‘Japan is no longer our ally’: Billy Hughes’ forecast
The idea of race dominated debate about international relations, and nowhere more so than in White Australia. Discussion about racial war, in fiction and in popular debate, became increasingly insistent as the 1930s advanced. The fiction especially anticipated just enough of what actually occurred, or seemed likely to, in 1942 to influence thinking about invasion for decades to come.
In 1933 A. L. Pullar published his first and only novel, Celestalia. It begins with volcanoes in Japan triggering epic movements of people across east Asia. Japanese settlers move into Manchuria and China, Chinese into Sumatra and Siberia, and millions of Japanese found an overseas empire in Brazil. The ‘great war of 1952’ causes more population movements, with large numbers of defeated Italians emigrating to Queensland, and ‘racial suicide’ in America as a Negro military junta seizes control and white Americans join an enlarged Canada. These convulsions touch Australia. In 1953 Japanese–Brazilian pocket battleships fire long-range poison gas shells to destroy Sydney and Melbourne, and by the 1970s most of Australia has become the Chinese colony of Celestalia. The novel ends with the loss of Tasmania, the rump of White Australia. The question ‘What right had six and a half million people to lay claim to … an empty [sic] continent?’ permeates the book.1 Many posed the same question, both in and beyond Australia, pondering the future of the powers around the Pacific, although perhaps more realistically than Pullar.
In reality, after a brief democratic experiment, by 1930 militarists had captured Japan’s government. While Australian Government statements and actions generally avoided dealing with Japanese militarism, conservative politicians published forthright statements in the mid- to late 1930s that reflected a pragmatic, even pessimistic, view of the implications of a militarist Japan in Australia’s region. In 1935 – the year in which Adolf Hitler breached the Treaty of Versailles by introducing conscription – Billy Hughes broke with the United Australia Party’s official stance and published Australia and War Today.
Hughes accepted that Australians lived in a ‘world resounding with preparation for war’, and accepted that the disarmament conferences on which the world had staked so much had failed. Hughes conceded that what Japan was doing in Manchuria was little more than ‘the way we made good our footing here’. A Neo-Darwinian, he believed that life was a ‘fight for survival’ and that ‘progress is bought by blood’. Hughes dismissed economic sanctions – the League of Nations’ only real weapon – as ‘an empty gesture’.
Hughes argued that Australia could not defend itself, that the Royal Navy no longer commanded the seas and that the League of Nations could not ensure security. This was crucial because, as he emphasised, ‘Japan is no longer our ally.’2 His book detailed these related developments. The Militia, he disclosed, numbered about 27 000, less than a sixth of the number that General Harry Chauvel’s senior officers’ committee had recommended in 1920, and was inefficient. The RAN had just four ships in commission in 1932, and the nearest British fleet was stationed 10 000 kilometres distant, in the Mediterranean. Australia’s defence services were ‘quite unequal to the task of defending even a fractional part of the country against an invader’.3 Meanwhile, to Australia’s north, ‘The East, roused from its age-long slumbers, has awakened.’
Despite his warnings, like Samuel Rosa, Hughes maintained a cool perspective on what the possibility of invasion might entail. He ridiculed those who thought that an invader might take advantage of the ‘empty North’. This was, he wrote, ‘the last thing an enemy would do.’ Since this idea recurs so often in invasion fiction and speculation, it is worth quoting Hughes’ criticism of it. ‘Why should he land a force in a remote and almost uninhabited section of this great island continent?’ Hughes asked. An invader would face a ‘two-thousand-mile trek across great stretches of difficult country to embark on a long and eminently hazardous campaign against a warlike, resourceful and resolute people’.
Hughes’ critique offered cold comfort, however. ‘An enemy with a strong naval force … could without much effort … reduce the country to submission in twenty-four hours by simply threatening to bombard Sydney,’ he argued. Sceptical of any government’s resolve, he predicted that ‘one shell screaming over Sydney … would bring the Government to its knees’. In a footnote that later fiction-writers obviously read, Hughes added that an invader would be well advised to land a force to Sydney’s north to destroy the Hawkesbury River bridges, cut Sydney off from the north and ‘reduce the Newcastle steelworks to hideous wreckage’.
Given that a fleet could not be built quickly, and that an army could only meet an invader that was already on Australian soil, Hughes’ answer to the problem of defending a large continent was air power. The exploits of air pioneers such as Kingsford Smith and Bert Hinkler inspired Hughes as they thrilled many newsreel audiences. Hughes urged the ‘young men of Australia’ to become ‘air-minded’, although even this seemed an ambitious goal. In 1935, Hughes conceded, there were in the entire Commonwealth only 237 suitably qualified pilots, fourteen navigators and seven radio operators. As he knew better than most, the Great War had cost Australia 60 000 lives and £80 million ‘to keep the war 10 000 miles away’. Surely, he asked, ‘we can find the money to protect ourselves from a still more disastrous war coming to our very doors?’
Hughes’ candour did him no good in his party. Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, anxious not to offend any potential aggressor, suspended him as Minister for Health and Repatriation for several months. But his book seems to have inspired two of the most influential works of invasion fiction published before 1942.
