Bearing Witness

The Burma Campaign – the fight against the Japanese to defend British India – involved air, land and sea operations.

As Australians served as part of Allied forces, Australia’s role is not so obvious as it is on other fronts, such as North Africa, Singapore or New Guinea.

Three official war artists deployed to Burma: Frank Norton, Roy Hodgkinson and William Dargie. They created a compelling record of how Australians’ experiences in Burma were shaped by dramatic technological advances and challenging conditions.

Frank Norton

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Frank Norton served as Australia’s first official war artist with the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) from 1941. He seemed destined for the role. The then 25-year-old artist had been already accepted into the Royal Society of Marine Artists and was establishing a successful career.

Norton was attached to the Eastern Fleet, arriving in Colombo in December 1943. He joined the corvette HMAS Cairns on convoy duty in the Arabian Sea. Norton’s sketchbook of December 1943 to January 1944 contains observations of routine life on board Cairns, including aspects of the ship’s working environment, views of and from ships, colour notes and annotations to aid the development of larger works and illustrations. His view of Colombo from Ipswich shows the harbour full of wartime shipping, framed from above by a line of barrage balloon defences.

Despite the frustrations of waiting to join suitable ships, getting local permits and vaccinations, and not having any cabin accommodation (he slept and worked in wardrooms or on deck), Norton had found the officers helpful and had had ‘a very happy time’.

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Norton next went to Trincomalee on the eastern coast of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) and joined the HMAS Quiberon between 7 and 18 February 1944. The ship spent most of the month on exercises off Ceylon and an operational sweep in the Bay of Bengal (11–12 February). Norton’s drawings exemplify the lengths that he went to capture scenes of interest. Operational sweep gives us a unique view of the ships undertaking the sweep from inside the blast shield of the ship’s aft torpedo tubes. He climbed up to the crow’s nest to draw, and made several studies in pencil from the deck, looking up as a sailor climbs to take over the watch.

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Although less dramatic than his maritime battle paintings, Norton’s technical knowledge and experience of life aboard inform a valuable record of the service of many Australians. He returned to Australia in May 1944, having completed 43 artworks.

Roy Hodgkinson

Roy Hodgkinson enlisted in the AIF as a trooper in the Armoured Division in 1941. Before the war he had studied art in Sydney, and by the time he was 20 had started a successful career in journalism as an illustrator and cartoonist.

He served as a war artist from February 1942. Hodgkinson approached his commission like a war correspondent, creating images to be both informative and entertaining. It is clear in his letters, and when interviewed in later life, that Hodgkinson saw that his contribution was to create drawings that would appeal to veterans as true representations of their experiences when they were seen at the Australian War Memorial, and to function as morale-boosting propaganda for the Memorial’s service annuals. 

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“Mostly Jack ashore and afloat but without any signs of action,” was Colonel John Treloar’s description of Hodgkinson’s artworks with the Eastern Fleet. During the war, Treloar was on leave from his role as Director of the Australian War Memorial; as Officer in Charge of the Army’s Military History Section, he managed the official war art scheme. First used in the 1700s, the word ‘Jack’ has become a popular slang word for a ‘sailor’, and ‘Jack ashore’ for an often inebriated sailor on leave.

Soon after arriving in Colombo on 26 October 1944, Hodgkinson started his ’Jack ashore’ series. He spent time in the busy Pettah market district of Colombo, capturing impressions of Aussie sailors on leave, the local people and the city. 

Hodgkinson’s drawings of the RAN in Colombo use common stereotypes of sailors and the unique aspects of their service abroad to make them as broadly representative as possible.

After three months with the RAN, in February 1945 Hodgkinson joined RAAF personnel working with 205 Squadron RAF at Lake Koggala in southern Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka).

Hodgkinson focused on the activities of Australian air force personnel attached to RAF Group 229 Transport Squadrons, who were working to sustain the British Fourteenth Army. This air support was crucial to the 
campaign’s eventual success.

Hodgkinson made rapid notes from life to work up into larger, highly detailed drawings to illustrate tasks specific to the Transport squadrons. Subjects included personnel undertaking operational flights; dropping supplies; medical air evacuation; and flying on oxygen at high altitude.

