Scorched Earth Read online

  • To attack him, through fire and destruction.

  • To obstruct and to impede him, and dislodge his foothold.

  • To slow up his advance.

  • To leave him nothing to loot and remove to his own country.

  • To deny him everything in our country.

  The Code assumed that civilians would be evacuated in stages from the most vulnerable areas (or those the Army had abandoned) to areas where the Army was still in control. Women with young children and the very old and ill could move to ‘fortress’ areas immediately, but others should continue living and working as normal, leaving only on orders from the Army.

  As an area was evacuated, its key resources would be disabled or destroyed. The Code identified all such resources, their locations, the best methods for their destruction, and the authorities responsible for destroying them. It recommended that special Scorched Earth Support Squads be set up to instruct civilians in the Code and help them prepare for evacuation and dispose of property such as boats, vehicles and tools (Chapter 12). The first squads were established and in training by mid-April 1942.11

  Despite its name, the Code regarded total devastation as a last-ditch measure to be used only in dire emergency. As Swain wrote: ‘This policy is called “scorched earth”, although normally the denial will be selective rather than devastative … the denial command will be issued by the Army only if danger is imminent and enemy pressure critical.’ Denial would take place in stages: first ‘tactical demolition—jetties, bridges, railways, roads and telegraph’, then ‘parched earth destruction—oil wells and supplies, coastal craft, motor vehicles and foodstuffs’. The ‘third degree’ was ‘scorched earth destruction’, which ‘extends to everything!’

  Various government departments were asked to develop scorched earth strategies—the Mines Department prepared one for coal mines; Main Roads helped the Army with evacuation plans and road construction; the Department of Road Transport prepared a memorandum on petrol and oil destruction; Public Works and the Maritime Services Board devised a strategy for wharves and jetties; Agriculture set up a Primary Industries Evacuation committee and prepared denial plans for stock and crops; the Maritime Services Board and Fisheries advised the Navy on watercraft; and Forestry looked at timber supply.

  An important principle of the Commonwealth scorched earth policy was that in the event of an invasion the entire nation would be mobilised. Every citizen and worker would have a part to play. Many of the scorched earth measures depended on individuals sharing their local knowledge and expertise, and putting the collective defence ahead of private interests. Sacrifices would have to be made if the invaders were to be repelled. As Swain declared: ‘in Total War—the War for Survival—the citizen is no longer a detached neutral or a chattel, but the involved majority, deeply concerned in events and for victory’.

  Over a thousand people in Ku-ring-gai Shire were in training in the Citizens’ Guerrilla Force. Pictured are members of the Turramurra Force.

  Harold Swain, the chairman of the Scorched Earth subcommittee, was appointed not so much because of his professional background (he was New South Wales Forestry Commissioner in 1942), but because of his force of character, his prodigious organisational ability, and his passion for the cause of civil defence. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography makes no reference to his role in developing the Scorched Earth Code, but it notes that he was an ardent advocate of forests who was confident in his own opinions and impatient with those who disagreed.1 A tribute by Peter Holzworth noted that Swain ‘had an ego the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground … His stoushes were legendary! … he was right and everybody else was wrong.’ But staff and bush friends admired him for his defence of forests and forestry.2

  In the document he sent to Premier William McKell in January 1942 (reproduced in this chapter), Swain asserted that ‘no part of our coasts can be regarded as immune from bombings, shellings or actual landings’. He went on to detail what would likely follow such landings, invoking the examples of Korea, Manchuria, China, the Philippines and Malaya. Australians, he said, had to be prepared for invasion and its horrific consequences; the Japanese would make no distinction between soldiers and civilians. That meant civilians must collaborate closely with the military in a ‘defence-in-depth’ that could only succeed if the entire population was thoroughly prepared: informed, trained and organised. Every last man and woman must be part of the war effort, from soldiers and militiamen to police officers, stockmen, doctors, taxi drivers, firefighters, engineers, boot makers, carrier pigeon owners and cooks. All belonged, in his scheme, to one of the ‘Ten National Emergency Services’, which must stand ready to fight ‘with tin helmet, gas mask and rifle (or grenade, or butcher’s knife or club) at the ready’.

