F I NAL WORDS BEFORE SHIPPING OFF TO HELL
After many rejections, a chirpy Vallance Shaw told his mate he was finally going to war. He didn’t know where he was being posted. He didn’t know it was a doomed mission
Val Shaw picked up his cheap fountain pen. He wanted to tell his dear friend, Jack Patterson, about the unlikely set of events which had plonked him near Sorrento, where he gazed at the boats at anchor and the petticoats on the main street. “Dear Patto,” he began writing. “Since I last saw your honourable self this little world of mine has been disturbed.”
Shaw was 23, an employee at the Argus, one of the city’s big metro newspapers in the 1940s. He itched to serve a country which fretted about the Japanese march southwards.
It appears that his eyesight was poor. Shaw had tried to enlist in the air force, and the army, and the navy. The armed services needed men, urgently, but they did not want Vallance Shaw.
Patterson, a cadet journalist, understood such exercises in dashed hope. He wanted to be a pilot, but had been rejected for flying for high blood pressure.
Shaw had refused to give up, he wrote to his friend. He had ripped out the pink pages of the telephone directory, and tried every shipping agency in Melbourne. He would join the merchant navy.
But he hadn’t been to sea, it was explained to him, again and again. He was not a member of the Seamen’s Union.
Shaw tramped down William St, to try yet another shipping agency. A Norwegian ship needed a deck hand and cabin boy for a sixmonth trip which would take in Hong Kong, Africa, America and Britain.
This was his ticket. All Shaw needed was a passport. He had photos taken in Flinders Lane, and popped into the Argus building, still preserved today at the northern end of the CBD, to say goodbye.
The next day, he went to the Immigration Office. The “cold and officious bastards” there refused to process his passport. There wasn’t enough time, they said. Anyway, Norwegian sailors could man Norwegian ships. Shaw “could have wept”.
As he wrote, the rebuttal proved fortuitous – the Norwegian ship was soon to be torpedoed and sunk by the “Yellow Bellies up north”.
And still, Shaw would not be put off. He returned, again, to the Australian Imperial Force office. Good news, finally. He could be enlisted in the postal unit.
But the postal unit, it turned out, was fully staffed. Shaw was to join the artillery as a clerk.
Shaw had signed up at Royal Park on November 20, 1941. But things had taken an odd jag. As he wrote to Patterson: “Through some bungling – not uncommon in the Army – I found myself in the infantry and started my final leave within a week.”
He was going to war, a belated inclusion in the 2/21 battalion, which had trained together in Darwin for many months amid shortages of equipment, supplies and ammunition. Shaw didn’t seem to know where he was being sent or what he was supposed to do.
But army brass did, and many senior Australian officers openly feared that the 2/21st battalion posting was a mission doomed to condemn hundreds if not thousands of Australian men.
Shaw had rushed to put his affairs in order – to that end, he was writing to ask if Patterson would serve as an executor to his will. He probably wrote to his mother, Lily, at the house in Kew, and his brother Jack.
There was jauntiness in his voice, as if the generous loops of his cursive script described his excitement. He had made the most of his limited freedom; “I contrived to find happiness with a nurse from the Fairfield Hospital – I did.”
Yet Shaw had also walked the main street of Mornington, he told Patterson, and come across the avenue of trees for the fallen men of World War 1. They had served in the infantry, machine gun and artillery battalions, even the Camel Corps.
The tribute “impressed me very much”.
“It all looks so very beautiful and peaceful,” Shaw wrote of the Mornington Peninsula foreshore, in the closing days of 1941.
“But over everything there is a strange vague feeling as if sitting on a time bomb and waiting for it to go off.
“I do not expect to be at Sorrento for long …” “Here’s to a kind 1942.”
As Private Shaw wrote to Patterson in camp from his Blairgowie tent, a career colonel and decorated soldier was writing a letter to Army Headquarters.
Gull Force commander Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Roach was tasked with leading a defence of Ambon, a small island to the north of Australia.
Today, Ambon is an Indonesian wonderland rinsed in friendliness and spices.
Then, it was a rundown Dutch outpost critical to Australia’s future. It boasted a deep harbour and two airfields.
If the Japanese seized Ambon, Australia’s mainland was imperilled.
Gull Force included the men of the 2/21st battalion. The bulk of them arrived at Ambon, now under imminent threat, on December 17, 1941. Roach would cite a near absence of automatic guns, artillery or naval and air support in asking for his men to be evacuated.
He had spoken of “unpardonable stagnation” in the planning for the Ambon campaign. In his late December letter, he spoke of his “feeling of disgust and more than a little concern at the way in which we have been ‘dumped’ at this outpost position”.
By January 13, he raged about the “purposeless sacrifice” which awaited. Army HQ in Melbourne responded with cynical indifference and stripped Roach of the Ambon