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Hodgkinson was billeted with officers, and as a result his artworks reveal their relatively privileged camp life that included servants, hot baths and cups of tea. He does not seem to have spent time with ground crew, presumably because they were not Australians. 

Because Hodgkinson’s artworks served as morale-boosting propaganda, and with a veteran audience in mind, they do not convey much of the hardship endured by aircrews in Burma. For example the somewhat Incident during monsoon, Kyaukpyu showing men struggling against the elements and trying to hang onto their tents, is the artist’s only depiction of the horrendous monsoonal conditions that resulted in ‘weeks of abject misery’ at camp, with flooded airfields and extremely dangerous flying conditions. 

After 10 months continuous service, Hodgkinson embarked for Australia on HMS Belfast, arriving in Sydney on 21 August 1945.

William Dargie

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William Dargie’s deployment to Burma was shorter than Norton’s and Hodkinson’s, curtailed by logistical and health challenges. Dargie had first deployed as an official war artist to the Middle East in 1941.

He was a 29-year-old traditionally trained painter who famously received news that he had won the Archibald Prize while he was digging a trench in Tobruk. He then had deployments in New Guinea, where he won Treloar’s appreciation for both his written and visual records.

Dargie’s time in India was limited by the need to get to Greece. He was sent there to study the region where the AIF had fought in 1941 at the same time of year, as an artist had not been appointed at that time. After weeks of delays, from 16 December 1944 Dargie started with the 159 Liberator Squadron, based at Digri Aerodrome in north-east India. Another frustration was his materials – waiting for paint to be sent from Australia, and finding that the canvas boards he had been supplied with were buckling in the conditions.

The only picture Dargie painted of aerial action must have been based on crew descriptions, as Liberators of 159 Squadron RAF dive-bombing railway station, Ye, Burma shows a bombing raid, which he would not have personally witnessed. Dargie captured the moment when the aircraft (in a steep dive at an airspeed of 230-260 mph) dropped nine 500lb bombs from a height of 400 feet. The station was badly hit, several trucks were blown off the tracks, and about 400 yards of line completely wrecked.

While in New Guinea, Dargie relished being among the men, close to the action. With the RAF, he was limited to activity away from the front lines, and his written descriptions are not nearly so comprehensive.

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Liberators of 159 Squadron RAF dive-bombing lacks the assured technique displayed in scenes he had actually witnessed. He was deployed on 4 January 1945 to 134 and 258 Thunderbolt Squadrons, based in Arakan (now Rakhine) state in Burma. The other 34 paintings and drawings Dargie made in India and Burma all depict what he had seen personally in his usual style: bombers ready to take off or undergoing maintenance; portraits of the crew; and scenes of the crew at work and of labourers building the aerodrome.

Paintings such as Planes grounded by the ‘Chota’ monsoon contrast the technology of the bombers with the limitations imposed by the climate. American Thunderbolts of 134 Squadron are stuck on the clay runway, with weak sunlight shining through storm clouds, highlighting the water pooled on the ground.

Dargie’s quick oil sketches of personnel attest to his fame as a portraitist, often capturing them at work, such as Pilot in cockpit of Thunderbolt (Warrant Officer Russell Precians).

Plans to document a Beaufighter squadron were foiled by malaria: Dargie was hospitalised 14-26 January, and was almost immediately re-admitted with stomach trouble. His health problems reoccurred throughout his deployment to Greece, forcing an early return to Australia. Dargie was not satisfied with his work in Burma and India; but given his ill health, his long service as a war artist, the poor quality of his materials and the challenging climate, it is remarkable that he achieved what he did.

Press reports of the military campaign and the 1943 famine meant that Australians were aware of the war in Burma as much as they were of other significant fronts. But this memory has declined over time, as Australia’s public memory of the Second World War has focused on other theatres of the war, such as the prisoner of war experience in South-East Asia and the campaigns in Papua New Guinea and Tobruk. Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of many, most especially the artists, a significant record was obtained and preserved of Australia’s role in the Burma campaign.

A longer version of this article appears in In the Fight: Australians and the War in Burma 1942-1945, edited by Andrew Kilsby and Daryl Moran.