New Guinea Forces
At the outbreak of the Pacific War, Australia
administered two territories in New Guinea quite separately.
Papua was an Australian territory, acquired from Britain
in 1906 and 
maintained at absolutely minimal cost to the
Australian taxpayer. The Territory of New Guinea had been
captured from Germany in 1914 and was administered as a
League of Nations Mandate. Thanks to large gold
discoveries and an expatriate-controlled plantation industry,
New Guinea was wealthier but was administered mainly
in the interests of the expatriate community. The Papuan
Administration was largely indifferent to the expatriate
community and pursued a remarkably benevolent and
paternalistic policy towards the Papuan community; in New
Guinea, the reverse was generally the case.
History tells us that Australia and the Army in particular
were quite unprepared for the Japanese challenge in Papua
New Guinea. This was certainly true of the two civil
administrations. In New Guinea—as with the small Rabaul
garrison—a sauve qui peut mentality prevailed. An
excessively legalistic policy promptly disarmed the civil
police and, in many cases, simply abandoned them.
In Papua, a clash between the civil administration and
the Army led to the dismissal of the former and the
establishment of martial law. Some of the field personnel
of the Administration were told that they were out of a job;
others were simply ignored.
For its part, the Army with no experience of military
government had made no preparations for administering
a population assumed to number some hundreds of
thousands, many of them in enemy-controlled territory.
Its most urgent task was to stem the Japanese advance
in country largely beyond vehicular transport. For this,
they needed labourers (carriers) to logistically support
the trained troops and supplies that were slowly
beginning to trickle in to Port Moresby.
The 8th Military District Commander was Major General
Basil Morris, a regular gunner not very highly regarded
by his peers. Morris did, however, try to make a silk purse
from a very tatty sow’s ear. Part of the manufacturing
process was to establish ANGAU.
ANGAU’s priority task was to recruit labourers to
carry for the Army. Somewhat to its surprise, the Army
found that the transport infrastructure of the New Guinea
of 1942 was almost totally unfamiliar with the internal
combustion or steam engine. Supply from, and
evacuation to, bridgeheads, airheads and roadheads for
the forces in contact with the enemy depended upon the
broad backs and stamina of thousands of ill-nourished,
poorly clothed, usually unpaid and overworked Papuans
and New Guineans. These were normally conscripted in
a fairly ruthless process that ANGAU was only slowly
able to ameliorate as the emergency diminished.
Powell suggests that this labour conscription was
unfair if only because the people of Papua New Guinea
owed little or no loyalty to Australia. That may be but it
can also be said that Australia owed an obligation of
just treatment to the people of Papua New Guinea and
that defeating the Japanese was the best way to achieve
that objective. Indeed, this is the strongest argument for
the late war operations in the northwest, New Britain
and Bougainville, criticised by many as unnecessary and
wasteful. Powell’s discussion of the loyalty question is
substantial and well balanced.
After the Japanese defeats in Papua, ANGAU steadily
developed as a broad-based military government. Powell
notes that the labour administration section always
accounted for around half of ANGAU’s total strength of
366 officers and 1660 other ranks, not including the 2700
strong police or the still larger indigenous labour force.
ANGAU was also responsible for such tasks as civil
law enforcement, district administration, health services
and coastal shipping. Many of the key personnel,
especially in the District Services Branch, were former
administration officials but, equally, many were drawn
from volunteers sought from Army units.
The District Services personnel - the ‘kiaps’ - and
their colleagues of the Royal Papuan Constabulary who
best knew the country and its peoples were increasingly
drawn into active military operations against the
Japanese as advisers, scouts and guides. ANGAU was
partly responsible for the administration of the alphabet
soup of irregular units that operated in enemy-occupied
territory. Indeed, many of the personnel were so
interchangeable that some of my own superiors in post-
war PNG freely admitted that they were never quite sure
whom they worked for at any given time.
Powell describes a wide range of ANGAU operations
as well as devoting two excellent chapters to ANGAU’s
people, one on the Australians and the other on the Papua
New Guineans. He touches only briefly on the role of
Colonel Alf Conlon’s Directorate of Research and Civil
Affairs, an organisation that played the principal role in
establishing the comparatively radical post-war national
policy for Papua New Guinea as a single entity. This is a
pity but it may well have been considered outside the scope
of his study. Nonetheless, the job was done largely by the
Army under the benevolent direction of the Commander-
in-Chief, General Blamey, often in spite of the traditional
political indifference to Papua New Guinea. From the
Army’s perspective, this study of ANGAU reinforces the
not well-understood view that ending the fighting does not
guarantee the peace.
Professor Powell has given us an excellent and balanced
study of a unit that was as well known as any to those who
served in New Guinea but the scope of whose operations
was seriously under-estimated, both at the time and since.
Sources:
The Third Force: ANGAU’s New Guinea War
1942–46’, Alan Powell, ‘Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2003
Book review by Michael O'Connor
Australian Army War Diaries - Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit