Absent Without Leave: The private war of Private Stanley Livingston

By Paul Livingston

A touching, surprising, controversial and original family memoir, from the unique mind of well-known comedy figure Paul Livingston - aka Flacco.

Absent Without Leave follows three wide-eyed young Australian men from their enlistment at the Sydney Showground in 1940 to the war in the Middle East and jungle warfare in the Asia-Pacific. Private Stanley Livingston and his two best mates, Roy Lonsdale and Gordon Oxman, would be brothers-in-law as well as brothers in arms by the end of the war, as Stanley would marry Roy's sister Evelyn, while Gordon would marry Lilly Livingston, Stanley's younger sister.

In this case the term absent without leave has no negative connotation. Between their Middle East and Pacific campaigns Privates Livingston and Oxman, and many of their fellow soldiers, abandoned their units to be with their loved ones. These men were not running from battle or responsibility, but to the service of their families who desperately needed them.

This is also an account of the civilian men and women back home, and of Stanley's future wife, Evelyn. Evelyn's war is a story in itself, by day riveting bombers at Kingsford Smith Airport, by night enjoying the spoils of war courtesy of the ever-present and exotic American servicemen.

Absent Without Leave gives a deeply human face to the circumstances of war. Like many veterans, Stanley Livingston spoke little about the war, and this book is an attempt by his son to discover the man he had never really known. The result is an extraordinary story about an ordinary man: illuminating, deeply moving and told with no shortage of humour. Absent Without Leave unearths a part of Australian history that has largely been forgotten, because no-one ever really talked about it. Until now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781743433461

Book preview

Absent Without Leave follows three wide-eyed young Australian men from their enlistment at the Sydney Showground in 1940 to the war in the Middle East and jungle warfare in the Asia-Pacific. Private Stanley Livingston and his two best mates, Roy Lonsdale and Gordon Oxman, would be brothers-in-law as well as brothers in arms by the end of the war, as Stanley would marry Roy’s sister Evelyn, while Gordon would marry Lilly Livingston, Stanley’s younger sister.

In this case the term absent without leave has no negative connotation. Between their Middle East and Pacific campaigns Privates Livingston and Oxman, and many of their fellow soldiers, abandoned their units to be with their loved ones. These men were not running from battle or responsibility, but to the service of their families who desperately needed them.

This is also an account of the civilian men and women back home, and of Stanley’s future wife, Evelyn. Evelyn’s war is a story in itself, by day riveting bombers at Kingsford Smith Airport, by night enjoying the spoils of war courtesy of the ever-present and exotic American servicemen.

Absent Without Leave gives a deeply human face to the circumstances of war. Like many veterans, Stanley Livingston spoke little about the war, and this book is an attempt by his son to discover the man he had never really known. The result is an extraordinary story about an ordinary man: illuminating, deeply moving and told with no shortage of humour. Absent Without Leave unearths a part of Australian history that has largely been forgotten, because no-one ever really talked about it. Until now.

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The private war of

Private Stanley Livingston

PAUL LIVINGSTON

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First published in 2013

Copyright © Paul Livingston 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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Allen & Unwin

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Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

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ISBN 978 1 74331 582 8

eISBN 978 1 74343 346 1

Cover design by Lisa White

Set in 12.5/17 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia

For Dottie

Contents

. . . and how was your war, Dad?

Introduction: Two of the boys, a wog, a donkey and myself

1 Three men walk into a bar

2 One small step for a Zetland boy

3 Hole sweet hole

4 Mayhem was only a part of it

5 Three men and a barber shop

6 A nip in the air

7 The home-front line

8 Evelyn’s war

9 Run for your death

10 Gaps in the ranks

11 Absent friends

12 From the Pimple to Scarlet Beach via Dead Man’s Gully

13 Destroy all monsters

14 Present and accounted for

15 The ordinary trenches

16 Memoirs of a pacifist smoker

17 Don’t give an old digger the gripes

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

. . . and how was your war, Dad?

Ever heard the one about the old digger who never talked about the war? So have I—I grew up with one. As a child it never occurred to me to ask, ‘And how was your war, Dad?’ I took my father’s war for granted. His years as a front-line soldier didn’t seem to have left any obvious scars. Curiosity came only after I vacated the nest. On my irregular sorties to the suburbs I’d sit in the backyard with the old man, an Onkaparinga blanket covering the Hills Hoist to keep the sun off. To keep the sun off the beer, that is. We talked, one on one; I was eager for anecdotes. I was twenty-nine and in my first year of what some might laughingly describe as a ‘career’ in stand-up comedy. War is no laughing matter. But then again, you had to be there. Stanley J. Livingston had been there.

I only managed to glean the barest hints of my father’s experiences in World War II (I’ve always found the habit of numbering wars unnerving: it implies a certain inevitability, and there are still a lot of numbers out there to get through). Stanley didn’t live to tell the full tale. By wandering through my own memories, as well as those of people who knew him and many more who didn’t, I wondered if I might catch a glimpse of the man I never knew.

Introduction

Two of the boys, a wog, a donkey and myself

One of the most enduring images from Australia’s ill-fated campaign in Gallipoli is that of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, ‘the man with the donkey’. Legend has it that after working as a merchant seaman for four years, Simpson enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in September 1914. He was assigned to serve with the 3rd Field Ambulance as a stretcher-bearer, but Simpson shunned the stretchers in favour of a donkey called Murphy, the animal he employed to transport wounded men to the beach at Anzac Cove. In what is claimed were ‘lightning dashes’ into ‘no-man’s-land’, he is rumoured to have saved the lives of over three hundred men before being killed in action on 19 May 1915. A hush fell over the Gallipoli Peninsula on the day the man with the donkey was slain.

Or so the story goes.

Almost a century after the events of Gallipoli, the mythos of Simpson continues. The tale has crossed continents as accounts of Simpson’s feats have been told again and again. Some have Simpson as something of a saintly figure, others a bacchanalian brawler; there are even claims that Simpson was shot by an Australian. What does all this really have to do with young Jack Simpson? Does the elevation of a good man into a superhero enhance or offend his memory? Does it matter? One thing is certain—the legend wasn’t Simpson’s doing. It was born after his death, the yarn spun and woven through the decades. There can be no denying the appeal of such a myth. The Simpson legend has all the necessary ingredients: heroism, anti-authoritarianism, selflessness, larrikinism and mateship. Throw in a faithful little donkey named Murphy (or Abdul or Duffy, depending on the source), and a legend is born.

The lowly donkey, along with its companions the ass and the mule, has been exploited in more than one famous myth. The Bible is full of donkeys, from the one who spoke to Balaam—‘Am I not your donkey on which you have ridden, ever since I became yours, to this day?’ (Numbers 22:30)—to the animal’s more significant role in the New Testament: Mary, pregnant with Jesus, is said to have travelled to Bethlehem on a small donkey, and just before his own death, Mary’s firstborn himself rode one into Jerusalem. The donkey has since been dubbed ‘the Christ-bearer’. The story of stretcher-bearer Simpson trading his stretcher for a donkey has some resonance with the Jesus myth: the humble Christ, renowned for helping the sick and broken with no shortage of courage or humility, before entering the arena of his own death. A single image can wield enormous power. After decades or even centuries, a myth may bear little witness to the actualities of its origin. Perhaps this is of small consequence, especially if the myth promotes qualities beneficial to its devotees.

Whether Stanley James Livingston, a private in the 2/17th Australian Infantry Battalion, was mocking Simpson when he climbed aboard a donkey somewhere in the Middle East is not clear. World War I was coming to a close when Stanley was un-immaculately conceived in the year of our donkey-straddling Lord one thousand nine hundred and eighteen, and by the time the photo was snapped the myth was already well and truly ingrained. Perhaps it was the biblical myth that Pte Livingston had in mind? There is every chance he was in the vicinity of Jerusalem at the time. But precisely where and when the photo was taken is not so clear. Does this look like the fresh face of a young man enjoying his first overseas trip, a battle virgin? Or are we looking at a war-weary veteran of one of the most intense and bloody campaigns in military history? What had he got himself into, this kid from suburban Zetland, in the middle of no-man’s-land, with, as he put it, ‘two of the boys, a wog, a donkey and myself ’?

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Pte Livingston scribbled those few words in elegant cursive on the back of the photo. For an ordinary soldier—and there were few more ordinary than Stanley—taking even an innocent holiday snap was subject to heavy regulation: ‘Photographs of a purely personal nature may be included in correspondence, but attention must be paid to the background, which must not include anything the photography of which is prohibited.’ This included military vehicles, tanks, signal equipment, artillery, aircraft, ships, fortifications, camps and weapons. There was equally heavy censorship on any message attached. It would seem Pte Livingston was just following orders by maintaining a sparse background and simply noting the subjects in the shot (unless of course a donkey might be construed as a military vehicle), but perhaps he had nothing to hide. Was it merely a photo opportunity with reference to nothing and no-one? Sorting fact from fiction is a perilous pursuit. Myths grow and facts are their casualties. In what follows I have done my best to avoid the pitfalls of myth-making and to instead present an honest account of what it might have been like to follow in the bootsteps of an ordinary soldier. In this case that ordinary soldier was my father. And just to set the record straight, one thing is for sure: Pte Stanley Livingston was no messiah, but he was, from all reports, a very naughty boy.

