‘Blinded, and dazed’: reactions to the invasion threat
Addressing a Sydney crowd soon after the bombing of Darwin, Billy Hughes drew little satisfaction from seeing the threat he had predicted come to pass. Still, he spent a few minutes lambasting those who had tried ‘appeasing the unappeasable’, who had believed Japan’s ‘hypocritical cant’ and who had been fooled by ‘the illusion of impregnability … the policy of isolation’. But there was little point in recrimination. ‘In this supreme crisis,’ he told his audience, with ‘Bombs on Darwin … deeds alone can keep Australia white and free’.1 What might those deeds have been, and who would have performed them? With invasion a real, seemingly imminent prospect in the autumn and winter of 1942, how prepared was Australia for the crisis it seemed to face?
There was a curious unreality to many of the responses to the invasion crisis. The authors of the pamphlet They Shall Not Pass saw the mobilisation of ‘the whole of Australia’s vast war potential’ as quite simple: Australia was to ‘produce planes (to keep the enemy away from our suburb, and from Australia)’.2 The problem of defence against air attack seemed to be even easier: ‘we must ring each suburb and every important and heavily-populated area in Australia with anti-aircraft guns’. The industrial plants to make these guns would of course be shifted inland (as Russia’s had been). Objections that such plans might be unreasonable would be met by the ‘continued purging of blimps and brass hats of the High Command’.3
Not surprisingly, people reacted to the threat by sending their ideas for weapons that might help to defeat the invasion they all expected. Bill Wentworth, now a Militia officer, submitted at least two suggestions, including a plan for derailing trains. A classically minded oil-company manager from Adelaide, inspired by stories of Archimedes, suggested building boats with mirrors. If they steered towards an invasion fleet with the sun at the right angle, ‘they would be greatly hindered, blinded, and dazed’.4 A stock and station agent from Gloucester, a Gallipoli veteran, suggested building fast launches. ‘I do not profess to know anything about the Navy or sea-warfare,’ he began modestly, but he thought that a thousand such motor boats could sink an enemy fleet. ‘If there is nothing in the idea,’ he sensibly conceded, ‘just consign this to the WPB.’ (Defence filed it, but not in the bin.) Anyway, if invasion came he would ‘be out with the VDC doing a bit of hit and run with the mounted section of that force’.5 A more imaginative idea came from Mr Thomas Blunden of Mumbil, New South Wales, who suggested that a complex network of rubber or canvas tubes would enable the navy to ‘lay mines of mammoth size’ in likely invasion routes.6 One dedicated patriot, a Mr T. A. White of Lane Cove, offered himself as a ‘human bomb’. A 42-year-old married man, a ‘highly paid automotive and transport executive’, Mr White was willing to drive a fast motorboat stocked with explosives at a Japanese aircraft carrier. He suggested that the government should recruit ‘20 other fools like me’.7 More volunteers came forward, but the minister for air declined their offer.8 Most of these ideas were technically ludicrous, but the point is that these men were impelled to put them forward. No one can blame them for taking seriously the prospect of invasion.
Outlandish as these suggestions seem, they were not far different from what the Japanese were expecting to meet. In July 1942 the Japanese embassy in Madrid passed on intelligence gathered by agents. More gossip than hard facts, it included some reference to Australia, such as the advice that ‘if the Japanese cannot land in Australia and New Zealand soon, they never will be able to’, because all likely landing places had been fortified. It reported that between Cooktown and Cairns the coast was protected by landmines that could be detonated remotely, with anti-tank defences, minefields and barbed wire protecting ‘trenches, machine-guns, pillboxes’ and even ‘gas throwers’.9 It was not. In fact, real Japanese intelligence had stopped in December 1941. The Japanese now knew little more of the Australian order of battle than they could infer from out-of-date telephone books.
‘Punily naked’?: the defending forces
By the end of March Blamey had returned from the Middle East to become commander-in-chief of Allied Land Forces (a new and unique position) to organise troops for both the defence of Australia and the expected Allied counteroffensive. He thoroughly overhauled the army’s command structure and distribution, relegating the old state-based military districts to line-of-communication areas, and organising his forces into several armies and corps. From Cape York to Cape Bruny, Militia units dug, wired and patrolled the coast, all the while training for the test they expected. There is an exaggerated perception these days that Australia’s defences were ‘weak’: ‘Australia stood utterly defenceless,’ writes Brian McKinley.10 But even before the valorising of Kokoda began, the official historians thought the value of the Militia had been ‘written down’. Paul Hasluck, drawing on his colleagues’ work, thought that ‘it was in fact a much better fighting force than the Government credited’.11 But how effective would it have been in the advent of invasion?
Despite the government’s alarm, Blamey remained confident. While visiting Australia just before Japan’s entry into the war, he had told Cabinet that the Militia’s strength (five infantry and two cavalry divisions, then being converted to ‘motor’ divisions) was ‘excessive’ unless both the Royal and US navies were ‘swept from the sea’.12 By mid-April, Allied troops in Australia numbered 40 000 Americans, 100 000 AIF and 265 000 Militia. (The army called up 114 000 trained Militiamen and accepted a further 23 000 volunteers for the AIF within weeks of Pearl Harbor.) In March Blamey took command of ten Australian divisions, with a further two American divisions arriving in April and May. While the RAAF was weak in first-line aircraft, the American air presence grew rapidly, mainly with bombers in north Queensland, and fighters protecting Darwin (over 400 Kittyhawks had arrived by the end of February). Almost the entire Royal Australian Navy (RAN) operated in Australian waters, part of a unified American naval command spanning the Pacific, which sent fleets to the south-west Pacific as required (notably in the Coral Sea battle). Although defending the entire continent, this force was more than enough to meet anything the Japanese could muster, especially in the vital and more vulnerable south-east.
As Map 3 shows, the First Army became responsible for the defence of Queensland and New South Wales, the Second Army for the southern states, the 3rd Corps for Western Australia and separate Northern Territory and New Guinea forces for those territories. Blamey’s operational instructions to their commanders initially focused on defence against attack or invasion, but by July he was directing them to prepare for ‘mobile offensive operations’. The defensive period had lasted less than six months (and even then, air and naval forces had been taking the war to the Japanese since January). The power of Australia’s defence increased.
For most of the war, Australia fielded ‘two armies’: the all-volunteer AIF, which could serve anywhere; and the partly conscripted Militia, comprising most of the troops defending Australia. The two coexisted uneasily. In history, as in life, the AIF has captured the attention and the esteem. The AIF troops looked down on Militia as ‘Chocos’ (because they would melt in the sun) or ‘Koalas’ (because they were ‘not to be exported or shot at’). The rivalry between the Militia and the AIF colours memory and history, and the Militia comes off second best. Donald Horne, now N275176, a Militia gunner in the 1st Field Regiment, felt his inferiority as a mere ‘Choco’. ‘Punily naked in a uniform unhonoured by shoulder badges saying AUSTRALIA’, his colour patches lacking the AIF’s grey border, his slouch hat with its ‘furtive hatband of mere felt’ compared with the AIF’s pleated puggaree, he felt ‘a sense of genital inadequacy’.13 Like many Militiamen, he soon volunteered for the AIF.
It is easy to make light of the Militia’s prowess, and the Militia itself accepted its supposed inferiority. Gunner Horne found himself posted to the southernmost defence position of the Kembla fortress near Wollongong, New South Wales, a tank-trap overlooking Mullet Creek. His unit’s task was to ‘check the advance of the Jap’. Horne’s mates heard that his company commander, a Great War veteran, had decided that the position was so thinly held that ‘when the Jap attacked we would all be killed’. The trenches his section dug turned out to be under a colony of flying foxes, which, ‘making literal an army-issue metaphor, “shat upon us from a great height” ’, as the Militia traditionally have been.14 Peter FitzSimons, the Militia’s most extreme denigrator, represents it as a ‘kind of mostly younger version of Britain’s “Dad’s Army” ’, a shockingly inaccurate slur on hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers.15 The official historian, Dudley McCarthy, described the Militia in April 1942 as ‘fit, and engaging in fairly elaborate unit and brigade exercises’.16 Militia war diaries confirm this judgement.
The Militia has received little attention and less credit for its role in 1942. Many commentators assume that it would have failed (an estimation expressed in influential invasion novels in the 1930s). Colin Finkemeyer, who had left Horsham High School to become an AIF gunner and was captured in Malaya after the fighting at Bakri, wrote that a Japanese invasion force ‘could have walked straight onto [sic] Australia’.17 Since they never tried, it is hard to disprove this assertion. But the Militia was tested, in Papua. It is true that not all Militia battalions performed as well as the 39th Battalion. The 53rd, its brigadier explained, ‘taken before its training was complete and hustled into action in a fashion which would bewilder even trained troops’, performed worse. But the later campaigns in New Guinea and the islands were to provide many examples of Militia units fighting with skill, courage and dedication: the 61st Battalion at Milne Bay, the 58th/60th at Bobdubi Ridge, the 37/57th at Fortification Point, the 25th at Slater’s Knoll, and the 53rd itself later at Arty Hill.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to the Militia is the so-called ‘Battle of Cronulla’. Bill Wentworth, his eyesight disqualifying him from joining the AIF, became a lieutenant in the Militia 45th Battalion. In 1942 he led his men on a raid on army and civil targets in southern Sydney. Assembling at Cronulla, they easily passed through the beach defences, stole buses and army vehicles and spread havoc among the emergency services. He shorted the electric railway lines, allegedly captured his own battalion commander, and even ‘destroyed’ a munitions depot at Liverpool.18 The episode, retold by Wentworth’s admirers and detractors, grew in the telling – federal parliamentarian Fred Daly remembered that it was ‘told many times in the House’.19 In 1975 I heard Labor minister Clyde Cameron goad Wentworth, gleefully telling the House of Representatives that Wentworth (in the ‘Home Guard’) ‘blew up the [nonexistent] Cronulla Bridge’, captured the Redfern Police Station (with troops dressed as tramway men) and kidnapped Blamey to hold him at Leura in the Blue Mountains for 48 hours. Wentworth lost his temper, rose to the bait and called Cameron ‘a damned liar’.20 Members of the Militia might retort that many historians have treated them as Cameron treated Wentworth. The ‘Battle of Cronulla’ shows that the Militia was far from being an ineffectual force.
‘Above all your own interests’: Curtin ‘brings the troops home’
If there is one factoid that most Australians can recall from 1942 it is that John Curtin brought the troops home. The importance of the ‘Burma convoy’ is that Curtin defied Churchill. Australians make a great deal of this. Noel McLachlan, in his history of Australian nationalism, Waiting for the Revolution, gives a racy account of the confrontation. He describes Curtin as ‘stubbornly resisting Churchill’s desperate bullying … putting Australian nationhood beyond doubt’.21 The italics are McLachlan’s, but most Australian writers have taken the same view of the episode, until John Edwards’ revisionist interpretation, Curtin’s Gift.
As you would expect, the full story is more complex. Curtin did not demand the return of Australian troops from the Middle East. Churchill ordered them from the Middle East to what he called the Far East, and Curtin’s Advisory War Council agreed on 5 January. What Curtin did do was defy a decision taken by Churchill, and supported by Roosevelt, to change the destination of the convoy in which some Australian troops were travelling. The last week of February 1942 brought one of the most dramatic episodes in Australia’s war.
Japan’s entry into the war coincided with an easing of the crisis in North Africa, which allowed Churchill to use the Middle East as a reservoir of forces to meet the new crisis in Asia. These forces included planes, ships and two of that theatre’s best formations, the 6th and 7th Australian Divisions, constituting the First Australian Corps. We need to be clear about what Churchill wanted them to do. Their movement orders had them board a succession of transports at Suez, steam down the Red Sea and head south-eastwards. Exactly where they would end up would depend upon how the war developed and, as we have seen, it developed badly.
