Australia under attack.

FOR YEARS, Max Hastings has personified the red-blooded, macho, up-front-with-the-troops British war correspondent. I occasionally wondered whether he might have rubbed a bit too closely against Ernest Hemingway, transplanting a few tufts of that famous chest-hair of which "Papa" was so proud. Over sixteen years, Hastings edited successively two of London's top dailies; he has published twenty books--not all of them on war; a few years ago this full life was recognised by a knighthood. (Has he repented becoming "Sir Max"? The title now appears rarely in blurbs and publicity.)

His most recent book is Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. Its central subject is Japan's evil chickens flying home to roost after the Pacific war it had begun so cockily in 1941. The preceding years of Allied struggle are sufficiently sketched to give depth and context to the denouement. Nemesis is a good enough book, except ...

Except that it is impossible for an Australian to read it without a surge of black outrage, with an aftertaste of gratuitous libel. Because of Hastings' record, and because Nemesis is already a bestseller, his charges should be answered; the present woeful ignorance of Australians about their own past makes the task of rebuttal more difficult, but more necessary.

In his book of nearly 800 pages, Hastings devotes one short (ten-page) chapter to Australia. And that chapter he titles "Bludging and Mopping Up". He calls 1945 "the most inglorious year in Australia's history as a fighting nation". He dwells lovingly for a whole page on the shortcomings of our drink-sodden, whoring, fat, repulsive and corrupt commander-in-chief, General Blamey; something weird there, because Blamey. had small influence on the great affairs of 1945, which ostensibly is Hastings' subject.

True, he bestows a kindly passing nod on our earlier fighting brilliance (Tobruk, Alamein); "Weary" Dunlop is wheeled on for a perfunctory mention. But the general picture of both Australia's armed forces and its civic life is one of decadence and decay.

These things Hastings alleges against a country which became a belligerent on day one of the Second World War against fascism; a nation of a mere 7 million persons, of whom over half a million fought overseas. Not even Soviet Russia put such a proportion of its people into uniform.

We sent three superb divisions to North Africa, the Middle East and Greece. The cream of our newly-trained aircrew went abroad to help Britain; much of our naval strength was in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, helping the Royal Navy.

In the Pacific, the war against Japan might have been prolonged indefinitely if Australia and certain strategic parts of Papua and New Guinea had not been held as bases from which the eventual Allied counterattack could be launched. From March to September 1942, across the whole sweep of General MacArthur's vast South West Pacific Area, the only Allied offensive actions were fought by Australians around Wau, Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea.

In September 1942, Australian ground and air forces won a decisive victory by repulsing an attempted Japanese occupation of Milne Bay, on the eastern tip of Papua. This drew no bouquets from General MacArthur's headquarters far south in Melbourne, where the battle was largely hushed up. The last thing that this most political of generals desired was any victory for which he himself could not claim all the praise, whether he deserved it or not.

But, fighting far away in Burma, British Field Marshal William Slim saw and said what MacArthur would not admit: "Australian troops had, at Milne Bay ... inflicted on the Japanese their first defeat on land ... of all the Allies it was Australian soldiers who first broke the spell of the invincibility of the Japanese Army."

Years before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor the Royal Australian Navy (more prescient than Australian governments) saw what was coming. They established the Coastwatchers for surveillance of Australia's coastline and Pacific island territories. In the greatest secrecy, civilians--they might be district officers, station managers, traders, planters--were organised to report to naval headquarters all suspicious movements of ships or aircraft. In frightful danger, these isolated men remained on duty through the whole war. Near the end, individual coastwatchers were even organising their own guerrilla bands to harass the now failing Japanese garrisons.

Australian self-praise for these intrepid men is unnecessary; US Admiral Halsey said it all. After his Marines had won the critical, touch-and-go battle for Guadalcanal Island, Halsey announced: "The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific."

On the Allied Council for Japan (which advised MacArthur's military government of occupation after Hiroshima) the Australian Macmahon Ball was chosen to represent, not merely his own country, but Britain and the whole British empire. Such recognition would hardly have gone to a nation which had sat on its hands during the fighting.

So what is it about Australia's Pacific belligerency that so gripes Sir Max?

He despises our citizen home forces--the Militia. Does he know that the only unit entitled to inscribe "Kokoda" among its battle honours is the Militia 39 Battalion? Does he know that, the moment John Curtin's wartime government made it legally possible, militiamen in their tens of thousands voluntarily transferred to the "serve anywhere in the world" AIF? Does he know that the Militia 7th Brigade did much to secure that brilliant victory at Milne Bay, which so cheered Bill Slim and so irked Douglas MacArthur?

Max Hastings uses isolated incidents of "stickiness" (for example, among Australian units engaged in the dull but deadly business of mopping up on Bougainville) to suggest a disgruntled army on the point of mutiny. The fact is that MacArthur, as supreme commander, had by then decreed secondary roles only for the Australians, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Hastings is justly harsh about our outrageous trade unions, which exploited a war in which their compatriots were fighting and dying. But were the Australian watersiders and coalminers any more disgusting than the dockyard workers in beleaguered England, whose monumental bludging was even immortalised in verse by Michael Thwaites in his "Jervis Bay"? The Australian Thwaites, though an academic, yet captained a British minesweeper through the war in the Atlantic. He wrote (I quote from memory): "A dockyard 'matey' working was a sight you seldom saw ..."

Sir Max depicts Australian civil society in 1944-45 as divided, disaffected and corrupt, devoted to the "black market" and any other racket they could get their fingers into.

There were indeed disgraceful episodes. For example, a philanthropic knight and later Lord Mayor of Melbourne gouged unconscionable profits from his contracts to supply electric wires and cables to the forces. Exposed by an inquiry, he disgorged his loot "voluntarily", to avoid publicity. A Labor senator and cabinet minister continued in wartime to run his (illegal) SP bookmaking business in New South Wales, using stationery and paper which, to put it politely, ought to have remained in Canberra. (No action that I ever heard of was taken against him.)

But such things were exceptions, and Hastings' portrayal of us is a lie. I had returned to Australia in 1944, and my army duties (so far from restricting me to some isolated unit camp or barracks) let me move freely among the civilian life of two states and of Canberra. I know that the Australian people were united as never before. Food and clothes rationing, travel restrictions, blackouts and shortages of goods--all these they bore philosophically and accepted as their contribution to the "war effort". Any voluntary patriotic activity was eagerly supported by a people anxious only for an opportunity to "do their bit", whether it was organising "war savings" in neighbourhood streets, serving in the Home Guard, hospitality to visiting servicemen, visiting the wounded in hospital or sending comfort parcels to the men in the forward areas. Thousands of family homes had endured sad bereavement, or awaited with stoic patience the next news from the battle areas.

What imp of misapprehension or malice led Hastings to betray his own standards with such gratuitous offence? I take off my hat to much of this book; for chapter 14 I put it on again.

If Sir Max should visit Australia, I should greatly like to arrange his reception; it would be of the simplest kind, requiring no more than a bucket of tar, a pillowful of feathers, and a quick dip in Sydney Harbour. I just wish ...