What’s the sensible thing to do if you are a soldier in January 1945 on an island of no strategic value when your officer gives you an order that’s likely to get you killed?

Max Hastings’ answer is that, for the sake of your country’s honour, you take the chance of having your head blown off. If you were an Australian soldier on Bougainville you said “we’re too tired and there’s a chance someone might get hurt.” That’s a smarter reply than that preferred by the former editor of The Daily Telegraph.

Hastings’ book Nemesis on the war against Japan is just the right sort of chunky for holiday reading to fill out the gaps in your knowledge of how inhuman imperialist conflicts can be. It’s also full of interesting characters such as Lt-Gen Adrian Carton de Viart (sic), a man who bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them. He was awarded a Victoria Cross, presumably for something else.

For Max Hastings anyone who is willing to fight for “his” country and more or less adheres to the “rules of war” is probably a decent fellow and it does not matter if he’s a Japanese officer in Manchuria or a British one in Burma. He is a lot less sympathetic to working class initiative and devotes the best part of a chapter ranting against the bludgers who made up the Australian dockers’ union and the sensible wing of the country’s army. A bludger is a loafer or skiver.

His principal gripe is that they refused to get themselves killed for no obvious purpose. He writes “The last year of the war proved the most inglorious of Australia’s history as a fighting nation.” This sentence is preceded by “From October 1944 until July 1945, Australian soldiers participated in a series of island campaigns. The evident futility of these embittered many men, drove some to the edge of mutiny and beyond.” (p.364) Shortly after this he mentions that Australians had fought hard in New Guinea, which had an obvious defensive tinge and earlier in Europe and North Africa.

Rather sensibly most Australians chose to enlist in a home based militia when the option was available. However it’s the unions that really get the bile flowing. The dockers did what they were supposed to and took militant action, including strikes to defend their conditions. They refused to work in the rain or handle refrigerated cargo, a decision that must have made sense at the time. When the crew of an American ship “mutinied” they refused to let new men on board until the “mutineers” had been released. What are unions for if not that sort of thing?

With a population of about 7 million Australia notched up 1 million strike days in eighteen months in 1942 and 1943. They refused to accept the role that British imperialism had scripted for them. They chose not to be canon fodder in the reconquest of territories that would be lost in squalid colonial wars a few years later. Galling as this may have been for Churchill and Mac Arthur this outbreak of rudimentary class consciousness and the strikes were a beacon of working class power in a time of imperialist carnage. Small wonder Max Hastings disapproves.