‘You will be finished’: George Mitchell’s The Awakening
George Mitchell (‘soldier, author, politician and lifelong larrikin,’ according to Bill Gammage in the Australian Dictionary of Biography) had survived the Great War unwounded after four years. His Backs to the Wall had become a classic account of Australia’s role on the Western Front in 1918. His 1937 novel The Awakening, endorsed with a no-nonsense foreword by Billy Hughes (in which he repeated the views he had put in Australia and War Today) made up in apparent authenticity what it lacked in artistic merit.
The Awakening begins with a shot-riddled Australian plane returning to Mascot Airport, having spotted a fleet of warships off the coast of Sydney. Once again, a powerful, unnamed Asian power invades Australia. The immediate story is that of John Cromwell, a Great War veteran who in the opening chapter kills the crews of enemy aircraft that land on his central Queensland beach. Cromwell recruits a motley band of canecutters and veterans and leads them against an invasion force. His wife, a nurse, is killed when the invaders bomb the local hospital, but he soon grows to love Betty, a plucky girl soldier who campaigns with him from Queensland down to New South Wales. He and his ‘Commando’ capture and use heavy artillery, defy tanks and a cruiser, and shoot down fighters with seized pompom guns.
The backdrop to Cromwell’s exaggerated adventure is that a world war has begun. Germany has invaded France and the Netherlands, Germany and Russia fight over Poland, and Britain is cut off from its Atlantic lifeline by giant German torpedo-carrying flying boats refuelled from submarines. In Asia, Singapore is besieged by land and sea. ‘Britain is no longer able to guarantee our security,’ Billy Hughes wrote in his foreword. Australia stands alone against an unnamed enemy, which can only be Japan.
An enemy fleet bombards Sydney, although RAAF planes do manage to sink an aircraft carrier. Gas-laden ships run ashore at Manly, Coogee and Bondi, and poisonous clouds drift over the city as aircraft bomb roads and bridges choked with refugees. Enemy forces land north and south of the city, at Broken Bay and Port Hacking, but the Militia cannot hold them. The mainstay of the defence becomes Great War veterans and bands of hastily armed civilian men.
But the invasion succeeds. Melbourne and Adelaide are the only capitals untouched, and they are cut off when railways are bombed. Enemy commandos land in the remote desert to cut the transcontinental railway linking South and Western Australia. Newcastle and Port Kembla are captured. Brisbane is threatened by a landing at Southport. Maryborough, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Townsville and Cairns are overrun. Darwin and Broome are taken by forces disguised as merchant sailors. ‘How we are paying for our easy years!’ Cromwell remarks bitterly.4
A few volunteers from a non-interventionist America arrive to support Cromwell as his commando – now horsed – hurries to Rockhampton, which is besieged by invaders who have landed near Yeppoon. They break the siege. But even as he surrenders an enemy general predicts, ‘In the end we will take all Australia and you will be finished.’ There seems little hope. Isolationist politics make official American help impossible, while Britain is still fighting for its existence in the Atlantic. The nameless enemy in Australia begins dropping bombs filled with anthrax bacteria. Cromwell and Betty go south to join the climactic Battle of Bulli Pass – where Mitchell imagines another fight with backs to the wall and Cromwell dies in a heroic last stand. Mitchell’s tale holds out no hope of an easy victory.
‘A thrilling novel that may forecast the future’: Erle Cox’s Fool’s Harvest
In December 1937 Japanese troops captured the Chinese nationalist capital of Nanking and began a six-week rampage in which soldiers killed at least 250 000 people in the most bestial way. The Rape of Nanking – both a metaphor for the invasion and a literal description of the fate of thousands of Nanking’s women and children – exposed to the world the nature of Japanese aggression. By the time Australians learned of the Rape of Nanking many believed that their country was the target of Japan’s expansion. Willard Price’s 1938 Japan Reaches Out told them explicitly, ‘Australia is one of the direct objectives of the southward advance.’5 Price pointed to Japanese interest in the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea, and in Australia. Describing Japanese economic enterprises in pearling, wool and minerals, he warned, ‘the writing on the blank map of northern Australia is plain … “If you cannot use this, we will.” ’6
Price’s foreboding found a fictional counterpart in Erle Cox’s hugely popular serial Fool’s Harvest, published in the same year. Cox had become Australia’s premier science-fiction author in the mid-1920s with his Out of the Silence, whose unique appeal sprang from the idea that Australia might be the setting for an encounter between the human and the extraterrestrial. In 1938, Cox used Fool’s Harvest to awaken Australians to the threat of an invasion from the north. Serialised in The Argus from November 1938, it appeared in hardback and paperback editions in 1939. As popular novels, both Fool’s Harvest and, less so, George Mitchell’s earlier The Awakening, remained in the popular imagination as the invasion crisis of 1942 developed.
Fool’s Harvest deserves detailed attention because it seemed to predict what might well occur. It is presented as a manuscript written by a Walter Burton, who has witnessed the horrible aftermath of Australia’s conquest by the forces of ‘Cambasia’, described as the Paramount Power, P. P. – the word ‘Japan’ never appears but the implication is obvious. Burton, a journalist and a member of the resistance movement against the invaders, writes the story on scraps of paper in shorthand and code before the Cambasians execute him in 1952 for a ‘tragic and ill-advised attempt at rebellion’ against the P. P. The manuscript is smuggled out of a ‘concentration camp’ near Newcastle and eventually presented to the University of Canberra (which in 1938 and even the 1970s was fictional) in the mid-1970s. It is published when the rump of Australia (2 million out of 7 million people and only the south-eastern states) regains limited independence after a Pacific settlement in 1966.