1

Three men walk into a bar

‘We were both in before the bugler’s lips were moist.’

Colonel D. Goslett (on enlisting in World War II)

In May 1942, Pte Stanley Livingston was midway through a seventeen-month ‘stunt’ in the Middle East. Military campaigns were often referred to as ‘stunts’ or ‘shows’, laconic understatement being the diggers’ trademark. Intensive training was up and running. Just what they were training for was a mystery to the infantrymen. Those first across the line were generally the last to know what line they were to be first across. But something was up. After marching from Latakia in Syria to Tripoli in Lebanon, the 2/17th Battalion of the 9th Division of the Australian Imperial Force arrived in Jabal Tourbol, a mountainous region in northern Lebanon.

Before long the troops commenced mule training. ‘Mule School’ was compulsory for all companies, who were put through the handling and loading of mule teams before embarking on a two-day bivouac, complete with mules, a few of the boys no doubt, and perhaps even the odd wog. Twenty-seven mules were attached to the unit, and the official war diaries confirm that all personnel had become thoroughly proficient in leading and handling the animals. Perhaps it was here that Stanley was snapped mounted on a mule? When I showed the photograph to William Joseph Pye, known as Bill, a 95-year-old veteran of the Middle East and Pacific campaigns (who’d been at times within spitting distance of Stanley Livingston, although their paths weren’t to cross), he told me he would have sworn it was taken in Palestine. A clue.

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Armies tend to recruit individuals to be trained in flying, sailing or, in my father’s case, walking. The infantry is the perfect place for the walking man. Military nomenclature can be confusing, so here are some basics. A division is a grouping of brigades commanded by a major general. A brigade is a grouping of battalions commanded by a brigadier. A battalion is a grouping of companies commanded by a lieutenant colonel. Each company contains around a hundred and twenty men commanded by a major or a captain. Companies contain platoons of thirty or so men commanded by a lieutenant. These men are collectively called the infantry.

Individually, infantrymen are described as ‘foot soldiers who engage the enemy in close quarter fighting with the aim of destroying their capacity to wage war’. I doubt this was how they advertised the job in 1939. I imagine the ‘Call to Adventure’ would hold more allure for a working-class boy from the inner-Sydney industrial suburb of Zetland. The sound of adventure calling gets a lot of attention in the history books. Legendary tales of soldiers born for battle and chomping at the bit in World War I had already taken a firm hold at the start of the second stunt. Bit-chomping may have been true for some young adventurers enlisting in that first Great War, but many more were acting on a sense of duty, to empire, to country and to community. It wasn’t so much that young people in 1914 listened more to their elders as that their elders didn’t much listen to them. The ‘me’ generation was decades away; this was the ‘us’ generation. Individuality was not the norm. Sticking to the norm was the norm. Dr John Connor puts it succinctly: ‘Family responsibilities generally loomed much larger in a young man’s life in Australia in 1914 than it does today. In a time before pensions, superannuation, retirement villages and nursing homes, parents required their children to keep and care for them in old age.’

At the beginning of World War II, the norm still stood, unchallenged. In his memoir of that war, The Reluctant Volunteer, veteran Peter J. Jones admits to having been morbidly fascinated as a child by the events of World War I. It was this fascination mixed with horror that struck the boy when his father took him to see the original film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930. He also shared every little boy’s fascination with the maimed, and was deeply curious about the men with empty sleeves and trouser legs who limped through the streets in the 1930s. ‘Shell shock’ was the term his father used to describe these destitute veterans of the Great War, and these strange creatures induced in the boy no immediate desire to go to war himself. With the onset of World War II, Jones recalls it was a sense of duty, and the example of his friends, that prompted his reluctant enlistment. Jones also had the example of his father, who had enlisted without question and was one of those who landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. Jones sums up his philosophy: ‘Like the bulk of humanity, I was and am a peacelover—but never a pacifist imagining, in spite of promptings of commonsense, that non-resistance is suitable in all circumstances. Practicalities have a way of overawing wishful thinking.’

While the cause was common, and the call to duty shared, nevertheless the ranks of the newly enlisted consisted of a diverse range of characters from all walks of life who were not shy in exhibiting their own peculiarities. G.H. Fearnside, former sergeant with the 2/13th Battalion, remembers this diversity. There was ‘Harry the Knife’ from the Redfern slums, a Rhodes scholar, a pimp, ministers of religion, barristers, clerks and drovers. Fearnside notes that the army ‘accepted anyone who had two arms and two legs, and the requisite number of heads’. From the relative safety of his St Kilda apartment in 2012, former Rat of Tobruk Eddie Emmerson recalled, ‘We had one bloke, Bobby Fink—he was a bloke who worked the boats between London and New York playing poker. You . . . had criminals and you had blokes dodging wives, dodging the law, but they were a good mob, you know.’

