The Debt of Freedom

Geo

rge Whittington, of the Australian Army's 2/10th Battalion, was one of more than 500,000 men from his country and New Zealand who traveled overseas to fight in World War II. The sacrifices they made are chastening to recount: Australia lost nearly 34,000 killed; New Zealand's 12,000 toll was the highest per head of population of any Commonwealth nation - at 6,700 per million, more than Britain's 5,100 or Australia's 3,200.

Although more than 200 New Zealanders lost their lives alongside their American allies in the nightmare of Guadalcanal in Solomon Islands, most Kiwi casualties were incurred far from home. Australia, in contrast, lost twice as many men in the Pacific as in Europe. During 1942 and 1943, the Imperial Japanese Army was moving south; in New Guinea, then an Australian territory, the Japanese might have expected an easy time against the relatively untrained and under-equipped Australian Militia - all that could be spared in the early days of the jungle campaign.

What happened is the stuff of legend: in dense bush and on vertiginous mountain tracks, in sweltering heat and freezing cold, the young men checked and halted the Japanese advance. When the battle-hardened Australian 7th Division arrived back from the Middle East in support, the Japanese were doomed. Here in New Guinea, wrote Winston Churchill in his history of the conflict, "the tide of war" had turned. One measure of the intensity of the fighting is the fact that of Australia's 20 Victoria Crosses in the war, 12 were won in the Pacific. The Commonwealth's supreme decoration for bravery has been awarded only 1,355 times since its institution in 1856. All of the medals are struck from bronze cannon captured at Sebastopol in the Crimean War; one is still in the hands of Ted Kenna, the last survivor of that heroic dozen.

And supplementing those acts of courage, there were many others who took frightful risks to help turn Churchill's tide. All over the islands, natives buried any resentment of their colonial masters to serve and die with them. The enduring image of the New Guinea campaign is the photograph opposite, taken by New Zealander George Silk. It shows Private Whittington being led to a field hospital by one of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, Orokaiva villager Raphael Oembari, on Christmas Day, 1942. The Australian Department of Information, which employed Silk as a combat photographer, suppressed the photo as potentially damaging to morale, but Silk disagreed, finding it profoundly moving - and he was a determined man. While recovering from malaria in Australia, Silk found out where his pictures were being held, wined and dined a lady who had access to them, and recovered this one. He sent it to LIFE magazine, which printed it in March 1943. His actions cost him his job with the Department of Information, but won him a position with LIFE, where he stayed for 30 years.

Six decades on, Silk's photograph has lost none of its power, although knowledge of the war's outcome perhaps dulls our understanding of official concerns about its publication. Where now we see resilience, courage, tenderness and indomitable spirit, at the desperate height of the war few would have read in it the signs of an Allied victory. Whittington, like so many of his young comrades, did not return from New Guinea. We owe him, and all of them, a moment of reflection, and a silent prayer of thanks.