Landers - Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace

Lingering Ghosts of War and Peace

Published by Books Unleashed at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 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 Fitzpatricks 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, Australias 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 national security service, ASIO, similar to Britains MI5. No one ever seems to have told Chifley about that Moscow code name. During the war, Hughes and Fitzpatrick had a joint friend who, in 1942, as the Japanese swept towards Australia, 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 Australias Most Embarrassing Spy Secret.

My 2015 book detailed problems during my search for facts about all that, and about matters in my fathers 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 Sydneys Little Chicago, published earlier on the internet. This version of necessity retains many biographical details. Because of personal problems that worsened after the earlier version I have included some new details.

Contents

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 Hesss 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.