  He envisaged that while the armed forces engaged in battle, civilian guerrillas would assist them from the rear, supplying them with food and intelligence, serving as scouts and messengers, manning tank traps and roadblocks. These guerrilla bushrangers could live ‘aboriginally’ on rabbits, birds and game, fish and eels and boiled kurrajong roots, and improvise their own weapons—‘an ironbark spike might do as much damage as a bayonet’.

  Swain assessed and identified evacuation routes from the coast to the interior. He drew up ‘battle orders’ for civilians, who would be formed into ‘Civilian Collaboration Columns’. These orders included digging air-raid shelters, watching potential enemy landing places, keeping cars filled with fuel, making identification discs and preparing an evacuation kit. Specific instructions were added for workers and business owners: grocers were to prepare stocks of flour, sugar, tobacco and soap; farmers would ready horse carts for use in an evacuation; blacksmiths would make hand grenade containers; cooks and waitresses would establish mobile canteens.

  In Swain’s all-encompassing vision, no adult citizen was exempt, and none was unimportant. ‘EVERYONE must be used,’ he wrote. And there was no time to waste: ‘Every citizen will get busy at once.’

  COPY No.31.

  26.1.42.

  TOTAL WAR - AND TOTAL CITIZEN COLLABORATION

  ø/ RECONNAISSANCE!

  Australia is the British arsenal of the East; and a Pacific bastion on the southern route between U.S.A. and Japan.

  It becomes therefore of considerable military interest to Japan - and no part of our coasts can be regarded as immune from bombings, shellings, or actual landings.

  The invasion method will most likely be initial infiltration at many points, using our own fishing boats and launches to swarm up and down the coast, projecting spearheads through ascertained lines of weakness, spreading through the forests, scattering points of entry like sparks from a bush fire, advancing by looting, creating confusion and stampede, using our own people against us, converging upon the core of resistance in the industrial concentrations of our cities.

  Our answer must be to counter every inch of the way - with the entire population mobilised as one army of essential war functioning, with every unit knowing his or her battle duty.

  We must delay, delay, DELAY - knowing that help will come.

  There must be no evacuation - as such; but no Australian - and no alien - must fall into enemy hands; and there must be neither water, food, nor supply in this country for the Japanese.

  Total war is unbridled license: and complete spoilation.

  Massacre, torture, ransom, pillaging, vice monopolies, and all types of racketeering are features of the Japanese concept of making the occupied country pay for the upkeep of the Japanese army and gendarmerie, to build up the private fortunes of its army chiefs and to provide pleasant looting for the peasant soldier. Women become chattels and the victims of unspeakable beastliness; men the slaves. The Japanese humor will sometimes pay for services rendered - in Australian notes printed in Tokio.

  This is authenticated.

  What has happened in Korea, Manchuria and China is being repeated in Malaya and the Philippines. Even in Russia the technique of the German
forces is identical. Witness - the Russian official category.

  Further, the Japanese will not forget the White Australia policy!

  We are assured by authority that these things will happen here at any moment; as to the where we have no inkling.

  Planning for citizen collaboration-at-war suffers the lag resulting from unbelief in the incredible; it remains for the planner, even against his own incredibility, to labor at a plan so decentralised, self-starting and all-encompassing, that it becomes an automatically acceptable control and guide to every person at the sudden moment when the incredible becomes horrified belief, and imminent stampede, and the enemy’s aim of civil confusion is precipitated upon our defending forces.

  Witness what happened at Penang - where incredible civilian incredibility resulted in disaster.

  The military plan must apportion the civilian operation.

  This war is not a war confined politely to opposing armies, with civilians as harmless and unharmed observers.

  Uniform or no uniform - and of the Japanese soldiery in Malaya only 50% wore uniforms - the entire civilian population is in World War II equally with its soldiery.

