Controlling male sexuality: combating venereal disease in the New Zealand military during two world wars.

THERE IS AN ABUNDANCE OF STUDIES about control of venereal disease in the military during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians have written extensively on this subject, beginning with the Contagious Diseases Acts, which was intended to protect the fighting power of the British military forces during the late nineteenth century, and ending with what Lucy Bland has called the "militarization" of venereal disease in the mid-1980s. (1) Because the control of women, particularly prostitutes, was an obvious and visible part of gender bias in the military campaign, it has drawn attention from historians in New Zealand and other countries. (2) We have learned a lot from this scholarship about the social construction of gender in the military venereal disease campaigns, which pathologized female sexuality. Surveillance, control, or even punishment of men has not tended to be the focus; instead, it has been stressed that men's sexual behavior was condoned by the military and generally understood as a necessary evil. A perusal of the official histories both of disciplinary problems of combatants and of the New Zealand Medical Services during World War II seems to confirm this notion, as these histories are conspicuously silent on the issue of punishment of servicemen for contracting venereal disease. (3) The official history of the Medical Services, for example, has only one sentence on disciplinary action in its eleven-page discussion of venereal disease in the armed forces, and that comment relates to the British forces and not to New Zealand policy. (4)

Yet when I interviewed World War II veterans about their experience of military medical practices as part of a larger historical study on venereal disease, they did not solely remember the surveillance of prostitutes. "Frank" (his name, as the names of all others interviewed, is a pseudonym), back then an eighteen-year-old recruit with the New Zealand army, remembered vividly an examination process during which men were lined up with their trousers down and a medical officer grasped one penis after another without protective gloves--a "shocking experience," he called it. (5) Another New Zealand veteran, "Roger," recalled that the soldiers in line "just turn[ed] turkey" when expected to expose their genitals. (6) These so-called dangle parades were part of a tradition of mass medical inspections in the military. Pre-enlistment medical inspections were often just as embarrassing for men. Yet Frank's and Roger's experiences, as part of a number of venereal disease surveillance and control measures for servicemen and male sexuality, have been little acknowledged in the historiography. (7) This case study on the New Zealand military venereal disease campaign not only in the Middle East and the Pacific theaters of war but also at home aims at filling these gaps by comparing military practices for combating venereal disease among servicemen between World War I and World War II. (8) It will also reevaluate the meanings of male bodies and sexuality attached to combatants both by the combatants themselves and by the New Zealand military. (9) Using Stephen Whitehead's emphasis on the importance of understanding the "multiplicity of male embodiment," this article advances the idea of diversity rather than homogeneity in the venereal disease military campaign and its historiography. (10)

This alternative story is based on New Zealand Defense Department archives and hitherto untapped archives of the Royal New Zealand Army Medical Corps, aided by interviews with nine veterans, two doctors, and one member of the military medical personnel. (11) The small sample of interviews testifies to the difficulty of finding witnesses who are still alive, served during the period of the world wars, and are still willing to speak about venereal disease. This article is not primarily about oral history but places the interviews in context with written sources, providing information from both and provoking new lines of inquiry. (12) I compare both wars first, by looking at educational practices, medical practicalities, and surveillance; second, by analyzing the support of regimes of military punishment by medical staff and administrative military staff; and third, by exploring the meanings attached to male sexuality by the New Zealand defense establishment and combatants themselves.

EDUCATION

The New Zealand military authorities during World War I were mostly unprepared to face the problem of venereal disease. Their complacency about the disease was in part a result of the fact that prior to 1914 the permanent New Zealand military establishment was very small, and the majority of the national militia, called the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces, was comprised of part-time volunteers under what was called the Territorial Force. Consequently, there was an inadequate level of planning for the establishment of an expanded military as would be required when World War I broke out in 1914, including in the medical services, at least until 1916. A low rejection rate of recruits on grounds of venereal disease--only 295 out of a total of 88,895 medical rejections--might have left the military complacent about the issue. (13) Yet when sent overseas to fight in World War I, New Zealand soldiers--who were in the majority under thirty years of age and unmarried--had opportunities for unrestricted access to alcohol and sex unequaled at home. (14) The consequences of these demographic and social factors became apparent particularly in Egypt, where soldiers roamed the markets, dance halls, and unlicensed brothels and fell for the "irresistible temptations of a sensuous oriental city." (15) First in Egypt and later in England, a concomitant steep increase in venereal disease among imperial and colonial troops ensued. This problem was not restricted to New Zealand, as rates also shot up for the briefly stationed Canadian and Australian expeditionary forces. (16) As the rates detected during enlistment procedures were low by comparison, the loss of personnel that ensued from New Zealand soldiers being admitted to hospitals by February 1915 caught the military by surprise. (17)

There was no organized plan in the early war years on how to deal with infection, and soldiers were originally left to their own devices as to whether or not they would engage in sexual relationships. Many of them may well have been ignorant of contraceptive and protective measures. It was after the incidences in Cairo in 1915 that education on venereal disease became increasingly important to military policy. The military response to the problem was dominated by a growing concern about personnel wastage as well as by moral considerations, including the anticipated social implications of giving the soldiers, and consequently the army, a bad reputation with the New Zealand population at home. (18) Practical information on venereal disease and the provision of personal prophylactics and condoms to servicemen came initially not from the military but from the controversial campaigner for the Voluntary Sisterhood, Ettie Rout. (19) A committed socialist at home, Rout invited criticism for her support of contraceptives for New Zealand soldiers, and she single-handedly provided social and sexual welfare services later in the war to New Zealand soldiers stationed in England and France. In contrast, military education was based mainly on abstinence coupled with increasing calls for chastity and--if that was not enough--scare tactics.

Following the Australians' lead, military medical officers decided to order soldiers' payroll cards, distributed to them with their monthly salaries, to be printed with British Lord Kitchener's advice for soldiers: "To avoid strong drink and to respect womankind; to be chaste and to be temperate." (20) Efforts were made to keep alcohol consumption under control, as it was believed often to neutralize the good intentions of sexual self-restraint many soldiers might have had. In addition, as with the other Allied forces, scare tactics were used to keep New Zealand servicemen away from sexual encounters. Lectures such as those by Lt. Col. James Hardie Neil of the New Zealand Medical Corps included depictions of the "ravages of the disease." (21)