The events of the novel open in September 1939 (less than a year after its publication) with sabotage – the destruction of the Hawkesbury River railway bridge – and a shocking air raid on Sydney. On ‘Bloody Saturday’, Mosman, Darlinghurst and Paddington are left blazing, and Burton’s wife and child are among the 200 000 casualties. Sydney is devastated. HMAS Canberra is sunk in the harbour after the arrival of a Cambasian fleet – its battleships built in defiance of the Washington Treaty. Nor does help come from ‘home’. Cables from London disclose that Britain is being attacked by three Great Powers (Germany, France and Italy) and – ominously – a British fleet based at Singapore is defeated. The Singapore Strategy fails (as it actually did in 1942) and there is to be no help from the Motherland: Australia stands on its own.
At the same time as Sydney is bombed and shelled, the Cambasians attack Darwin and Perth. Nothing more is heard of Darwin, but the resistance later learns a shocking story of when two divisions land in Perth and swiftly take control. Apart from commandeering cars and shooting their owners, ‘at first,’ Walter Burton, writes, the Cambasians impose ‘no great ill-treatment of the conquered race’. Soon, though, they give orders to segregate Western Australia’s men and women. The men are sent to labour in the iron-ore mines at Yampi. There, half-starved, they are ‘driven to their tasks till they drop … without medical help or sanitation’.7 (In another parallel with history, the conditions resemble those actually inflicted on Allied prisoners of war and Asian labourers on the Burma–Thailand Railway.) Soon, the Paramount Power makes forced labour in the Yampi mines the main punishment for resistance to its rule.
But a worse fate awaits Western Australia’s women. They are held in camps north of Perth, where the Cambasians are ‘determined to solve the racial problem’.8 The fictional editors at the fictional University of Canberra have censored a 2000-word excerpt, which presumably described mass rape with the aim of creating a mixed-race population. (Cox’s vision eerily resembles the rape camps in the Balkans in the 1990s.) So shocking were the descriptions of the treatment of women in the women’s camps at Carmel and Mundaring, the editors recommended to the government the destruction of Burton’s account. No more sensational mix of sex and race could have incited readers’ sensitivities. Readers of Cox’s grim fantasy in what Burton called the ‘lost state’ could be forgiven for fearing the movements of a Japanese fleet in the Indian Ocean a few years later.
Meanwhile, a Cambasian fleet appears off Port Stephens to land an invading army. The fleet, of ten battleships, fifteen cruisers and thirty destroyers, would have represented most of the real-life Japanese fleet at that time. Like many invasion fantasists, Cox envisaged Australia as the invaders’ main objective, something that in 1942 it was not to be. The outnumbered RAAF is defeated after fighting around Newcastle, and the Cambasians land and advance southwards. They are able to move freely because before the war their agents had helped themselves to military intelligence.
The RAAF at Richmond is left with just one plane. Its pilot decides to sell his life dearly, determined to fly into a Cambasian aircraft carrier. He takes off (‘going to his death with a smile and a wave of the hand’) and sinks the ship.9 (The echoes of the kamikaze attacks directed at Australian warships from late in 1944 seem ironic in hindsight.) Burton, Fergus Graham and Burton’s sister Lynda (the novel’s slight attempt at a love interest) flee from Sydney and reach Melbourne, fighting off desperate fugitives who try to take their car. Just three raids suffice to break Melbourne’s nerve, ‘a calculated butchery to smash the morale of the civil population’.10 A year after the bombing of Guernica, everyone expected that ‘the bomber will always get through’ to wreak mass destruction and destroy civilian morale.
Despite quixotic gestures by the defenders, the Cambasian advance cannot be stopped. The Australian commander-in-chief, ‘General Mackinnon’, foresees that Cambasian forces moving south from Sydney will cross the Murray and converge in central Victoria on the road to Melbourne. Here the climactic Battle of Seymour is fought, and – in a departure from previous invasion novels – the defenders lose. A commentary on the novel claims that Cox was ‘fortunate enough to have Sir Thomas Blamey as his consultant on his tactical and strategic thinking’.11 Indeed, the forceful Mackinnon, who tells a quaking Cabinet that they are reaping a ‘fool’s harvest’ for their years of negligence, bears a striking resemblance to Blamey. ‘The fools,’ he says, ‘are the entire population of this country, who have been warned again and again, and would not heed the warning.’
By the last week of September 1939 the Cambasian occupation is complete. Australians are made to labour, growing food for Cambasia, but are themselves fed only cabbages. Children are removed from families. (Modern readers cannot help reflecting that this was exactly the policy still being pursued by an Australian Government towards Aboriginal people at the time.) A guerrilla resistance develops, led by ‘old Diggers’. Resistance heroes (‘Dumbell’ Wright in north-east Victoria and Monty Black, operating between Nowra and Moss Vale in New South Wales) lead bands living in the ranges, feeding off stray cattle released after their owners flee or die.
