We tell stories because we'd often prefer to live in fiction than face the horrors of
reality. Myths are a type of story, and we often use them to make sense of what
we can't make sense of or what we refuse to. Myths can protect us from the truth.
As war is so horrific, it makes sense why we would dress it in myth. Falsehoods and exaggerations
shroud both World Wars, and no belligerent nation is totally free of them—not even Australia.
In this video, we're going to shed light on some of the myths
commonly associated with Australians in the First and Second World Wars.
One
prevailing myth regarding Aussies in the World Wars is that they were—by and large—rugged,
resourceful bushmen with exceptional tans.
According to Michael John Pyne's Relationships between officers and
other ranks in the Australian Army in the Second World War, this was a stereotype proliferated by
the famous Aussie historian Charles Bean. In reality, though, the majority of Australian
men who served in wars came from "the city and urban backgrounds"; they were city slickers.
As the bushman stereotype was so prominent in stories from World War I,
Aussie soldiers sent off to fight in the Second World War felt they had to live up to it—when,
really, the whole thing had been blown out of proportion. According to Pyne,
"Many of these men were living in the shadow of the Australian bush and pioneer [l]egends
which helped to form the identity of the [Australians in World War I]."
Another aspect of Aussie soldiers that appears to have been blown
out of proportion was their larrikinism. This term isn't super easy to pin down,
but we'd define a larrikin as a troublemaker with a good heart.
In a military context, the negative effects of larrikinism boiled down
to a perceived lack of discipline. But were the Aussies truly lacking in this department?
With this, it's very much the extent to which Australian soldiers lacked
discipline that is the myth, as there are, if we're being honest,
bucketloads of examples of poor discipline to draw upon, especially from the First World War.
For instance, the aforementioned historian Bean wrote the following in his diary:
"There was a great deal of drunkenness [in Cairo] and I could not help
noticing that what people said was true—the Australians were responsible for most of it.
I think we have to admit that our force contains more bad hats than the others, and I think also
that the average Australian is certainly a harder liver. He does do bad things—at least things that
the rest of the world considers as really bad." Here, Bean was agreeing with British General Sir
Archibald Murray, who, reflecting on the Australian soldiers' behaviour in Cairo,
said, "I have never seen a body of men in uniform with less idea of discipline."
So that settles it, right? The Aussie diggers were just as undisciplined
and uncontrollable as their reputation suggests.
Well, maybe not.
There's plenty of evidence of good discipline,
too, including what Bean wrote for the Australian War Memorial in 1983:
"It was discipline—firmly based on the national habit of facing facts and going
straight for the objective—that was responsible for the [Australians'] astonishing success."
This definitely contradicts what he wrote about the Aussies in Cairo, and while we
chalk it up to Bean wanting to paint Australian soldiers in a more positive light later in life,
others have made similar arguments, especially in the context of World War II.
Hearing stories of Anzac larrikinism and mateship from their fathers and grandfathers who served in
the First World War, the soldiers of World War II believed they would, in Pyne's words, "be led
by an informal discipline, rather than a formal military discipline. [But] this led to a sense
of disappointment and bitterness when they did not find that the army lived up to these expectations.
Instead of officers and men pulling together in the spirit of the Anzac Legend,
they found an army that was led by an officer class that was more elite than they had expected."
When Pyne said "informal discipline," he was referring to a system dictated by mateship
and mutual respect. A quote by World War I veteran Ron Burridge illustrates this point:
"We had good officers, we respected them, they were down to earth blokes [, and] just
like mates. [...] [T]hey treated us the same as themselves[.] [T]hey respected
us and we respected them. They all were working-class people, so they were OK."
So, while the Aussies may have lacked discipline in a traditional military sense,
they weren't wholly without it; they just had their own brand of it.
If larrikinism was one side of a coin, fearlessness was the other. If we're to
believe the stereotype, while the Aussie soldier may have lacked typical military discipline,
his morale was always high, and he feared nothing.
Of course, this was far from true for every soldier.
In Anzac Memories: Putting Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia,
author Alistair Thomson states, "The legend of the Australian soldier—the best fighter
in the war—caused many diggers to repress their feelings [during and after the war]."
Thomson goes on to quote Great War veteran Fred Farrall, who spoke of the trauma he suffered after
returning home: "I had dreams of being shelled and being frightened, scared stiff. You don't
know when the next shell that is coming is going to blow you to pieces or leave you crippled."
Farrall also explained that the digger stereotype—the larrikin and fearless
fighter—did not fit his experience of the war and also made him feel uncomfortable
about his own identity. For this reason, he avoided Anzac celebrations like the plague.
In his book We Were the Rats, Australian World War II veteran Jack Lawson Glassop suggests
that Anzac legends from the First World War caused similar problems for Australians in
World War II. In Glassop's words, "The trouble is the world expects so much of
[us]. They think we all swear like troopers, drink like fish, and fight like wildcats,
and that we don't know the meaning of the word 'fear.' We can blame our fathers. It makes it
hard for us. All our lives we've read that when our turn comes we don't let everyone down."
So, while these expectations may have rallied the Aussies as a collective,
the individual soldier was still shaking in his boots.
Returning to our definition of a larrikin—a troublemaker with a good heart—we can shed
some light on another myth regarding Australian soldiers: that they were all, indeed, and always,
good-hearted people. Our point here is that Australian soldiers committed atrocities, too.
They were not above killing surrendered Japanese in the Second World War, for one, a notion
supported by Australian historian Mark Johnston. In his words, "It often proved
difficult to prevent [Australian soldiers] from killing captured Japanese before they could be
interrogated. Some Japanese soldiers were almost certainly deterred from surrendering
to Australians." If General Sir Thomas Blamey is anything to go off, this behaviour was far
from shunned by high command, as well. In a January 1943 interview by the New York Times,
he said, "We are not dealing with humans as we know them Our troops have the right view of the
Japs. They regard them as vermin." As for an example from World War I,
there was the case of the Kiwi soldier Leslie Lowry, who chased after a Bedouin man
who'd robbed him near the village of Sarafand al-Amar in what was then, in 1918, Palestine.
Closing on the thief, the thief shot him, and with his dying words,
Lowry told his Anzac brothers in arms what had happened. The Anzacs then took their revenge,
an event which the famous Australian poet Banjo Paterson described like this:
"A few Australians went along with them—there couldn’t be any trouble on any front without
an Australian being in it—and the revenge party followed the thief to his village,
recovered the stolen goods and killed every able-bodied man in the village. Then they
threw the bodies down the well, filled the well up, [and] burnt the village."
This wasn't troublemaking; this was an atrocity.
So, going off the evidence we discussed today,
not all Australian soldiers were rugged bushmen, not all of them were undisciplined larrikins,
not all of them were fearless, and not all of them were always good blokes.
But what do you think? Do you agree that the myths we covered are actually myths?
Do you have any evidence that reinforces or contests our arguments? Can you think
of any myths that we didn't cover? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.