The Battle of Brisbane

On the evening of 26 November 1942, in the centre of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, the largest wartime riot between soldiers of two allied armies broke out. For several hours a crowd of Australian servicemen and civilians besieged an American military store, and an American military policeman, trying to stop his weapon being taken from him, fatally shot an Australian gunner. The following evening the clashes were repeated. The events went down in history under the ironic name of the Battle of Brisbane, although censorship ensured that little was known about them during the war.

A city full of Americans

From the beginning of 1942 Australia became the main American base in the South-West Pacific. After Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia in March and took command of the Allied forces in the area, his headquarters moved in the summer to Brisbane – to the building of the AMP insurance society on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets. Tens of thousands of American servicemen passed through the city, which had some 330,000 inhabitants: men arriving from home, waiting to be sent to the front, or resting after the fighting. At the peak, the city’s population grew by about 80,000, and according to various estimates between 150,000 and 300,000 Americans were stationed in camps in the surrounding area. Over the course of the war nearly a million American servicemen passed through Australia. Brisbane was also where the orders came from for the divisions that were moved to Port Moresby and the northern coast of New Guinea in the autumn.

The official propaganda of both countries stressed comradeship in arms, and most contacts between the soldiers passed off peacefully. There were, however, many sources of tension. An American private earned much more than an Australian one, wore a better-cut uniform and had access to the PX (Post Exchange) military stores, where for little money one could buy cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, ham, ice cream or nylon stockings – goods that in Australia were rationed, expensive or unobtainable altogether. Australians were not allowed into the PX, and their own canteens offered tea, sandwiches and soft drinks. Pubs could serve alcohol only during two short, hour-long windows a day, which encouraged fast drinking and crowds of tipsy soldiers in the streets.

The greatest resentment concerned women. The Americans, generous thanks to their higher pay and their PX goods, were very popular with the women of Brisbane; a journalist who counted passers-by in Queen Street in mid-1942 tallied 152 women in the company of 112 Americans, and only 31 women with 60 Australians. By the end of the war some 12,000 Australian women had married American servicemen. Many Australians, especially those who had come back from the fighting in the Middle East and New Guinea, felt they had become second-class citizens in their own city. A saying about the Americans popular at the time – overpaid, oversexed and over here – was also familiar in Britain.

The American military police were particularly disliked. Australian military police went unarmed, whereas the Americans carried weapons and batons and – in the Australians’ view – used them at the slightest provocation. According to the authorities, there were as many as 20 fights between soldiers of the two armies in the city in a single night, and in the weeks before the riot several incidents with fatal casualties occurred in Brisbane and other Queensland towns. On the morning of 26 November an American military policeman beat an Australian soldier with his baton in Albert Street.

The first evening

26 November 1942 was a Thursday – the Americans were celebrating Thanksgiving. According to the reconstruction by the Australian historian Barry Ralph, at about 7 p.m. a drunk Private James R. Stein of the American 404th Signal Company was walking from a pub that was just closing towards the PX on the corner of Creek and Adelaide Streets. He had stopped to talk to three Australians when a military policeman, Private Anthony E. O’Sullivan of the 814th Military Police Company, came up and demanded his pass. Stein was too slow in finding it; the MP began to hurry him and detained him. The Australians stood up for the American, and when O’Sullivan raised his baton they went for him. More MPs ran up; together with their beaten colleague and Stein, they withdrew into the PX building.

A crowd quickly gathered in front of the store – first about a hundred Australian soldiers and civilians, then more and more. Bottles and stones were thrown at the windows, and the American Red Cross club across the street was also besieged. Fights broke out in various parts of the city centre. By about 8 p.m., according to various accounts, between 2,000 and 5,000 people were taking part in the riot. Some Australian military policemen took off their armbands and joined their comrades, and the fire brigade, which arrived on the scene, did not use its hoses – something the Americans later held against it.

Military policemen of the 738th Military Police Battalion defending the PX came out in front of the building armed with shotguns. The crowd took this as a provocation. Several soldiers tried to disarm Private Norbert Grant; in the struggle, at about 8 p.m., the shotgun went off three times. The first shot hit Gunner Edward S. Webster of the Australian 2/2nd Anti-Tank Regiment in the chest and killed him – according to some accounts on the spot, according to others shortly afterwards in hospital. The pellets wounded several other soldiers and at least one civilian – sources give between seven and nine people wounded by gunfire. Grant managed to escape into the PX. At about 10 p.m. the crowd dispersed, leaving the ground floor of the store wrecked.

The second evening

The tension did not ease the next day. On the evening of 27 November several hundred Australian soldiers gathered outside the Red Cross building; NCOs moving through the crowd took hand grenades off several of them. In Queen Street a group of Australians armed with clubs ran into a detachment of about 20 American MPs, who drew their pistols – a shoot-out was avoided only thanks to an Australian officer who persuaded the American commander to lead his men away. The crowd moved on to the AMP building, MacArthur’s headquarters, and hurled abuse at it. In the surrounding streets any Americans encountered were beaten; more than 20 of them were injured, and eleven, including several MPs and officers, ended up in hospital.

The total toll of the two nights was one Australian killed, a dozen or more Australians wounded by firearms and batons, and several dozen Americans roughed up; some accounts speak of hundreds suffering minor injuries. Rumours that circulated later about Australians being machine-gunned or Americans beaten to death are not borne out by the documents.

Censorship and courts

The authorities of both countries did everything they could to keep the affair from spreading beyond Brisbane. On 26 November itself the office of the Chief Publicity Censor banned the transmission of details of the riot by telegraph and radio. The next day the Courier-Mail reported the death of one soldier and the wounded, but without a word about who had been fighting whom. On 1 December the censors were instructed on no account to allow any mention of clashes between Americans and Australians. The affair did not appear in the American press at all, and soldiers’ letters from Brisbane were censored to remove any reference to the incidents. The result of this censorship was rumour, more exaggerated with every week.

The commands reacted above all with disciplinary measures. The units involved in the riot were moved out of the city, military police patrols were strengthened, the Australian canteen was closed and the PX was moved elsewhere; the ban on carrying weapons while on leave was also enforced more strictly. In February 1943 Private Grant was tried by an American court martial for manslaughter and acquitted – the court found that he had acted in self-defence. Five Australians were convicted of assault, one of them being sentenced to six months in prison. In Australia the verdict in Grant’s case was received with bitterness.

Place in the war

The Battle of Brisbane did not shake the alliance – neither the governments nor the military commands allowed it to become a political issue. Prime Minister John Curtin, who since December 1941 had staked the country’s security on cooperation with the United States rather than with Britain, could not afford a public quarrel with the Americans at a time when their divisions were fighting alongside Australian ones in New Guinea. The riot showed, however, how hard it was for a small society to take in on its own soil the large army of an ally that was richer and better supplied. Similar, though smaller, clashes broke out in Townsville, Rockhampton and Mount Isa, in Melbourne in December 1942, in Sydney in 1943 and in Perth and Fremantle in 1944, and in New Zealand – in Manners Street, Wellington, in April 1943.

In Brisbane itself relations settled down in time after the riot; the American sergeant Bill Bentson recalled that a few days later Australians in the pubs were slapping him on the back and buying him beer, remembering “a good old brawl”. Yet the memory of those two nights survived in Queensland as a symbol of the less official side of the alliance – the side that wartime propaganda did not want to talk about.