Read an extract from Soldiers and Aliens — a forgotten history

Four thousand Australian soldiers in World War II who signed up for service were never to fire a weapon. Their work was essential for the war effort, but they were ‘aliens’ – non-British subjects – many born in other countries. Largely forgotten, their contribution to Australia during World War II makes for an engrossing story and provides new insights into a critical period of Australian history.

Soldiers and Aliens is a forgotten history of the remarkable contribution of these non-British subjects to Australia in World War II, from respected folklorist, social historian and writer, June Factor. Read an extract from Soldiers and Aliens below!

June Factor

Introduction

How long does it take my father to persuade my mother that he should join the Australian Army? In June 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union; in December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Darwin not long afterwards. It’s time, my father says, for him to help defend us from a possible Japanese invasion. My parents have been in Australia for less than three years; they are struggling to master English and make a living. My father is barely 5 feet 4 inches in his socks, and weighs a modest 9 stone. But he is a persuasive man.

According to family folklore, my father writes twice to the Minister for the Army, offering his loyal service. When that fails, he persuades two more prominent members of the Melbourne Jewish community to sign a letter to the Minister with him. He is pleased when the reply this time is ‘Yes’: the government has decided to allow ‘friendly aliens’ to join the army. Soon, choice will be replaced by compulsion; military or civilian conscription is extended to all but neutral or suspect ‘enemy’ aliens.

On 16 May 1942—my mother’s thirty-third birthday—my father enlists in the Australian Military Forces. His army record book registers him as Szulem Faktor, and, under the heading ‘Restrictions Regarding Employment’, notes that he has ‘poor physique’. Very soon, he will be hauling large sacks of potatoes and helping move bombs and other ammunition at the Victorian–New South Wales railway junctions of Tocumwal and Albury. He becomes a soldier who never fires a gun. He wears the khaki uniform and the slouch hat until 15 September 1945; the next day, his young daughter’s birthday, he is in civvies again.

There are so many questions we wish we could ask the dead. I never thought to ask my father what the weather was like that first day, when he went to enlist at the Caulfield Racecourse in Melbourne. I never asked my mother what they promised each other before he walked away from our small, rented North Carlton cottage.

I have only fragmentary memories of my father in uniform—I was very young then. He was a great raconteur, but stories of his time in the army were rare; those early post-war years seem to have been filled with talk about how to bring the handful of family survivors from Europe to Australia.

While I never forgot my father the soldier, it was not until quite late in his life that I began to ask questions about those army years. The stories of one anti-fascist Polish Jew have led me to a multitude of tales peopled by Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Germans, Chinese … And to even more questions. How did these mostly non-naturalised men come to be in the Australian Army? What did the army want them for? What did it mean to be an ‘alien’ in the Australian Army? What did they do when not soldiering in their khaki uniforms, slouch hats and solid boots—the formal dress of all Australian soldiers? How did the locals view this polyglot collection of Diggers? How did the men with heavy foreign accents and unpronounceable names regard the locals? And, in the end, why does it all matter now?

‘Modern warfare is a potent generator of memories’, wrote the historian Catherine Merridale. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that contemporary historians have found ways to access and disseminate war memories on a scale previously unimaginable. Oral history has played a significant role in this process.

They were a heterogeneous lot, these men: scholars and peasants, musicians and factory workers, communists and royalists, Jews and Catholics, animists and atheists. Diverse in nationality, and in their capacity to undertake demanding physical work, fastidious or rough-and-ready, they lived in tents and huts in crowded proximity.

For some, the journey to Australia was like a holiday—a calm interlude between the fears and anxieties they were escaping and a hopeful but uncertain future in Australia. Kurt Lippmann, an eighteen- year-old from Hamburg, who later served in the 4th Employment Company, remembered his family’s voyage on the Blue Funnel liner Ulysses—a ship appropriately titled for passengers travelling into the unknown. He called it ‘the highlight of our lives, chiefly because it was a complete relief from the past, and the worries of the new life were still in the future.’

For the majority of those who came from the European Axis countries (initially, Germany and Italy), and from countries occupied or threatened with occupation, it was a peaceful and humane sanctuary they sought. Cruel regimes stimulate emigration.

Some saw Australia as a fresh opportunity: the promise of a new life. That was particularly true for those escaping privation. Many were leaving families, and sometimes whole districts, that were wretchedly impoverished. Through word of mouth, they heard this was a country where hard work would allow peasants and working men alike to live in modest comfort.

A strong bond of solidarity developed from the men’s broadly common circumstances, the work they performed, and their widespread commitment to contribute to the defeat of the Axis powers. Each Company was a community of about three hundred to five hundred men, with subgroups as small as a tent full of friends or as large as a national, religious or language cohort. As well as work, there was sport, gambling, dances, concerts, political debate and hunger strikes—when, according to the painter Yosl Bergner, in the 6th Employment Company ‘we had home-cooking in our tents and ate more than ever’. A camaraderie among ‘the boys’ (as many of the Europeans called themselves) generally ensured fundamental stability when political or personal enmity erupted.

Some of the men wrote memoirs, and some families have kept letters, photos and other documents from those long-ago days These rich sources, together with the writing of historians, have provided layers of knowledge and understanding of the central voices of the approximately four thousand Employment Company men who created a multicultural force in the Australian Army—long before the word ‘multicultural’ had entered the nation’s lexicon.

—This is an edited extract of Soldiers and Aliens by June Factor, published 15 June (MUP).

Soldiers and Aliens

Men in the Australian Army's Employment Companies during World War II

by June Factor

Four thousand Australian soldiers in World War II who signed up for service were never to fire a weapon. Their work was essential for the war effort, but they were 'aliens' - non-British subjects - many born in other countries.

Scholars and peasants, musicians and factory workers, communists and royalists, Jews and Catholics, animists and atheists, they all laboured under standard strict Army regulations, living in tents and huts, loading and unloading trains, working the wharves, cutting timber...

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