Morotai Mutiny
Eight senior pilots, including Australia's leading flying ace, Group Captain Clive Caldwell, tendered their resignations to protest what they perceived as the relegation of Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) fighter squadrons to strategically unimportant ground attack missions against Japanese positions that had been bypassed in the Allies' "island-hopping" campaign.
This wing comprised three Supermarine Spitfire squadrons, whose pilots included veterans of the North African Campaign and the defence of Northern Australia against Japanese air raids.
1 TAF were increasingly assigned to garrison duties and harassing Japanese bases on islands bypassed by MacArthur's forces.
[5] US Marine Corps aviators from the Air North Solomons command also believed that MacArthur's headquarters was favouring the USAAF in the assignment of combat duties.
1 TAF personnel based on Morotai, particularly the Spitfire pilots who had little opportunity for the air-to-air combat they specialised in and whose aircraft were ill-suited to ground attack missions.
[8][9][10] In March 1945, frustrated by the lack of response from Cobby and his staff and convinced that operations were becoming even more wasteful, Arthur began discussing his concerns with other senior No.
9 Operational Group and had made allegations regarding the leadership of its commander, Air Commodore Joe Hewitt, who was eventually dismissed from his post.
[10] Arthur later stated that, "I meant to make as big a fuss as I possibly could with the object of getting the position corrected ... All the same, we realised that, to lay ourselves open to any charge of mutiny, we might lessen the force of what we were doing, which was the reason we put the things in as resignations and not as any attempt to unseat people higher up.
[4] Arthur reasoned that, although Cobby was partly to blame for the morale issue, "we felt that his value to our move, because of his name with the Public, together with Group Captain Caldwell, would give us a very considerable amount of public support ... he was the prima donna of one war, and ... arm-in-arm with the prima donna of the next war, we would put up a reasonable front and attract a lot of attention in the headlines of the newspapers."
The letters read, "I hereby respectfully make application that I be permitted to resign my Commission as an officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, forthwith."
1 TAF was at a "dangerously low level" and recommended that Jones fire Cobby and replace him with Air Commodore Frederick Scherger.
[7][14] Jones considered the pilots' action "absurd", because an officer could not legally resign during wartime, but travelled to Morotai from his headquarters in Melbourne to investigate the matter personally.
"[7] Kenney also became embroiled in the affair, having been informed by Bostock, and insisted on speaking directly to the pilots himself over Jones' protest that this was an internal RAAF disciplinary matter.
[4] The commander of the Australian Army's I Corps, Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead, who was at Morotai preparing for the Borneo campaign, also supported Cobby's removal.
Morshead and other senior army officers were concerned that the dispute could disrupt preparations for the Australian landings in Borneo and consulted with Kenney on the matter.
[10][16][17] Ultimately, no court-martial took place for any actions directly related to the "mutiny", and most of the pilots involved continued on operations until the end of the war.
[4] Upon Jones' request, the Australian government also set up an inquiry into events on Morotai, headed by the barrister John Vincent Barry, KC.
1 TAF, the inquiry also heard evidence of shortcomings in the Air Force's higher command that may have contributed to structural and morale problems on Morotai, particularly a bitter and long-running feud between Jones and Bostock over the division of operational and administrative control of the RAAF in the Pacific.
to give them that more important or more interesting work ..."[20] The incident did not change the RAAF's role in the dying days of the war in the Pacific and may have hindered No.
