Henry Gordon Bennett, (1887–1963) CB CMG DSO VD MiD(6) was born at Balwyn, Melbourne, where his South African-born father was a
schoolmaster. He attended Balwyn State
School and Hawthorn College, then became an actuarial clerk at the Australian
Mutual Provident Society (AMP). At age 21, he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant
in the Citizen Military Forces (CMF) and posted to the 5th Battalion, Victorian
Militia. In 1912, a massive reorganization moved his battalion into the new 67th
(Hodson’s Bay) regiment. He convinced his new superiors to appoint him as the regimental
adjutant, which carried a temporary promotion to major. Shortly after the First
World War began, Bennett transferred from the militia into the new 6th Battalion,
Australian Imperial Force (AIF), a part of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Division,
AIF. Bennett had wangled a furlough from
the AMP and managed to keep his temporary rank, even though he was no longer an
adjutant.
Due to a
shortage of training camps in the UK, the entire 1st Div AIF was held in Egypt
in October 1914, and Bennett got to be the second-in-command of the 6th. The battalion
was sent to Gallipoli, where early on the morning of 25 April they were dropped
off on the southern flank of the beachhead at ANZAC Cove. Bennett was
detailed to lead 300 men up to establish an advanced position on Pine Ridge,
south of Lone Pine. After only four hours on shore, Bennett was wounded on the
shoulder and sent back to the beach for treatment. Subsequently, the enemy
counter-attacked and the isolated position on Pine Ridge was overwhelmed. The
men lost included Bennett’s brother Godfrey. Refusing evacuation to a hospital
ship, with only the field dressings on his wounds, Bennett then returned to the
fight, thus acquiring a reputation amongst his Diggers for guts and steadfast responsibility.
This was the only time he would be wounded in the war.
In early May, the entire 2nd Brigade was transferred
to Cape Helles for the Second Battle of Krithia. Bennett’s battalion advanced
against impossible odds and took heavy losses. Bennett had actually been struck
by a bullet that hit his ammunition pouch, detonating stored cartridges. He was
knocked off his feet but otherwise unwounded.
By the end of the day, he was the only officer in the 6th left standing. With a
handful of men, he had achieved the farthest advance of the attack. The next
day he took over the battalion and was promoted to temporary lieutenant
colonel.
On 7
August, the 6th was involved in one of the diversions in support of the Suvla
Bay landings. They were tasked with capturing a Turkish position known as the German
Officers' Trench, which enfiladed neighboring ANZAC positions, including the
Nek. Two attempts at capture failed; the battalion’s losses were 80 killed and
66 wounded. Bennett had survived unwounded again, which enhanced his aura of
immunity.
Following
the debacle at the German Officers' Trench, the 2nd Brigade, including the remnants
of Bennett's 6th, relieved the 1st Brigade at Lone Pine. Later in August, as
reinforcements from the 2nd Division AIF arrived at Anzac, the
original Australian units were rotated off to Lemnos to rest and refit. While
there, Bennett contracted paratyphoid fever and was evacuated to the UK. He
wouldn’t rejoin the AIF until January 1916.
In March
1916, the 1st Division AIF moved from Egypt to France. Bennett subsequently led
his 6th Battalion through the Battle of Pozières. After the 1st and 3rd
Brigades had captured the town on 24 July 1916, the 6th and 8th Battalions of
the 2nd Brigade moved in to occupy the ruins, where they had to endure a
prolonged artillery bombardment. On 26 July he reported to divisional
HQ: "My men are being unmercifully
shelled. They cannot hold out if an attack is launched. The firing line and my
headquarters are being plastered with heavy guns and the town is being swept by
shrapnel. I myself am O.K. but the front line is being buried." Nevertheless,
at Pozières, the 6th lost just 190 men, the smallest toll among the 12
battalions of the 1st Division, which overall suffered 7,700 casualties.
Bennett
continued to serve as the CO of the 6th, as well as doing stints as the acting
3rd Brigade commander, covering for Brig. Gen. Ewen George Sinclair-Maclagan
(1868–1948) CB CMG DSO, a British regular soldier who suffered frequent
attacks of “exhaustion.” In mid-November, Bennett took a brief leave in
London, where he married his fiancée, Bess Buchanen, whose gold-framed picture
he had faithfully carried in his blouse pocket. He later claimed that, while
somewhere in France, the photo had stopped a bullet from hitting him in the
heart. If true, it seems incredible that a man could have been so miraculously
saved twice.
On 3
December 1916, he was finally given the command of the 3rd Brigade and
became a temporary brigadier general. He was embittered by the delay which
he found unconscionable. Notwithstanding, at age 29, he was at the time
the youngest general officer in the Australian Army. He would lead the 3rd
Brigade for the remainder of the war.