Cox sketches out Cambasian oppression, in which men can be shot for failing to raise their hats to Cambasian officers in the streets, and quislings or traitors – called ‘blowflies’ – collaborate with the invader. Cambasian peasants arrive to take over farms, including the whole of Queensland, from which ragged refugees flee with tales of terror. American Committees of Inspection are hoodwinked by the Paramount Power. By the end of 1941, under a Congress of Berlin (to which Britain and the United States agree), what had been Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory are declared Cambasian territory, while the remainder of Australia is to be ruled by the Paramount Power for twenty years and thoroughly plundered for alleged reparations.
Eventually, after bloody reprisals, the guerrillas are faced with terms impossible to resist and, rather than see hostages executed on New Year’s Day 1942, Dumbell Wright’s group and the other resistance bands give in (although Wright himself commits suicide rather than surrender). Forty thousand guerrilla fighters are sent to concentration camps. Before the novel’s end, Burton’s manuscript (completed in a concentration camp while he labours in the Newcastle steel mills) suggests that a resistance movement returns in the late 1940s, and the reader knows from the ‘editors’ introduction’ that eventually, but at a massive cost, Australia regains partial freedom.
As the novel’s blurb put it, with ‘shells on Sydney; massacre in Melbourne’, Fool’s Harvest was ‘a thrilling novel that may forecast the future’. Cox’s imaginative and largely plausible story gained in impact because it did not attempt to paint a picture of easy success. It must have been in many minds during 1942, although its pessimistic plot did not, it seems, merit new editions. Later readers must see its story through the lens of what almost happened when the real-life Cambasians conquered South-East Asia a few years later.
The prospect of Japanese bombs increasingly preoccupied thoughtful readers. At ‘Coorain’, a sheep property in the far west of New South Wales, Jill Ker’s mother and father’s ‘most heated discussions’ dwelt on Japan’s intentions. Jill’s mother, a voracious reader, predicted that ‘after Hitler provoked war in Europe, the Japanese would begin to expand in the Pacific’. Jill’s father always reminded her of the might of the Royal Navy and the impregnability of Singapore.12 Was Fool’s Harvest among the dozen books the Kers received from Sydney bookshops each week, I wonder?
‘The ideal victim’: Bill Wentworth’s forecast
In the mid- to late 1930s Australian authorities increasingly pondered what the reality might be. In Japan and the Defence of Australia, Edmund Piesse canvassed the technical possibilities of Japanese aggression towards Australia. He thought they ranged from naval attacks on Australia’s trade or raids on coastal cities to ‘invasion, conquest and annexation’. Piesse was optimistic that a blockade could not succeed: ‘we could get along without imports for … long enough to tire out a blockader.13 Interruption to the coastal trade carrying iron ore between Whyalla in South Australia and the steel foundries of Newcastle would be a more serious matter, and Piesse emphasised the need for destroyers and submarines, and aircraft to protect them. These forces would also help to deter or repel the anticipated raids that had been such a prominent part of Australian defence planning for the past century.
Finally, he considered the ‘somewhat remote possibility’ of invasion. Piesse’s discussion of this was accordingly rather superficial – he considered a blockade much more likely – but he concluded that the possibility demanded ‘mines, submarines, destroyers, coast fortresses, mechanised land forces and sea and land aircraft’.14 This defence force was very different from the reality, which was a navy based on cruisers, an unmechanised army and very few aircraft. Piesse urged the development of a strong air force especially: ‘modern [aircraft] carriers could bring within easy flying distance of our capitals enough aircraft to endanger our main cities.’15 An RAAF exercise had recently simulated the arrival in Queensland of Japanese settlers (essentially the scenario of Fox’s Australian Crisis), though an embarrassed RAAF officer later recalled that ‘they got right down into the Coral Sea’ before the exercise folded for want of aircraft.16
W. C. (Bill) Wentworth belonged to a long-established Australian dynasty. His great grandfather, the explorer W. C. Wentworth, had written the poem ‘Australasia’ while at Cambridge in 1823. The 32-year-old Wentworth, a progressive economic adviser to the conservative New South Wales Government, pondered the problem of Australia’s relationship with Japan. In January 1939 he published Demand for Defence. It revealed that the Federal Government had ‘no adequate plan of Australian defence’, set out the weaknesses that he presumed Japan already knew about, and suggested how Australia might be defended from the invasion he thought would come ‘certainly within the next three years’. Through careful argument – indeed, the document’s cold, analytical tone is still disturbing – Wentworth narrowed down the likely threats: attacks on Australia or on New Guinea, or an invasion of Australia.
Wentworth considered Japan’s motives for invading. He argued that it needed room for its population. Australia was perfect, he contended – its climate was excellent, its inhabitants were few, and ‘there would be no racial objection to exterminating them completely’. Australia would also supply Japan’s need for raw materials and food; its possession would enable Japan to control the Pacific from north to south. Japan could use the White Australia policy as a pretext for invasion and for the ‘extermination or enslavement of the present Australian people’. ‘Australia,’ he concluded in his disconcertingly detached style, ‘is the ideal victim.’
