...and now for the conspiracy theory.
According to people you should know, (I think, but am not certain, that it was George Odgers in his Official History of the RAAF in WW2, Volume 2), the courts martial of Bobby Gibbes, Blackjack Walker and Clive Caldwell, all senior RAAF officers whose names were also very well known to the Australian public, was a complete stitch up, designed to take the spotlight off a public protest they had organised through a friendly Parliamentarian to put a stop to the totally useless offensive flight operations of the RAAF squadrons out of Moratai in 1945.
The RAAF Kittyhawk squadrons were losing pilots steadily in ground attacks on tactically and strategically useless Japanese-held islands that had been bypassed and had nothing of value on them apart from "an endless supply of anti aircraft ammunition" according to one of the others (I think Cadwell) court martialled along with Gibbes.
It would seem Gibbes and the others committed the most grievous of sins for a senior military officer - they tried to look after the men serving under them and not have them risk their lives unless it was for something worthwhile.
Their demise was exacerbated to a very large degree because of a wartime custom in the RAAF that went horribly, horribly wrong for the men who remained fighting at the front (and not just in this incident). If an officer, particularly a senior officer, was unable to ‘cut the mustard’ on operations, (and apparently, there were many), he was usually sent back to Australia to a desk job in Air Force Headquarters (the classic ‘sideways promotion’) – where, because he had recent experience ‘in theatre’, he usually became the resident expert on that theatre of operations and was all too often promoted into a position where he became senior to the man who had sacked him and sent him home.
Payback time.
Apparently there were quite a few such people back in Melbourne who took great delight in screwing Gibbes and the others, (I think) all of whom plead guilty to the old “Section 40” charge, (which, for those not familiar with it, (“conduct prejudicial to good discipline”) is almost impossible to beat, which is why it was the one slapped on them. They plead guilty because they were so utterly disenchanted with the System they had absolutely no respect for it and for the men who were overseeing it.
Sound familiar? Some things are timeless.
If you what to really get into a can of worms, there was the “two separate Air Forces” problem that plagued the RAAF at that time and I think played a part in this, i.e., those who followed AVM Jones and those who followed AVM Bostock.
If you want to go into that, we’d be here for days on end. The short version: Jones was assigned as CAS, but he was junior to Bostock, and the Brits wouldn’t let the Australians have a full Air Marshal, so the CAS remained the same rank as the man he’d bypassed – but lower down the stud list, and therefore in the Bostock’s (and many who agreed with him) eyes, he was still his junior. Throughout the whole war, there was another war -, and a very serious one - going on within the RAAF between the two camps, and it caused enormous problems.
Sound incredible? And incredibly petty? Check it out. It’s quite likely somewhere on Google.