War experiences are filled with such a sweep of human emotions and deep fears that they are difficult to share honestly with anyone. Few people arc able to fully express or explain the totality of their experience. The exclusive and cultish behaviour of veterans is designed to exclude those who were not there, but more importantly, veterans are drawn together on particular days to try and recapture some of those intense forms of reality which were so starkly revealed in battle. Intensities that are rarely part of ordinary life.

Few soldiers will publicly admit it but many thoroughly enjoyed their war and would gladly live it again. War correspondents, like George Johnston, have sometimes been very honest and admitted the special life they had during a war. To soldiers their great reward was to have survived – this in itself marks one as special even if it is only to one’s self. The survivors do mourn the dead with deep sincerity since they best know what the dead have missed.

War is one of the most specially individual events in human life. Yet it fosters one of the most powerful forms of group unity and comradeships known. But this complex web of human action cannot be given a complete account or history. There are too many terrible truths that can only be half told. Each individual, each group, each leader, each family, each community and nation has its own history of the war. And for all of these there are the complementary histories held by all those who were involved, be they allies or enemies.

In all the books here reviewed there is much revealed about men and nations, but there is much to caution us to be slow in judging the merits or defects of the human institutions of war and peace.

In a global sense war and peace are the two great constants of human life. One ought not to be regarded as more normal than the other. Most Australians, nevertheless, consider war as an aberration, that normally happens far away. Australia has never had a civil war or started a war. Australians fail, as Jane Ross shows in Myth of the Digger, to exhibit either militaristic personalities or military minds. There has been no strong militaristic tradition and Australians tend to make poor regular or regimented soldiers. Why then have our troops been involved in so many wars so far from home? Why do Australians make pragmatic, receptive and innovative fighters?

George Johnston’s War Diary 1942, his largely autobiographical novel My Brother Jack (1964), and his many other books and articles seek to answer many questions about himself and other Australians. He seeks to unpick the Australian penchant for creating powerful national myths about our heroic failures. Johnston questions the role and credibility of those who report the war, the place of the non-combatant, the personal nature of war, the enjoyment of war, the amateur approach of Australians to war, the power of war to unify and divide and the way war forces individuals to assess the importance of things and people.

The war forced Johnston to confront a number of personal dilemmas. The pressure of war demanded that men enlist, especially so as the war moved toward Australia, but for Johnston self-doubt remained even after he became a war correspondent. He found that as a correspondent he did not have the companionship of servicemen. He felt a loneliness and detachment which has its impact in War Diary 1942 as he reports, in a flat and almost emotionless tone, the terrible and grave peril faced by Australia.

Johnston never had the clear-cut sense of historic mission which pervades Bean’s diary Gallipoli Correspondent. Bean sought with all his skill and courage to get all the facts and this volume is only one selection from almost three hundred volumes he recorded during the First World War. To Bean there was a special trust to accurately record the extraordinary deeds of the young men of a young nation.

Johnston has no doubts that he is involved in a just war which must be waged to put an end to German and Japanese fascism. He perceptively notes that the war will, however, put an end to the old plantation-colonial set who have so exploited the native peoples of Papua-New Guinea. But the reporting of the war has many problems. In reporting he can improve the morale of the Australian troops and people and possibly damage the efforts and will of the enemy.

The dilemma is how the war should be reported. The answer in 1942 was clear. So poor was the northern defence of Australia, so slowly had preparation been made, so niggardly had the supply of weapons, aircraft and troops been to New Guinea and so savage were the attacks of the Japanese that Johnston was sure the dishonesty was desperately necessary. Absolute truth in reporting a war may endanger us more than our enemies.

Johnston exhibits considerable rage, in the Diary, when he recounts the panic with which preparations are made to resist the Japanese invasion of Papua-New Guinea. He is particularly angry at the time and opportunities that had been wasted. But this fails to answer the difficult question of how much democratic nations can or should spend on defence. Non-militaristic Australians have refused to pay anything but token defence forces. Indeed in 1942, in the time of greatest threat to Australia, we as a nation were less than enthusiastic in our support of the war. It is perhaps partly a deep-seated guilt that has made our belief in ANZUS so strong. The Diary lacks details of the men and women involved in the New Guinea campaigns. Johnston very briefly mentions individuals but provides little idea of the nature of the war being fought on the ground. Sir David Hay’s full account of the 2/6^th Infantry Battalion in Nothing Over Us is likely to become a model of scholarship and presentation for unit histories. Hay provides, as does John Bellair’s Amateur Soldiers, the detail, the character and personalities of the Australians who fought. The essential nature of the Australian troops was that they were amateurs – but particularly gifted amateurs who quickly developed and applied the qualities that Ross has noted make Australians good fighters. The key to the Australian’s approach was “figuring out the best way” to beat the enemy at the least cost to our men.

The war in Papua-New Guinea was a war a long way from Sydney or Melbourne, yet it was a war on Australian territory and compared to battles of the First World War it was a war against our homeland. To Johnston the Japanese bombing of Port Moresby gave the war an immediacy that was “no longer the mythic far adventure” which had been his inheritance from his parents’ involvement in the Great War. But even so there remained the problem of the myth that had been created around the Gallipoli and Western Front campaigns compared to the almost dismissive reaction of the popular imagination to the New Guinea campaign.

The mythologies of Gallipoli were begun even while the campaign was being fought. Tom Gardner, the central figure in Six-Bob-A-Day Tourist, was alarmed, not just at the distorted information given to the people in Australia, but more at the ways in which what he and others had done at Gallipoli was being taken from them and given new form and new meaning. He progressively became “fed up with the war”, as he saw what happened at the front in France and in base areas in Britain. His sister was an important figure in the anti-war movement in Melbourne and he found that there was much to justify her work. But the great engine of the war was Germany and Gardner was unable to resolve the problem of how one can have a worthwhile peace while the German war machine remained undefeated. Janet Morice’s Six-Bob-A-Day Tourist offers far more explanations for Australian involvement in the Great War than the title suggests and provides some elements to the answer Johnston has for Australia’s military history, but the book is too didactic in its treatment of the peace movement.

One reason developed by Johnston and others for Australia’s enthusiasm for overseas wars was that we have been unable to come to terms with living in the interior of our continent and continue to live in tight coastal enclaves. Social, spiritual and economic pressures create an impulse to leave to right wrongs in other lands. Although we have little real enthusiasm to live in the bush, Australians imagine they have been part of the bush even if it is only the result of seven adventure-packed days on tour. The view that war is not possible in Australia is naive but the impulse to fight wars beyond our shores remains a good strategy. It will never be easy, however, to choose which are the proper wars to fight.

In World War I a German victory would have forced Australia to accommodate German interests and power in the South West Pacific and our relationships with Britain would have been drastically changed. In World War Two the military invasion of Papua-New Guinea, the attacks on Australian shipping and the bombing of many coastal cities brought the reality of war to the Australian homeland. Yet a paradox lies at the heart of the reaction by Australians to these wars.

The remote defeat in a totally futile campaign at Gallipoli was used to build a myth that this was the birth or creation of a nation. The more proximate and vital victories in Papua-New Guinea, where Australian troops inflicted the first two defeats on Japanese troops in land warfare, are all but ignored in popular imagination. Great distance has lent power to our myths of national identity while real threats to our peaceful land and society have been emptied of their content. It may be that we still refuse to face the problem of knowing ourselves.