  The passing of war conventions must be believed. We have seen that the declaration of an open city has lost its old-time value. We know that civil populations will be enslaved to manufacture munitions for the slaughter of their own kith and kin.

  Only raw realism can energise us to the realism of total war. It is just plain Horror and Murder. And as we expect no mercy let us as civilians, even though unarmed, slaughter the armed “yellow dwarfs” with our own “tooth and claw” in our own familiar forests.

  Wintringham3 has told us what was accomplished in Spain by civilians.

  At least we can outnumber the potential invading force.

  ø/ NOT EVACUATION BUT DEFENCE-IN-DEPTH - WITH TOTAL CITIZEN COLLABORATION IN A MASTER PLAN.

  There have been, in the dim past of a week or two ago advocates of the policies both of “staying-put” and of “evacuation”.

  Wholesale evacuation in emergency of helpless civilian communities inland would cast impossible tasks upon a transport system weakened by petrol shortage; it would block the roads and hinder our fighting men in their life and death efforts; it would create impossible supply chaos behind the lines, and burden an unorganised water supply after a seven year drought; it would initiate disorganisation and a defeatist morale.

  It would suit the enemy.

  There are 2,700,000 people in New South Wales, most of them on the coast; and more than half of them in the hundred odd air miles between Kembla and Newcastle.

  We cannot evacuate from our Moscow and Leningrad - our cores of war production.

  Nor can we quite “stay-put” - as if at our peacetime stations.

  The policy of “staying-put” would leave a vast civil population passive and unhelpful in the way of our armies of production and defence; in the hands of the enemy this inert mass would become a hostage and would be used as such mercilessly by the Japanese soldiery.

  Our plan must be one neither of evacuation nor of staying-put; but one of organised military-civil defence-in-depth, in which the civil population becomes part of our war organisation within a MASTER PLAN for Total Citizen Collaboration in Total War.

  That total citizen collaboration is indispensable to victories is obvious upon reflection of the consequences of its complete absence in France and of its inadequacy in Malaya.

  Civil collaboration commenced in the Philippines when Filipino drivers smashed the cylinder heads of their motor buses rather than that the Japanese should requisition them for the conveyance of troops.

  In China, civil collaboration is called banditry - by the Japanese! In Russia it is called guerilla warfare, and was organised by a complete code.

  But plain citizens have many opportunities in war other than to take the available rifles out of the hands of their mates in uniform.

  In total war uniforms are of reduced significance - 50% of the Japanese soldiery in Malaya wore coolie disguises!

  In Malaya the Japanese were preceded by requisition parties which collected food, clothing, shoes, petrol, bicyles, cars, buses, and loot and commandeered boats for coastwise infiltrations.

  The plain citizen can see to it that such things do not happen here. But he needs to be organised to learn his part.

  Whilst the Army Chiefs in Australia are hard put to it to improvise a fighting force from raw recruits, it becomes a duty of civil Government to complete our citizen collaboration-at-war - and to plan it to the last dot of perfection.

  The Germans had ten years to work out such a plan: the Japanese have had since 1915, at least.

  We have a day or a week, or a month perhaps.-

  - And every succeeding moment will alter our attitude to this Plan until we are projected on to the ultimate -

  Until then every edition of a Master Plan will be out of date immediately it is drafted: but redrafts must flow continuously until the ultimate, the while implementation proceeds, and ordinarily sequential processes telescope.

  There needs to be an Editor-in-chief of the Master Plan who will incorporate and order the Sectional drafts of the specialist sub-editors as fast as they develop.

  Everything must be fit and time.

  To state a problem is to solve it.

  This problem is ramified to the nth degree.

  Those who have to state it will have the most arduous task in laboured thinking ever given to Australians to be done on time - but it will save a situation and build a new one in record time.

  For Defence-in-depth, there must be an instant acceleration of peace-time decentralisation policies! This in itself is a colossal duty, involving transfers of industry, but it is an integral factor of strategy.