William Pye was in 1941 a 24-year-old evening student in the faculty of economics at Sydney University. His father had fallen upon hard times and gone AWL from the family, leaving Bill to support his mother and his sister, who was still in school. Bill had intended to enlist, but the pressures of family kept him occupied until an opportunity arose when an employee the university wanted to retain was in danger of being recruited. Someone was required to take his place in the army. Bill Pye was their chosen man. Bill joined a good mob too, the 4th Anti-Tank Regiment, and he was in charge of many of them, having attained the rank of lieutenant by June 1941.

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On 4 June 1940, Stanley Livingston walked through the gates of the Sydney Showground to join a stream of men duty-bound for enlistment. What prompted his decision? Rumours of a war in Europe had been building for some years. In January 1939, the world-renowned science-fiction writer H.G. Wells was visiting a complacent Australia, and his predictions for the country’s future did not go down well. Wells had a predilection for prediction. Some of his hits were lasers, nuclear weaponry, wireless communications, answering machines and, in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, World War II. Wells didn’t hold back. From the safe distance of Australia he slammed Hitler, calling him a certifiable lunatic and putting the boot into Mussolini at the same time. No-one took much notice of Wells’ comments, and the prime minister at the time, Joseph Lyons, publicly rebuked Wells for rocking the boat. Australia had no reason to make waves. H.G. Wells would not be silenced, ominously warning that the absence of the British Fleet would leave Australia isolated in the Pacific and that ‘the so-called Japanese menace to Australia is no bogey’. After Wells’ departure, Australia maintained its ‘no worries’ policy until a couple of months later when Adolf Hitler invited himself unannounced into Poland.

Another Wells, a local with the initials H.D., walked into a milk bar near Waverley Oval in Sydney at around 9.30 p.m. on 3 September 1939. Harry David Wells stopped and listened as the voice of a new Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, crackled over a radio: ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform you that, in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.’ Those with memories of the previous stunt felt dread, while the youngsters felt a nervous rush of excitement, but on the whole, the opening act of World War II failed to impress. Many dubbed it a phoney war and thought it would be all over soon enough without too much fuss. But by 3 June 1940 it was clear to Harry D. Wells that this war was not going to disappear overnight, and so he headed to the Sydney Showground to enlist, where he was promptly photographed, X-rayed, vaccinated and given a number, NX27792. He then joined another group of fresh diggers, all bearing their issue of the only belongings they would be needing for the journey ahead: a knife, a spoon, a dixie (cup), a palliasse and two blankets.

It was the very next day that Stanley Livingston ambled through those same gates. He was not alone; Stanley had recruited two of his best mates, Roy Lonsdale and Gordon Oxman, to enlist with him. It is not too far a stretch to imagine that the decision to join up would have been conceived over a few beers in the pub where they had all first met as thirsty young men in the year leading up to World War II, the Tennyson Hotel on Botany Road, Mascot. It had been love at first sight. Gordon had his eye on Stanley’s younger sister Lilly; Stanley had his eye on Roy’s younger sister Evelyn; and Roy had his eye on a schooner of Reschs Pilsener. Roy’s was the greatest love, and one that all three shared. Roy lived directly across the road from the pub at the back of a barber shop run by his father, Ernest Arthur Lonsdale. Stanley lived up the road in Tramway Street, while Gordon had to stumble back to Wollongong. It would become a familiar regime: with Gordon claiming he had no money to get home, Stanley had no choice but to let him camp at 77 Tramway Street, within close proximity of Lilly Livingston.

On 2 June 1940, the trio had been celebrating Stanley’s twenty-second birthday at the bar of the Tennyson Hotel. They had something else to drink to that night: all three had committed to enlisting in the AIF. On this their second-last night as civilians, the boys ingested as much false courage as possible. They had to be quick—like all pubs at the time, the Tennyson closed at six o’clock. The idea was to get the men out of the pubs and back to their families; in reality, the measure created a culture of binge known as ‘the six o’clock swill’, which had men knocking off work and heading straight for the bar, where they drowned as many sorrows as was humanly possible before six. Alcohol was possibly a major contributing factor in much of the volunteering for the military, and not just in Australia. One American volunteer recalls acting on an alcohol-induced impulse only to suffer an overwhelming sense of imprisonment once he sobered up. Alcohol remained this soldier’s main means of coping with the next four or five years of service. Alcohol would also become Stanley Livingston’s main weapon of choice, not only in his army years but well into civilian life as well.

Two days later, while the rest of Australia were going about their business, life was set to radically change for the three men. There’s no way of knowing if they had time to grab a newspaper on the way to the showground, but had they