It is not true, as Patrick Lindsay (and many others) believe, that ‘against Churchill’s wishes, [Curtin] insisted that our forces in the Middle East be rushed back to help to defend the homeland’.22 Even David Day, a champion of Curtin, writes quite clearly: ‘It was Churchill, not Curtin, who first suggested withdrawing Australian troops from the Middle East.’23 So where does the myth come from?
It arises from what happened once the ‘flights’ of ships were ‘on the water’, as the jargon put it. When Churchill and his War Cabinet decided that the Japanese advance demanded more formations in South-East Asia, the Japanese had not yet conquered Malaya. By the time the ships were moving across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, the situation had changed dramatically. Japanese troops were now moving from Thailand into southern Burma, threatening Rangoon.
Rangoon still sounds like the archetypal imperial outpost, where mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the midday sun. To Australians, then as now, it seemed remote and unimportant. But to Churchill, and even more to Roosevelt and the Americans, Rangoon was a link to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, who had been fighting the Japanese for five years. Losing Rangoon would make the war in China longer and harder. Most Australians today neither know nor care about China’s war, but Churchill and Roosevelt did. Churchill implored Curtin to allow one Australian division to be diverted to Rangoon, ‘for the sake of all interests and above all your own interests’.24
By mid-February, with the ships spread across the Indian Ocean, the Japanese were advancing into southern Burma, where another of the awful human tragedies of the war unfolded. A great many of Burma’s people – of all races – tried to escape. Over half a million fled towards India, and perhaps a fifth died on the way, on mountain and jungle trails, of hunger and disease. Burma’s garrison, a weak combination of British, Indian and Burmese troops, could not hold the Japanese advance. It seemed sensible to Churchill to use this Australian force to try to hold them at its capital, Rangoon.
Accordingly, on 20 February he ordered the ships carrying the Australians south-westward from Ceylon to turn north and head towards Rangoon. Only then, though, did he inform John Curtin and the Australian Government. Churchill’s presumption naturally angered Curtin, who wanted a large, experienced force in Australia to meet whatever the next stage of Japan’s plan of conquest might be – he could only think that ‘they’ were coming south. Understandably, Australians have traditionally sided with Curtin in the stoush-by-telegram that ensued. Many writers have quoted great slabs of the telegrams that passed between Canberra and London – and Washington, as Churchill brought in Roosevelt to lean on Curtin. They show the tension between Australia’s leader and the leaders of the greatest democratic alliance the world has ever seen at a time of its greatest crisis. In the end, Curtin got his way.
As the convoy steamed across the Indian Ocean, Curtin, too worried to sleep, anxiously paced the garden of the Lodge in Canberra. Frank Green, clerk of the House of Representatives, described finding him there in the cool, dark Canberra night in early March. He persuaded him to take a cup of tea but could not get him to go to bed. ‘How can I sleep with our men in the Indian Ocean among enemy submarines?’ Curtin famously replied. It shows his humanity, but also the lack of resilience that would kill him before the war’s end.
The spectre of invasion coloured the feelings of all the Australians involved. Soon after the convoy left Colombo, Major General ‘Ned’ Herring, commanding the 6th Division, spoke to the men aboard his transport, the Andes.25 Better than any other document, Herring’s speech expresses the feelings of the Australian troops as they crossed the ocean to defend their country from what they dreaded. Herring recognised that they faced ‘the most fateful hour in the history of our country’, that it faced ‘the threat of invasion, invasion by a savage foe’. Herring reminded other ‘thirty-niners’ they had volunteered ‘to rid the world of Hitlerism’, and they had hoped to return to peace and ease. ‘This homecoming,’ he said grimly, ‘is not the one we had hoped for.’ They would return to fight ‘a damned sight harder’ than before. ‘You all know what the Japanese did at Nanking,’ he said. ‘Nothing would please them more than to get at our white women.’ There was ‘no need to tell you what that would mean’. The fight against invasion would be a ‘real crusade’. ‘The Japanese may kill us but they can’t make us quit … that is the spirit of the British people.’ In that spirit, Herring ended by quoting Churchill’s stirring oratory from Britain’s dark days in 1940: ‘It is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation.’
