Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace

By Neil Landers

A search involving ghosts from World War I and afterwards leads towards some during the Cold War at high levels in Australia, the US, Britain and the Soviet Union

• Language: English
• Publisher: booksunleashed
• Release date: Apr 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310593550

Book preview

Ghosts of Childhood

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2015 Neil Landers

The author has travelled widely, worked on newspapers in Australia, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London, and done other work. The photo shows him in 1974 when he began seriously researching some matters in this. The front cover shows Australian troops about to sail for Gallipoli in 1915.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

The fact that this book is published online does not mean that any part of it can be reproduced without first obtaining written permission: copyright laws do still apply. Inquiries should be directed to the author.

The author asserts his/her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

Foreword

In August 2015 I published a first edition of this on the internet under the title Ghosts of Childhood. A key person in it is a Sydney businessman, Ray Fitzpatrick, who in 1944 was named in the Australian Parliament as a major war racketeer. Many of the allegations against him were undoubtedly true. He did, however, have a reputation for greatly helping people down on their luck. The problems of many of those had begun with service during World War I. After the allegations in parliament Fitzpatrick just laughed.

Government efforts to obtain sufficient evidence for serious charges against him were thwarted with help behind the scenes from Alfred Hughes, a police detective who in 1942 became the head of counter-espionage in NSW.

Another person who helped Fitzpatrick avoid charges was my father, his accountant since the mid-1930s. In 1915, aged 17, my father sailed to join the troops at Gallipoli. His active service ended in late 1916 when he was caught by a shell at the Somme. Between the wars he devoted a lot of time to helping men whose recovery from the war had been less fortunate than his own.

The allegations in parliament were begun by a man with whom he was almost as close as he was with Fitzpatrick, and who in about 1937 he had helped become Fitzpatrick’s legal adviser. Fitzpatrick then helped that man in 1940 become the local representative in the parliament. After the allegations my father began getting almost blind drunk every night.

In 1955, after Fitzpatrick became the first person ever jailed by the parliament, an extraordinary wall of government silence was thrown up about anything to do with him. Behind that was a secret involving Alfred Hughes and Ben Chifley, Australia’s prime minister from 1945 to late 1949.

Messages intercepted during the war, and decrypted by Americans with British help, showed someone with high contacts in Australia, code-named Ben in Moscow, was spying for the Russians. Evidence soon pointed to Hughes. That led to heavy US and British pressure which forced Chifley in 1949 to start a security service, ASIO, similar to Britain’s MI5. No one ever seems to have told Chifley about that Moscow code name. During the war, Hughes and Fitzpatrick had a joint friend Stan (later Justice Stan) Taylor who, as the Japanese headed alarmingly towards Australia in 1942, was the head of national security in NSW and was very close to Chifley, then treasurer and in charge of the home front.

In 2014 I published a book on the internet about this and other connections Fitzpatrick had with people high in the federal and state governments and in ASIO. I entitled it Australia’s Most Embarrassing Spy Secret.

My 2015 book detailed problems during my search for facts about all that, and about matters in my father’s life and mine. Soon after I published it the first volume of an official history of ASIO appeared. In it was no mention of relevant details in my two books, details that were far more important than almost all in the official history. Facts that have been omitted go not just to an obvious major reason behind the US and British pressure to found ASIO, but to the heart of the overwhelming focus of the first volume, the defection in 1954 of local Soviet spy chief Vladimir Petrov, an event of international importance.

The main person behind the wall of official secrecy imposed in 1955 on anything to do with Fitzpatrick was then prime minister Robert Menzies. Despite many wartime and postwar battles with Chifley, Menzies regarded him as a friend. It is likely that his reasons for that secrecy included a desire to protect the reputation of Chifley. This might also help explain the incredible omissions in the official history.

However, there was never any suggestion of wrong-doing by Chifley in this matter. And the full facts, had they been included in the history, would probably have helped increase the justifiably high reputation of the man who, against strong opposition from many in his own Labor Party, started ASIO.