Further
actions on the Western Front included repulsing a counter-attack at Lagnicourt
in April 1917, staging a successful assault on the Gheluvelt plateau in
September 1917, in which the brigade captured the German third line and held onto
it for five days, suffering heavy losses at Poelcapelle and Passchendaele during
October 1917, achieving great success at Chuignes during Ludendorff’s “Black
Day,” and attacking in several smaller actions against the Hindenburg Line in
1918.
The high
command considered him an able front-line commander, sometimes heroic dependable
and level-headed. He was generally well regarded by his men as well, who
considered him lucky, a sort of human talisman. But his peers found him jealous,
prickly, conniving and whinging. The official AIF historian Charles E. W. Bean mentions
Bennett's jealousy and criticism of superiors and petty quarrels with other
officers. Bennett’s chief of staff in Malaya, Col. James Thyer, put it this way:
Between the wars he was a civilian and did not study military tactics,
but rested on his World War I laurels. He was moved by hunches and believed in
the stars. He was tremendously ambitious and had his head in the clouds, which
is the last place a good battle commander’s head should be. Although
he was never in Bennett’s chain of command, a famous peer and fellow CMF
officer, the lighthorseman Maj. Gen.
William Glasgow (1876–1955) KCB CMG DSO VD, commander of the 13th Brigade, put
it most succinctly: Bennett is a pest!
After the
war Bennett lived in Sydney, where he sat on the New South Wales State
Repatriation Board and in 1928 became one of the City Commissioners. He became
involved in rightwing politics, too. He continued in the CMF, commanding the
9th Infantry Brigade and in 1926 the 2nd Division. He wasn’t promoted to major
general until 1930, another delay that he resented, especially since Glasgow
had been made a major general in 1921. Along with some other citizen-officers
in Australia's essentially part-time army, he detested the handful of regular
(Staff Corps) officers. His distaste of permanent officers, especially British
(like Sinclair-Maclagan) increased during the two decades of peace. In late
1937 he published a series of newspaper articles on defense policy which
criticized regular officers and which resulted censure by the Military Board.
On the
outbreak of World War II, Bennett was junior in rank only to the Chief of the
General Staff (CGS), Gen. Brudnell White (1876-1940) KCB KCMG KCVO DSO, and
Glasgow, who had been made the Australian High Commissioner for Canada in 1939.
Bennett was certain that he would be the
leader of a new AIF and was infuriated when White instead appointed the
commander of the 6th Division, Maj. Gen. Thomas Blamey (1884–1951) GBE KCB CMG
DSO MiD(8) VD, a regular officer with whom Bennett had clashed many times. Worse
still, White then gave the vacated 6th Division command to Maj. Gen. Iven
Giffard Mackay (1882–1966) KBE CMG DSO (2) VD, known familiarly as
“Mr. Chips.” Bennett and his cronies saw these moves as revenge exacted by the politicians
and Staff Corps. His military qualities weren’t the issue; it was his
temperament—he was considered unsuitable for a semi-diplomatic command, especially
one that would involve subordination to
British generals ( let alone American ones, as it would develop).
Bennett’s
bad news didn’t stop there: as the AIF formed the new 7th, 8th and 9th Divisions,
each command went to others. Bennett languished unassigned until August 1940,
when White's death in a plane crash led to the appointment of the commander of
the 8th Division, the engineer Maj. Gen. Vernon Sturdee (1890–1966) KBE, CB, DSO
as the new CGS, once again skipping over Bennett. However, as CGS, Sturdee
appointed Bennett to succeed him as commander of the 8th Division. This series
of slights spurred Bennett’s ambition to make up lost ground, particularly
against Blamey.
When the
British asked Australia to contribute a force to help the Indian Army in the defense
of Malaya, Bennett and his 8th got the job. In February 1941 he flew to Malaya
and joined his division, which then consisted of just the 22nd Brigade (likely
Blarney’s doing). In fact, Bennett never had all of his brigades in the
theater, let alone all together. His relations with his own senior officers
were unhappy and some of them tried to have him replaced on medical grounds. His
dislike of regular officers continued and was felt within his command, but actually
his most antagonistic relationship was with Brig. Gen. H. B. Taylor (1890–1966),
a civilian chemist and fellow CMF officer, who was the CO of the 22nd AIF
Brigade until sacked by Bennett. Bennett’s dealings with British senior
officers in Singapore weren’t harmonious, especially with the chief, Lieut. Gen.
Arthur Ernest Percival (1887–1966) CB DSO(2) OBE MC DL.
