Page 12 - eMuse Vol.9 No.07_Neat

So when American dive bombers returning from a raid on a Jap-
anese base were caught in an electrical storm and lost their bear-
ings, there was no radio station to guide them to safety. Lost, they
ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all 32 men.
Colebatch quotes RAAF serviceman James Ahern, who served
Australia’s on Green Island, where Australians had to listen impotently to the
doomed American radio calls. The grief was compounded by the
fact that had it not been for greed and corruption on the Australian
Secret War Waterfront such lives would not have been needlessly lost.
Almost every Australian warship was targeted throughout the
war, with little intervention from an enfeebled Prime Minister Cur-
The Traitors Within . . . tin. There was the deliberate destruction by wharfies of vehicles

There was a time, during the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries and equipment, theft of food being loaded for soldiers, snap strikes,
when the workplace was not safe, in fact it was often downright go-slows, and, demands for danger money for loading biscuits.
dangerous, the hours were unreasonably long, and, the wages Then there were the coal strikes which pushed down coal pro-
were pathetically low. Children as young as four years of age were duction between 1942 and 1945 despite the war emergency. There
forced to work in these same substandard conditions. Exploitation were few a honourable attempts to resist union leaders, such as
of the worker was at a criminal level. the women working in a small arms factory in Orange, NSW, who
In a long and often bitter struggle, the trade union movement refused to strike and pelted union leaders with tomatoes and eggs.
was born and it fought for better working conditions and fair pay. This is a tale of the worst of Australia amid the best, the valour
Because the long overdue “fair go” was eventually won, for many a of our soldiers in New Guinea providing our last line of defence
grateful worker the union could do no wrong. against Japanese, only to be forced onto starvation rations and go
But human nature is such that sometimes power corrupts. easy on the ammo because the strikes by the wharfies back home
Along with improved working conditions many unions became prevented supplies from reaching them.
quite influentual. There are unions that have lost track of why they A planned rescue of Australian POWs in Borneo late in the war
were formed in the first place. They have adopted agendas of their had to be abandoned, writes Colebatch, because a wharf strike in
own that were/are contrary to the best interests of the workers and Brisbane meant the ships had no heavy weapons.
their nation. There was no act too low for the unionists. For instance, in
This book review is a revelation of union actions many of us 1941, hundreds of soldiers on board a ship docked in Freemantle
don’t want to know about. entrusted personal letters to wharfies who offered to post them for
Wally beer money. The letters never arrived.
At one point in 1942 a US Army colonel became so frustrated
Perth Lawyer, Hal Colebatch, has done the nation a service with at the refusal of Townsville wharfies to load munitions unless paid
his ground breaking book “Australia’s Secret War” telling the story quadruple time, he ordered his men to throw the unionists into the
of union bastardry during World War II. This timely new book re- water and load the guns themselves.
veals the union movement’s role in one of the most shameful peri- In Adelaide, American soldiers fired sub-machine guns at whar-
ods of Australian history. fies deliberately dropping their aircraft engines from great heights.
Using diary entries, letters and interviews with key witnesses, Australian soldiers had to draw bayonets to stop the same Adelaide
he has pieced together with forensic precision the tale of how Aus- wharfies from stealing food meant for troops overseas.
tralia’s unions sabotaged the war effort, how wharfies vandalised, You will read this book with mounting fury. Colebatch offers
harrassed, and, robbed Australian troop ships, and probably cost various explanations for the treasonous behaviour of the unions.
lives. What wharfies did to Australian troops — and their na- Many of the leaders were communists obsessed with class warfare.
tion’s war effort — between 1939 and 1945 is nothing short of Fervent identity politics led them to believe they were victims, and
an abomination . that servicemen and women were puppets of capitalism whose
They did the same thing in Sydney during the Vietnam War, lives were of no consequence.
e.g., an example I can well remember is that the Sydney wharfies Contrary to popular belief, strikes and sabotage continued to
stole all the vast and expensive tool kits that went with each of the the end of the war, even after the Soviet Union became an ally,
Centurion tanks as they were loaded on board a ship for Vietnam. writes Colebatch, who contends that the Australian left may have
They had refused the tanks until they were taught to drive them wanted to undermine the military in preparation for revolution af-
from the tank transporters when they arrived on the wharfs, (a ter the war.
very short distance) to the edge of the docks, which obviously gave Whatever the reasons for the defective morality of these union-
them the chance to steal the many thousands of dollars of tools, ists who sabotaged our war effort, the traitors have never been
which had to be replaced urgently by air to Vietnam. brought to account. This story has been largely suppressed for sev-
These people still have not been brought to account for this or enty years because the Left have successfully controlled the narra-
earlier actions during WW II . tive of history.
One of the most obscene acts occured in October 1945. At the
end of the war Australian soldiers were released from Japanese Editor’s Footnote:
prison camps. They were half dead, starving and desparate for Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the
home. But when the British aircraft carrier HMS Speaker brought editor or the readers’. It is presented as a point of view that some
them into Sydney Harbour, the wharfies went on strike. For 36 may not know exists. I sincerely thank the anonymous author and
hours, the soldiers were forced to remain on board, tantalisingly contributor for presenting this point of view
close to home. This final act of cruelty from their country-men was
their thanks for all their sacrifice. Wally
Colebatch coolly recounts outrage after outrage. Their were
radio valves pilfered by waterside workers in Townsville which pre- a|b
vented a new radar station at Green Island from operating.
12 eMuse July 2020