New chapters and material I have added, mainly near the end, have helped make the new title much more appropriate. The material includes some from my 2014 book and some from a biography of my father, entitled From the Somme to ‘Sydney’s Little Chicago’, published earlier on the internet. This version of necessity retains many biographical details. Because of personal problems that worsened incredibly after the previous version I have made significant changes or additions to chapters 23, 24 and 27.

I have also added a long final chapter headed Sex, Spies and Paul Keating. I do not see why it should offend any reasonable person.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE - Night-time Fears

CHAPTER TWO - Unhappy Schooldays

CHAPTER THREE - Unmentionable Subjects

CHAPTER FOUR - Daily Mirror Reporting

CHAPTER FIVE - Wider Experience

CHAPTER SIX - Overland to Saigon

CHAPTER SEVEN - Working in Hong Kong

CHAPTER EIGHT - After Hours in Hong Kong

CHAPTER NINE - Working in Tokyo

CHAPTER TEN - Living in Tokyo

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Indian Roving and Afghan Smuggling

CHAPTER TWELVE - Highs and Lows in London

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Athens and Ethiopia

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - LSD and Other Hospital Drugs

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Life and Work in Wagga

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - US Police Batons v. Flower Power

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Back to Hospital

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Rock Bottom

CHAPTER NINETEEN - New Technology Woes

CHAPTER TWENTY - Working for Murdoch

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Searching for Facts

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - The Birth of Countless Ghosts

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Traveller's Tales

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Problems While Searching for Truth

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Exorcising My Ghosts

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Allegations and Mystery

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - Strange Events

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - Fitzpatrick-Chifley-Moscow link

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - Official ASIO Cover-up

CHAPTER THIRTY - More High-level Ghosts

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - Sex, Spies and Paul Keating

CHAPTER ONE

Night-time Fears

Sleeping soundly each night as a child directly over where a man had fatally injured himself, after almost decapitating his wife in an adjacent bathroom, was not always easy. His wife, Clara Hess, was about to leave her husband Philip after their marriage had broken down. According to some neighbours, her ghost haunted the house.

By about mid-1943, when I turned five and knew vaguely what a ghost was, I had heard a little about this in my home, those of neighbours and out in the street. After I learned to read well I found out much more. In a wardrobe in my bedroom, used to store odds and ends, I discovered newspaper cuttings that graphically described everything.

My father George had rented his house to Philip Hess while he went to live out in the country with his first wife, who was dying of tuberculosis. Just after 1pm on April 29, 1929, after packing the last of her belongings, Clara Hess entered the bathroom and began touching up her makeup in front of a mirror alongside the bath. Her husband fetched a large shaving razor, walked in and gripped her strongly from behind. He then slit her throat from ear to ear with such force that he almost severed her head.

Slashing at his throat, he staggered into their bedroom, where he fired a small-bore rifle into his head. Fatally wounded, he fell to the floor in a pool of blood alongside a window.

That window was alongside my bed. Soon after the war, knowing what I knew, George pointed out discolouring to me in the floorboards under my bed where Philip Hess’s blood had dried. At the time he was installing new floor covering. Later my mother Olive told me how, after they had married soon after that event and moved into the house, she had scrubbed and scrubbed but had never been able to completely erase all the indications.

Whenever I said anything about the ghost stories Olive always told me there were no such things as ghosts and I should take no notice of them. I tried. But sometimes, when I awoke early in the morning, the house was dark, perhaps wind outside was slightly shaking the windows, and floorboards seemed to be creaking in the passageway outside my bedroom … I think most people will understand.

Adding to my fears was my brother Colin, who was born prematurely in 1931, seven years before me, and was mentally retarded. He was also seriously disturbed. Often he threw tantrums in which he sometimes became dangerously violent. On a few occasions he attacked me so badly I thought he was trying to kill me. Colin had a small bedroom on a built-over back veranda at the other side of the bathroom. I developed a fear that when I was asleep he would come into my room and try to kill me.