Demand for Defence must have been read eagerly by Japanese officials and agents. It disclosed in a clear, convenient form, with excellent maps, the significant weak points of Australia’s strategic situation and defences. An ‘Invaders map of Australia’ helpfully showed where the Great Dividing Range could readily be crossed from west to east and that a landing in western Victoria entailed ‘no mountain barrier’ to an advance on Melbourne. Of course these geographical facts could have been gleaned from a good atlas: Wentworth’s analysis merely made it available in a handy, pocket-sized compendium.
He thought Japan could land up to 150 000 troops within a few months – double that if its war with China ended favourably. Contrary to Samuel Rosa’s view a generation earlier, Wentworth did not think that Japan would have any trouble transporting large forces across tropical seas. Contrary to Billy Hughes’ scorn for the idea that the Japanese would bother seizing a remote part of the continent, Wentworth thought that they ‘would eventually attempt the conquest of all Australia’.17 Some of his calculations and assumptions now seem unlikely: could the Japanese really have used Lord Howe, Norfolk, Kangaroo, King or Flinders Islands as intermediate bases? Staff officers of a later generation would regard his study as a ‘worst-case scenario’, but given his assumption that Japan would act within a few years, he can be forgiven his pessimism.
Having detailed how easy it would be to attack or invade Australia, Wentworth went on to propose some defences. He wanted not a ten-year plan but a one-year plan, so near did he think the danger lay. He proposed building airfields and batteries around the coast, and abandoning what could not be held in order to defend ‘base areas’ in the populated south-east. Wentworth urged a ‘burnt earth’ strategy and guerrilla war (despite Japanese troops’ known brutality towards civilians, which was obvious from their conduct in China).18 Like George Mitchell, Wentworth doubted the capacity of the depleted and demoralised Militia and recommended it be replaced by a regular army of 100 000 men supplemented by the standby of Australian military romantics, 500 000 ‘competent riflemen’ organised from shooting clubs. He proposed that with this force fighting from base areas, Australia could hold out for anything between ‘a season’ and several years, hoping to attract aid from Britain or the United States in the meantime.
‘An interest in Australia’: Japanese espionage
Even though Japanese official policy seemed not to extend to planning aggression against Australia, the actions of Japan’s agents aroused reasonable suspicion. It was commonly, and rightly, supposed that Japanese naval and commercial visits offered opportunities for espionage. Japanese intelligence interest in Australia’s ports dated from the turn of the nineteenth century. Mary Gilmore, in 1912 a journalist on the left-wing Worker, had watched Japanese sailors on a goodwill visit to Sydney. ‘The little brown men,’ she had written, ‘bought maps – maps of Sydney. The harbour, and the suburbs.’19 Like most labour sympathisers, Gilmore was suspicious of Japan’s economic motives in seeking to compete with ‘White Australia’s’ economy, and remained doubtful.
There is no doubt that Japan gathered geographic, cartographic, economic and military intelligence about Australia with enormous energy, though not necessarily efficiency, from at least the 1920s. A visiting American geographer, Ellsworth Huntington, was surprised in 1923 to find ‘how many intelligent Australians were really concerned over this matter’.20 Edmund Piesse doubted that agents operated officially – why, he asked, would the government employ conspicuous Japanese? There was nothing specifically directed towards Australia in this: Japan’s espionage effort encompassed every nation and colony in the western Pacific and south-west Asia. In the Japanese manner the two services (Japan had no separate air force) operated independently of each other and of the Foreign Office’s intelligence agency, which concentrated on forming pro-Japanese bodies overseas. These included organisations such as the Nippon Trade Agency, which maintained an office in Sydney, or the South Seas Development Company, based in Timor and New Guinea but with an ‘interest in Australia’. Japanese consular offices controlled this espionage effort. Well aware of what they faced, Australian intelligence officers described the traditional Japanese method as ‘mass espionage’, in which traders, visitors, students and especially merchant navy officers provided intelligence to the services as a sideline to their business.21
About 2000 Japanese lived in Australia before the war, including visitors of various kinds, such as students and businessmen, temporary residents such as diplomats and merchants (wool buyers, for example), and permanent residents, mainly laundrymen and market gardeners, but also pearl fishermen and their families in northern Australia.
Bob Walton’s 1987 article in the Journal of the Australian War Memorial established beyond any doubt that the Japanese navy had spied on the Australian coast between the world wars.22 Walton described the close interest that merchant naval officers took in the Hunter and Port Stephens (where ‘Cambasian’ troops landed in Fool’s Harvest). He explained ‘this was not merely tourism’. The officers’ car-hire bills, paid by shipping companies rather than by the officers themselves, ran into tens of pounds, large amounts for impecunious officers. The result was a mass of intelligence, presumably much of it irrelevant and ill-digested, but at best often superior to Australia’s own information about itself. Bill Wentworth thought that the maps and observations collected by Japanese pearling luggers were much more accurate than the map available to Australia’s services, although later experts disagree.