As it turned out, Curtin was almost certainly right in insisting that the convoy not proceed to Rangoon. If Australian troops had been plunged into a battle for Rangoon it is possible that they would have stopped the Japanese, completely transforming the shape of war in south Asia. But the chances are that they would not have done. If they had been landed at Rangoon days before a Japanese attack they would have gone into action under-equipped and certainly unprepared. Their ships had been loaded without thinking that they would go into action immediately on disembarking; it would probably have been Singapore all over again. Another Australian division (besides the 8th) would have been captured, or they would have shared with the British, Indian and Burmese troops the terrible retreat over the mountains to India that Bill Slim described so powerfully in his classic Defeat into Victory (a memoir, incidentally, he wrote at Yarralumla while he was governor-general).
‘It will happen here!’: the imminence of threat
Under a drawing of aircraft dropping bombs on Sydney (with the Bridge in the background), Curtin – whose photograph appeared on most advertisements warning against attack or invasion – told newspaper readers, ‘It WILL happen here!’26 Preparations against bombing figure prominently in accounts of Australia in 1942. Recollections of shop windows blocked by sandbags; air-raid shelters built in parks, gardens and schoolyards; and blackouts (soon modified to a ‘brown-out’) dominate local and larger histories. ‘Air Raid Precautions’ (ARP) bodies attracted huge numbers of volunteers – over 115 000 in New South Wales alone by the end of 1942. ARP volunteers, their instructions, exhortations and exercises, reminded all Australians that they could soon be facing ruin from the air, just as the invasion novels had predicted, and as London had under the ‘Blitz’, which Australians had seen on newsreels.
The Japanese made about 122 air raids on Australia – I say ‘about’ because some were so vestigial that they cannot really be counted as raids – including sixty-four on Darwin. The remainder include four on Exmouth Gulf in the west and three on Townsville, with nowhere but Horn Island in Torres Strait suffering more than eight. But ‘raids’ does not imply a tropical Coventry. Mossman suffered one ‘raid’ when in mid-1942 Japanese flying boats became a nuisance in north Queensland. In the early hours of 31 July a Japanese aircraft jettisoned half a dozen bombs on Miallo, a sugar town just north of Mossman. Investigators found only one crater, in the cane close to the house of an Italian cane-farmer, Zilina Zullo. A bomb had wounded his three-year-old daughter, Felicia.27 This was traumatic for the Zullo family, but it was not exactly the Blitz. Australia lost fewer than 100 civilians dead, but if it had suffered casualties in proportion to Britain’s losses from bombing, it would have lost over 10 000 civilians dead.
Air-raid shelters were a fact of life in 1942 and provide a rough indication of the degree of anxiety Australians felt. With bombing confined largely to where most Australians did not live, air-raid shelters soon became a joke or an embarrassment. The Melbourne Argus published doggerel that represented the dilemma of many backyard shelter-diggers within months of the height of the crisis:
There’s a trench in our backyard
With water it is brimming,
What shall we do in our backyard
Breed ducks or just go swimming?28
Air-raid shelter stories abound from 1942, but no historian has worked out what proportion of householders bothered with them or in which towns or suburbs. A Women’s Weekly reporter visited sixty suburban homes in Sydney in January and found that a quarter had made no preparation for blackout let alone bombing, and that a further third had bought blackout paper but had not fitted it. A third of Sydneysiders had made no preparations at all.29 Many would do more in the coming weeks, but it is a reminder that the shelter-diggers and the blackout wardens have captured our attention more than those who did nothing because they saw no urgent reason to.