Me with Colin during the war

Another threat to sound sleep in that house began early in 1944 after one of George’s accountancy clients in our village of Bankstown, on the south-western edge of Sydney, was named in the Australian parliament as a major war racketeer. George began getting drunk every night in the front living room while playing 78rpm records. As he got drunker the music became louder. He would then sometimes put on a record of World War I marching songs and loudly join the singing. That could go on almost until dawn.

I did, however, feel safe when I could hear that sound drifting through the house.

Each afternoon, while improving my reading in 1944, I strained my ears for the first distant sound of a whistle that heralded the approach of a newspaper boy. When he neared with his billycart I went to meet him with two pennies for a copy of the Sun. By then Olive was usually in the kitchen shelling peas, stringing beans or peeling potatoes for dinner. I would lay the Sun on the floor and prop myself on my elbows over it. As she finished those tasks, put vegetables on to cook, and began preparing the meat and dessert, I would read stories to her. Any word I did not know she would tell me how to pronounce and what it meant.

My parents during the war

In that way I followed the northwards advance of Americans and Australians towards Japan, the progress of Russian armies towards eastern Germany and the 1944 Allied breakout from Normandy towards the Rhine.

When I played soldiers with other small boys in the street there were arguments over whose turn it was to play Australians, Americans or Russians, and whose turn to play Japs or Germans, and have to fall down dead when bayonets were run through them. Enthusiastically we attacked Japanese convoys and retreating German armies, making rising sounds we had heard on the radio as we dived towards them with arms spread wide as wings. The sounds from our mouths became staccato as we opened fire with our machine guns.

From late 1944 I was sick in bed much of the time for almost a year with whooping cough and other illnesses. Although I have clear memories from before that period, I have almost none during it. But I can remember the end of the war in the Pacific.

Music was playing and people drinking, singing and dancing in backyards or out in the street. An aerodrome on the outskirts of Bankstown was still an important base for the Australian Air Force. But British Fleet Air Arm personnel had replaced the many Americans who had begun arriving in early 1942. Everyone watched as searchlights near the aerodrome, rarely used since 1942, swung slowly and triumphantly backwards and forwards across a dark sky for a last time.

As people returned from the war, and regular work resumed at a group of terminating co-operative building societies George had started in 1937, he stopped drinking heavily. If I went to the bathroom early in the morning a light sometimes would be on in the living room. Now, however, the door would be open, and he would be working at his desk.

I was still trying to get to grips with events in that house. Before I went to bed each night I had to shower in the adjacent bathroom. A shower and water heater, installed at the end of the bath soon after the war, were about two feet from the mirror where Clara Hess had stood during her last living moments. I began turning off the light. Alone, just outside an eerie red glow from gas flames under the heater, I then stood in near-darkness under the hot water defying her ghost, if it did exist, to appear before me. It never did.

Outside of the house, my early years were mostly happy. My closest friend was Norma, a girl next door. It was with her, behind a large hydrangea bush in front of our house, that I first learned the difference between boys and girls.

As a result of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever Norma was not robust. But she was always happy when with me. Unhesitatingly she followed wherever I led, be it into the deepest recesses under our homes, braving the perils of rusty nails and hairy spiders, or climbing up trees. I liked drawing and became good at this. Norma always admired my drawings, as did her mother and mine.

When Olive saw me with her in, under or near our house she often told me to be careful with her. But in her house no one seemed to care what we did. After a while with me her nose sometimes began to bleed and she was put to bed. But soon she was up again as bright as ever.

In early 1946, a year late because of the illnesses, I began going to North Bankstown Primary School. It was up on the Hume Highway, just past the top end of Sir Joseph Banks Street, where we lived at the bottom end. After school and at weekends there were paddocks and other places in which to play before dinner.

Behind homes up the street was a dense forest of tall eucalypts clogged with undergrowth. Exploring through that was exciting. On my way home from school, alone or with a classmate or two, I often went through that forest, or else roamed along different streets or across paddocks.