  Necessity compels a straight relation to emergency, with every Australian accommodated at the essential post for which his peace time functioning fits him, knowing his job and ready to march.

  Vague and purposeless self-activity will not suffice!

  ø/ BATTLE STATIONS FOR ALL - THE TEN NATIONAL EMERGENCY SERVICES

  A modern civilisation is complex and cannot be reduced in modern war to the simple elements of a tribal war, viz (i) fighting men; (ii) serving women.

  The Minister for the War Organisation of Industry4 has told us that there is no such thing as a nonessential industry.

  Our military text books did not contemplate the incorporation of this complex civilisation in a fighting-supplying-marching army of the whole.

  The German and Japanese did!

  Before we can marshall it to war, we must know and accept its components and guard ourselves against the elemental temptation to revert to tribal simplicity.

  This is the purpose of Man Power Policy.

  One fighting man requires seven working men behind him.

  The principal battle stations of a war of 1942 - the ten actual National Emergency Services - are:

  1. The Fighting Forces - the A.I.F., R.A.A.F. and Militia - up to our capacity to modernly equip them!

  2. Civil Administration-at-War: Implementing the Master Plan, and its Local Action detail.

  The Police, Justice, Law, the Church, Banking and Finance, Forestry, Stock, Agriculture and other Government Departments functioning at war, Schools (children protection and supervision), Councils and Essential Services (Gas and Electricity regeneration and supply, water supply, sewerage and drainage) and so on - with their requisite clerical and accounting staffs.

  3. Auxiliary Defence:

  (i) The Volunteer Defence Corps: - Attested volunteers over military age or in reserved occupations, who drill and may fight as a section of the militia.

  (ii) Guerilla groups: Self active unattested men (and boys and women) who practice guerilla exercises, street fighting, obstruction etc.

  (iii) Town fire brigades; A.R.P. (N.E.S.) Organisation; Bush Fire Brigades – The latter manned by men who often have essential occupations to maintain at war, but who funct
ion in invasion against incendiarism, bombings and shellings.

  (iv) Labor Corps: Men, (and women) from both essential and non-essential industries, who in the course of invasion or war changes become detached from industry and become available, through National Service offices, as a pool from which can be drawn either reinforcements for the fighting forces, or labor for trench-digging, fortifications, bush firefighting, demolition, supply, the transfer of industry and so on.

  (v) Friendly aliens, or even prisoners-of-war may be organised within this group.

  (vi) Ambulances and Hospitals - including convalescent homes and mental hospitals with Doctors, Dentists, Opticians, Druggists, X-ray Operators, Undertakers, Cemetery Staffs, Artificial Limb Makers, Surgical Supplies, Red Cross, First Aid etc.

  4. Transport Services:

  (i) Shipping and ferries (plus pilot services, harbour works and light houses services, hire launches and fishing boats).

  (ii) Air transport.

  (iii) Railways and tramways.

  (iv) Road transport:

  (a) Cartage contractors and taxi-cabs.

  (b) Auxiliary road transport.

  (c) N.R.M.A., R.A.C.

  (d) Garages and Service Stations.

  (e) Oil depots.

  (v) Ship and boat builders.

  5. Communication and News Services:

  (i) Beam, cable and wireless.

  (ii) Post and telegraph.

  (iii) Radio Stations.

  (iv) Newspapers.

  (v) Printing, engraving, photography.

  (vi) Messenger services.

  (vii) Carrier pigeon owners.

  (viii) Auxiliaries.

  6. Commissariat:

  (1) Services:

  Canteens; hotels, restaurants, cafes, ham and beef shops, railway refreshment rooms, bakers, fishmongers, fruiterers, butchers, grocers, cooks, waitresses - all and more would be needed when homes are disrupted.

  (2) Primary production and processing:

  (a) Cattle and stock: dairying: sheep stations.

  (b) Wheat farmers.

  (c) Fishermen.