Various ministries and services funded and directed much of this effort, or capitalised on the presence of legitimate trading concerns. A Japanese trawler-man admitted in 1934 to a British agent that ‘our fisheries are not genuine industrial undertakings’. They enabled Japanese naval intelligence to map and report on ‘every nook and corner’ of the coast of Malaya and Singapore, he revealed indiscreetly, and beyond South-East Asia into Australian waters. British intelligence agents reported on a boat operating from Singapore towards north-west Western Australia and as far west as Ceylon and the Bay of Bengal. They logged the ship’s movements from Singapore and reported that the ‘general impression’ it conveyed, with its smart crew of officers and men, all naval reservists, ‘was that of a naval patrol boat rather than a trawler’.23 Japanese ‘encroachment’ off northern Australia and Papua New Guinea aroused intelligence and economic concerns. A 1938 report noted that navy reserve skippers made ‘no attempt to conceal how much they know about our north coast’.24 In the late 1930s the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land killed several Japanese who encroached too closely on their country.
In Sydney the Japanese consul, whose house at Point Piper enjoyed an uninterrupted view of Garden Island naval base and the harbour, was especially active. In Victoria employees of the Mitsui wool company took fishing trips to Westernport Bay, photographing the Flinders naval base channel in all weathers. The contribution that Japanese ‘front’ companies made to intelligence is suggested by the example of Mitsubishi, another wool-buying concern. One of its employees (‘allegedly a wool-buyer’) was found with five maps ‘of value to a potential enemy’, had ‘extracted naval photographs’ from a naval rating at the Hotel Australia, and had obtained reports on the Barkly Tableland and the Sir Edward Pellew Group in the western Gulf of Carpentaria.25
Darwin had always been a major centre for Japanese interest, much of it open. In 1936, for example, a Japanese Department of Education vessel arrived to investigate the port’s suitability for merchant marine cadet training. ‘All ranks,’ an Australian report disclosed, showed the ‘keenest interest in the rise and fall of tides, layout of town, position of public buildings [and] water supply’. They were especially eager to learn whether Aboriginal people were able to perform manual labour. Its captain bought eighty copies of photographs of port, oil and railway facilities.26
Much of this espionage involved obtaining what intelligence specialists call ‘open source’ material – that is, freely available books or photographs. Australian investigators remained casual in their scrutiny of these operations, admitting that ‘too much published material was available to them’ for too long. In 1941 the Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) was embarrassed to learn that the Japanese embassy had a standing order at Verity Hewitt’s well-known Canberra bookshop, and was buying not just books on international affairs but titles such as New Zealand from the Air, Grenade Training and even British Fighter Planes. At the same time, the collecting seemed so indiscriminate that its bulk concealed its value. A stash of documents confiscated from the camp of a supposed mineral survey party near Rockhampton, for example, included textbooks on mining, stock exchange reports, travel and railway guidebooks, maps of various kinds, albums of ‘Queensland scenes and industry’, the pedigree records of sheep and cattle, and reports of industrial disputes. Not that this material was worthless, but it was hardly going to make invasion easier.27
Intelligence has always been bedevilled by colourful and often farfetched allegations. In 1941, for example, Nazi sympathisers claimed that a secret society, the ‘Black Dragon Section of Ronin’, operated in Australia to train agents (‘Ronin’) for ‘possible penetration into Australia’. But much of this was hearsay, either exaggerated or invented. Professor Ryonosuke Seita was described as the ‘master Japanese spy in Queensland’. But he was such an obvious candidate for spymaster – he was professor of Japanese at the University of Queensland – that he was kept under surveillance by the CIS, and seems to have achieved relatively little besides providing a point of contact for the state’s small but active officially sponsored Japanese community.28 On the outbreak of hostilities many Japanese resident in Australia fled to Japan, while Australia interned about a thousand Japanese residents.29 With this, the CIS declared, ‘it is presumed that the Japanese intelligence organisation in Australia then collapsed.’30
‘In diplomatic contest’: Australia and Japanese aggression
The Anglo-Japanese treaty that had so roused the suspicions of the Pacific dominions was allowed to lapse in 1921, largely because of pressure from Canada, which was as wary as Australia of Asian immigration. In the 1920s and early 1930s Japan and Australia enjoyed a period of what Ian Nish calls ‘muted cordiality’.31 Trade increased – Japan became Australia’s second-largest trading partner in the 1930s – though not necessarily to Australia’s satisfaction. Australia remained firmly within an empire trading bloc. In 1934 Lyons despatched Sir John Latham on a symbolic ‘Eastern Mission’ to several Asian destinations but mainly Japan. The promise of greater contact ended with economic and diplomatic tensions from the mid-1930s. Negotiations for the removal of tariff barriers broke down in 1936 over Australia’s willingness to divert its goods to British markets, while international concern at Japan’s aggression in Asia increasingly made Japan a pariah, though one valued as an economic opportunity.