Mild warfare involving rocks was endemic between boys from our school and those from a Catholic school a few hundred metres down the Hume Highway. If I was with boys from my school then or at weekends, and we encountered boys from the Catholic school, a hasty search for rocks to throw often followed. A few times after those encounters I returned home streaming blood after failing to dodge a sizeable rock. This worried Olive, who tried to make me spend more time at home in peaceful activities such as reading or drawing.

The great day of the week for Olive was Friday. This was when she put on one of her best dresses and hats and set off in the morning for Town, the shopping centre of Sydney, a distant and fascinating place where many buildings were five or six stories high and some even higher than that. During school holidays I often accompanied her. There were more people than a boy from an outer suburb could have imagined, all crowding along the cavernous streets, and giant department stores that lured my mother from floor to floor.

When his finances improved my father bought a six-metre cabin cruiser that he moored at Picnic Point on the Georges River. On that we began to spend at least one day each weekend. Usually we cruised to a part where fish were said to have been biting and threw a few lines over the side. I learned how to help with mooring, how when travelling to watch at the bow for calm patches ahead that warned of sandbanks just under the surface, and how to row a dinghy we kept at the rear. Before long I was allowed to row the dinghy alone into creeks and explore their shallow depths, as well as banks overhung with branches.

In late 1947 the semi-rural atmosphere of Bankstown began to change rapidly as migrants poured in from war-shattered Europe. A paddock that had been there one day would be gone the next time I went past. In its place would be mounds of earth, a truck or two, and a roaring earth-mover, topped probably by a native of a Baltic state who was sweating and cursing in the unaccustomed Australian heat as he struggled with levers.

A few months later the paddock would be covered with small wood-framed houses with walls of fibro – thin sheets of compressed asbestos and cement. Financing some of them were George’s terminating building societies and also a permanent society, similar to a bank, he had formed just before the war. Once a week, in a little new English tourer, he drove into the city for talks at government departments and at the head offices of banks and insurance companies that were financing the terminating societies.

In a large shed in our backyard was a photographic darkroom. On shelves around its walls were dozens of books, many dating back to my parents’ childhoods and some to the previous century, which covered a great range of subjects. Many were about foreign lands. I became an avid reader of those and from some developed a desire to one day see the countries they described.

The most prized book was kept in Olive’s wardrobe. This was a large bound and embossed volume filled with photographs on heavy art paper of misty highlands and castles in Scotland, a land she talked often of one day visiting but never did. On days when the weather outside was as drizzly as it looked in those photographs I would occasionally sit, encouraged by her, and pore over those Caledonian scenes, so mysterious and awe-inspiring to a boy surrounded by the brick bungalows, paddocks and, increasingly, little fibro homes, of Bankstown.

When I was nine, Olive began sending me to junior art classes at the Australian National Art School in Darlinghurst, just east of the centre of Sydney. Each Saturday morning I set out with a feeling of great anticipation. The classes ended at lunchtime. I then had all afternoon to explore the centre of Sydney and nearby districts.

Much transport in Sydney was by tram. Sometimes I was able to travel for hours on them without paying. On the old toast-rack type, in which the conductor moved around the outside on a running board, I kept moving to the side away from him. On newer trams with central corridors I got off whenever the conductor neared. Between the rides I often explored nearby streets.

Back at home there were still problems with Colin. Since I was old enough, Olive had made me help with household chores such as drying dishes and laying out the table. Always she tried to apportion the work equally between us. But this rarely worked out. If, say, I had dried the dishes after lunch, she would try to make Colin dry them after dinner. Usually there would be a wail: I did it last time. It’s Neil’s turn, make Neil do it.

Neil did it at lunch time.

I don’t care. It’s Neil’s turn, it’s Neil’s turn. Then he would run into his room.

