Arguably, the most ubiquitous and perhaps the most neglected unit of the Australian Army’s World War II New Guinea campaigns was the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU). The Army History Unit deserves commendation for sponsoring this latest, excellent volume in the Australian Army History Series, especially as at a time when the need for a modern civil affairs capability in the ADF is readily apparent.

Alan Powell is Emeritus Professor of History at the Northern Territory University. His other contributions to Australian military history have included the highly regarded War by Stealth, a study of Australians in the Allied Intelligence Bureau.

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.

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