We may find that relatively few went to the trouble or expense, and those who did were mainly in potentially threatened areas. Gavin Souter’s father and a neighbour dug a trench 12 feet long and 4 feet deep in the Souters’ backyard as a shared slit trench. It soon filled with water in Kempsey’s climate and gradually fell into disrepair. Kay Grant, author of a couple of books of Dorothy Parkeresque satire, poked fun later in the war at the fate of many shelters hastily dug in 1942:
It’s covered with flowers and veg. – we’ve never sat inside.
The sandbags leak, the roof sinks fast, but don’t you dare deride!
(Be thankful when you hear a thud and something bangs your boko,
It’s not a high-explosive bomb, but just an outsize choko!) 30
No one could have known, but the entire effort turned out to be wasted.
‘We are all at War Stations!’: the voluntary war effort
The seeming imminence of the Japanese threat galvanised the nation’s commitment to the war effort. Curtin’s advertisements in 1942 told Australians that ‘We are all at War Stations!’31 Like much wartime rhetoric, it exaggerated the reality. In fact, while almost everyone supported philanthropic charities, most Australian civilians did not join a patriotic or a defence organisation. But thousands did, and voluntary organisations and services experienced a dramatic increase in membership. About 100 000 men, both Great War veterans and men in reserved occupations, joined the Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC).
The RSL had formed an unofficial VDC in 1938, a politically acceptable variant on the right-wing ‘secret armies’ of the ideological struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. By 1942 it was part of the army and had mustered 110 battalions and about 98 000 men. The VDC, like the Militia, is often portrayed as a Dad’s Army-style Home Guard – although it was not called that in Australia, and the average age of its members in 1942 was thirty-six.32 The reason the army thought it was worthwhile was that it would have had a real job to do in the event of invasion. Despite its dummy guns and machine-gun rattles, there is no question that VDC men would have ‘taken one with them’ had they faced Japanese troops in their streets, paddocks or bush. They were certainly trained and equipped for last-ditch stands, and there is no reason to think that they would have failed.
The volunteers’ usefulness to the army was not just as a combat force. Indeed, the VDC had at least two other jobs. First, VDC platoons became a network of intelligence, linked upwards through the chain of command and covering the whole of the settled areas from about Cooktown south and west to about Geraldton. Anything that occurred could in a matter of hours be investigated and reported.
Second, in the event of invasion, the VDC would direct and control the streams of refugees. As invasion novels had suggested (and as experience in Europe had confirmed) fighting pushed swarms of refugees away from invasion and they could clog defence forces’ routes to battle. Among the VDC’s jobs would be supporting the nine ‘internal security’ battalions posted around the country, rounding up suspects and holding back or directing fugitives.33
The VDC harnessed a common desire to contribute in a concrete way. In some communities children – boys anyway – and a few women were allowed to join for a while. Kempsey’s unit formed a ‘Junior VDC’ of teenaged boys in khaki slacks, shirts and forage caps made for five bob each by a neighbour. They drilled for a while, but after a rough-house in the sandhills (in which blue-arm-banded boys ‘donged’ red-arm-banded opponents), Gavin Souter gave it away, and the movement collapsed after a few weeks.34 The VDC was, after all – as the Kempsey unit was probably reminded – a serious business. Civilians, many of them older men, with basic weapons and little training, were expecting to shoot at trained Japanese soldiers, perhaps within a few weeks. Those who dismiss the VDC as a joke miss the point of how vital it might have been.
‘Sydney may be our … Leningrad’: the People’s Army
Stories of panic coexist with the saga of the People’s Army, which casts the drama of 1942 in a different light. Despite paper rationing, pamphleteering enjoyed a wartime boom. Among the many published in 1942 was They Shall Not Pass: A Preliminary Plan for a People’s Defence. Its authors reported ‘a considerable number of people who are doing little – if anything – to assist in … keeping the already bloody hand of the lustful Japanese War Lords from mauling the homes, the lives and the liberties of our own Australian people’.35 Their response was to visualise a ‘People’s War’, quoting Army Minister Frank Forde, who imagined that ‘Sydney may be our unconquerable Leningrad’.36 In Sydney, two very different authors promoted the idea of a ‘People’s Army’.