Often all that angered me. But Olive would then tell me he was different from other boys and I had to try not to be angry with him. I began to feel sometimes it was my fault that Colin was like he was.

My parents sent him to an institution, or else to classes for backward children at ordinary schools, but he often refused to go. Much of his time he spent alone in his room. A doctor had diagnosed his problem as depression and had prescribed amphetamines to buck him up. All they did, however, was increase tantrums in which he often became dangerously violent.

As soon as I returned from the city after art classes he usually went to his room, if he was outside it, and slammed the door. He almost never sat at a meal table with me. Be it breakfast, lunch or dinner, if I was in the house he would collect his meal in the kitchen and take it to his room.

By now my relationship with George was deteriorating. This was partly because of long hours he was working at his office, work that was sometimes followed by evening functions he felt he had to attend. That meant he was rarely in the house to help control Colin when he was throwing tantrums. There were other reasons, which I only began to understand later. He always insisted that I should never cry, even if I had hurt myself badly and was in serious pain. Often he threatened to beat me if I did not stop. When he was present I always managed somehow to stop.

Over the years my parents had a succession of cats named Ginger. Normally they were male. Just after the war, however, one was female. Every so often she began to swell. Whenever Ginger was due and disappeared we searched under the house, the shed and other likely places. When we found her litter, five or so helpless little creatures, I took them around neighbours’ back doors to ask if anyone wanted any. Once or twice I managed to unload a male.

Each time a day finally came when George filled a large bucket and took Ginger’s litter from her for a last time. They were then put into the bucket one by one and held under the water until movement had ceased. At first that was George’s job. But when I was about seven, despite my protestations, it became mine. He ordered me not to cry and watched me closely to see I did not. Then I had to help bury them. It was a job I had to do a few times and hated.

As work at his building societies rose in line with the building boom the frequency of his evening functions increased. Wives often were expected to attend those functions. Olive obviously did not like them much but sometimes she felt she had to attend. On such occasions she would tell me they would not be home too late. I did not like to go to bed early on those occasions. To help pass time, and also sometimes during a wet day, I often began to play records from George’s extensive collection.

They did not always come home too early. On such occasions I would sometimes prepare for sleep. I still had a deep fear that when I was asleep Colin would try to kill me. My bedroom door could not be locked. So after closing it I would put the only chair in the room against it.

George when he was at home still liked a drink in the evening, although nowhere near as much as late in the war. People often gave him a bottle of spirits as a present, particularly at Christmas. As a result, he had a well-stocked drinks cabinet. Before long I discovered that, if left alone in that house at night, or worse, alone with Colin, the contents of his drinks cabinet could help calm any fears. There were usually more than a dozen bottles of spirits. By only taking a bit from each I was able to hide my actions, or so I thought.

When I was eleven Olive asked me if I would like to go to a boarding school in the country. I asked her why. In the fiercest words of her life to me, she said: Because I have to get you out of this house, Neil.

CHAPTER TWO

Unhappy Schooldays

Katoomba, a cliff-top tourist resort in the Blue Mountains surrounded by some of the best scenery in NSW, is two hours west of Sydney by train. To there I went early in 1950 for the final year of my primary education at Clairvaux, the junior section of St Bernard’s College, run by the Catholic De La Salle teaching brothers. I had no idea what to expect.

George, of English and German-Jewish descent, was nominally Anglican. Mainly Scottish Olive was the daughter of a devout Congregational lay preacher. Their decision to send me to a Catholic school raised eyebrows among Olive’s anti-Catholic relatives. But neither at the time was religious. An Irish Catholic friend of my parents, who had a son there, had recommended St Bernard’s, which was cheaper than any Protestant boarding school.

Clairvaux, at the edge of Katoomba overlooking a sweep of unpopulated valleys, proved to be dreadful. The brother in charge frequently beat hell out of any boy he could find an excuse to get his hands on. Usually he used a length of stiff hosepipe that made a fearsome noise but left no marks. While I was far from being the worst of his victims I was not spared his hosepipe. Another brother was known mainly for hanging around in the lavatory and molesting the youngest boys when they entered.

