcing water down a prisoner's throat.
As the Vietnam War dragged on, Australia's involvement was increasingly questioned. The relationship between Australian troops, many of them conscripts, and their officers and NCOs, became increasingly tense. Cases of soldiers attempting to kill their superiors were reported. It was not uncommon for those in command to add "please" to their orders.
Training conscripts for duty in Vietnam was not a kid-glove affair, either. Eventually the Australian press christened the Puckapunyal training camp in Victoria, "Suicide Camp", alleging bastardisation of recruits led to young men attempting suicide; a number of successful suicides occurred in the Kapooka Camp. Self-mutilation by cutting off the trigger finger was also a reported tactic as desperate young men tried to escape the systematised maltreatment.
Something Australian military spin doctors and Anzac Day enthusiasts never point out is that during the Vietnam War, at least 13% of Australian deaths in Vietnam resulted from accidents and illness unconnected with battle and from battle accidents, as Australians accidentally killed their own mates, or as American artillery and aircraft fire accidentally took Australian lives.