Australia’s attitude to Japanese goods remained contemptuous. Gavin Souter, then the twelve-year-old son of a bank manager in Kempsey on New South Wales’s north coast, recalled how Japanese toys were cheap but never worked properly. Japanese crockery broke easily; even Japanese matches snapped. As for many Australians, ‘our stock condemnation for anything that failed to function satisfactorily was “Made in Japan” ’.32 It was said that a Japanese town had been renamed ‘Usa’ so its goods could legitimately be stamped ‘Made in USA’ to avoid the widespread prejudice.33 Other voices warned of Japan making more than toys. At Horsham High School in western Victoria, Colin Finkemeyer’s history teacher warned his pupils of Australia’s vulnerability. Finkemeyer recalled how ‘he used to say, “the yellow fellow one day will come and invade Australia” ’ and would predict that ‘you young people’ would be called upon to resist.34
In 1930 aggressive militarists captured the Japanese army’s high command and dictated to the government. Imbued with ideas of expansion, the army independently embarked upon a long and brutal war of conquest on the Asian mainland. Japan – or rather, maverick militarists in the army – staged the ‘Mukden Incident’ as a pretext for invading Manchuria in September 1931. The militarists soon established a puppet state, Manchukuo. The army and navy assumed power, in fact. The civil government had little influence over them or their policies, and throughout the 1930s civilian politicians were outmanoeuvred, browbeaten, intimidated and terrorised into compliance. In July 1937 Japanese army officers faked the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident’, giving them a pretext to embark on an even more aggressive war of conquest in China proper.
Despite reports of the Rape of Nanking, Australia responded timidly to this overt aggression. All major parties supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of preserving peace by negotiating and acceding to the dictators’ demands – the policy later derided as ‘appeasement’. Fear of Japan in fact underlay Australia’s compliant attitude towards European fascism. Australia did not support the League of Nations’ ineffectual attempts to resolve the Manchurian Crisis of 1931. Australians seemed relieved at Japan’s thrust into China, guiltily glad it was directed westward rather than southward.
Robert Menzies, prime minister from April 1939 to August 1941, has been singled out as the arch appeaser. He uncritically and unduly admired Nazi Germany’s efficiency, but both government and opposition shared this attitude until events forced them, as they had forced the European democracies, to take a more vigorous line. The failure of appeasement, with Czechoslovakia sacrificed to Nazi ambition, at last convinced Britain, and in due course its dominions, to stand up to aggression in Europe. The British Government did not consult the dominions in this, but during 1939 the Australian Cabinet gradually accepted the need to act. By September it had talked itself into accepting the principle that aggression needed to be halted. At the same time, Menzies’ eyes were always on the Pacific, and that meant Japan’s likely actions. In one of his earliest statements after taking office, he revealed that he had ‘become convinced that in the Pacific Australia must regard herself as a principal’.35 That decision compelled Menzies to consider regional Australian as well as global imperial interests. A week after the declaration of war he made clear that ‘the Far East is a major problem to us’ even if it was a ‘relatively minor one to Whitehall’.36
The eventual likelihood of Japanese attack depressed the ALP leader, John Curtin. The recollection of Elsie, Curtin’s daughter, is well known. She described her father pensively staring out at Rottnest Island from Cottesloe Beach (she thought during the 1937 election campaign). When Elsie asked him why he was so gloomy, Curtin explained, ‘I was thinking what we would do if we saw the Jap fleet coming in past the island.’ Elsie asked him if he thought the Japanese would. ‘I’ve stopped wondering if,’ he replied. ‘The only question now is when …’37 Labor’s platform, To Build and Defend a Happy and Self-Reliant Australia, did not reflect Curtin’s personal pessimism. The party sought to build ‘friendly relations with all other countries’ and deprecated entanglement in the ‘problems of Europe’. Echoing Billy Hughes’ ‘air-mindedness’, the ALP argued for an ‘aerial fleet … equal to any that can be brought against us’. But in a thinly veiled reference to the Japanese threat it acknowledged ‘there is not far away from us a power with a seaborne plane strength of not less than 300 planes’.38 Bob Wurth, author of a sympathetic study of Curtin’s relationship with Japan’s ambassador to Australia in 1941, frankly describes his attitude: ‘Curtin appeased Japan.’39 Ironically, writes Joan Beaumont, a leading scholar of Australian foreign policy, the party that achieved victory in the coming war was, as the war approached, ‘more isolationist than the government.’40
Edmund Piesse advocated a stronger defence force, but hoped that ‘we shall be able to hold our own in diplomatic contest’.41 That hope seemed for most of the 1930s to founder on timidity and an understandable lack of confidence. As a small, vulnerable nation remote from imperial protection and facing a large and powerful potential threat, it would be unreasonable to expect vigorous independence. Australia’s engagement with Japan through Latham’s Eastern Mission of 1934 seemed successful precisely because Latham studiously avoided any criticism of Japan’s aggression on the Asian mainland. While many commentators remained coy, anxious to avoid upsetting Japan, Bill Wentworth stressed that ‘we need not be frightened of offending Japan’. He thought that Japan would act according to its own interests: ‘we have nothing to gain by her friendship,’ which he thought a ‘pretence’, ‘and more to fear from her hostility,’ since he was certain that ‘our only role … is that of potential plunder’.42
‘A bit of an invasionist’: the Singapore Strategy and its critics
From 1923 successive British governments began, reduced, stopped, revived and finally finished the Singapore naval base, the core of a strategy based on a British fleet reaching Asian waters in time to forestall or defeat Japanese aggression in Asia. Despite reservations, successive Australian (and New Zealand) governments accepted it as the best hope for security should war occur. The strategy’s twin principles, as Winston Churchill (who was first lord of the Admiralty in 1930) reassured Australia, were that Singapore would never fall, and Australia and New Zealand never suffer serious attack. But while building the Singapore base, the Royal Navy’s relative strength declined, and no one faced up to the implication that it could not fight enemies in Europe and Asia at the same time.
