Bad Characters

BAD CHARACTERS: Sex, Crime, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force

by PETER STANLEYPier 9, 2010, 287 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

On the afternoon of 13 June, 1918, in France, Private Nicholas Permakoff of the Australian 4th Battalion threw away his rifle, climbed out of his trench and walked towards the German army lines. A miner from Dubbo in New South Wales, originally from Russia, Permakoff had volunteered for the 'Great War' but his wish to fight had evaporated after the Russian Revolution.Instructed by his platoon commander to shoot him at any sign of 'treachery', Permakoff was fatally wounded him as he walked off to end his war.

Peter Stanley notes, in Bad Characters, that Permakoff has been omitted from the National Roll of Honour which commemorates Australia's war dead. Infected with 'Bolshevism', Permakoff had transgressed the fundamental tenet of war - killing the 'enemy' - an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the Army Council, which "cautioned against forming 'Soldiers and Workers' Councils on the Petrograd model'".

Socialist revolution did not, in the end, get going in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) but Australia's citizen-volunteer soldiers posed constant challenges to military authority. Malingering, shirking, going absent without leave, desertion, riot, strikes, protests, mutiny, self-inflicted wounds - the AIF was bedeviled by these individual and collective acts of dissent to a war which had rapidly lost its romantic lustre after the horrors of Gallipoli and the trench warfare of the Western Front.

Senior commanders lamented their soldiers' working class tradition of standing up for their rights. One Australian General complained to his British counterpart about the 'national democratic outlook in Australia' which means Australian soldiers 'are not easily made submissible to formal discipline'. One Australian Captain had to explain to British officers that Australian soldiers 'do not come from a country where the labourer touches his hat to the squire'.

Aubrey Herbert, a British Member of Parliament who served as an interpreter at Gallipoli, was amazed that, even on active service, Australian soldiers held that 'the 'eight hours day' was almost a holy principle'. Union membership in Australia was 40% at the time and trade unionists-turned-soldiers treated their army bosses as they would any other employer, using the civilian tools of "political and industrial protest including meetings, rallies and strikes".

Soldiers' diaries, forbidden in the AIF, "reveal what the official record does not" - an extensive catalogue of "collective demonstrations". Soldiers at training camps protested over pay, drill hours, leave and rations. Troop transport ships saw soldiers refuse to break strikes by their civilian coal stokers, after a 'socialistic agitator', as one diary records in the case of the Kanowna, made a 'great speech', whilst the captain of the Royal Navy cruiser which forced the soldiers on the Boonahback into line, described the Australian troops as 'saturated with Trades Unionism'.

Australian soldiers also took direct action against unjust military discipline, for example forcibly releasing soldiers who had been given 'field punishment' (the cruel and degrading 'Crucifixion' that bound a soldier to a cartwheel, stake or fence) for minor infractions at an army camp in Egypt. Many military rules were a petty charade to enforce soldiers' subordination to officers and were thus treated with disdain- saluting was a perpetual battleground and it became virtually extinct amongst Australian soldiers.

The AIF also experienced collective resistance to war through 'combat refusal'. In 1918, sixty men of the 59th Battalion, suffering from fatigue and nervous strain, refused to advance on German lines as ordered, whilst all bar one of the 119 man 'D' Company in the 1st Battalion, also 'tired of the war', refused to advance on the Hindenberg Line after five days of continuous fighting.

Australians resented army life and, having learnt in the civilian workplace that hurrying only gets you more work to do, they resorted to slacking off, putting in minimum effort and feigning illness. Absenteeism was endemic with over 20,000 Australians court-martialed for absenteeism in the last year and a half of the war.

Many sought a more permanent escape. Hundreds of AIF soldiers were convicted of desertion whilst at least 700 Australians committed self-inflicted shooting wounds. Another hundred, "men on the edge of sanity, driven to self-destruction by the trauma of war" chose suicide.

Some turned their weapons on their military bosses ('fragging', as it was to become known in the US military during the Vietnam War). Stanley recounts one Australian Lance-Corporal who was convicted of killing his Sergeant by tossing a grenade into his dugout in France after the Sergeant had reprimanded him over a dirty rifle and called him a bastard.

Australian working class culture, however, was flawed by racism and, with a frenzy of reactionary patriotism in parliament and press, the Australian army experience was marked by racial and ethnic violence.

After capturing the German colony of New Guinea, Australian troops "reminded confused Melanesians that different white men now ruled the villages and plantations" and theft, arson and assaults followed, whilst in Egypt, "many Australians behaved with the disdain 'white men' felt for what they saw as inferior races". One soldier wrote of how 'we thrash the black fellows with whips ... every nigger who is impudent to a soldier gets a hiding'.

"Rarely", says Stanley, "were such assaults punished". Some forms of indiscipline were, apparently, quite acceptable to Australia's military authorities. The murder of German prisoners of war by Australian soldiers was also neither infrequent nor considered a war crime.

Racism also led fifty soldiers in Australia, in 1916, to join an anti-German riot in St Kilda in Victoria, whilst a protest march over grievances by soldiers at a training camp in Liverpool in NSW saw the windows of Greek fish shops smashed under the impression they were Turkish.

Sexism, too, was prevalent amongst Australian men in khaki and, despite officially sanctioned and heavily patronised brothels and prostitutes, sexual assaults, including gang rape, occurred frequently. There was a high level of other crime (theft, embezzlement, drunken violence) in the Australian army, only some of it the work of hardened criminal recruits.

With its terror and the prospect of imminent death or mutilation, war subjected Australian soldiers to inhuman strain. With 60,000 dead, and 150,000 wounded, the AIF's total casualty rate was an extraordinarily high 70%. It was not so much 'bad characters', as the army labeled its misbehavers, but the very character of war which turned many men bad.

Stanley has compiled a necessary corrective to what he calls the "romantic nationalist mystique" that surrounds the Australian military. Central to this worship, and sanitisation, of Australia at war has been the idolisation of the Australian 'digger', a cult which can admit no trace of industrial or political dissent whilst any anti-social behaviour is recast as a benign "mischievous larrikinism". This myth of the 'digger' is skewed history, argues Stanley, and the portrayal of war as "glorious or heroic" is sheer "foolishness".

Stanley, however, has a strong "regard for the AIF" and his critique of the Australian military is therefore blunted. Stanley wants to redeem all soldiers as honoured ANZACs, even the 'bad characters'. They also served, he believes, who only assaulted the 'Gyppos', raped 13-year-old girls and stole from civilians whilst the absconders are roped back into the war they tried to escape from.

Crucially, Stanley's framework does not question the purpose of war and missing from his book is an analysis of those soldiers who went beyond trade union consciousness and returned as pacifists and socialists, as opponents of the political and capitalist authors of the 'Great War'.

Within these limits, however, Stanley's history, by bringing from official obscurity those whom the war turned 'bad', has the invaluable merit of showing the reality of war, an ugly hell which turned men into criminals, or, as we can take hope from, rebels.