Appointed prefects were given unlimited power. The previous year this system had reached a nadir under a boy whose father, a wealthy businessman at a nearby town, contributed handsomely to school causes. That boy was now at the senior school, but the mere sight of him was enough to terrify some of the younger boys. Sometimes he initiated new boys by forcing them to eat peanut butter sandwiches. Since they were given the choice of either eating up or being seriously beaten, they usually ate up, although they knew what the peanut butter really was.

Despite all that, the year’s main event for me occurred at home during the second term holidays. Norma was in bed all the time. But her mother let me into her bedroom for a while each day. Boarding school had ended my Saturday art classes. But I still frequently did drawings, usually of surroundings and the people in them, which I always showed her. Then I read books to her she liked, as I had done sometimes in the past. Norma lay whitely against the sheets and listened with interest as I read.

She was worse than I had ever seen her before. But I fully expected she would soon be up again, fit and chirpy, as she always had in the past.

Sometimes her mother entered and straightened bedclothes or adjusted curtains. She would ask if I wanted a cup of tea. Not fruit cordial, which we had normally been given in the past, but tea, the main drink of the adults. This she brought in china cups, complete with saucers, for both of us. She also often brought a plate of such luxuries as iced vo-vos, a biscuit, topped with marshmallow and strawberry jam, loved by most Sydney children. Members of her family and other neighbours began to talk to me during those holidays as if I had suddenly become an adult.

The holidays were almost over, and I was steeling myself for the return to boarding school, when Olive came into my bedroom one morning to see if I was awake, told me gently that Norma had died during the night, and left me alone. I cried my eyes out for quite a while as it sank in. Then I dressed and went out to the street, where a hearse was parked outside her house. I felt angry at my mother for not telling me what was happening. Returning to the back, where she was working, I told her as brutally as I could that the death-cart has come for Norma and did not mention her again.

Although I had sufficient talent to attend junior classes at the Australian National Art School, and to be encouraged by teachers to continue there, I ceased from that day on to have the talent or inclination to draw.

The senior section of St Bernard’s, in Merriwa Street near the bottom end of the shopping centre, where I received the five years of my secondary education, had none of the abuses at Clairvaux. The brothers were mostly well-meaning and fairly ordinary men who spent much of their spare time running up and down the school’s tennis and handball courts. If they used corporal punishment it was usually with more than sufficient justification. There were no prefects, and the boy who had terrified those at the junior school had gone off to another school. Later he became a prominent provincial businessman.

The principal, Brother Cassian, had promised my parents I would not be forced to attend Catholic services or classes on religion. This had been ignored at Clairvaux, where he had no real power. But at the senior school he kept that promise. It mainly meant that during morning Mass or other church services I usually had to sweep the quadrangle. I think many of the boys envied me as they knelt in the school chapel, mumbling prayers and fingering their rosary beads, while I slowly pushed a broom around outside.

My best friend during the first year there was a boy named Dally Messenger. His grandfather, of the same name, was regarded by many Australians as the greatest player ever in the world of both rugby codes. When he arrived at the school near the start of winter there was strong expectation among the boys and brothers. Any team with a grandson of Dally Messenger in the line-up would surely be formidable.

Sadly, he proved hopeless at rugby and became known to many boys as Daggy Dal, after Dagwood, a bumbling comic strip character. He was not a fool, however. Like me, he was good at classwork and an outsider. We got on well. Our friendship culminated in November with a memorable betting coup.

We organised a sweep on the Melbourne Cup among boys in the junior classes. His given names were Dally and Raymond and the slight favourite was Dalray. A study of its recent form, together with that omen, convinced us Dalray could not lose. So, after collecting sixpences from many of the junior boys, we put most of it on Dalray with an illegal starting price bookmaker at a barber shop in the main street. When it won at 4/1 we scored a lot of tuckshop money. Dal left at the end