While dominion governments accepted the strategy, not all their officials or officers did. Naval officers supported the British ‘Blue Water’ school, which advocated exerting imperial sea power on a global scale, putting their faith in the power of a combined imperial navy to deter or defeat a Japanese threat in Asia. The chief of the Naval Staff wrote a paper deriding the ‘Invasion Bogey’ – using the same title as the Marxian pamphlet of 1909. The army and the air force, led by the brilliant John Lavarack (who, as the British defence bureaucrat Sir Maurice Hankey said, was ‘a bit of an invasionist’), doubted that the Royal Navy could be relied upon to appear when needed and in strength.43 Australia needed an army and an air force capable of meeting invasion if the navy failed, he argued. Successive Australian governments accepted British assurance that the Singapore naval base would be ready and that a fleet could be sent if required.
As Brett Lodge has shown in Lavarack: Rival General, a fierce debate continued in Australia throughout the interwar period between what might be called ‘invasionists’ and ‘imperialists’. Imperialists such as Frederick Shedden (who was dubbed the ‘pocket Hankey’ after his patron, Sir Maurice Hankey, and who was later the powerful secretary of the Department of Defence) professed confidence in the Singapore Strategy, accepting assurances that a British fleet would arrive in time to deal with Japanese aggression. Others, mainly army officers such as Lavarack, remained sceptical that this prospect could be relied upon. The argument over whether the accepted policy left Australia open to raids or even invasion, burbled on into the late 1930s. Ultimately, despite the advice of its military experts and disturbing signs that the Royal Navy could not possibly meet its commitments, Australian governments went along with the Singapore Strategy until it was too late. The base was finished, but the promised fleet would never materialise.
Australia’s defence services ended the 1930s at different states of preparedness for different tasks. The RAN was most prepared for war. Its major warships included two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, two sloops and five destroyers. It was able both to protect Australian waters and contribute to the Admiralty’s global reach. Despite many urgings, the RAAF had almost no modern planes and it was unready to meet attack on almost any scale. The army’s task was to defeat raids or an invasion. Forts and coastal batteries, relics of colonial insecurity, protected the ports of the state capitals, and Darwin, Albany and Newcastle. In 1935 the incoming chief of the General Staff (in effect the army’s commander) bemoaned his force’s deficiencies – few tanks (all obsolete), no antitank or anti-aircraft guns, and no heavy artillery. Its Militia infantry and light-horse units were almost all under strength and could not offer ‘sustained resistance to organised landings,’ he admitted.44
The fascist powers’ aggression in both Europe and Asia became increasingly harder for Australia to ignore. The discovery of the massive Yampi Sound iron-ore deposit in north-western Australia in the 1920s aroused interest in Japan and apprehension in Australia. By the mid-1930s, Japanese proposals to exploit it met increasing opposition, precisely because it represented a strategic threat. In a unique gesture of cautious defiance, in 1938 the Lyons Government embargoed the export of Yampi ore to Japan, ostensibly as the lode was of limited size, but actually because Frederick Shedden advised it would be a ‘potential threat’.45 Even the Housewives’ Association saw the danger and lobbied Joseph Lyons to ensure that Yampi iron ore not be supplied ‘to provide ammunition for this cruel race to use against innocent women and children’.46 As it turned out, Yampi was not mined until after the Second World War.
Anxious not to offend Japan, the following year the Lyons Government overruled trade-union opposition to shipping pig iron to Japan. Its action caused widespread indignation, not only from unions, but from many fearful of Japan’s intentions. The citizens of Bridgewater, Tasmania, for example, wrote to Lyons, warning that ‘the tentacles of Japan are spreading … Australian iron ore may be used by Japan against the Australian people’.47 Port Kembla wharfies courageously refused to load pig iron for ten weeks in 1938 before Robert Menzies, the then attorney-general, broke the strike. (The victory earned him the lasting nickname of ‘Pig-iron Bob’. As a gleeful ALP leaflet put it during the 1943 election:
I’m Bob the scrap iron merchant,
I’m silly as can be,
For once I sent the iron to them
Now they drop iron on me!48)
As conflict seemed more likely in both Europe and Asia, Australia began to develop a more independent approach to foreign policy. Lyons’ tentative attempt to broker a Pacific Security Pact foundered on Japanese indifference and American isolationism. In 1939 Menzies sent Richard Casey to Washington, Sir John Latham to Tokyo and Sir Frederick Eggleston to Chungking (now Chongqing), the new capital of Nationalist China, all appointments bearing upon Australia’s place in the Pacific. Joan Beaumont explains the growing awareness among Australian leaders of the dilemma they faced: ‘Britain might be so preoccupied in Europe and the Mediterranean that the Royal Navy would be unable to neutralise a Japanese threat in the Far East.’49 The prospect of the Singapore Strategy failing gave Australian politicians nightmares: soon invasion would be expected.