Having visited Republican Spain during the Civil War, left-wing journalist Rupert Lockwood admired the philosophy of Tom Wintringham, the commander of the British battalion of the International Brigade. During Britain’s invasion crisis in 1940, Wintringham had published New Ways of War, a manual of irregular warfare that would inspire an Australian guerrilla movement. In his Guerrilla Paths to Freedom, Lockwood used the example of Spanish, Chinese and especially Russian guerrillas. He asked his readers to imagine ‘Japanese Army units, tired by long marches under the hot Australian sun’ being attacked by bush-based fighters who would ‘make them wish they were back on the scenic coasts of Hokkaido’. Lockwood’s followers were particularly strong on Sydney’s North Shore.
Lockwood invoked the traditions of the bush and the larrikin. He thought that ‘in Australia it should be possible to give the Japanese who don’t know our bush a hellish time by setting the bush afire’. ‘Secret, untrodden guerrilla paths through the Australian bush and mountains, over suburban fences and city roof-tops’, he declared, ‘may be Australia’s Paths to Freedom.’37 (Although he also wondered whether ‘town-bred men and women’ would suit this ‘hungry, roving life’.) Although he was one of the few Australian journalists who had actually seen Japanese soldiers at close quarters – he had been harassed crossing the border from China into the Soviet Union – Lockwood’s knowledge of war was mainly theoretical.
By contrast, Ion Idriess, a Light Horse veteran and president of the People’s Defence Auxiliary, was a practised bushman as well as a gifted writer of popular tales of the outback and its people. He was no left-winger, suggesting that the People’s Army movement was as patriotic as it was ideological in its motivation. Idriess, who wrote rapidly anyway (‘like stinking hell,’ he said), soon produced a series of six pamphlets under the title The Australian Guerrilla.
Idriess challenged his readers ‘to fight, not to cower in a dugout or a garden … We remember Nanking.’38 He wanted to shock them into realising the gravity of the threat they faced (the first book opens: ‘If parachute troops drop on your suburb tonight what can you do? Nothing.’) and to give them the confidence to fight back.39 Based on his experience as a sniper with the Light Horse on Gallipoli and in Palestine, and his expeditions ‘wild pig hunting with the northern abos’, Idriess passed on skills of living and fighting in the bush. With this help (‘Attack … that enemy aerodrome’, ‘Wreck that train!’) Idriess hoped to create ‘one great army to defend and hold Australia’.
The desire to fight a guerrilla war went beyond the left-wing patriots of the North Shore. In far north Queensland the writer Jean Devanny came across a dairy farmer and sometime goldminer in the hills outside Cairns. He told her that when it ‘looked as though the Japs might get through … we thought that we would fight like the Russians … we oughta been given guns’. His wife (‘My missus’) said that ‘if the Russian women can fight so can we’.40
Irrespective of the self-reliant traditions of the Australian bushman, the authorities as a whole suspected an unofficial, uncontrolled and politically motivated guerrilla movement, and the Commonwealth Investigation Service kept its leaders under surveillance.41 In any case, the status of guerrillas under international law was ambiguous. Even assuming that the Japanese observed the Geneva Convention – which as it turned out they did not – they would still have every right to regard captured guerrillas as outside the laws of war and execute them. Writers on the People’s Army have tended to stress the political aspect of the authorities’ concern, but the expectation of imminent invasion and the reprisals and atrocities that seemed likely to follow may well have been the most important factor in their minds.