Japanese
troops landed in Malaya on 8 December 1941 and advanced steadily southward. On
9 January 1942, although he had no experience whatsoever in working with the
Indian Army, by dint of seniority Bennett was given command of an ad hoc
division-size formation called “Westforce,” which consisted of the recently arrived
27th AIF Brigade, plus the remnants of the battle-shocked 8th and 22nd
Indian Brigades and the green 45th Indian Brigade. Bennett was
charged with defending northwest Johore state. His troop dispositions were
fundamentally unsound. Save for a successful ambush by Australians at Gemensah
Bridge on 14 January and the dogged defense of Parit Sulong Bridge by the
Indians of the 45th Brigade, which delayed the enemy for several days (at the
cost of about 80 percent casualties), overall he fared no better than his
British counterparts. By the end of the month the defenders had to withdraw to
Singapore. A command center was set up in a space in the Ford factory which was
called “The Box.” Considered the most disciplined troops available, Bennett’s two
AIF brigades bore the brunt of the 8 February Japanese assault but were
overwhelmed.
Bennett's
conduct of operations had been questionable and Percival later noted that Bennett
became more troublesome as the end approached. There were 15 top-ranking
officers and civil leaders that met daily in the Box, all British except for
Bennett. They decided to ask for surrender on 15 February. On the night of the
14th, after having issued an order stating that all
officers in command of troops would stay with their men, he handed over command
of the 8th Division to a fellow CMF officer, his chief of artillery Brig.
Gen. C. A. Callaghan (1890–1967), who was hospitalized and hors de combat. Bennett
then proceeded, in the American lingo, to “bug out.”
There were
several published accounts of his adventure, none of which were provided by Bennett
himself. Broadly stated, the story goes like this. Along with a few junior
officers and some local Europeans, Bennett commandeered a series of watercraft by
threatening, bullying, and pulling rank. They successfully crossed the Straits
of Malacca to Sumatra, although it took them seven days—they had planned for
two. Nevertheless, they met up with a river launch, which took them up the Batang
Hari River to where it crossed the main highway, at which point they were met
and driven to Padang, on the west coast. From there, Bennett flew to Java and on
to Australia in PBYs, arriving in Melbourne on 2 March 1942 (ten days before
Gen. Douglas MacArthur bailed out of Corregidor).
The Australian
response to Bennett's escape saga was mixed. Some actually bought his premise
that he had valuable experience on Japanese tactics. Most, however, including
senior officers, denounced him for deserting his troops. At first the cover story
seemed to work: Bennett was promoted to temporary lieutenant general on 7 April,
but then he was made the head of III Corps, based in Perth, which was a
training job. Blamey refused to allowed Bennett to have another AIF command,
not even in the New Guinea jungles where Bennett’s supposed experience might possibly
have been useful. Bennett tried petitioning politicians for help, but none
would touch his situation. Bitterly disappointed, he quit active duty, transferring
back to the CMF on 9 May 1944. He then proceeded to write his analysis of the
Malayan debacle, entitled Why Singapore Fell, in which he mostly
blamed people who couldn’t object because they were either POWs or dead. Although
Blamey sought to block the book's publication on the grounds that the war
wasn’t over, it came out later that year anyway.
After the
release of the surviving POWs in 1945, Blarney received a letter from Percival that
accused Bennett of unlawfully vacating his command. A military investigation was
called which found that Bennett had relinquished his command without permission
but didn’t cover his subsequent run for it. Bennett still commanded support
from his Diggers who had served with him in World War I. Responding to their
pressure, the politicians commissioned Supreme Court Justice George
Ligertwood (1888–1967) KCB to hold another inquiry, the findings of which,
while they didn’t charge Bennett with cowardice, they did find his actions
unjustified.
Bennett's
stated case for leaving Singapore evolved to this: since he had learned how to
defeat the Japanese but had been let down by incompetent British leadership and
poor quality Indian troops, he was obligated to report his knowledge to his
superiors. This was poppycock. In fact, his greatest tactical achievement was
made by those maligned Indian soldiers. He had proven no more proficient than any other
commander in Malaya, where no one did a good job.
Recall the
complex and closely timed series of movements that plucked him from Singapore
and got him to Melbourne in just 17 days, which certainly required forethought,
planning, resources, payments, and outside help. It’s absolutely incredible that
he could have arranged all of this at the last minute while he was hunkered
down in Singapore. The escape scheme must have been hatched way before 14
February.
To
Bennett, the most important reason for his actions was likely his desire for
higher command, especially to lead the AIF, which meant that he had to get back
to Australia somehow, some way. As a POW, he wouldn’t ever get promoted again.
His
prejudice toward regular officers, particularly British, plus his persistent ambition
for advancement, overcame his soldierly bearing at the most critical point in
his career. When his most sought-after goal was permanently denied to him, he
consistently blamed others, especially Blarney.
After the
war Bennett left the CMF but kept his oar in, writing articles on the benefits
of a citizen army over a regular one. He died on 1 August 1962.
Jim Patton
Sources
include Australian War Memorial and The Australian Dictionary of Biography