‘We fight blurry Japs alonga you’: war in the north
While the Japanese did not attempt a land attack on Australia, during 1942 and 1943 Australian, British and United States forces fought an air war across the vast distances of northern Australia, eventually defeating the Japanese attacks. (This almost-forgotten air war perhaps explains why the RAAF, alone of the services, has embraced the idea of a ‘Battle for Australia’.42) It had been a Tiwi man, Matthias Ulungura, who captured the first Japanese pilot shot down over Australia, a couple of days after the 19 February raids. Perhaps having sat in the ‘coloured’ seats at the pictures in Darwin to watch cowboy films, Matthias knew to bark at him, ‘Stick ’em up.’43
The war affected the Indigenous people of northern Australia widely and deeply. Forcible evacuation disrupted many communities’ relationship with their country and each other. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people found work at camps and bases. It was often the first time that Indigenous people and soldiers had seen each other’s ways. Some soldiers became ‘gin jockeys’, using Aboriginal women as white men always had, but many others gained insights into a culture they had never before known or noticed. Indigenous Australians used their knowledge of the bush to help observer units and to rescue crashed airmen, although most were used as labourers, paid in money. This meeting had profound effects when, twenty-five years later, Australians were asked to decide whether Aboriginal people should be counted as citizens.
One of white Australia’s fears had been that Aboriginal men would accept Japanese invaders, if only because in the past they had often taken goods for women. In 1942 those who claimed to know the north and its people warned of betrayal. Owen Griffiths, a writer who had served in the wartime navy in and around Darwin as a paymaster lieutenant, passed on what old Territory hands told him. He claimed that ‘If the Japs had landed … the bush Aborigines would probably have gone over to them’.44 But six months before the outbreak of war in the Pacific, anthropologist Donald Thomson had persuaded the army to use Aboriginal men as a surveillance force, and in mid-1942 the army acted to form Aboriginal surveillance and guerrilla parties in the north.
At least three informal Aboriginal guerrilla parties operated in the north, one led by George Mitchell, author of The Awakening. They confirm the proud claim, made by an Aboriginal man to Cyril Longmore (who led another group) that ‘we fight blurry Japs alonga you’.45 Donald Thomson, by 1942 a RAAF officer, organised resistance groups among the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land. He had last seen one group in 1937, when he had tried to stop them attacking Japanese pearlers. Now the same men needed convincing that ‘they really could kill Japanese … without incurring the ire of the Government’.46 Many Aborigines worked informally for the mounted North Australia Observer Unit. Its history, Curtin’s Cowboys, discloses that the unit employed at least sixty Aboriginal men and women, many of whom worked for just ‘a bit of tobacco, a pair of shorts and a hat’ – and perhaps to keep their own country.47
Before 1942 the superintendents of ‘natives’ in north Queensland estimated that ‘not one per cent’ of the Indigenous people of Cape York and the Torres Strait could be trusted to remain loyal.48 The work of Aboriginal people for the services in the north, and especially the service of islanders in the Torres Strait Light Infantry, gives the lie to any suggestion of ‘disloyalty’. For the record, as Bob Hall shows in The Black Diggers, the people of the Torres Strait Islands boasted a greater percentage of enlistment in the army than any other region. Out of fewer than 4000 islanders almost one in four volunteered, a rate about twice that of white Australia. So many productive men did the army accept that their loss actively harmed the islanders’ wellbeing.49
Neither the people of the Torres Strait – the Australians closest to danger – nor the 7 million others to the south who spent 1942 waiting and worrying were to face the ultimate test. The future novelist Olga Masters, then a young mother, lived at Ettalong on the New South Wales central coast, where Japanese transports had appeared in The Awakening. She recalled walking along the beach in 1942 and, musing on its beauty, ‘thinking what would happen if it didn’t belong to us any more’. Unlike many people then and since, she went on to wonder ‘how likely that was’.50 Since the war, too few Australians have asked that question. At the time there was no answer besides propaganda posters, newspaper advertisements and press communiqués that inflamed rather than informed. Today, though, the answer is available from the evidence – sources that have now been located and translated, analysed by scholars able to comprehend and interpret what actually happened. It can now be told how Japan, far from launching an invasion, deferred the whole idea.